Title: Negative Utopia Author: prufrock's love Rating: NC-17 Classification: Novel, Post-colonization, Serious Angst, MSR, RST for the shippers, Everybody/other- but it turns out really, really badly, Secondary character death, Implied rape, Scully POV, Mulder POV Summary: After the world ends, Mulder and Scully's struggle to survive at any cost continues. Spoilers: Through mid Season 7 Distribution: link to: http://www.geocities.com/prufrocks_love/utopia.html Disclaimer: Not mine; don't sue. This isn't intended for profit. Author's notes: There are strong elements of romance in this story, but die-hard MSRs who adored "Cycles" may not like this. It's not… light. Rereading it, it reminds me most of The Stand (but much, much shorter) and Terminator, if that helps. I have an idea for another MSR, so hold on to your flames for a few weeks - this is what the muse sent me this time around. Can't piss off the muse. For those that like to play "find the obscure reference," they're not that obscure this time and include Brave New World, 1984, Fahrenheit 451, The Handmaiden's Tale, Lord of the Flies, The Stand, and a few biblical (not Ghostbusters!), the Mad Max movies and Independence Day. All quotes used as transitions are cited, so they're easy. The Greenbrier Bunker in White Sulphur Springs, WV is a real place and (free plug) open to the public for really expensive, really cool tours, none of which profit me, either. For the obsessives: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/bomb/sfeature/bunker.html offers an excellent VR tour, although I have a difficult time getting this site to load. http://www.greenbrier.com is the site for the hotel. James Randi heads a foundation that offers a million dollar prize to anyone who can scientifically demonstrate the paranormal, and the prize remains unclaimed. Apologies to Randi, Newt Gingrich, and Pat Robertson - at least I didn't kill you off, and that's always a big danger in my stories. Introduction: The aliens have come and gone, leaving the planet devoid of civilization except for a few pockets of survivors. By making a deal with the Grays, Mulder has saved Scully only to lose both himself and her into the madness that follows colonization. "Negative Utopia" tells the story first from Scully's and then Mulder's point of view as they fight to survive in the wasteland and to come to terms with who they've each become- to themselves and to each other. This is fundamentally a dark love story about Mulder and Scully with guest appearances by Skinner, Krycek, Marita, Gibson, and The Lone Gunmen. It draws heavily on classic negative utopias such as Fahrenheit 451, 1984, Brave New World, and others and incorporates many elements of the X-files mythology. This novel evolved from the need for a continuation of what I originally wrote as a short story- Negative Utopia from only Scully's point of view. How did Mulder become the man readers are introduced to in the beginning of the story and how did the relationship between he and Scully play out after the original ending? There was also strong interest in Skinner's actions, so his actions were more fully detailed. After some thought, the second section evolved in the interest of closure, such as it is with my fics. Be warned that the general reaction (to Section I) has been "darkly excellent." Characters in this story are the ones we know and love from the X-files after an apocalypse destroys everything they use to define themselves. It answers the question: what becomes of humans when there is no humanity left? Who is sane when there is no sanity? Negative Utopia by prufrock's love *** 2 August 1914 Germany has declared war on Russia. Swimming lesson in the afternoon. -diary entry, Franz Kafka Outbreak of World War I *** Part I: Scully I am his now. It's still surprising to me how readily I think of myself as property. As though I have no say over my life anymore, no voice. In truth, I don't. I haven't for a long time. Granger, the leader of the colony where I was living, told me to pack my things this morning. I obeyed, although there wasn't much to pack- a change of clothes, my doctor's bag, a few toiletries, an old picture of Mulder and one of my family. And the watch. I dug the man's watch out of its hiding place - duct taped under my night stand - and wrapped it in my spare pair of jeans before stuffing it in the very bottom of my duffle bag. No one was going to steal my dirty jeans. I figured I'd been traded to another colony again. A doctor was a powerful bargaining chip and winter was coming. They needed supplies. I looked around the old house that had been mine for the last few years and said goodbye to things I'd come to think of as my own. A vase of fresh flowers from the man next door, my examine room, a warm bed that I slept in alone. None it was actually mine, of course. I only hoped the next colony would be as nice to me. I hoped it was a colony I'd been traded to and not a single man. Maybe Skinner had found a way to get me back. Could I go back to him at Alpha Colony? It was safe with him, too. Yes; I could go back to Skinner. I didn't hate him. I understood. Maybe it was Mulder. Maybe Mulder had finally found me. No. I can't even think that after this long. Mulder is never going to come for me. I hope it's Skinner instead of a stranger. I can still feel his hands and breath on me, so careful. As careful as Mulder was. STOP THAT! Don't even think it! He's never going to come back for you. I pulled myself up to my full sixty-two inches, took a deep breath, and opened my front door to discover who my next owner - or God forbid - owners, was. Mulder was standing in the shadows of my porch next to a wooden box about the size of a milk crate. I thought at first he was a mirage, one of my dreams come to life. No, he was really there. Finally, really, there. I wanted to touch him, but he didn't move - he was so still he could have been a statue of a vengeful angel. Mulder had no expression, made no sound to acknowledge me. The leader lifted the box lid, nodded, and without a word, handed my duffel bag and doctor's bag to him. The deal was done. Whatever the terms were, they were acceptable. Mulder walked down the cracked steps without looking at me and got into the driver's seat of a green Jeep. I followed quickly like a child tagging along at his heels, afraid to look back. Afraid I would feel the Granger's hand on my shoulder stopping me, asking me where I thought I was going. Hours have passed now and Mulder still hasn't spoken. He's older - it has been more than five years sincce I last saw him. His hair is cut short and his face is tanned, as though he spends most of his time outdoors. Gone are the expensive suits, replaced by serviceable denim, cotton, and leather. He's clean shaven, which is odd these days, but he hasn't shaved today. There's a gun and a knife on his hip, normal apparel now, and more weapons and survival gear in the back seat. I see a long, roughly healed scar on his forearm and another on his jaw, evidence of violent encounters - with who or what exactly, I don't know. He's still slim, but his body is denser, rougher. Shoulders are broader; muscles built by survival instead of bench presses. In short, Mulder has hardened. He doesn't seem to notice that I'm staring at him. In fact, he doesn't seem to notice much of anything except the dashboard and the asphalt road ahead of us. Mulder just drives silently, through mile after mile of nothingness. The bigger cities were destroyed, not by the aliens, but by humans. What wasn't burned or looted in the initial panic was bombed once governments toppled and extremists got their fingers on the "nukes" buttons. Some cities are still supposed to be hot, although I think only the smaller bombs hit in the US. I'd heard that China was wiped clean, but you hear all sorts of things. By the time the aliens were in place to start their breeding programs two days later, there wasn't much left to breed with. Once colonization began, the seas boiled and the skies fell. Any humans that could be found were rounded up and infected with Purity by the aliens directly since the bees were mostly annulated by the bombs. I don't know of anyone that survived the concentration camps - if they found you, you died. If you were stung by one of the bees, you died. I'm guessing there aren't more than a hundred-thousand people left on Earth, which means there are several billion extra gray alien bastards roaming the universe now. They gestated, hatched, and moved on within a month, leaving the planet raped not only of its citizens, but of its civilization. What followed reminded me of a Stephen King novel - pockets of survivors began to emerge and regroup into colonies. Most survivors were those already infected with Purity or vaccinated by the Consortium - including Mulder and me - who couldn't gestate. There were a few others, though, who managed to escape the human toll and evade the aliens' camps and bees. We peaked out like gophers after the hawk flies on, searching for direction. As civilization arose from its ashes, it reformed and regressed thousands of years. There was no law except to survive. Trade what you have, if you have it, for what you need, or kill and take what you want. The strong survived, the weak either died or became property. I became property. I didn't realize that at first. It wasn't like someone stood me on an auction block one day and started the bidding. All I wanted to do was survive and avoid being raped or dying of starvation or exposure. I didn't suddenly wake up one morning and realize that I didn't control my life anymore- it was a slow progression. First, as a woman, it attracted dangerous attention for me to leave the colony, so I immediately became dependent on others for food and supplies. I had to ask for everything I needed, from a pocketknife to underwear - embarrassing, but safer. I knew the men I was with - Skinner and The Gunmen - and they took pride in seeing I had everything I could ever want. Since I couldn't hunt or forage very far, I had no idea what was really happening outside of the fences I lived behind - only what others chose to tell me, although I trusted them. I knew they didn't tell me some of the horrors they saw, but I probably didn't want to know. I was seeing enough horror in my little medical clinic. I noticed I wasn't consulted about major decisions because I couldn't do the heavy physical work of rebuilding or fight in the battles between colonies, but that seemed fair. I didn't want to vote on how high to build the fence or where to build the barn anyway. It was easier to align myself with one powerful man and let him defend me than to fend off advances from every male around. That was a matter of convenience. Sure it was. Looking back, I can remember the first time it happened, but I didn't notice until it was too late. Somehow I slid down that slippery slope one day at a time and now there was no clawing my way back. I was property and I had just been traded. I've been treated much better than most women. Dramatically better, thanks to Mulder and medical school. As a doctor, I belong to the community, not to a single man anymore, so the community had an interest in me being well-cared for. I've never been actually raped or hurt and I always have clothing and enough to eat. A man tried to force me once and was later found in the woods after his exile with both his hands cut off; a strong warning for other men. Mulder's warning. My skills were for sale, but my body belonged to someone else. Now Mulder has come to claim it. I am Mulder's now. That thought brings a surge of warmth between my legs even as my stomach knots in fear. I am Mulder's now. I still have no choice. As I notice the pressure in my bladder and the emptiness in my stomach, Mulder pulls the Jeep off the road into the trees and stops. He gets out and disappears silently into the woods, leaving me sitting in the passenger's seat. So it is true - he can still hear others' thoughts as clearly as he could five years ago. I've heard stories about the great Fox Mulder, but it's hard to separate fact from legend. Mulder is a mystery man, capable of killing with a thought. His preferred weapon is a pistol, a straight razor, his bare hands. Mulder fights for the aliens, the rebels, the humans, or for his own gain. He kills for profit, for revenge, for pleasure. He was too dangerous for any colony to accept him, so he roams. He is a monster, a hero, a tragedy. Any of the rumors could be truth or lies or somewhere in between; I had no way of knowing. I only knew that I had been alone for a long time until this morning. But I am Mulder's now. Mulder returns and hands me a bottle of water, an apple, and a wedge of cheese from a bag in the backseat. He must have been somewhere with a dairy to trade recently. There was no shortage of fresh water and game, but anything that required processing, like cheese or butter, is rare. Few people have the skills necessary and those that do often used those skills to keep themselves alive, rarely having excess to trade. That was how colonies emerged - providing protection for inhabitants in exchange for services for the colony. Farmers farmed and hunters hunted while warriors warred. Men realized quickly that they had to eat in order to fight. There were other benefits in a colony - a group leader could trade for things an individual could never afford - a doctor or an engineer. Leadership was gained and maintained by violence, if necessary, and fighting between colonies was legendary. Disputes over boundaries, trading rights, women - anything, could spark a gorilla war between men with little to lose. Both colonies I have lived in had rules similar to the laws Before and breaking the colony's rules could mean anything from a fine to exile to execution- it depended on the colony and the leader's mood. For a woman, exile from the safety of a colony could mean a slow death. There was nowhere to go even if I was desperate enough to run - the whole planet is the same wasteland. It's getting dark now. The further the sun sets, the tighter that knot in my stomach gets. Night means beds. Women are too rare After and sex is too expensive a commodity - ownership of any woman came with certain inalienable rights. And I am Mulder's now. Mulder would never hurt me; I'm just a little nervous. And Mulder is being a little weird. A little? We'll have to stop soon. Even Mulder wouldn't brave headlights in the dark to keep driving - announcing he was a sitting duck to anyone who might be watching. He still doesn't speak or look at me, but his face is haunted in the dying light; a man whose eyes have seen too much. He turns off the road into a long dirt driveway and stops the Jeep behind a peeling white farm house where it can't be seen. I follow him into the dim interior, clutching my duffle bag and trying to control my shaking. What do you want from me, Mulder? Do you still love me? Is this where you live now, Mulder - a quiet farmer in the middle of nowhere? Are all the legends about you lies? No - he doesn't live here. No one's lived in this house for a long time. This is just a place to spend the night. I watch Mulder rig all the windows to make noise if they're opened and brace the doors closed, locking out the night. He finishes his rounds in the bedroom, standing at the foot of a stranger's bed. I take the hint. I love Mulder - I can do this. I'd rather do it willingly than be forced. Not like this isn't force. I do have a choice. I can run away and be gang-raped by the first group of road warriors that catches me or I can undress. I unlace my boots to get them off and let my jacket fall on the floor - it probably can't get any dirtier. Jeans off next, then over-shirt. I don't have any pajamas, so I lay down on the bed in my panties and t-shirt. I love you, Mulder - please don't hurt me. I'm cold. I'm so scared. I pray he hears me. He doesn't bother to even undress - doesn't even take off his boots. In the dark, I hear him set something heavy and metal on the night stand - a gun - and the bed shifts as he lays beside me. I'm very still, waiting for a touch. When it doesn't come, I roll away from him and will sleep to take me instead. We slept like this once, Mulder. Do you remember that night? Knowing there would never be another like it - two scared people trying to save each other with flesh in the shadows. The bed shifts again as Mulder moves towards me. I try not to flinch, holding my breath. A hand rests lightly in the small of my waist, tentative and comforting, and I feel safe. For the first time in years, I feel safe and I sleep. Dawn. I wake to Mulder wrapped around me instead of the blanket, and I forget for a sleepy second that the world has ended. We're still in DC or a motel room somewhere and Mulder has fallen asleep in my bed. God, Mulder, don't you have your own room? Not that I'm complaining, but it doesn't look good. Then sun burns away my dream and I remember. No more motels, no more FBI, no more innocence. We aren't staying here. He's left a bucket of water for me to brush my teeth and wash off my topmost layer of dirt, and by the time I finish, Mulder is filling the Jeep's gas tank and loading water and supplies that were hidden in an outbuilding. This must be a safe house he uses. Rumor has it that he cris-crosses the country regularly alone, making the trip that others fear. The walled colonies are somewhat safe; the empty plains filled with real road warriors are not. I get in the Jeep as Mulder starts it and another day on the road begins. He looks at me, really looks at me for the first time with sad hazel eyes. Oh, Mulder - I love you. No matter what you've done or who you've become, I still love you. I feel him inside my mind, listening. He puts the Jeep in gear, eyes straight ahead now. I brave a hand on his denim arm and he lets it stay. Mulder drives without stopping across the plains, passing cars that have been shoved into the ditches by someone to clear the road or taking dirt paths across the fields where the road isn't passable. If there is another soul