Chapter Text
The DC suburbs are quickly and messily evacuated. It’s early in the morning on what is technically Thursday, but feels more like day three of Tuesday by the time all the shooting has died down. Scully is driving them down the center of an empty street in Bethesda, lined with rows of pink dogwood and colonial style mansions, while Mulder slouches in the passenger seat, watching her watching the road. The distinction between asphalt, and sidewalk, and tree lawn is lost under a thick layer of rotting petals.
He presses his tongue to the roof of his mouth, sensing her growing annoyance with his road chatter but finding himself unable to shut the hell up.
“Seriously, Scully,” he prods, “who do you think is gonna make it?”
The suspension judders over some hidden speed bump or piece of debris. Behind them, the treads leave long and wavering grooves in the pink mush.
Her profile hardens. “Mulder,” she says. “I don’t want to talk about this.”
“My money’s on the Mormons,” he says.
Dogwood drop all at once, so there could be anything under the layer of petals: A kid’s bicycle, garbage that never got collected, someone’s dead cat. Up ahead, on Scully’s side, there’s a car that’s been abandoned in someone’s driveway with all the doors open.
“I understand that this is your way of coping,” she says, “but it’s not mine.”
“I think we’re looking at either hyper individualists or strong communitarians,” he continues over her objections. “Fringe subcultures, people who are already off the grid, and close-knit communities with a preexisting tradition of mutual aid.”
“Alright, how about the Scientologists?” she tosses out, humoring him.
“No way,” says Mulder. “They’re too pampered, too Hollywood. They don’t stand a chance.” As they pass by the vehicle, he notices the bodies sprawled across the back seat, the driver folded in half over the steering wheel. “Except for maybe the Sea Org,” he amends.
Scully doesn’t respond to this and neither of them acknowledges the bodies.
“I’m thinking the Mormons, the Navajo, the Cherokee, the Amish. Throw in the Nation of Islam, just for fun.” Mulder starts listing these groups on his fingers. “Your various species of California libertarian hacker types, your raw vegan hippies, your bearded doomsday preppers. Perhaps the more solidaristic of the southern black churches.” He glimpses what might be a child’s car seat through the back windshield and looks away before his eyes can confirm it. “Like a Noah’s Ark of ethno-religious and regional diversity. Preserve those elements, and when all of this is over, we can cobble America back together.”
“When all of this is over?” Scully’s voice is flat.
“Of course,” he says, “the advantage goes to the most heavily armed.”
“Mulder,” she sighs. “Are you having some sort of manic episode? Should I be concerned?”
“What?” He feigns offense. “What do you mean?”
“You’re talking too much,” she says, “and you keep talking over me. And you’re being incredibly morbid—”
“Isn’t that normal?” he asks, interrupting her yet again.
“Well,” she says. “You know what I think? I think you're compulsively rambling in order to drown out your own thoughts.”
“Ok.” He crosses his arms and twists away from her, leaning his forehead against the passenger side window. He can feel her staring pointedly ahead at the road, even as he watches his own breath condensing on the glass.
“And now you’re going to give me this petulant silent treatment,” she says.
He turns back, feeling his seatbelt lock, and yanks it in and out until it slackens again. “How is it that your silence is stoic, but mine is petulant?” he counters.
She shrugs with both hands on the wheel.
“What do you want from me?” he asks her. “What, what is the correct way for me to conduct myself under these circumstances?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “Forget it.”
“Do you want to give me a list of approved inflections and facial expressions?” He raises his voice at her. He feels like arguing with someone, maybe God, but he’ll have to settle for Scully because she’s the only one here. “You know, so I can behave exactly the way you want me to at all times?”
Her jaw shifts on its hinges, but she doesn’t take the bait. She’s not going to give him the satisfaction of a shouting match.
He unclips his seatbelt and lets it fly back into the reel, unable to tolerate the sensation of it against his neck any longer. His back is stiff from sleeping in the car. They both need a hot cup of coffee, a shower, a fresh change of clothes; But none of those things seem to be on the horizon.
The dogwood give way to commercial zoning, looted storefronts and more bodies. They pass a car crashed into a fire hydrant that’s still geysering into the air. Scully is right: He can’t stand the sound of his own thoughts. He craves distraction they can ill afford, and her superior self-mastery under these extraordinary circumstances puts him to shame.
“This contact of yours,” he says, glancing at the stack of papers on the console between them. “This uh… Dr. Sonja Hathale. Is she Navajo? That’s a Navajo surname, isn’t it?”
“I’ll let her know she made your list of potential survivors,” says Scully. Her eyelashes flick towards him, and it feels like the first time in ages that her gaze has deviated from the road ahead.