alive here, I don't see him. There are fields gone to seed and an occasional shell of a burnt house visible from the road, but no humans. I wonder how these people died. They probably weren't killed in the initial riots or by the bees - did any of them survive, escape the alien's concentration camps? Or did they lay terrified under chicken wire while the black oil dripped onto them, gestating and exploding in their bodies as it took life? Mulder stops to let me empty my bladder again between the rows of corn and I see a figure approaching the Jeep from behind as I return. Whoever it is, I can't see his hands. I yell for Mulder to look out and he pivots and pulls the trigger without hesitation. The shot catches the dark-skinned boy in the center of his forehead, killing him instantly. Mulder must have become a better marksman since I last saw him. I examine the dead boy out of habit and my need for something to do in my shock. He doesn't have a weapon. He doesn't have the back part of his skull anymore, either. "How did you know he was going to hurt us?" I ask Mulder. "I didn't," comes his blank response as he starts the Jeep. I swallow against the urge to vomit and get in, leaving the body of a boy not old enough to have peach fuzz on his face laying in the road for the buzzards. I know Mulder can talk now, but he doesn't say anything else as he drives. I let my mind drift away from the horror and sleep lightly in the warm sun against his shoulder. I can't judge him. I didn't have to survive what he survived. Mulder was the reason I was safe and sheltered in all this madness. *** Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the unknowable. But there it sits, nevertheless, calmly licking its chops. -H. L. Mencken *** The phone rang just after midnight on a Monday morning. Damn it, Mulder - it was a holiday. No chasing bad guys on a holiday. I figured he felt too lousy to do anything anyway - he'd had another monster headache Friday afternoon and I'd sent him home to sleep it off when I still couldn't find anything wrong with him. Not that it wasn't fun checking, but he seemed okay. I had a CT scan scheduled for him tomorrow and was planning on making him wear a hospital gown so I could ogle that cute ass. Hey - he would have done it to me. Mulder's voice on the line was forceful: "Pack like you're going camping and call your mother. Tell her to get out of the city. I'll be there in thirty minutes, Scully." I was already stuffing a bag. Mulder didn't give me orders unless it was important. Life or death. "Why, Mulder? Where are we going?" "They're coming." And he hung up. I didn't need to ask who "they" were. I telephoned my mother with the message and told her I loved her. I was waiting on the curb when he pulled up. Mulder took a Bureau car - he could care less about protocol. If he was right, by tomorrow, there wouldn't be anyone to object. We drove southwest, flying down the interstate as visions of "them" chased us. Sunrise found us just over the Virginia border and revealed giant discs hovering silently in the sky, looking remarkably like Independence Day. I wondered if Mulder ever saw that movie? Mulder stopped behind a huge hotel and I realized where we are. The Greenbrier. The Greenbrier bunker in White Sulphur Springs. The bomb shelter built covertly under the luxury resort decades ago to house Congress in case of nuclear attack. It wasn't a government secret anymore - but the aliens didn't know that. Skinner was already there, as were The Gunmen and a few politicians I recognized from CNN, waiting to close the main door. Mulder and the others pulled the second concealed blast door connecting the bunker to the hotel shut with an immense metallic echo, sealing us off from the world before its inhabitants awoke to find judgment day had come. As Skinner threw the bolt, locking us behind tons of reinforced steel, silence pervaded. Were we all there were? Out of five billion people, were we ten or so the only ones who knew? How did Mulder know? "I can hear them in my head," he answered me. I didn't ask out loud. "I can hear you, Scully," he said. "Hear, Scully." "Hear, Scully." *** It could be that God had not absconded but spread, as our vision and understanding of the universe have spread, to a fabric of spirit and sense so grand and subtle, so powerful in a new way, that we can only feel blindly at its hem. -Annie Dillard *** I shake myself awake. Mulder is speaking, his voice rusty. "We're here, Scully. We won't stay, but you can clean up." "Here" is yet another farm house with skinny chickens in the yard and children playing on the front steps in their underwear and diapers. A pretty woman comes to the door, holding a rifle. When she sees Mulder, she lowers the gun and returns to the house without speaking, leaving the door ajar. Maybe no one speaks outside of the colonies. Mulder gets a bag out of the back seat and takes it in the house as I stand in the yard fending off hungry chickens and a friendly milk cow. He's bartering - some cigarettes and whatever else - for what this woman sells. I can guess what it is that she sells. Through the window, their bartering looks pretty heated. The woman keeps shaking her head "no" and I see Mulder clenching his fist. She sees it too and backs off. Women didn't fare well After. That was all it was called – Before and After. Firstly, there weren't many women After. I was probably the only female that had been vaccinated, and very few had been infected with Purity. Most of the others that survived were flukes - hunters out in the woods up north, fisherman out in boats - almost all men. After the aliens left, the bees died, and rebuilding began, the few females were important pawns, but pawns. Some lived as wives if their husbands were powerful enough to keep them safe, but most didn't. Most made their way with the skills they had. Like this woman. Her swollen belly and the children on the porch were evidence of another post-colonization phenomena I had encountered - no birth control. I'd delivered many babies in the last five years, most of them unwanted. Latex breaks down quickly and pills, if you could find them, were outdated. Within two years, any fertile woman of childbearing age looked like something out of the middle ages. I'd seen some women with five children under the age of five. Mulder comes out and nods curtly at me. I step over a dirty dark-haired toddler and preschool-aged boy on the wooden steps and go to him. I know this woman. I've seen her. Her expression indicates she obviously knows and dislikes me. Mulder looks at her threateningly and her overt distaste fades into mere annoyance. Then I remember - she's one of Mulder's informants. Worked for the UN. Name starts with 'm'- Miranda, Matilda? It doesn't matter - now she's just a whore. She must have a man watching out for her; there was no way she lived alone out here. I see Mulder doing something mechanical in the back yard with the little boy and the toddler following him around - they know him, he must be here a lot. Then I realize who Miranda/Matilda's protector must be. Her Big Brother. Again, I do not judge. Our parting words were: "Survive. No questions." I did what I had to; I guess Mulder did too. Perhaps I can even make myself believe that. The blonde woman grudgingly fills the tub for my bath, carrying water from a pump in the yard and heating several pots on the stove. I lay back in the luxury; I can't remember the last time I bathed in something besides a stream. There is even soap and razors. Shampoo and deodorant. There was no shortage of supplies After, but getting them from place to place was still a problem. Anything with a shelf life that survived the looting was there for the taking and there weren't enough people left for there to be shortages; the supplies were just in isolated pockets. Several colonies had established local trade routes, but not many. Most were self-sufficient, trading for what they need with whoever happened by. Mulder must bring her these things. He could bring a whore shaving gel, but he couldn't come get me for five years. Looking out the window as I dry, I see Mulder offer the older boy a lollipop beside the stream. The boy takes it shyly and sits beside Mulder on the bank, leaning against him. They could be any poor rural father and son or uncle and nephew enjoying the warm sunshine in their back yard Before, except that I saw Mulder shoot another boy point-blank this morning and threaten a woman with his fist an hour ago. I will not cry. I will not cry. I can feel the lump rising in my throat, but I will not cry. Sometimes, I'm sure it's not real. That this is a bad dream that I'll wake up from. It's - surreal. Aliens invading, civilization collapsing. It was a movie I'd seen or book I'd read. There were even jokes about it - the colony I was living in was "451," and "Alpha" before that. Drugs and alcohol were "soma." There were "unpeople" and "big brothers," "road warriors" and "savages." A rival leader was a "Randall Flagg" and a woman not a whore or a professional was a "Martha." Post- apocalypse humor. Clean, practical clothes have appeared in place of my dirty ones and I put them on, marveling that they fit. I remember silk and cashmere fondly - it was still available, but useless. Functional is the fashion; cotton, denim, wool, and leather. Mad Max meets John Wayne. I dry my hair in the breeze and watch Mulder bathing nude in the stream, hard muscles rippling in the sun. The little boy sits on the bank, already scrubbed clean and wearing tiny Osh-Kosh overalls. No shirt, but miniature burnt yellow work boots identical to Mulder's. He's holding Mulder's gun and knife, still savoring the last licks of his lollipop. That child can't be more than four. You don't let children have guns, Mulder. And you let them get sticky candy all over themselves and -then- bathe them. Even I knew that. I remember Mulder teasing me when we went undercover as a married couple once Before - how he jokingly barked orders at me, aping a redneck accent. I resisted the urge to jokingly kick his butt. Mulder, in general, had been scared to death of my temper and knew exactly how far he could push me before I lost it. If that man out there that looks like Mulder barks an order at me, I'm following it, whether it's to get in the Jeep or to take off my clothes and get on my hands and knees. I'm not questioning him and I'm not giving him advice on how you care for little boys. Just because he hasn't hurt me doesn't mean he won't. I know danger when I see it. God - what happened to him? When Mulder returns to the house, hair still damp, he opens the hood of her Chevy truck in the driveway. The boy sits on the left fender, handing him tools and watching. He tinkers a bit and the engine hums to life. My Mulder that couldn't fix a dripping faucet. The woman brings Mulder a rag to wipe off his hands and a glass of water. I didn't get a glass of water, but I get the feeling she doesn't like me very much. If I were her, I wouldn't like me very much, either. It's afternoon now - only a few more hours of daylight. I don't want to spent the night here, Mulder - not with her. I can't lie on the other side if the wall and listen to you have sex with her, Mulder. I don't want her to listen and gloat while you have sex with me. Please don't remind me that I am as much your property as she is. I try to think that as loudly as possible. A man with a familiar face emerges from the corn fields, holding the customary rifle, his other sleeve empty. Krycek. Wonder how well he shoots with one arm? He and Mulder exchange glares and the oldest boy runs and hides behind Mulder. Krycek leers at me and Mulder puts a hand on the pistol on his hip, warning him. Krycek turns and vanishes into the fields without a word, the toddler trailing after him. Guess Mulder is the better shot. I don't even worry about the possibility of Mulder offering me to another man - Mulder is not good at sharing. The woman brings a dirty baby to me to check. I pronounce her fine and probably underweight, and the woman nods and returns to the house, closing the door loudly behind her, never speaking to me. I'd like to check her pregnancy and the other children, but that isn't requested. Mulder starts the Jeep and I get in, thankful that we're leaving. I'm not asking any questions - I don't think I want the answers. The oldest boy climbs over me and settles himself in the back seat, fastening his seatbelt, humorously enough. Mulder just drives west into the dying sun. We spend the night in another abandoned house, the boy sleeping curled up against my chest and Mulder against my back - like some bizarre blended family. I thought perhaps Mulder was waiting for me to get cleaned up before we had sex, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Maybe that isn't what he had in mind after all. I'm not sure I like that possibility any better. I still don't know the boy's name or why he's with us. Like Mulder, the child doesn't say much. Morning brings more west again. I can see the outlines of the gray Rocky Mountains on the horizon in the distance. The miles hum by as the air cools and the Jeep's knobby tires singing against the pavement lull me. *** Black holes would seem to suggest that God not only plays dice but also sometimes throws them where they cannot be seen. -Stephen Hawking *** The bunker smelled like a battleship - lots of metal and gray paint. Vast. No sounds invaded to tell us what was happening aboveground - were the rebels striking back or was the planet already dead? Mulder said the ships were moving into place and would soon begin collecting specimens. That was the word he used; how the aliens think of us. No, the rebels were losing. People were dying. Mulder closed his eyes and scanned through the radio stations of thoughts he must have been hearing. He couldn't find my mother or brothers, but that didn't mean anything - there were so many thoughts to listen to and he could only listen, not necessarily know who he was listening to. The bunker had space and provisions for several hundred people and we were less than a dozen. Our watches said it was night again, although there was no sign - no way to tell night from day. We fanned out through the dormitories and rooms, trying to get our bearings in the maze of hallways. Mulder led me to a room on a floor all to ourselves and I followed without question - my first steps down the slope to becooming property. When he closed the door, I sat on the bed, buried my face in my hands, and cried. I was embarrassed to be so weak, but I couldn't stop. The last few hours had been too much for me to absorb and I needed to shut down for a while. Mulder held me as I shook, sharing my tears. I could feel him inside my head, a gentle probing pressure. Light pressure to feel what my body felt, more intense throbbing to listen to my thoughts. He could feel my grief and shock, but I couldn't feel his. Early in the morning I had finally fallen asleep against his chest when I heard him startle awake and gasp. "It's quiet." "What's quiet?" I whispered, like the aliens would hear us fifty feet underground under twenty feet of cement and steel. "The thoughts - it just suddenly got very quiet." Mulder listened in the blackness, tuning to someone who might have an answer. "Mushroom clouds, Scully - nuclear bombs. They've wiped out the cities." "The aliens?" "No, we did it." God, he must have just heard millions of people die. What that must sound like... "Are the aliens still coming?" "They're coming - they want me. They're looking for me." "Why, Mulder?" "They know I can hear them. They want me to help them communicate. They can't find me, though, so they're searching... they're searching for you. The chip - they're searching by the chip in your neck. I can hear them. They haven't found you yet, but they will. They don't want you, Scully; you already have Purity - so do I, but they'll still kill you to get me." He had to run, to get away from me before the aliens could get him. But where could he run too? We were locked under tons of steel. I didn't realize until years later that I never even considered that I should leave the bunker - for him to stay safe since I was the one the aliens could track. "The bombs are still exploding, Scully - the cities are burning and they can't search through all the interference. Not for another few hours, anyway. Then I'll have to go." There was no more talking. Alone in the dark, cinderblock room, in the too-narrow, too-short bed, I kissed him. Not the way I'd thought of from time to time, but hungry and frightened. I was desperate to find something to cling to - something normal and enduring in a world that was changing too fast for me to comprehend. Mulder's mouth was more gentle than mine, as though he was savoring a delicate desert. He made love to me the same was he'd touched me for years - carefully exploring new territory and waiting for my reaction before proceeding. He set the pace with me following like a scared teenage virgin being seduced by her teacher. Finally, Mulder stopped waiting for me to be an equal participant, laid me back on the rough sheet, and worshiped every inch of me - memorizing my body because he might never see it again. This wasn't the kind of lover I wanted to be for him, but that night, it was all I could give. I told myself I couldn't let him go without proving to him that I loved him. I told myself this was about love. I could feel Mulder being distracted by his thoughts, pulled away from me by the screaming tides outside the bunker. "Just me, Mulder. Come inside me," I whispered, and the throbbing in my head increased until it blocked out even my listening to my own higher brain. I felt the brief pain as my body accepted his and soft lips apologizing onto mine. I could feel my sensations, but there was no room for cognition, no rationalization, no doubts. As a woman whose thoughts had always interfered with love-making, it would have been a frightening experience, except that I couldn't feel fear. Only the seductive mix of pain and pleasure that was loving him crashing over me, wave after wave. Mulder shared my every sensation, intensifying his own experience, and allowing him to play my body like a fine violin. He came because he felt me coming because he was coming because I was coming. Together, we were a complete cycle. Afterwards, our bodies separated, but Mulder stayed in my head, listening to my sleepy thoughts. My fears. My desires. In that night, he knew my truths. "They've found you, Scully. They're coming." I bolted upright at those words. Mulder was dressed and sitting on the edge of the bed. "I love you. I'll ask Skinner to take care of you- just stay with him. I've been listening to everyone and he's the best choice. He won't let anyone hurt you, but... he likes you, Scully. Just do what he says, okay? I'll come for you when I can. Until then, I want you to survive - no questions about how you do it." A thousand thoughts flooded my mind at his words. No, don't leave me. Run, Mulder - don't let them catch you. Take me with you. I don't want Skinner - I want you. I can take care of myself. How long - how long until you can come? Hurry. I love you too, Mulder. Please. But Mulder was gone. I heard his footsteps in the long cement hall, leaving me. I ran to catch up and heard him talking to Skinner. "Take care of her, sir. I can hear what's happening already to the women outside and I don't want that to be Scully. I won't let the aliens hurt you all, but you'll have to keep her safe here. Just you. Don't let anyone else... Don't hurt her, sir." Mulder must have heard my thoughts, because his next words were, "I'm sorry, Scully. Go back - I don't want you to hear this. Just survive - no questions." I retreated back into the cold room, sitting on the still-damp spot on the bed, curling into a ball and sobbing. Down the long hall I heard twenty tons of blast door swing slightly open, then a monstrous clangy thud as it quickly slammed shut again. *** God does not play dice with the universe; he plays an ineffable game of his own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the players, to being involved in an obscure and complex version of poker in a pitch dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time. -Gaiman and Pratchett *** We stop for lunch and to let the restless little boy stretch his legs behind a grain silo. I ask him his name as Mulder slices another apple for him with a huge hunting knife, cutting off the peeling like my mother used to do. The child shrugs, huge hazel eyes watching me. Old eyes. "Boy. We just call him Boy," Mulder says. Boy nods. I haven't heard him speak yet either. Mulder seems to know what the boy needs, just like he knows what I need, although he gives him more food that he could ever eat. He gets a rifle out of the back of the Jeep and vanishes into the tall grass and random rows of corn. After about twenty minutes, I hear a shot and see a large goose fall from the sky. Dinner. "He won't hurt you, ya know." So the boy can speak. I thought it might have become a lost art. His slow, measured words are too old for his years - they remind me of the way Gibson Praise spoke. "He's takin' you someplace safe. He likes you." "Can you hear like he can?" I ask, and the boy bobs his head up and down childishly - the way a four-year-old should. A shit- eating grin crosses his face and mischief glimmers in his eyes. He reminds me of someone I used to know Before... Mulder. He reminds me of Mulder. This is his son. The toddler and the baby were Krycek's or some other man's, but this boy is Mulder's. Mulder and that whore's. A second shot and another bird drops from the sky. Mulder must be hungry. Two fat geese are added to the back of the Jeep and we pull back on the road. West. Always west. *** For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries. -Robert Jastrow *** The first problem in the bunker was boredom. The was nothing to do, day after day, week after week. Frohike cooked, Skinner and Byers maintained the generator and the water processing plant, but for the rest of us, there was nothing that required our time. I did one round of kitchen duty before I was removed by unanimous vote. Of course, I get trapped in a bunker with Newt Gingrich and Pat Robertson with nothing to do - why couldn't Skinner have more interesting poker buddies? Wherever Mulder was, he was laughing his ass off. Langly tried using his laptop to interface with the antiquated communications system, but there was no dial tone. No network still standing for the modem to link with. No TV or cable transmissions. Then he got the old ham radio working. The Gunmen spent every free hour scanning that radio, searching for life like the SETI project. I often sat with them for lack of anything better to do, listening to the static. I was daydreaming one afternoon when I heard Langly shout: "Randi! You owe me about a million dollars, mother-fucker!" A man's voice crackled through the static, "I got it right here – been using it for toilet paper." James Randi. The great skeptic. A hero of mine and a nemesis of Mulders - on the other side of that radio, our link to life on the other side of the blast doors. I sat next to Pat Robertson at breakfast and lost my last stick of gum to Newt in a game of five-card stud today. God definitely had a sense of humor. According to Randi, the aliens seemed to have collected all the humans they were going to take. The saucers had moved on, along with the faceless rebel fighters. The larger cities had been destroyed and Randi hadn't seen another person since Before. He'd been out on his boat with his dog when they came and returned to shore a two weeks later to find his house and his family gone. Now it was just him and an old dog, sitting in a lighthouse beside the ocean. Waiting. Did we stay in the bunker or did we leave? Skinner voted to stay, as did The Gunmen, but the others wanted to go. No one asked me. Society was already changing. The final decision was to open the blast doors but to stay in the bunker, so Skinner and Byers unlatched the huge gray door, leveraging their weight against its squealing hinges as it opened. There was nothing alive except deer grazing in the ruins of the resort and dogs looking for their masters. No people. Mulder was right - the world had suddenly become quiet. In many ways, our group was very well off. We had a stronghold that was practically impossible to penetrate. I had a medical background and The Gunmen had technical knowledge; Skinner and some of his friends had the Marine's survival training. The politicians - well, they - they had lots of opinions. No cities near us had been bombed, so no fallout. We had food and water to last for months. We started rebuilding. We weren't the only ones who knew about the bunker, of course. Men began to appear out of the woods and from the road leading into the valley, clutching rifles and backpacks. Some were mountain men native to the area, some were military men already infected with Purity that survived the bombs, riots, and bees. Within six months, there were more than a hundred men living in Alpha Colony with more arriving every day. Alpha-males. Skinner was never humble. It's not that I'm not a grown woman - I can handle myself. And it's not that all the men were crazed rapists, either. It was just the constant stress of being the lone woman that made me start to retreat. I had a man at my heels every time I budged - helping me carry firewood, wash dishes, scrub my clothes in the stream. The ever-present male eyes followed me all day, always there and always wanting. The final straw was when I was bathing - in the stream, of course - and discovered I had a group of admirrers. Men were willing to sit in the rain to watch me bathe. I told Skinner and he went with me the next time, in theory, looking the other direction. I was more comfortable with the Gunmen as my guards, but they didn't dissuade the other men the way Skinner did. Skinner had been asked several times what he wanted for me - the men assumed we were covert lovers. Good to know fifteen minutes with me is worth two cows - we laughed about that offer for days. Skinner had never mentioned whatever he and Mulder discussed, and he hadn't made a move that could have been construed as sexual. He just took care of me, keeping me with him when he could and arranging a guard when he was away. There were several gay couples that formed- and left - but most men watched me. Brought me things they thought I wanted from outside the valley and sat beside me at meals. Most of them were polite, just lonely - they accepted my polite "no" without question. Other men, frankly, frightened me - Alpha Colony was a tough place by then. Mulder was right, I needed protecting, as much as I hated it. This was a society where the strong thrived and the weak suffered, and I was one of the weak. I couldn't survive on my own if I left, but it was becoming more and more of an issue for me to stay. One man in particular was a problem from the moment he arrived. He'd made his way north from Tennessee, and I always thought he was probably a relative of the Peacock family. No too bright. Didn't like hearing "no." Finally, he grabbed me in my room and managed to rip my nightshirt off before anyone heard me struggling and came to help. Once the man was gone, the others just let me sit on the bed while they stared at me, embarrassed, but not helping me or leaving me. Skinner finally came in from guard duty after an eternity and threw everyone out. He wrapped the blanket around me and stayed with me until I calmed down. It was a long time before I calmed down. It wasn't the shock of being attacked - God knows I'd been attacked often enough when I worked on the X-files. My terror was two-fold. First, the knowledge that I couldn't protect myself anymore finally sunk in. I had somehow become helpless - dependent - and it made me angry. Furious. Agent Dana Scully, M.D., is NOT helpless. And second, there was no one I could depend on except Skinner or another man like him. Langly, Byers, and Frohike would die trying, but they would die. The other men helped me because they assumed I was Skinner's and didn't want to risk making him angry. The world had stopped being a nice place. I could choose a man to protect me or I could have one chosen for me. That night, I realized that Mulder was right about something else - saying Skinner liked me was an undersstatement. He cared enough enough not to take advantage of me on a night when I would have let him. Probably would have welcomed him. Just stayed with me until I was calm enough to face the men outside and then led me down the stairs to his bedroom, knowing exactly what impression that would give any man who thought about touching me. Skinner cleaned off the other bed, put his blanket over me, and sat on the floor beside me until I fell asleep. I spent every night there for months. The next morning, Skinner told the Tennessee man to leave the colony. He refused and Skinner shot him in the back of the head, execution-style, with the same look in his eyes that Mulder has now. After that, Skinner was our leader; no one questioned him. I was under his protection, so no one approached me. Life went on. It was hard to tell sometimes that I had become property, but I had. I started to pray again. I prayed to my Catholic God, Mulder's clockmaker God, and anyone else that might be listening up there - for Mulder to come back, for my family, for myself. My unspoken prayers were somehow louder if I kneeled, so I put a thick blanket down in the little dental clinic adjoining my clinic and prayed there during the day, where I thought I was away from prying eyes. Skinner found me a few times and brought me back a Bible, a statue of the Virgin, candles and a rosary so I could create my own alter. The Bible had a family tree written in the front - names of people who had died while I lived. I prayed for those names, too. My mother would have been proud of how much time I spent on my knees - making up for the time when I had cancer, I guess. Occasionally I would hear a noise and find a rough-looking man I'd never seen before kneeling beside me, lips moving silently in prayer for someone or something. Forgiveness for sins or safety for loved ones? Death with peace or strength to survive? What did these men pray for? They never spoke to me - which seemed to be a command from Skinner - but it was good to know I wasn't the only one who sought comfort outside these gray walls. I turned to Heaven and my faith for salvation in those months; Mulder must have turned somewhere else. Don't think I don't understand what it's like to need to be numb, Mulder, because I do. And God answers prayer, Mulder - but sometimes the answer is "no," no matter how loud or long you ask. Faith is about accepting His answer. And eventually you get up off your knees and go on with your life. Men still came to me for medical treatment in the bunker clinic with Byers, usually, looking on with a rifle. I even gave lethal injections to two men that were infected with Purity by left-over bees instead of having Skinner shoot them before the aliens hatched. I told myself it was a mercy killing. There was a medical school somewhere close by and I made lists of what I needed, drawing pictures in an attempt to get the right instruments. There was no way I could go myself, even with Skinner and guards; I was too easily identifiable as a woman - endangering the entire group. I was as much a prisoner as if there were bars at the edge of the valley. It was that bad. Two hundred men and one woman in Alpha Colony and God only knew who prowling in the woods. I was trapped. All I could do was wait for Mulder, but God kept saying "no." One night I felt the soft throbbing in my temples, like a migraine, except it didn't hurt. More like a doctor gently kneading an abdomen - pushing, searching. The pressure increased and I knew it was Mulder - alive and listening to my thoughts from wherever he was. He could still do it, even after the spaceships moved on. I laid back on my cot and welcomed him. Skinner was asleep and snoring softly in his bed against the wall, so I let my hands roam over my body, knowing Mulder could feel the sensation. Sleep came and he had left me when I awoke. I felt Mulder's presence often for a while when I was at Alpha Colony - usually at night, but sometimes in the day just to listen to me. To make sure I was safe. I had no way of knowing where he was or why he didn't come get me, but I knew he was alive - somewhere in the vast emptiness outside that valley. Skinner appeared in the clinic one day complaining about his head "feeling funny." I found no evidence of neurological problems or any illness in my rudimentary exam. He said it didn't hurt, just felt "funny." I sent him back out to work on the barn we were building for the livestock, ordering him to return if it actually hurt. The men frequently developed vague complaints in order to get to see me and I figured Skinner was just whining. Not that Skinner ever whined and he could see me whenever he wanted. It was still bothering him as we got ready to go to bed, which worried me. I rechecked him, but he was still in excellent health - all the outdoor physical activity suited him. I couldn't find anything wrong and he insisted it didn't hurt, just throbbed; pressure like someone was examining him from the inside. It was Mulder. It was Mulder listening to him. Listening hard and long, more than necessary to gather any information about our group or about Skinner and me. Mulder wanted to feel what Skinner could feel. I knew what Mulder wanted to feel. That meant Mulder couldn't ever come back to get me. That God was saying "no." And faith is about living with His answer. I didn't explain what was happening to Skinner - I doubted he wanted a third in our bed. I just slipped off my clothes in front of him and waited. The birds and the bees and the monkey babies, Mulder. Birds do it, bees do it, even educated M.D.s do it. I just closed my eyes and licensed his roving hands. Skinner didn't question me that night. Afterwards, I went back to my own bed and slept alone. "That was Mulder, wasn't it?" he asked me the next morning. I nodded and he left, his face bearing the same stern, controlled expression it always did. It didn't happen again for several weeks and Mulder didn't listen to me, either. I filled my days with stitching up wounds, removing splinters, and even performed an appendectomy I was very proud of with the assistance of a very green Byers. I knew he was in love with me by then - Byers and Skinner both. I probably could have been content with either one of them, but I knew Skinner could keep me safe. I hated that I had become someone who had thoughts like that. There were more fights - struggles for power and supplies. Most of the men in the colony were ones I would have thought of the bad guys Before. Covert government agents, MIB, and special forces among those that had Purity, mostly military and mountain men with the training to survive among those that weren't infected. Skinner was holding on to power, barely, and I was more and more a liability for him. If he was overthrown as the leader, I would be the first casualty; probably becoming the unwilling property of the new leader. Leadership of Alpha colony came with a nice bunker, a band of ex-military men that killed on command, well-established trade routes, and the privilege of sleeping with me. Skinner came to me the next time, making love to me gently and silently. He said only that Mulder was listening and asked my permission. I closed my eyes and gave it. Whatever Mulder wanted. It happened again a week later and then not for another month. I never dreaded it - Skinner was a good lover - but I missed Mulder in my head, listening for me. *** I do not feel obligated to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. -Galileo *** Something is very wrong. My body is flying through the air like a limp doll, weightless. Did gravity switch off? It wouldn't surprise me at this point. Suddenly, my head hits something hard and the sun fades to black. It's raining - my