Mulder’s never met this woman in person, but he did catch her on the local news before it all cut to black, claiming to have manufactured more of the vaccine from a sample Scully gave her. As far as they know, the virus has already been released, though none of the bodies they’ve come across show any evidence of it, appearing instead to be victims of a chaotic mass exodus. Through the large front window of an ice cream parlor, Mulder notices a cashier slumped over his vintage novelty cash register, his brains splattered across the wall behind him. The weight of Mulder’s service weapon makes itself conspicuous against his thigh as they enter what may yet be a populated area.
“How many rounds do we have?” he asks, opening the glove compartment to count cardboard boxes of ammunition.
“I don’t know,” says Scully.
“How about a backup gun?” he asks.
“Yours and mine,” she says. “Under my seat.” She licks her lips, craning to look around the corner as she makes a turn. The traffic lights are all blinking simultaneously, signaling that the computer that controls them is out of commission. “I should have packed body armor,” she adds.
He leans forward in his seat, taking hold of the ceiling handle. “You grabbed what you could,” he says. “There wasn’t time.”
Among the last images he saw on television was the Capitol in flames, the federal buildings lying in various degrees of ruin, like the Roman temples they were so vaingloriously designed to resemble. At the time, these images evoked in him nothing more than a sense of déjà vu, so often had they been the subject of his dreams. Three days later, and with less than a night’s sleep spread across them, the horror is finally beginning to catch up with him.
He can feel Scully holding her breath around each turn in preparation for whatever they might be confronted with next. The closer they get to downtown Bethesda, the less the world outside the car windows resembles civilization as they knew it.
By the time they arrive at the campus of the National Institutes of Health, it seems they’re already too late. One side of the barbed wire barricades is piled high with civilian bodies, while the other is littered with the bodies of police in riot gear. Limbs and entrails are strewn across the lawn, the blood still brilliant red and fresh. Whatever killed both groups isn’t visible from the road, but Mulder has a terrible suspicion as to what it might be.
Scully takes her foot off the gas pedal and the car drifts to a stop before the roundabout. “Shit,” she hisses.
“Turn around,” says Mulder.
She cuts the wheel, but freezes when she looks up at the rear view mirror.
Mulder turns in his seat to see a lone figure standing in the middle of the road, a few hundred feet behind them.
“Is that…?” He squints.
“Is that Agent Spender?” Scully completes the thought. “I thought he was dead. Oh my God.” She looks from the mirror to Mulder and back again. “Put your seatbelt on,” she orders, and Mulder scrambles to comply.
The figure shifts his weight from one foot to the other and Scully floors it, turning onto the roundabout with a screech of the tires.
“Back of the neck.” Mulder reaches for his gun. “I need a line of sight on the back of his neck.”
“How?” Scully yells at him. “He’s running towards us!”
She’s doing sixty-five and Spender is still gaining on them. Mulder aims his gun through the rear windshield, looking for an opportunity to shoot, but Scully is right. Spender is so close to them now that Mulder can see his eyes, which are solid black. His expression is blank, betraying no evidence of exertion or even concentration on his target. The face of a shark would be more legible.
Finding a gap in the barbed wire barricades, Scully swerves onto the front lawn, trying to avoid the bodies with mixed success.
“What are you doing?” Mulder asks her, turning back around in his seat.
“I don’t know!” She drives over a curb and onto the campus walkways, weaving in between the vast complex of collegiate-looking red brick buildings. “Trying to lose him!”
They fly down a wheelchair ramp, picking up speed again, only to find themselves in a cul-de-sac, surrounded by buildings on three sides. Without a moment’s hesitation, Scully drives through a set of glass doors into some kind of food court and out through a glass wall on the other side, scattering aluminum chairs and café tables.
“We can’t lose him,” says Mulder. “We have to take him down.”
“By shooting him in the back of the neck?” says Scully. “Are you fucking kidding me?”
“Well, it’s the only way to kill them,” Mulder explains. “Their brainstem is vulnerable, because—”
“I don’t need a slideshow right now, Mulder!” she screams.
The lawn they’re driving on slopes downward and Spender takes a running leap to land with a thud on the roof of the car.
“Oh, fuck.” Mulder points his gun uselessly at the ceiling as it begins to dent under Spender’s fists.
Thinking quickly, Scully slams on the break in an attempt to throw him off, and Spender flips over onto the hood. His hand comes through the windshield, spraying her with shattered glass, and she floors it again with her eyes closed. The car zooms straight into a brick wall, deploying the airbags, and pinning Spender between the front bumper and the side of a building. The world rings and Mulder feels his teeth clack painfully inside his head.