face is wet. If the rain is falling down, gravity must have come back on. I can hear Mulder, so I must be dreaming; Mulder left me. Mulder will never come for me. No, it is Mulder, holding me in his lap and calling my name, hoarsely begging me to wake up. I fight to open my heavy eyelids and see his worried eyes full of tears. That's the rain. After a few minutes, my head clears and I ask him what happened. "We rolled over," the little boy answers my question, looking very proud of himself. "I was wearin' my seatbelt." Good for you, Boy. I'm friggin' thrilled for you. God, who let a million bumble bees loose in my head? All I get from Mulder are shaky hands cleaning off my face and "I'm sorry," repeated over and over. He's about half a step from sanity - I think the nosebleed did him in. The boy further reveals that the road had suddenly caved-in, flipping us into the gully and throwing me clear. Mulder and the Boy, who were wearing their seatbelts, were unhurt, but I'd been out for several minutes. And I was "bleedin'." What a day. Should have buckled up - gravity and all that. I assure Mulder that I'm fine, but he won't leave me alone. Finally I yell, which causes my head to pound but gets Mulder to stop fussing over me. I sit in the road feeling stupid while he rights the Jeep, drives back up to the road, and gathers the supplies that are scattered all over the place. I must have been asleep a while, because this doesn't look like Kansas anymore. Hell, this doesn't even look like Earth. Oh look - my best friend, Mulder, and the illegitimate child he had with a whore before he switched careers to professional killer almost have our Jeep reloaded. Did I mention he's psychic now? So's the kid. And he owns both of us outright. Christ, my head hurts. The Boy smirks when Mulder tosses several broken bottles of whiskey and the cartons of cigarettes they have soaked into the ditch. There are a couple of looks exchanged and the Boy dodges quickly, missing the brunt of Mulder's sudden slap on his face. I try to get up and intervene - I can't believe that Mulder just hit a child. I get to my knees as Mulder warns, "Don't you dare think of her that way," to the boy. Either that slap wasn't as hard as I thought or the boy doesn't know how to cry, because the boy just apologizes and comes to help me, looking chastised. I kneel frozen - stunned as the rough pavement cuts into my knees. Mulder is embarrassed. He examines his boots closely and then vanishes for half an hour. By the time he returns, the boy has helped me clean my scraped elbows and bloody nose and explained what cigarettes and whiskey are usually traded for - whores. Mulder wouldn't need to pay for sex since he'd just bought me, according to the boy. I'm not sure I wouldn't have felt the urge to spank you too, boy. I wouldn't have slapped you, but that's not nice. I know he doesn't remember a time that women were useful for something besides sex and I know he's a child and he's been listening to Mulder and... And I'm going to cry again if I don't watch it. My brain can't hold all this. Mulder has reappeared as silently as he left. I'm not speaking to him and he better not listen to me. He can beat me senseless if he wants, but I'm not going to watch him abuse his son. "I'm sorry, Scully. I won't do it again." His face indicates he means it. I want to believe him so much that I do. He was just upset that I was hurt and he snapped for a second. My Mulder would never hit a child. When I get to my feet, I sway for a second before he picks me up in his arms to carry me. I protest, and to my surprise, he puts me down without question. I keep expecting to be forced, and instead, there is this weird balance of power between us. I haven't felt power in years, and I'm grateful to Mulder for that, if nothing else. A familiar hand on my back guides me into the passenger seat and then fastens my seatbelt snugly over my lap. I would kiss him if I wasn't so afraid of him. Instead, I take his hand as he drives to wherever it is that we're going while the boy sits in the back seat, happily eating all the peppermint candy he can hold. Mulder gave him the whole damn bag as a peace offering. I'm sorry, too, Mulder. I'm sorry I'm responsible, at least in part, for what you've become. *** Science at the cutting edge, conducted by sharp minds probing deep into nature, is not about self-evident facts. It is about taking huge risks. It is about wasting time, getting burned, and failing. It is like trying to crack a monstrous safe that has a complicated, secret lock designed by God. -Richard Preston *** I eventually had to ask myself the question: did I want Skinner as something more than a surrogate for Mulder? In many ways, he reminded me of Jack or Daniel - older, powerful, commanding. I'd been attracted to him because of that Before. But I wasn't a child anymore and I didn't need a father-figure. All I needed was to not be attacked. All I wanted was for Mulder to come for me, but he was never going to. I needed to live with God's "no." And Skinner was a good man. Finally, I stayed with Skinner in his bed after we had sex one night. He made love to me as though he was treading where the brave men dared not go, never touching me outside our bedroom or announcing in any way that we were lovers, because we weren't. Mulder and I were lovers - I'd just had sex with Skinner a few times. I'm not sure Skinner saw it that way. We must have overslept, because I didn't hear Byers knocking. He opened the door to find me asleep nude against Skinner's broad chest with his arms wrapped safely around me. I opened my sleepy eyes to meet his accusing ones. His eyes called me a whore the same way I called the boy's mother one. Surviving was one thing; betrayal was another. Byers never said anything to me, but that was the last night I slept with Skinner after we had sex. *** But I don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose, which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell, possibly. It doesn't frighten me. -Richard Feynman *** Mulder had barely stopped the Jeep before the boy has climbed over me like I was a set of monkey bars, running towards a blue house. A young man with glasses opens the door for the child and he scampers inside, already at home. The man - no, the teenager, smiles at me and waves as Mulder brings in our bags and the two geese he shot. When I reach the front door, the young man grabs me in a big bear hug and lifts me off my feet. Whoever it is, he's definitely friendly or he'd already have eaten one of Mulder's bullets. Those glasses... Gibson. It's Gibson Praise. That's right - he could hear the same way Mulder could. Can. If he'd been infected with Purity Before, he was useless to the aliens an a host, so they would have let him live. He was about ten or eleven Before, making him about fifteen or sixteen now. Gibson! I kiss him square on the lips before I can stop myself. Mulder hands the limp geese to a girl with, of course, a big belly. She goes outside to clean them as I watch her, worried. She's barely hit puberty - her hips are still very narrow. Might be about thirteen years old at the most, although she's tall. She was going to have trouble having that baby. Maybe that was why Mulder wanted me. Oh please, don't let this be his child too. She's a child herself, Mulder. *** Two things continue to fill the mind with ever increasing awe and admiration: the starry heavens above and the moral law within. -Immanuel Kant *** It was actually a pregnant woman that caused me to leave Skinner's Alpha Colony. Another leader made an offer too good to turn down - trade me for a veterinarian they had and the other group would stop trying to take the bunker - call a truce and discuss merging the two colonies. The leader had a wife pregnant with twins, according to the vet, and they needed a doctor. I saw Skinner's eyes as he thought about it. The leader from other colony said they had other women and more civilians, so less infighting for power and more stability. He said they had prostitutes, so it wasn't likely I would be raped. Skinner was having difficulty keeping order among his men and waging a battle to keep the bunker and protecting me. He couldn't fight a war on two fronts. Something had to give and I caused a lot of resentment among the men. Skinner never asked me what I wanted. My AD, who always respected my work as a woman in the FBI, never asked me. I didn't want to go and I told him so. Loudly. I argued and I yelled and I debated. I even tried to seduce him when he told me to pack. "Mulder was only listening the first time." That was all he said. The dozen or so other times we'd had sex, it was just because he wanted the release, so he lied to me. I was packed and ready to leave in ten minutes. Byers tried to object and Skinner shot him dead. There were no further arguments. *** The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed. -Albert Einstein *** The pregnant girl cooks the geese over a fire outside, looking like the Native Americans that lived here before the white men came. I can see the Indian features in her face - she's probably full blood. Black hair to her waist, high cheekbones, long, beautiful legs visible under her short skirt. She would have been a child on a reservation maybe, one that was overlooked by the aliens and the bees. I feel Mulder behind me on the steps, sitting with his long legs on either side of me. He pulls off the hat I usually wear to avoid attracting attention as a redhead and unbraids my hair. It's longer now, touching my shoulders - it's easier to let it grow than to try and cut it. I feel the gentle tugs as he combs out the tangles, then buries his face in it, breathing deeply. I remember this touch. I remember this Mulder. He rebraids it the way he must have learned on Samantha's hair decades ago, fastening it with my elastic band. When he gets up, I reach back for my hat, but Mulder keeps it. "Leave it off," he says. "No one will bother you." That's because I'm his property. I'm Mulder's now. After dinner, I lay in bed beside Mulder, listening to Gibson and the girl have sex upstairs. Where were child protective services when you needed them - I think I'm listening to a felony. At least it's not Mulder with her. The boy is restless in front of me, tossing and turning. Finally the child whispers to me: "Gibson isn't hurtin' her. You can go to sleep." I feel Mulder shift and the boy leaves silently. The couch springs creak as the boy lays down in the living room, banished to the other end of the house. Mulder runs his hand over my shoulder and down my arm, up over my stomach and resting it between my breasts. "Do you want this, Scully?" He can hear what I want, he just wants the word to come out of my mouth. "You don't need to be afraid - I won't hurt you." I want to believe him. Mulder stands up and undresses, revealing more scars on his body. Then he lies back on the bed and waits, the way I waited for Skinner. "If you want me, you make love to me." I hesitate. It was easy to imagine an eternal bond of love between us when I was alone and afraid. It was even easy to allow myself to be seduced that night in the bunker by a savior who could read my mind. Mulder, my best friend and partner, had never been my lover. Not in the way I'd imagined Before. And this man was almost, but not quite, my Mulder. A hand takes mine in the darkness and I remember all the times Mulder held my hand Before. Stood by me, saved me, loved me without question. I move with him as he draws me closer. Mulder has never been passive about much of anything, and an apocalypse hasn't changed that. His hands rest on my hips, encouraging me as I slide down slowly, further and further without hesitation, gritting my back teeth against the pressure on my cervix. I'm not really ready yet and there is a tight stretching, almost tearing sensation, like opening your mouth too wide when you yawn. I breathe deep, smelling Mulder and hearing his gasps at the tight embrace. For you, Mulder - does that tell you how much I want you? A hand on the small of my back - on my tattoo, and on my waist guide me as I rock. My orgasm comes almost instantly and I lay against his sweaty, scarred chest as he continues to guide my hips, faster and faster until I feel his body stiffen and arch under mine. Only afterwards do I feel him inside my head, searching as I doze. *** I find it quite improbable that such order came out of chaos. There has to be some organizing principle. God to me is a mystery but is the explanation for the miracle of existence, why there is something instead of nothing. -Alan Sandage *** *** I wondered after I left Skinner's colony if he hadn't lied to me. Only woman or not, I couldn't see him taking advantage of my trust. He unquestioningly loved me - maybe he just wanted to make sure I was safe. But I'd heard Mulder give him permission to use my body as he wanted - as though Mulder was the one that got to give permission. Regardless, I was leaving. I sat in the passenger seat of the Army transport truck as they drove to my new home and marveled at the landscape. I hadn't ever been out of the valley - it was too much of a risk. The men brought me whatever I wanted or needed, although they all thought I needed lots of lingerie and perfume instead of long underwear and boots. It was wonderful to have two hundred men know I preferred regular to deodorant tampons and there seemed to be a conspiracy not to bring me a decent bra. A conspiracy in which Skinner was an active participant, I might add. Bastard. I wasn't sure where I was going - I'd thought the other colony was closer. Herds of deer grazed beside the roads, free of the hunters that once kept them thinned out and the guards riding with us shot several from the back of the truck until the leader told them to stop. Most houses I saw were still standing - whole and empty. Just like me. My driver - Granger, the leader, saw me smile when he stopped for a stop sign and used his turn signal, as though the old traffic rules still applied. "No one's going to hurt you - we just need a doctor," he assured me. Mister, as long as you aren't Walter Skinner, I don't care if you make me dig ditches, I remember thinking. He kept his word. No one harmed me and I wanted for nothing. Two weeks later he had a set of healthy identical twin girls and I was the colony hero. My life went on as it had before - aches and pains, accidental cuts and the occasional gunshot wound. Lots of food poisoning as canned goods began to get too old. Deliver babies and care for the dying. Much the same, except that Mulder came to me at night again, listening. And I stopped praying. *** Divinity is not playful. The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest. By a power that is unfathomably secret, and holy, and fleet. There is nothing to be done about it, but ignore it, or see. -Anne Dillard *** I heard Mulder chuckle deeply in the dark. "Ah - to be fifteen again." Then I hear a girl's giggles upstairs and I understand. I kiss Mulder - it's been so long since I've heard him laugh. I wasn't sure that he still could. He kisses me back and I learn that forty-five knows a few things fifteen doesn't. This is the man I always wanted to be my lover - not the Mulder that shot a child or slapped his son or even the one that saved me from the aliens. Nestled naked in his arms, I wait for morning. Dawn brought a change of vehicles and more silent west. It's colder in the mountains and Mulder gives me a winter coat and puts one on the boy - he's planned this trip for some time, although I'm still freezing with the top off the Humvee. Gibson and the girl sit in the back seat dozing against each other as we drive. There is no trace of the lover I'd heard laugh in the dark last night in Mulder - only a silent man with a grim expression and a driven look in his eyes behind the wheel. After lunch, Gibson drives while Mulder sleeps in the back seat with me and the boy. Neither of us slept much last night. Gibson didn't either, from what I heard, and I don't like him very much because of that. He must be listening to me, because he defends himself: "If she wasn't with me, she'd be a whore in some colony, Scully. Which do you prefer?" I prefer a world where it's no acceptable to have sex with thirteen year olds, Gibson, but I don't say that out loud. If Gibson heard me, he's ignoring me. Gibson keeps the vehicle in the middle of the two-lane, as one who had learned to drive without other cars on the road. Mulder did the same, as though he had erased any memory of Before. The girl rides shotgun, literally, holding a rifle in her slim arms while the little boy stares fascinated as the mountains grow larger. I have so many questions. Where have you been, Mulder? Why didn't you come for me? Join the colony as my husband under another name, if nothing else. Was this child conceived with her while you were listening to Skinner make love to me? The timing was right, but how could you do that to me? What happened to you to harden you into someone I barely recognize? Are you a killer, a martyr, or a victim? Where are you taking me? Why don't you talk to me? Do you remember all those nights together – long talks in a rental car about anything and everything as we drove in search of the truth? Gas station coffee in Styrofoam cups and Chinese take-out? Basement offices and slide projectors? Do you remember who we were, Mulder? I can feel Mulder listening as he sleeps, but I get no answers – only silence in the Army vehicle as the mountains pass. Gibson slows as we round a blind turn and Mulder wakes quickly, picking up the rifle he used to shoot the geese yesterday. The girl stands and braces herself, gun against her shoulder, ready as the boy gestures for me to get down. As we cower behind the seat, the Humvee lurches forward and I hear the girl lay down a line of cover. Several shots answer and Mulder fires twice. There are sickening wet sounds as his bullets find flesh and the squeal of tires as we round the curve too fast. Then it's over and the boy sits back up, pulling on my sleeve for me to follow. Mulder leans the rifle against the door of the Humvee and goes back to sleep, his son curled against him. Asleep, this man looks even more like my Mulder. Gibson isn't as sensitive about taking bathroom breaks, so the boy and his girlfriend are squirming all over the place before I brave asking him. He pulls over without a word. What I wouldn't give for some of the friendly banter Mulder and I used to have. Actually, I'd settle for a good fight right now - all these men listening to each other's thoughts is getting to me. I drag my feet as much as possible, taking the boy into a rudimentary women's bathroom at a visitors' welcome center. It's in perfect working order - there are no women left alive to use it and it's hard to break a pit toilet. There are still brochures in racks, so I get several to entertain the boy. We walk around a little, working the kinks out of our legs, and I show him how to make and throw a snowball. When we return, the girl is pacing and Mulder finally has an expression: annoyed. Mulder and Gibson fight without words, pointing at the girl and the vehicle. The boy translates for me: "She's havin' the baby too soon. Mulder wants to leave her here, but Gibson wants to wait and take her and the baby with us. He says he won't leave without her and you can deliver the baby. Mulder says she's goin' to die anyway and he should just shoot her now. That there isn't sucha shortage of pussy that he needed to be fuckin' a child..." Mulder and Gibson freeze as the little boy says those words, the argument instantly over. Mulder unpacks several sleeping bags and unrolls them on the floor of the visitors' center and gathers wood for a fire - we're staying. Hours later, the girl is still pacing across the orange tiles, rapidly getting weaker. Gibson walks with her, worried, while Mulder sits with his back against the wall and stares straight ahead, his rifle on the floor beside him. The boy sits on the other side of him, oddly silent, like the children that lived through the first holocaust. The next day comes without much change except that the girl is laying in the floor now, no longer able to walk. I have my bag with a scalpel and basic medical supplies, but nothing to perform a C-section, which is what she needs. If we were near a hospital, I'd take her there, but we're in the middle of the Rocky Mountains. Mulder's right - she's going to die. I have some old Demerol with me, but I doubt it's enough to be fatal. Maybe I could ease her pain for a few hours, but eventually... I see Gibson kiss her forehead and Mulder raise the rifle before I can finish that thought. I open my mouth to say "no," but she's already dead in a pool of blood. I can still take the baby, but Gibson shakes his head. There's no way to save a premature baby here, anyway. No, this isn't real. I'll wake up soon. Mulder rolls up the sleeping bag he was sitting on and clears the snow off the Humvee. Again, I get in the passenger's seat, leaving a child's dead body to the scavengers. By nightfall, we're through the mountains and I still haven't woken from this nightmare. We stop at dusk, Mulder choosing a Victorian-style house strategically set atop a hill. There are actually deer in the front yard, so a fat doe cooks while Gibson and Mulder put the top on the Humvee. I don't know if he's pissed because the girl put us behind his schedule, or because he doesn't know this house and we're cold, or because the moon is full. For whatever reason, frightening waves roll off of him whenever I get close. After we eat, Gibson grudgingly takes the boy to bed with him, still pouting over his girlfriend, and leaving me to Mulder's mercy. He reminds me of a panther pacing restlessly back and forth across the room. "I'm not a monster, Scully." At last - he speaks! I'm sure the angels are rejoicing. "I survived, just like you did. I don't question what you had to do." I didn't shoot any children, Mulder. "I did what I had to do. Would you rather have watched her suffer for hours? Would you rather have killed her?" "Stop that!" I scream at him. "Get out of my head!" "I don't blame you if I frighten you, or even if you hate me, but don't question my motives about you. You're the one thing I still care about." What about your son? What about Gibson? "I thought you might want the boy - Marita doesn't want him and Krycek hates him. He's a good boy, Scully, but you don't have to take him. I worried about that." "Will you kill him too, if I don't want him?" I will speak out loud! "No, I'll take him back to his mother and kill Krycek." He says it like it's the obvious choice. "I just want some answers, Mulder. Where you've been, what you've done. Why you didn't come for me sooner. What you've become. I just saw my best friend shoot a teenage girl in the face without flinching - that's not the man I remember." "I'm not the man you remember, Scully. Not even close." More silence as he leads me to the bed he's made, zipping two sleeping bags together. I let him undress me efficiently and wait while he takes off his own shirt and boots. Mulder kneels and pulls me with him. "You know, this is the best way to keep warm, Scully," he says flatly as his knees part my legs, hands cupping my cold, bare breasts. That was an echo of my Mulder, curled up beside me in a forest with a sore shoulder, listening to me sing Three Dog Night off- key. Maybe there are really only echos of that man left. Long, rough fingers that I remember being so elegant bend my knees up, opening me, exposing me. Not asking - telling me this is going to happen. He's hard against me, the bulge in his jeans pressing between my legs, insisting. Mulder lays me back, takes both my hands, and pens them above my head with one of his, stretching the new scabs on my scraped elbows painfully as he holds me down. I can't help it - I'm scared and I feel tears in my eyes. It's too impersonal, the way men touch prostitutes or the way I touch someone as a doctor. Just lay back and let your knees fall apart, ma'am. Please don't do it like this, Mulder. Please, no. I love you - I'll make love to you, but not like this. Don't treat me like your property. Please. I will not cry. I will not cry. Mulder stops and gets up, leaving me to tremble in the dusty floor, only a thin sleeping bag under me. I could pull the other sleeping bag over me, but I don't dare. Suddenly there is a flash of brightness and Mulder returns with a dim lantern, setting it in the corner and lowering himself on top of me again. The gentle light plays over his face, lover's eyes and full lips against the shadows of his cheeks. My Mulder is still beautiful, whether he thinks so or not. Mulder isn't the only one who isn't completely sane. This man is basically about to rape me. I try to tell myself that Mulder would never hurt me, but I can't make myself believe it this time. He raises my hands above my head again and my trembling gets worse. He moves like he's going to kiss me, but instead touches his lips to the flesh on the inside of my elbow and the underside of my upper arm. Lightly caressing, almost tickling me, he covers every inch. "It's so soft, Scully. Your skin is the softest thing left on this Earth. I wanted to see it. So beautiful and fair." His arm is dark against mine as he holds me, kissing my neck and shoulders while his other hand searches through the tangle of curls between my legs. I hear a whisper in my hair, "I do love you, Scully. Only you. Don't ever doubt it." In the floor of the looming house in the chiaroscuro, that is enough. My trembling stops as my body warms to his. He pushes farther into my mind as I hear a zipper unzipping. "Tell me 'yes,' Scully," he says, lips on my earlobe, "Tell me you want this." The word is barely out of my mouth when I feel him penetrate hard, causing me to cry out in spite of myself. Before my body adjusts, he begins to thrust roughly; oddly, it feels almost like my Mulder making love to me. I will my muscles to relax, replaying his last twenty words as my mantra. Afterwards, Mulder lays with me motionless until my breathing returns to normal. His hand covers my face for a moment and I panic before I realize he's checking to see if I'm crying. I'm not. I'm going to be in pain tomorrow, but he asked me and I said "yes." I didn't say "yes" to him being so rough, though, and I don't have to be psychic to know he's telling me he's sorry. Why did you do that? What happened? One second you were kissing my shoulders like my lover; the next you were using my body to forget you just killed a teenage girl so I didn't have to watch her suffer anymore. Yes, that is what you did. Mulder, if it made you forget, even for one second, it was worth it. You don't need to be sorry. I wrap his arms around me and sleep in the safety. These are the arms I want around me. An old nightmare wakes me next - I can feel the implant throbbing in my neck as I run from the aliens through the trees, searching for Mulder. I have to find him before they do; I can't let the aliens take him. Mulder is shaking me awake but reality blurs for a minute and I tell him to run. Run before they get you, Mulder! "They already got me a long time ago, Scully. It's too late now." I don't know why, but that makes me cry. Big, loud sobs that I'm sure are waking everyone up. Mulder holds me, just like he did that night in the bunker, sheltering me in the valley of the shadow of death. Eventually, I calm down, but Mulder doesn't let me go. He's kissing my neck, running his fingers through my tangled hair. He pushes me back and pulls my breast to his mouth, suckling gently, causing my body to reach in spite of myself. He's not listening to me, so I have to say it out loud: "Mulder - don't. You were too rough. Please. I can't again - I'm too sore. Do you want me too..." He shakes his head violently "no" and moves down on my body, kissing a path to my navel and then further and further down as I forget to breathe. He pushes me gently down on my back and runs his thumbs from the inside of my ankles all the, all the way, all the way... His tongue is so gentle against my sore, over-used flesh, flicking, licking, encircling and causing more cries unbidden from me. It isn't a cursory act - it's more of an... An apology. A gift. Giving me pleasure as he tastes himself inside me, penance for his actions only a few hours ago. Suddenly he stops, jumps to his feet and charges out of the room. Well, that was odd. Come back, Mulder. You owe me an orgasm. Maybe two. There are more quick footsteps and the boy is crawling into the sleeping bags with me. I try to cover myself, but the boy is terrified. I hear something hit the wall in another room and it sounds like a body. There are more sounds of fists against flesh – I don't know who is hitting who, but someone is going to die if they don't stop. "What's happening?" I ask the frightened boy. "Gibson was listenin' to Mulder," comes the voice from the bottom of the sleeping bags. Oh God. Gibson must not know what a mistake that was - Mulder was going to beat him to death. I wrap Mulder's big shirt around me and follow the sounds as blow after blow lands. Mulder put out the lantern, so I can't see a thing - only grope blindly. I yell for Mulder and the punches pause. The heavy breathing is to my left, and I reach out and touch Mulder's smooth, sweaty back. "Let him go, Mulder. He's not Skinner. He's fifteen - he'll listen to cats mate and get turned on. You remember fifteen, Mulder?" I guess he does, because I feel him stand up and move back. I can hear Gibson trying to catch his breath on the floor but I don't help him. I don't want to. Mulder isn't the only one who has hardened. The boy is somewhere besides our makeshift bed, so I lay down, wondering what is coming. Wondering if I'm going to be a way for Mulder to release his anger again. I can't stand another round of hate-sex, whether he loves me or not. Literally - I won't be able to stand up tomorrow. I feel something wet drip on my face and I realize Mulder is crying. I pull him down on me and he starts to shake violently. He buries his face in my neck and cries, sobbing for hours in the dark, never telling me why he's crying. What do you cry for, Mulder? For listening as Skinner had sex with me - for making me into a whore? Because you would have killed Gibson for being childish - for becoming so cold? Because you do remember being fifteen and how far away from that person you are - for the loss of your soul? Or do you cry for all those things? Gibson has vanished by morning, unwilling to continue to wherever it is that we're going. There are dark bloodstains on the wooden floor where I found him and Mulder last night, but Mulder dresses to fast for me to see if any of it came from him. The boy woke me up - standing over me before dawn announcing he was scared of the dark. Boy, you're not the only one, and there's a hell of a lot of dark out there. We eat cold venison for breakfast and set off again. I know Mulder sees me flinch when my hips hit the passenger seat, but he doesn't say anything. I can't even tell that he feels guilty. More west. *** He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and thereafter his shipmates called him mad. So man's insanity is heaven's sense. -Herman Melville **** I would feel Mulder listening to me, checking that I was all right. It took him a while to locate me after I went to the new colony, but after he found me, I felt him often. When the one man tried to rape me and I fought him off, I'm sure that it was Mulder that cut off his hands and left him in the woods to be found months later. Others must have thought the same thing, because that's when I heard the first rumors about him. The ex-FBI agent that could read minds. Fought with the rebels during the initial alien attack, using his gift to beat the aliens at their own game - or the other way around, depending on who was telling the story. He'd been all over the Earth After, even crossing the oceans. Now he roamed, searching for a woman. Others said he just roamed to kill for the highest bidder or for revenge. If there was a war between colonies, Mulder was there, bringing death with him. If you wanted something transported across the country, through the badlands, he was your man. The legends said he was the cruelest person alive. I didn't know what to believe, so I just waited. I couldn't leave and I wondered of Mulder would ever come for me. After a few years, I decided the answer was "no." Skinner came, though. There was some sort of treaty negotiation between 451 and Alpha, and Skinner was sitting on my steps when I got back from a house call that night. "I'm sorry, Scully." That's it? You tricked me into your bed and traded me like I was livestock and you were just "sorry?" I hit him as hard as I could. Skinner just rolled with my punch and then stood there in case I wanted to hit him again. You kept me safe, even killed for me when you knew I didn't love you - that I'd never love you, held me when I was afraid and made love to me so I wasn't, and you were just "sorry?" You let me believe that Mulder was out there wanting me for months - giving me some light to hide away inside me as I watched my world crumble. All you wanted for that was sex that you always made sure was good for me and you were just "sorry?" He was right - I did want to hit something again - I wasn't even sure who or what I was most angry at. I doubted it was Skinner. "I wanted you to know that Mulder is searching for you. I'll help him all that I can, but he's not at Alpha anymore. And I am sorry, Scully. All I wanted was for you to be safe." We looked at each other for a few seconds before he started to turn away. "Skinner?" He hesitated. "I wasn't unhappy. And you always made sure I was safe. You kept your promise to Mulder." That's as close as I was going to come to "apology accepted." I got a nod from Skinner before he pulled his hood up and walked away into the lonely rainy night. I had to go inside and lock the door to keep from running after him - after the safety that was walking out of my life again. *** The universe would never have been suitably put together into one form from such various and opposite parts unless there were some One who joined such different parts together; and when joined, the very variety of their natures, so discordant among themselves, would break their harmony and tear asunder unless the One held together what it wove into one whole. Such a fixed order of nature could not continue its course, could not develop motions taking such various directions in place, time, operation, space, and attributes, unless there were One who, being immutable, had the disposal of these various changes. And this cause of their remaining fixed and their moving, I call God, according to the name familiar to all. -Ancius Manlius Severinus Boethius (480-575 A.D.) *** "Are you my mother, now?" the boy asks as we cross from Utah into Nevada, the "Welcome" sign still standing. A few vehicles had approached and dropped back quickly when they saw Mulder behind the wheel as we crossed the desert. They watched, but didn't threaten as he drove flat-out, pushing the Humvee as fast as possible. His mother? I suppose I am. Always wanted a little boy - in fact, I always wanted one with Mulder. A little boy with his hazel eyes. Odd how things turn out. "Good. I've listened to Mulder think about you a lot." "Please don't listen to me think without permission - it's rude." The boy looks confused, but I feel him leave my head. Mulder was still there, though. "Okay - I was just wondering about you. Mulder tried for so long to buy you and I just wanted to know what you were like." I see Mulder look back at the boy, warning him. There is a bruise on his cheekbone - I guess Gibson got at least one punch in. "No, Mulder - I want to know. Is that what happened?" Mulder nods "yes," staring straight ahead. "They wouldn't let you go, no matter what I offered. I've tried for years. You were too well-guarded to take and I couldn't fight an entire colony." I wonder how many years he's tried. Was it just Colony 451 that wouldn't let me go, or did