Reeling from the impact, he and Scully both stagger out of the vehicle with their guns drawn. Her forehead is flecked with scratches, and there are shards of windshield in her hair. Blood pours from Spender’s mouth and the black film leaves his eyes, his expressionless face suddenly twisting in agony.
“Listen to me!” he chokes. “Agent Scully, they have your baby.”
Scully opens her mouth. “Who’s they?” She takes a step closer, her fear dissolving into anger. “Where are they?”
“Our father.” Spender’s gaze switches to Mulder. “Fort Bragg. Not much time.” His eyes flicker to black, then back to normal again, and he makes a horrible gurgling sound, the bloody vomit pouring down the front of his shirt. “He did this to us,” he says through his teeth.
“He made you into one of the supersoldiers?” Mulder asks.
His gun wavers, the pain in Spender’s face giving him pause. As far as he understood up until now, these hybrid supersoldiers were mindless drones. The thought that Agent Spender’s consciousness could remain trapped inside, forced to watch himself doing the aliens’ bidding, is considerably more disturbing.
“Kill me,” Spender pleads with Scully. “Then kill him.” He jerks his head at Mulder.
“What?” says Scully. She’s shaking, and Mulder wonders if he is, too.
“He’s a ticking time bomb,” says Spender. “Kill him. Kill the baby. It’s the only way. Don’t let them do this to anyone else.”
Scrunching his eyes shut, he starts slamming the back of his head against the brick wall behind him and screaming.
“What are you talking about?” Scully demands.
“They’re in my head!” Spender wails. “Kill meee!”
He leans forward, exposing the back of his neck, but as Scully approaches him, he rears up, his eyes all black again.
“Run.” Mulder rushes to her side of the car and takes her by the arm, pulling her towards the center of the campus. They won’t get far on foot once Spender frees himself, but the car is now totaled and they are out of alternatives.
When they reach the NIH Clinical Center, the overhead lights in the lobby are out, but there are red emergency lights along the baseboards, indicating that the fourteen-story research hospital is on automatic backup power. The lobby’s high ceiling is supported by two rows of gleaming white columns, interspersed with potted palm trees tall enough to scrape the third floor balcony behind them. There’s no one manning the reception, but there are pens, and papers, and desktop novelties scattered across the floor, suggesting a hasty retreat.
“Balcony.” Mulder points, running for the elevator.
Scully slips in after him as he repeatedly slams the number three button with the side of his fist. They catch their breath for a few seconds, staring ahead at the seam of the stainless steel doors. She gives his arm a brief squeeze that says, in case we’re about to die, which he immediately regrets failing to reciprocate as the doors open and they rush to the edge of the balcony.
As soon as the crown of Spender’s head clears the entrance, they both open fire. This is a mistake, but they are trained as police to aim for center mass, so it takes a second to register as one. Spender looks up at them and goes to scale the stairs, not even breaking stride when Mulder nails him in the chest. One of Scully’s bullets ricochets off the handrail and hits him in the thigh, which will slow him down only momentarily.
They run, turning a corner into the clinic, and pushing through multiple sets of double doors. Mulder stops, his sneakers screeching against the vinyl floor, to make sure Scully is behind him, and ushers her into one of the exam rooms, where they press their backs against the wall on either side of the entrance.
“I’m out of bullets,” Scully mouths, pantomiming with her gun.
As silently as he can, Mulder unzips his jacket pocket and withdraws a cardboard box of ammunition. Spender’s footsteps can be heard down the corridor, punctuated by the sounds of him kicking open each of the doors one by one in search of his prey. Scully feeds a new clip into her Glock and stands with the barrel raised and elbows close to her sides.
The suspense doesn’t last long. The door flies open and Spender bursts in, ragdolling Scully across the room with a swat of his arm before she can take aim at him. She sinks to the floor, leaving a streak of blood on the wall, and Mulder lunges after her, calling her name, only to be hoisted into the air by his throat.
The back of his head hits a whiteboard covered in writing and suddenly he is face to face with Spender, the gun clattering out of his hand. He tries to pry Spender’s fingers open, the toes of his sneakers scraping the floor as he dangles helplessly in the supersoldier's grip.
“Hello, Fox Mulder,” Spender says without inflection. “We’ve been monitoring you for a long time.”
“Who am I talking to?” Mulder struggles for air. “Who’s we?”
“You already know who we are,” says Spender. “We have known you since your embryonic stage.”
Mulder tries to shake his head in refusal but the grip on his neck is too strong.
“Don’t be afraid,” says Spender.
Over his shoulder, Mulder can see Scully stir. The side of her head is bleeding, but she’s alive and conscious. Their eyes meet, and she reaches across the floor for her gun, training it at Spender’s brainstem.
“It’s time for you to join us,” Spender is saying.