Skinner refuse too? Continue fucking me while he kept me trapped in the bunker clinic with no idea Mulder was outside trying to get to me? I think of the wooden crate on the porch of the house I used to live in. "What did you finally trade, Mulder?" "A man's head," a little voice in the backseat says, before Mulder silences him with another look and the last apple. Hours follow as Mulder turns south, following the coastline. California. Lunch is silent; an unspoken battle between Mulder and the boy. That boy needs a name. "I want to be Barney. I heard him in a book," he says with his mouth full. Christ - a nuclear war and an alien invasion and I can't escape Barney. Is there a second choice? "John Doe. That's what Mulder's thinking." I can live with John. John it is. Get out of my head, John. *** As you do not know how the spirit comes to the bones in the womb of a woman with child, so you do not know the work of God who makes everything. -Ecclesiastes 11:5 *** Mulder was looking for me. Mulder was looking for me. Those words gave me hope for weeks. Then weeks stretched into months and he still didn't come. Occasionally, someone from outside the colony would be brought to me for help if they had something valuable to trade with the leader for my services. I quizzed those men mercilessly - had they seen a tall man with dark hair named "Mulder?" One who was looking for me? Without fail, I got practiced blank looks and a nod "no." Part of the deal to get to see the doctor must have included not answering any of her questions about outsiders. I guess. Maybe I was just paranoid. Maybe Skinner was lying. Again. Someone brought in a young whore that wasn't from the colony - I guess one of the guards took pity on her and let her in. I watched her pile jewelry into my assistant/guard's hands - payment for whatever she wanted. She wanted an abortion. No. Not even a possibility. I couldn't even ask her about Mulder with my guard there - grinning because he was hoping I would have her undress to examine her. I felt so sorry for her, just standing there looking broken. I could have been her - a small, slim woman with delicate features; way too soft to survive in this world. She was pretty under all that dirt, but she wouldn't stay that way for long. Without Mulder and Skinner, I would have been her. When my guard's back was turned, I grabbed half the jewelry she'd given him off the table and thrust it at her. By rights, she should have gotten it all back, but that would never happen. This was the best I could do - that idiot guard couldn't count, anyway. "Come back and I've deliver that baby," I told her. She just looked at me. I doubted she would. Then a few months later, she was back - in heavy labor and starting to bleed. After five hours, she had a healthy, breech- birthed little girl with brown hair and beautiful hazel eyes under that wrinkled red face, and I was feeling very good about myself. I barely had the baby cleaned up before she was trying to wipe off and get dressed. I told her to lay back down - she could at least spend the night inside where it was warm. No, she was leaving. Before she left, she pressed something into my hand and told me it was for me - for helping her. Then she walked out. Without the baby. I tried to run after her and my guard stopped me. If she didn't nurse the baby, it would die. No one was going to go to the trouble of bottle-feeding goat's milk into a whore's baby and there weren't any nursing mothers in the colony that could take her. Maybe I could keep her. Yes, I could keep her. A beautiful little girl with eyes like Mulder's. I looked into my hand to see what she'd given me - probably some gaudy bracelet. Actually, it was just a plain, battered man's watch. Like a thousand others sold all over the place Before. Just like the one that Mulder had worn Before. I flipped it over to see if it was engraved - with what, I didn't know. How would I have known what was engraved in Mulder's watch? Nothing - it was blank. I tried to remember - was this was the last one he had Before? He smashed so many. Was he wearing it in the bunker? My guard saw that I had it and took it from me, explaining patiently that payment was made directly to the colony as he slipped it into his pocket. No, this was a gift to me - the colony already got paid. He wouldn't give it to me. I tried to take it from that big ox. I almost had him, Mulder. I was an FBI agent, you know. I got in several good jabs while the baby screamed miserably. But I didn't have a weapon and he did. And he was a man and I was a woman - his word against mine if I hurt him. I did all I knew to do. I dodged past him out the door and found Granger. I yelled and I begged as the leader promised me he'd bring me any watch I wanted. The entire colony stared as I dragged him back to the house I lived and worked in. Fuck them, I wanted that watch. My house was too quiet when we got back - the baby wasn't crying anymore. My guard was tossing an empty hypodermic syringe into the trash and the child was turning pale. I checked her, but she was already dead - one bubble of air to the brain was all it took. I tried to tell myself it was a fast death instead of a slow one. I tried not to look weak as I slid down the wall, holding the body of a dead little girl with eyes like Mulder's. "Give her the damn watch," Granger growled. Idiot Ox threw the heavy wristwatch at me, cracking the glass on the floor, and jerked the baby away by its little ankle. I just crushed the broken watch to my chest and cried until I ran out of tears. That couldn't be Mulder's child - he wouldn't do that to me. The whore had brown hair and hazel eyes, too. But that had to be his watch. It had to be. It had to be. *** Why should we demand that the universe make itself clear to us? Why should we care?... It is something about understanding the totality of existence, the essential defining reality of things, the entire universe and man's place in it. It is groping among stars for final answers, a wandering the infinitesimal for the infinity general, a deeper and deeper pilgrimage into the unknown. -Julian Jaynes *** Mulder stops again within an hour, surprising me. It's a tiny, no-name town with an abandoned gas station, a few stores and houses and not much else. John Boy hops out and disappears between the buildings - it must be safe. "It is safe, Scully," Mulder assures me. He's refilling the Humvee's tanks with diesel and loading more fuel and water behind the back seat. He finishes and takes me by the hand, leading me behind the store where he had the fuel tanks hidden and through the weeds. There's an old stone Spanish church and Mulder pushes the door open, then waits for me in the foyer. I cross myself and kneel. It's been so long since I've been in a church that I don't know where to start. Words learned in childhood form silently on my lips as I pray. I pray for my mother and Bill and Charles - whether they are alive or dead, I pray they find peace. I pray that Mulder and I find peace. I pray for the little boy I've just inherited and for the friends I've left behind - Frohike, Langly. I even pray for Skinner. Ahab and Missy and Byers and so many others among the dead. Mulder shifts behind me and I look back and silently ask him to join me. He shakes his head "no." There are still candles, so I take Mulder's hand and lead him this time. I light it with his lighter and give it to him, the small flame bravely glowing. He sets it safely in the middle of the table under the Virgin and asks me what we're praying for. "Our survival," I tell him as we walk out, tugging the warped door closed behind us. I start to call for John Boy when we reach the Humvee, but I'm not sure what to yell. Deserted town or not, I'd feel stupid standing in the middle of main street yelling for "Boy." I've barely thought it when John Boy appears at the end of the street, peddling a two-wheeler with training wheels for all he's worth. I glance at Mulder quickly and see the smallest hint of a smile. I like his method of calling his son - if all fathers were psychic, Wal-mart would have been a much quieter place Before. Boy arrives breathless and grins as Mulder puts the bike in the back of the Humvee without a word and shoves the gearshift into drive. The sun is setting as Mulder turns off the main road through the wine country and into the soft hills. I'm surprised again when he turns on the headlights - he must know the area where we are very well. Forty-five minutes later, where we are is parked in front of a cabin in the middle of nowhere. America is mostly dark middle-of-nowhere now days, but this was several miles past middle-of-nowhere. We walk inside and Mulder flips a light switch and, wonder of wonders, lights come on. The cabin has power. Water comes out of the kitchen tap and there's enough freeze- dried food for years in the pantry. And a shower and an indoor toilet. When I open the closets, there are functional clothes for me and the boy and extra linens. A big bed downstairs and a smaller one in the loft, both made up and ready. A stove on the center of the cabin for heat and cooking, a ham radio to communicate. Firewood stacked outside the back door and a rifle over the front door. Toys in a toy chest. Books. This is Mulder's home - this is where he was taking me. Now I'm home. We're home. Mulder, me, and the John Boy. I smile at Mulder and I see a faint light behind his eyes. "You'll be safe here, Scully," is all he says. Mulder sleeps with me in the big bed and John Boy sleeps in the loft. There is a silk nightgown in the closet and I put it on - it still smells of a Victoria's Secret store. Mulder runs his hands over it, the roughness snagging against the fabric as he kisses me. Our love-making is unhurried, the way I always wanted it to be. Slow and sweet. I can see my Mulder in this man. When I wake, Mulder is gone - both physically and from my head - and John Boy is asleep beside me. The Humvee is still sitting in the driveway, the tank refueled with diesel and Mulder's supplies are on the table where he left them last night. Initially I think he's just gone hunting, but John Boy says he isn't coming back. No note, no explanation, just gone. I realize that there are no clothes for Mulder in the closets, no books that he would read on the shelves. He never intended to stay here. He probably didn't intend to stay with me last night. I realize that I've never told him I love him out loud and now it's too late. Mulder saved me from invading aliens and insured my safety by trading his soul and that still couldn't shake those three words out of me. Once again, I lose my battle against the lump in my throat and spend the morning sobbing. I put a kettle on for coffee, still watching through the window days later. John Boy wants to have coffee with me - sure, why not? A four-year-old- almost five, he informs me - that has seen people murdered and listened to Mulder's thoughts could handle a watered-down cup of coffee. We sit in the swing on the front porch as the sun rises over the hills, charging the solar panels on the roof. "Is he not coming back right now, or is he still never coming back, John?" "He still doesn't know. He doesn't think you can forgive him." "What for?" I could forgive Mulder anything. "Oh - lotsa things. Helpin' the spacemen catch people so they wouldn't hurt the ones in the bunker. Leaving you. The man havin' sex with you- he feels really bad about that. Killin' lotsa people, 'specially the sex man." The sex man? Skinner? Mulder killed Skinner? "Uh huh. That was the head in the box. Oh - sorry. I won't listen anymore." I sit in shock as my coffee cools. He killed Skinner in exchange for me - that was the trade he made - so the leader of Colony 451 could take over the bunker and Alpha Colony. Mulder killed his friend and cut off his head and brought it to the leader in a box like a birthday gift. That was how bad he wanted me. I can still see Skinner standing in the rain, telling me he was sorry. Just sorry - for everything. Mulder is wrong - I can forgive even that. I watch the road that runs up the isolated hill to my cabin, linking me to this brave new world. Maybe one day Mulder will come driving up that dirt road in his Jeep, coming for me like he promised. John Boy goes out to play in the dewy grass as I sit, remembering to sip my tepid coffee. There is a tire swing in the tree beside the Humvee and a tree house that Mulder must have built for him. A labor of love by a man who thinks he's lost. As I finish my coffee and the cup that John Boy forgot, I feel a familiar pressure behind my forehead. Mulder is listening. *** There are many windows through which we can look out into the world, searching for meaning... Most of us, when we ponder on the meaning of our existence, peer through but one of these windows onto the world. And even that one is often misted over by the breathe of humanity. We clear a tiny peephole and stare through. No wonder we are confused by the tiny fraction of a whole that we see. It is, after all, like trying to comprehend the panorama of the desert or the sea through a rolled-up newspaper. -Jane Goodall *** *** Negative Utopia: Part II Mulder: She's safe. She's better off. It's better this way. This is what I planned. Keep walking. Don't listen, just keep walking. I have to concentrate to keep my feet moving. Scully's just on the other side of that hill, soft and warm and asleep in my bed. Her bed - it's not mine. It's Scully's now and I won't go back. I won't risk hurting her. It's better this way. Keep walking. She can't love me. Not if she really knew what I've become. She had sex with me because she didn't have a choice. But she kissed me. I didn't make her do that. I didn't make her put on that nightgown last night. No! She's just trying to survive. She loves who I was, not who I've become. She'll be glad I'm gone. Keep walking. Sleep, eat, walk away from Scully. Don't listen. It's more of an effort not to listen than to do it. It took me about three days to figure out how once my brain got switched back on, but it's second nature now. Just like tuning onto a radio station and turning up the volume if I want to hear better. It's also easier now that there are less people to listen to. I could hear Scully so easy. I could listen and see of she is relieved that I'm gone or if she wants me to come back. I can actually hear everyone all the time - that was what drove me half-crazy Before. Now I know how to fine tune and turn down the volume, so I'll have to find something else to blame my insanity on. It didn't make Gibson or the boy insane, and they can hear as well as I can. I heard three billion people die. Almost five billion if you count the ones that died instantly in nuclear fireballs. Three billion that I watched the Grays murder one drop of black oil at a time, while I stood by and did nothing. That's not true. I didn't do nothing. I answered every question the Grays asked me and I told them how the human mind worked so they could capture and process as many "specimens" as possible. It was my voice on the intercom blasting again and again "Remain calm. You will not be harmed," as humans waited to be infected with certain death. I did whatever they wanted as long as they left that bunker in West Virginia alone. No, Scully can't love what I've become. She's safe now - keep walking. Sleep, eat, walk away. Don't listen. Did I tell her there is extra diesel in the storage building? That she has enough power on cloudy days for one hot bath and the radio and lights, or a load of laundry, but not both? There's a wire basket in the stream if she wants to keep anything cold - did I tell her that? I should go back and tell her that. No! I'm just looking for an excuse. Keep walking. I love her. I told her that. She thinks she loves me. How can she love me? She can't read my mind. She doesn't know the things I've done - not all of them. I've killed people that I had no quarrel with because I wanted something they had. I've killed for gain and I've tortured for revenge. I've betrayed Scully with other women and I've burdened her with my child. Scully knows that. She still loves me. I did it to survive. Survive, no questions - that was what I told her. I did what I had to do. I didn't have to make her have sex with Skinner. I didn't have to have sex with Marita or those other women. Somehow I can forgive myself for murder easier than I can forgive myself for that. I heard her question whether or not I was with Marita at the same time she was with Skinner. I should have told her "no." I should go back and tell her that. No! Keep walking. Sleep, eat, walk away. I did it because I thought I was going to die. Because I was laying in a ditch alone and bleeding in the middle of Kansas and I thought it was my last chance to touch you. I was trying to get back to you, Scully. The Grays left me in the middle of fucking India. Oh God - India right After. That still gives me nightmares. You can't imagine how awful that was. But I didn't have one nightmare while you slept with me. Anyway, being on the other side of the planet isn't a big deal if you have a spaceship, but it's a problem when there aren't any connecting Delta flights anymore. One boat that I puked on for days, a couple of motorcycles and a Dodge truck I really liked and I was almost back to you, Scully - I was almost there and these guys jumped me for my truck. I would have just let them have it; there were vehicles sitting all over the place for the taking. That wasn't all they wanted, Scully. I can't tell you about it - not ever - but it was bad and I was alone; bleeding from so many places I couldn't even count them. I laid there for two days and I thought I was going to die. I wanted to feel what you were feeling like before, but I was afraid, Scully. I was afraid Skinner was hurting you. You're so tiny and fragile, even though you hate people thinking that. So I listened to Skinner - very carefully because I couldn't stand to listen to his thoughts, only his sensations. Did you know he thinks he loves you, Scully? Loved you. Past tense. He's very dead now. He can't love anymore. He can't trick you into his bed, either. That made him easier for me to kill, at least if I didn't think too hard. The next morning I was making my peace with Death when Marita's face appeared over me. Actually, at that moment, I would rather have died. She didn't let me die, though. When I woke up again, I was in a barn somewhere. She'd taken my knife and gun to keep me from killing myself and done the worst job of patching up my wounds I'd ever seen. She even had her own method for making sure I stayed prone so my ankle would heal. I could have told her "no," but the thought never crossed my mind. All I wanted was to be numb; to hide the way you hid that night in the bunker. In those first few months, I hid a lot. I learned so much about you in that one night, Scully. Every man should feel that at least once. Actually, once does it. I'd been listening to you before, but not feeling what your body was feeling. When we made love, I learned what sex felt like for a woman – for you. It's invasive; pleasure involved allowing your body to be penetrated. Yea, I knew that, but I didn't realize how personal it was. How very vulnerable women can feel. I swore I wouldn't hurt you that night and I tried not to, but you seemed all the more fragile to me after that; something I had to protect at any cost. I tried to protect your mom, Scully. I never saw Bill or anyone that might have been Charles on the ship I was on, but I tried to save your mother. She was one of the last specimens to be processed and I thought they might let her go if I asked. Actually, if I begged. No. No losing a specimen, even one that was basically my mother-in-law. It was like arguing with the Borg from Star Trek - all cold reason and amazing technology. Fixing a generator is nothing once you've seen Gray engineering. Anyway, Mrs. Scully wasn't part of my original deal to cooperate, so she was going to die. I held her hand after they gave her Purity and swore to her that you were safe and that you would stay that way. The tube was already in her throat, but her eyes told me she believed me. I wanted to shoot her before she realized what was happening, but my gun wouldn't work. I couldn't bring myself to choke her to death, so I just sat there and held her hand. It's exactly the same size as yours is, Scully. Finally, I listened to her thinking and I told her every answer she wanted to hear: her children were fine, the Grays were going to let her go. Hell, I even told her you and I were going to get married and give her lots of grandchildren. Eventually, she ran out of questions and I ran out of lies, so I just sat there. They put me off the ship and left with her before she could give birth to another gray bastard. Do you remember watching Star Trek together, Scully? Eating popcorn we bought at a 7-11, sitting on the floor against the foot of a motel bed and watching an old TV together Before. Before it all was gone? Before I was gone? I'm not gone. I remember who I was. I remember a man who spent Saturday mornings shooting hoops while the laundry didn't get done and dishes didn't get washed. I remember the endless quest to prove something existed that showed up for all the world to see on Labor Day. I remember an FBI agent who was desperately in love with his partner and had no idea how to tell her that. No idea if she wanted him because he didn't want himself. I guess some things stay the same. I still love her and I still don't know if she really loves me. Keep walking. Marita and I basically spent about three months fucking each other silly and I spent almost a year after that killing anything that moved for sport. Anything that kept me from having to think. When I was finally healed enough to get around, we found the farmhouse I took you to - it was more isolated - and lived there. I could even sit on the front porch and pick off anyone that came up the road with my rifle. Very convenient, but it didn't stop the nightmares. Or the flashbacks. Saucers in the sky. Feeling you flinch when I penetrated, making love to you because it was what I needed, not what you really wanted. Your face when I left you in the bunker. Skinner's face when I told him to do whatever he wanted to you, just keep you safe. The sound of that bunker blast door closing behind me as I walked out to the spaceship. My voice over the intercom, lying to people waiting to die. Black oil crawling under your mother's skin and into her eyes. Thousands of starving toddlers. That gang of men in Kansas. Getting off as Skinner fucked you. Waking up to find Marita fucking me. The sound my finger makes as it pulls a trigger and the wet sound a bullet or a knife makes when it penetrates blood and bone. Pick one. I knew she was pregnant when I left, but I didn't really care. I came back from foraging one day to find her in bed with some guy in exchange for a deer he'd shot. I had just brought her a deer – we weren't starving. She was just a whore. I slapped her without thinking and walked out. Then I sat in my Jeep shaking and told myself that she deserved it. That I'd snapped and that I wasn't a monster. I'd seen my father hit my mother and I wasn't going to become him anymore than I already had. It was never going to happen again. I was never going to hit another woman. I actually haven't, but I don't trust myself not to. I came for you. It took me a while to work up the nerve, but I did, Scully. I stood outside that chain-link fence and yelled and cussed at Skinner to let me have you. I shot one of the guards before they started shooting back. Anything - I offered anything I could think of, but there was no deal. They wouldn't let me in and they wouldn't let you out. Skinner wouldn't even come out to face me. I listened to you. No, Scully, don't masturbate - tell me where you are. Get your hand out from between your legs and tell me what you see. Are you inside or outside? In the bunker or in one of the cabins they'd built? Stop touching yourself and go outside for a walk. Walk two miles and look at the damn fence. Please, Scully. Okay - just touch yourself. Oh yes - just like that. Oh God. I waited and listened to everyone for months outside the fence, but I couldn't make sense of what I heard. I can only hear what people are thinking - not scan their memories for a glimpse of one small redhead. This listening thing doesn't work the way you think it does, Scully. It's not like the Stupendous Yappi. I think what I hear is the midbrain directing mental traffic, because I get a gibberish of sensations, thoughts, and lots and lots of crap that people ignore. Since my brain isn't used to tuning out someone else's familiar sounds and feelings - a generator humming, shoes pinching - I get a jumble until I get used to it. And it takes a while every time I listen to someone new to learn what to ignore. And then I can't see what people see or hear what they hear - I can perceive what they -think- they perceive. It all boils down to not that helpful after all. Finally, I caught Frohike in the woods one day on firewood detail - someone must have screwed up and not realized I knew him. He told me you were gone, but he didn't know where - traded to another colony like chattel. He told me Skinner had shot Byers and that no one in that colony, including Skinner, knew exactly where you were. All that time I'd spent at the fence watching for her, she was never on the other side. I sacrificed several bottles of Jim Beam to Venus or whichever God was most appropriate for post-apocalyptic angst and Frohike and I got good and drunk. We extolled your virtues and discussed the many ways to mutilate Walter Skinner. I favored red hot razors, but that's a personal choice. It took about half the first bottle before Frohike was willing to tell me you and Skinner had become lovers after that one time. I asked him if he was certain - I hadn't heard you think about that. You wouldn't do that to me, Scully. Just like I would never pay for a blow job from a prostitute. Just like I didn't have a baby with some slut in Kansas. He was certain. Byers had seen the two of you. I gave one of the bottles of whiskey to Frohike - it was a favorite of the little whore outside Alpha colony that I liked occasionally – and downed the third bottle myself. When I woke up, Frohike was gone and it was the next day in never-never land. I have never felt so alone in my life. It was like tracking the mists; I could hear you all the time, but I couldn't find you - I couldn't get to you. I thought I'd lose my mind. Maybe I did. I roamed. I roamed the country, killing and taking whatever I needed with the excuse that it was necessary in my search for you. I didn't think, I didn't feel - because it hurt to bad. I just survived - no questions. I was so happy to find Gibson safe in North Carolina, looking like a pubescent Tarzan with glasses on the beach. I thought I had finally found someone who would understand. He survived the same way I did - by helping the Grays - and he seemed to be okay. Maybe he knew the secret. No. There's no secret. Just days of numbness and nights of terrors for the rest of my life. Gibson had just learned to live with it and I hadn't. I had found a friend, though. When Gibson discovered that Indian girl in New Mexico, he suddenly wanted to play house all the time, so I left them to their love nest and went back to my lonely prowling. She was about twelve then, by the way, and I didn't give it a second thought. There were a few other side trips, but mostly I spent the next year looking for you. I stopped in Kansas to check on Marita and saw the boy. My boy. Krycek was with her by then, but that boy was unquestionably mine, whether I wanted him or not. I gave her a ton of stuff over the years in exchange for taking care of him. You can buy just about anything from a whore. Not love, though. I know how you feel, kid. Maybe someday we can do therapy together and talk about our mothers. I always had this fantasy that he and I could be together instead of just listening to each other. I wanted to take him with me every time I saw him, but I couldn't - I couldn't risk it. And Marita wouldn't have let me take him - having my son gave her and endless source of whiskey, smokes, and whatever else she wanted from me. I heard him cry when Krycek hit him - again - and that was enough. I was taking him or I was killing Krycek. I had him almost two days before I slapped him for thinking the same thing that I was. I swore to myself that wouldn't happen again, either. I could listen to the boy. I could listen and see what Scully is doing. I have to find him first, but that's not hard. Once I know the station, it's just a matter of finding it again. I find a nice tree to sit under, close my eyes and listen. Water. He's in the water and he's upset. Oh God - he's drowning. I have to get to him. No - I can feel his butt against something. It's okay. A bath. Scully's giving him a bath. Oh! She's doing his ears. I always hated it when my mother did that. "Mulder doesn't want you to give me a bath!" I hear him say. Good try, Boy. He hears Scully laugh and there's a washcloth rough on his back. She's laughing. She's happy without me. Keep walking. Get up and keep walking. No, I'll just sit here for a while and listen. Just a little while. I hear the boy hear Scully's voice as she talks to him. She wants to know if I'm coming back. I feel him listen to me - now that's an interesting sensation - and tell her that I still don't know. I hear him hear her cry. And cry. Get up, Mulder. You can't make them happy. Get up and keep walking. She'll get over it and she'll be happier. I found you, Scully - it took me a while but I found a colony with a female doctor. Actually, I found three, but the last one was the right one. It took me forever to figure out who the women in each colony were since they wouldn't let me in. Then a whore came back with tales about the nice lady doctor with red hair that gave be back some of the jewelry I'd given her to pay for her abortion. Yes, that was my watch. No, not my child. I already had one and I wasn't risking another. Besides, Scully - she was nasty. Gives good head, though. Again, I offered anything, but there was no trade. They wouldn't even let me see you - kept you barricaded in your house so I couldn't just take you. I listened to you and you didn't know any of that, which made it even worse. You thought I'd paid that whore with my watch and that you'd let my baby die. I had no way to tell you how wrong you were. I had no way to even tell you I was there. I stayed right there at that fence - all colonies were fenced by then, like it was some sort of zoning law or something. I left to find food and shoot a few people that annoyed me or could profit me, but mostly I waited and listened. Yes, I cut the man's hands off – there were enough prostitutes for him to touch without him putting his nasty hands on you. Not that my hands were much cleaner. One day, the leader came to me with a deal he was willing to make. You for Skinner. You alive, Skinner dead. Deal. I could care less why he wanted it. Payment on delivery. I stocked my cabin in California - it was one of the Y2K panic shelters, so it was already pretty self-sufficient. There were a few days that I dreamed about living there with you, but I knew I couldn't. I made a few modifications and gathered supplies for you and the boy, if you wanted him. I cleared out anyone that might have threatened you - you noticed they left me alone when we drove past. On my way to get you, I stopped to see my son told him I would be coming for him soon. Then I drove off in search of Skinner. You pretty much know the rest, Scully. You don't know that I killed him yet, but the boy will tell you that eventually. I never meant to have sex with you again. It kind of - just happened. I could hear, actually hear, Gibson with his girl and you were right there beside me and... And I'm sorry. I didn't mean for it to happen, even the way it did. After that I tried to make amends to you with every cuddling, foreplay technique I'd ever learned, but I knew it wasn't enough. I wasn't who you remembered and it was better if I just left you alone. But I let it happen again - I forced you. God, Scully - I should swallow a bullet for that, if nothing else. You wouldn't say that - you'll say you wanted me, but it's not like you had much of a choice except to do what I wanted. You thought I would hold you down and rape you - I heard how scared you were. I wanted to hear you tell me "yes," and I kind of lost it when you did. I didn't realize I was being that rough and that you would think your only choices were consenting or being raped. I thought you'd tell me if I was hurting you. I wouldn't have, Scully. I would never hurt you. I want to tell her that. I need her to know that. No. I did hurt her. And making her give me permission to do it doesn't make it any less a sin. I can't walk anymore and it's getting dark. I'll sleep here and... And what will I do tomorrow? Go or stay? Go. I'll go tomorrow. No. I'll stay one more day. Stay and listen to my son. I have this thing about feeding him, Scully. About making sure he's fed. If he ate all I wanted him to, he'd be as big as a house. I've brought Marita so much food over the years that she finally asked me to stick with booze and smokes. She can't cook and I'd hear him being hungry - I was scared he was going to starve like those kids in India. You don't know about that, do you Scully? You didn't come out of the bunker until after they all died and I guess none of the other men ever told you or let you see the bodies. You've never even given it a second thought that a grown alien can't gestate inside a very small child. I'm so glad. You see, there's a minimum amount of human tissue the Grays need to form, and it works out to about thirty-five pounds of child or more. They took everyone else they could easily find, but no one under three or so. Those they left to die. And there were lots and lots of kids in India. Were. I woke up in India - with a sprained ankle since the Greys kindly dropped me off about seven feet above the ground - to the smell of thousands of little bodies rotting in the heat. Everywhere. In their beds, on the sidewalks, in cars - wherever their parents left them, they died. Not all of them, though. A few of the oldest ones had managed to find water and a little food for three weeks and were still barely alive, little bellies grossly swollen. I kept hearing weak cries and I would limp into some merchant's stall to find a three-year-old dying of God-only-knows- what. It happened again and again and again - finding a child too far gone for me to help. I tried to help them, but I'm not the doctor, Scully. My training only helped if I needed to help them resolve their feelings about being abandoned. I didn't even know what was wrong with some of them. Some were just starving, but they were too sick to eat. Some typhoid - or something - from drinking dirty water. Some hadn't had their diapers changed and were so raw they had maggots... No, I can't think about it. I couldn't save even one of them. Eventually, I stopped hearing the weak cries. Whether they stopped or I just stopped hearing them, I don't know. I was just glad they stopped. And I'm glad you never heard them, Scully. And I'm glad you'll always make sure my son isn't ever hungry. If he survived Marita's cooking, he can live on yours. I want to hear you and him happy together and then I'll go. No, just one more day. I should make sure she's okay. Maybe she needs something; maybe I forgot something she will need. I'll go back and watch her, but I won't listen. Just one more day - I'll stay and watch her for one more day. Then I'll go and never come back. I won't listen. She won't know I'm here. No, she'll think three dead rabbits committed suicide on her front steps. Brilliant, Mulder. I wonder if I should have cleaned them? She's a doctor, brilliance. Scully can probably gut a few bunnies. God, I should just leave. After this morning. I'll watch Scully drink her coffee and John Boy - what a name - play one last time and then I'll go. She looks so sad. What are you thinking, Scully? Are you lonely? Are you worried? Do you need anything? Is something wrong? Are you not happy here? I can take you anywhere you want to go - just tell me. No, you won't tell me. You'll say "I'm fine," just like you always do. The world has turned into a Mad Max movie and you're still "fine." You've been sold, almost raped three times - once by me, - and seen your best friend and lover - I guess - murder two children and slap his son and you're still "fine." You've been forced into sex with Skinner and me and burdened with my child and have no control over your life. You're not "fine," damn it! None of us are fucking fine! I shouldn't be listening to her. She'll know I'm doing it. No, she can't tell where I am - I could be miles away for all she knows. Sad - she is sad. Lonely. Tepid coffee. Love Mulder. Should have told him. Need to brush teeth. Miss him. Is he okay? Where is he? John's going to need another bath. Why did he leave me? Love him. STOP! I stop listening, jerking down my mental volume knob. You do not love me, Scully! Suddenly, John Boy turns around and points right at the tree I'm sitting in. Traitor! Scully looks and raises her hand at me before she steps off the porch, noticing the suicidal bunnies. I drop the few feet to the ground to run and feel my ankle give way again. Damn it! I can't get away now. God - don't touch me, Scully! Leave me alone. Just leave me alone. She doesn't leave me alone, though. I get half-dragged into my cabin - her cabin - so she can check my ankle. It's sprained; I could tell her that. I got dropped out of a UFO and then tossed into a ditch by the gay pride motorcycle gang from Hell about five and a half years ago and my right ankle broke the fall both times. It was sprained then and it's sprained now. Leave me alone! Oh, thank you, Scully. That shot must have been something for pain. It doesn't actually hurt that bad, but I think you're afraid I'll hobble off. I will. Just as soon as I can, I'm gone. Not right now, though. Right now I'm going to lie here in a bed that smells like you and doze and dream about what could have been. I always wanted to marry you, Scully. Bet you never would have guessed that. Not a civil ceremony - the whole nine yards. The white dress, the tux - hell, you might have even dragged me into a church. Fox Mulder, the eternal bachelor, wanted to marry Dana Scully. First woman I ever wanted to marry. I wanted to take you someplace warm and sunny with lots of beaches for our honeymoon to make love to you for the first time and then adopt as many children as possible. I wanted the house in the 'burbs and the picket fence. I even have a ring somewhere. Not somewhere – my left front jacket pocket, actually. God - that seems so stupid now. I also wanted to keep chasing my little gray men all over the country and screwing around as I saw fit. Keep living like a frat boy and shaking my fist at the sky. Keep idolizing my schoolboy version of my partner - gazing at you in awe during the day and jerking off to those memories at night. Even Before, I was a bastard. OH GOD THAT HURTS, SCULLY! What in Hell are you doing to me? Whatever it is, I'm certain I deserve it. I'll try to stay conscious so I can suffer. Isn't working. Sorry, Scully. I must have fallen asleep in Scully's motel room or at her apartment again. She hates it when I do that. Sometimes if I lie real still, I can listen to her breathing for a while before she realizes I'm awake and kicks me out. It's pitiful for a grown man to do that, but it's about as intimate as I ever get with Scully, thanks to that damn bee. I hear Scully moving around, doing something that smells good - breakfast. Must be room service. Ouch! Burned herself. I like the way her breasts bounce against her chest with she jumps back. Guys don't ever have that sensation. Most guys. That nice jiggling weight and nipples brushing against her shirt. Very nice. Why can I feel that? Apocalypse. Colonization. Grays. Civilization collapses and chaos reigns. I sold my soul to the devil in exchange for Scully's life and am now basically a psychic, half-crazed killing machine. And my ankle hurts and I have to pee. Life sucks. Why am I naked? Naked, clean, and shaved? "Your clothes are almost dry, Mulder. You were nasty. Stop faking it and open your eyes," a female voice informs me. I guess I'm going to have to open my eyes. She is so beautiful. How old is she now - 40, 41? Doesn't show. Maybe I've aged enough for both of us. I'm trying to decide which part of her I like best this morning. The conventional favorites aside, I think it's the front of her waist. It's flat. Flat as a pancake. I'm sick of seeing women with huge bellies about to bring forth life - a life that is usually short, ugly, and resented. Give me a waist I can almost span with my hands and attach it to Scully. Next, of course, is the small of her back - an old favorite. That tattoo standing out in sharp contrast to her pale skin. I guess. I've never actually gotten a good look at it. It is first thing in the morning and I do have to pee. And I love whatever it is she just gave me in that syringe. Food. Scully's bringing me something that smells delicious and trying to spoon feed me. No, I don't need to be spoon fed, thank you. It's my ankle that's hurt, not my arms. Just give me the plate and get the hell away from me. Now she's across the room pouting. Good - pout. Get good and mad and hate me because I'm going to leave as soon as I can. Better if you hate me instead of keeping up this delusion that you love me. The boy crawls up beside me and I offer him a bite of oatmeal. He only takes one bite, since it smells a lot better than it tastes. Only Scully could screw up oatmeal. Food aside, he cuddles up beside me like I'm a good father and he's supposed to be there. I've never spent much time with him before I got Scully, although we listened to each other a lot. I told Scully the truth; he's a good kid. Amazing that he's mine. Eventually I get a layer of my clothes back and helped to the bathroom before Scully offers me another pain shot. She's got my ankle wrapped up and it really doesn't hurt as long as I stay off of it, so I shake my head "no." She insists it's broken and gives me the shot anyway. Why did you even bother to ask me if there wasn't a choice, Scully? Same reason I asked you if you wanted to have sex with me. Even a lie sounds good if it's what you wanted to hear. I hope I didn't say that out loud. That must have been a booster dose of Demerol, because I am suddenly such a happy FBI agent. I love Demerol. I love my Scully, my son, my cabin. Hell, I love this blanket and the wall. Just give me enough of this stuff and I'll stay forever, Scully. Demerol seems to be able to beat back the darkness inside me. Just keep me drugged up and in bed as your love slave, baby. I think that was a B-52's song. Love slave, baaaaby. Come here and love me, Scully. Let's make like spoons or sleepy kittens or suicidal bunnies. No, not like bunnies. You're not coming and loving me, Scully. Damn. Fine, I'll just lay here and grin at you. My little snuggle bunny. What? She's such a good mom - I knew she would be. She's reading the now-clean Boy "Goodnight Moon" - he loves that story. I found the book and I used to sit around the camps that bordered Colony 451 and read it to him beside the fire while he listened in my head. Yes, Mulder the Murder likes to read kid's books- tease me about it and I'll blow your head off. The other men didn't tease me, though. A couple of them even asked me to read it out loud, which I did not do. I got other books for him, too. "Dr. Seuss," and "The Little Prince," and "The Giving Tree" - nice, normal memories. I even picked up a Barney book somewhere in a nod to my role as the anti-Christ. Scully must have found them in my backpack. The boy's heard them a thousand times, but he's never actually seen the books before. I lose the battle against my heavy eyelids and leave this world for the evening, missing the sweet family tableaux on the couch. Someone's sitting on the bed beside me. Female. Smells good. Breasts. I like breasts. Scully. Open eyes - maybe there will be naked Scully-breasts. No - breasts are covered. Ankle hurts like hell, though. I open my eyes to see a needle going into my shoulder. Christ, what a lump, Scully. Can I go pee before I pass out again? "You'll run out of that, eventually." "That was the last," she tells me, dumping me back onto the bed. "It wasn't even a whole dose and I'm not sure how potent it is anymore. Your ankle is set and your clothes are dry. Get up and leave if you want to, Mulder." She's daring me! I will leave, Scully! Just as soon as I lay here for a little while. Half-dose, my ass... She looks adorable swaddled in that big t-shirt I found for her in Bolder and sweat socks, like we're old lovers going to bed in our weekend cabin. Before. But this isn't Before. And I am not the same person. I can't do this. Not even with Demerol. "Get away from me, Scully." "Why?" It's the same voice Samantha used to say: "You can't make me, Fox!" "Why?" How the hell can she ask me that? Why? She wants a fuckin' list? "Yes, why? Why, Mulder? Why would you go to all the trouble to get me and then abandon me?" "Because I promised." I haven't exchanged this many words out loud in one day in years. Sometimes I forget that I even -can- speak out loud. "You promised? You think this is what you promised me? Leaving me alone in the middle of the wilderness while you go off to whip yourself for surviving? What happened to 'no questions?" I don't know what to say to that. I am very, very out of practice at arguing - usually I just shoot anyone that disagrees with me. There is safety in my silence, so I retreat and roll away from her and back into my drugged dreams. Scully doesn't let me escape. Lips find my earlobe and small hands caress my hips, gaining an instant reaction through my analgesic stupor. If I could run, I would. "Stop that," I protest. It's an empty protest - I'd trade the rest of my life for Scully to make love to me once of her own volition. Scully doesn't even bother to respond. I'm rolled on to my back roughly and the front of my boxers are pulled down. When I realize what she plans to do, I push her away, harder than I intended. I will not let Scully do this. Oral sex isn't sex, is it President Clinton? It's not betraying Scully if I find the occasional whore willing to trade a blow job for whiskey or cigarettes, is it? It's a service - like getting a hair cut or an oil change. Even killers get lonely. It's not betrayal if I'm standing up and just unfasten my Levi's. And I don't ever want to think of Scully as one of those women - not when I'm going to leave her. Scully's sprawled on the floor beside the bed where I pushed her. I'm sorry, Scully - that was an accident. Sure it was. Her hair is over her face, so I can't see what her expression is and I don't dare listen - she has both my guns. Then I hear the sobs. She pulls herself into an impossible tiny ball and just sobs. I wait for her to stop, but she doesn't - just when I think she's about to dry up, the tap turns back on to full blast. This is how she cried in the bunker when her world was ending. I can count on one hand the number of times I've seen her cry, but I never thought one of them would be because I wouldn't let her give me a blow job. I will not reach out to her. I will not reach out to her. Thank God, she's finally stopping. Now she's just sitting there, still hugging her knees to her chest. Good - get up and go sleep upstairs, Scully. Get away from me before it's too late and I'll be gone in the morning. "I know what PTSD is, Mulder. And I know what survivor's guilt is. Why won't you let me help you? What are you so afraid of?" She deserves an answer. It takes me a while to get the words out; my lips feel floppy: "Scully, I know what those things are too. I also know there's a point when the frontal lobe can't process anymore shit and it just shuts down and lets the animal part of the brain take over. I'm there most of the time. I can kill without feeling any remorse - God, Scully - I can kill and get off on it. You don't know some of the things I've done, Scully." John Boy brings her a bath towel to wipe her eyes, looking concerned. I'm telling him to find someplace else to be and he's ignoring me. Stubborn little snoop. He's definitely mine. "I know the worst thing you've done, Mulder," she says, climbing back into bed beside me, bringing John with her. "And I still love you." I don't get time to dwell on those magic words because my numb mind reels - what does she know? That I found her ovum before? Women - Diana? Christine? Marita? One-night stands? Whores? How selfish I was that night in the bunker? How I helped the Grays? That I let her mother die? India? Kansas? That I came listening to Skinner fuck her? That I hit Marita? That I killed... who? Which of the hundreds? Skinner? She knows about the boy. The two kids I killed this week. Beating up Gibson. Whoever's head she thinks was in the box. The maybe it was rape and maybe it wasn't hate-fuck. Thank God she can't listen to me think. "You never stopped trying to keep your promise to me. You never stopped trying to come for me. And you know what, Mulder? Look at me, Mulder!" I'm looking. "I never asked you to stop. That makes me equally responsible for everything that has happened and you don't seem to hate -me- for that. Do you, Mulder? Do you realize that if it wasn't for me, you would have stayed safe in that bunker and lost your video collection playing poker for a month with Frohike?" This is a good point. I've never given it a second thought. She was worth it. That's why I'm still leaving her. Tomorrow. "I only prayed you would come. How can I hate God for answering my prayer or question the way he answered it?" Great - drag your God into this. That's the wives obey your husbands and the spare the rod guy - right, Scully? How appropriate. "What if I hit you? Or John? Or what if -" "Don't. I'm not a martyr, Mulder - or a punching bag. But you're not a wife-beater, either. You're my best friend and I know you. As a doctor, I know you'll do better here - away from other people and stress until you've worked through some of what you've seen. As an FBI agent and - I guess - as a mom - you hurt either of us again and I'm kicking your ass. I love you and I want you and I'll help you, but those are the terms, Mulder." I heard what she said. I also heard her say she loved me. Wanted me. Wife. Mom. "Go get my jacket and look in the front left pocket." I must be totally stoned to say that. Hell, I can't take it back now. Scully does and pulls out the ring. "Put it on," I tell her. "It was my grandmother's wedding ring and I always wanted my wife to have it." The platinum lace ring dusted with diamonds slides onto her left hand, where is should have been all along. Scully holds up her hand and examines the ring. "It's beautiful. She must have been a small woman - it fits me." "No, Scully - I had it resized. About a decade ago." Scully's face is soft, but I can't tell what she's thinking and I won't listen - that's not fair. "I can't promise any more, Scully. I promise that I'll never love another woman besides you. That I'll never hurt you or the boy or let someone else hurt you. But I can't promise I'll stay." Scully lies down on the bed and I lay beside her, not touching her as I turn off the lamp. John is already sound asleep against the wall behind me. One more night. Just one more night with her. "I remember something Martin Luther King said, Mulder - that sometimes it has to get really dark before you can see the stars." Scully rolls over to look at me and continues: "We would both have given our lives to save the other Before without a second thought. That's all you did After. You gave up your... peace... in order to save me and I refuse to hate you for that. I love you, Mulder." She said it again. "Scully, I have a hell of a lot of dark." She takes my hand in hers. "I know there are going to be times when you have to disappear into the darkness. But whenever you look up and see the stars, I want you to come back for me - for us, just like you promised." Just one more night, I tell myself, closing my eyes. One more night that I can pretend I'm someone I'm not. And then tomorrow - Tomorrow, I'll see. "You still don't believe in God, Mulder?" her soft voice asks me as she huddles closer to my chest. "No." This is an old debate. "God is Henry Ford and Smith & Wesson and the dark matter in the void of space. Nothing else." There is no God that would allow this negative utopia to exist – not one I want to believe in. I want to believe in a God that protects the weak and gives peace to the tormented. One that saves innocent children and brings lovers together. "Well, I do, Mulder. And I believe He answers prayers. It's just that sometimes He makes us work for our blessings so we'll appreciate what we've got when we get it. For better or for worse, and sometimes there's lots of worse, Mulder - that's the God I believe in." For better or for worse, Scully. For always wanting me. For keeping the faith. For surviving. For innocent children and peace for the tormented and lovers together. For a God that protects the weak when I couldn't. For appreciating our blessings. Scully told me once that every decision we made in our lives leads up to one moment in time. It's hard for me to accept that all the awful things I've seen and done have led up to me laying here with Scully and my son, listening to both of them breathe safely in the middle of a the end of the world. But they have. And there must be a reason for that. "Hey, Scully?" I'm getting sleepy again. "Maybe." "Maybe, what, Mulder? Maybe there is a God or maybe you'll still be here tomorrow morning?" "Yeah, Scully. Maybe." *** My religion consists of the humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds. That deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God. -Albert Einstein *** End: Negative Utopia