Mulder closes his eyes, hearing the gunshot and feeling the hand drop him. When he opens them again, Spender’s body is convulsing on the floor, the bullet wound exposing the metallic casing of his spine. Then, the violence ceases. Spender’s head is framed by a spreading halo of blood.
“Oh my God.” Scully lowers her gun.
“Are you alright?” Mulder asks her, stepping around the body and rushing to her side. “Are you concussed?” Scalp wounds bleed a lot, he reminds himself, so it’s probably not as serious as it looks.
“I don’t think so.” She touches her face and studies the blood on her fingertips.
“Are you sure?” he presses.
Holstering her gun, she puts a hand against the wall for balance. “Yeah,” she breathes. Both of them are shaking with residual adrenaline.
Mulder stoops to retrieve his own gun from the floor. “Great shot, by the way.” He tries to smile. “You really only get one chance with these guys.”
There’s a vacuum in his chest he can’t explain. His thoughts return to the elevator, and his failure to acknowledge her when they both thought they were about to die.
They find some alcohol wipes, which Scully uses to clean the blood from her face after picking the grains of glass from her hair. Besides the scalp wound and the spray of superficial scratches to her forehead, cheek, neck, and hands, she seems to have gotten away unharmed. Most of the cuts should heal without scarring. Afterwards, Mulder watches her take the elastic out of her hair and finger comb it into a fresh ponytail, wishing he could think of a way to broach the subject of what Spender said to them.
Lucking upon an electric kettle in one of the staff lounges, they make themselves styrofoam cups of instant coffee and walk the halls in search of any signs of life. In addition to backup power generation, the NIH uses underground cisterns to supply its research hospitals with emergency water, making it an ideal location to seek shelter. It’s extremely troubling that they’ve yet to find anyone else here alive.
The closest thing they do find is an envelope addressed to Scully on the desk in Dr. Hathale’s ninth floor office. Scully sinks into the doctor’s chair, turning the envelope over in her hands, as Mulder takes the chair on the other side of the desk. Tearing it open, she produces a folded piece of yellow legal paper.
“Is it from her?” Mulder asks, watching Scully scan the note.
She frowns at it in silence. “That’s what it says,” she answers after a minute.
“Can you identify her handwriting?” he asks.
“Well it’s pretty much illegible, which checks out, since she’s a doctor,” says Scully. “But no, we’ve never exchanged handwritten messages.”
“Could it be a trick?” he suggests. “Someone posing as her?”
Scully hands him the paper. “You mean could someone else have left this on her desk, hoping I’d find it? Conceivably. But to what end?”
Mulder looks at the note.
Agent Scully, it reads.
The Sample you provided me with has proven Invaluable to us. Unfortunately, it’s not Safe to continue our Work here. My team and I are headed West to Indian Country. I don’t know if you will ever find this Letter, but I have no other way of contacting you. I leave it here in the Hopes that you might know your efforts were not in vain.
Sincerely,
Dr. Sonja Hathale
“What’s with the random capitalizations?” Mulder asks. “Could it be some kind of cypher?”
“I don’t know.” Scully tilts her head back, resting it on the top of the chair.
“A-S-T-S-I-U-S-W-M-I-W-I-C-I-L-I-I-H.” He reads all the capitals out loud. “Does that mean anything to you?”
“No,” says Scully.
“What about just the non-standard capitals?” he asks. “S-I-S-W-W-I-C-L-H? Wait,” he considers. “Is Indian Country generally capitalized? How about S-I-S-W-W-L-H?”
“Maybe it doesn’t mean anything,” Scully sighs. “Maybe that’s just the way she writes.” She taps the little pendulum toy on the desk and watches it swing back and forth. “Anyway, it’s all too vague to be actionable. Maybe the vaccine got out there. Maybe your motley crew of survivors has a chance. But there’s nothing we can do to help them from here.”
Mulder drops the note, letting it flutter down onto the desk between them and leans back, tilting this way and that in his rotating office chair.
“Do you think Skinner’s still alive?” he asks the ceiling.
“Will you stop this?” she says. “I don’t want to try to guess who’s alive and who’s dead. It’s pointless speculation.”
Still leaning back against the headrest, Mulder lets his head loll to one side so that he can face her. “Since when does speculation need to have a point?” he asks.
Scully has a way of rolling her eyes without actually rolling her eyes. “Does talking about it constantly give you some sort of illusion of control?” she asks. “Is that what this is about?”
“Well, what else are we supposed to talk about?” He gestures to the room and to the universe in general. “People are dying. That’s what’s happening.”
She doesn’t argue with this. He does a three-sixty rotation.
“I guess we should probably talk about what’s next on the agenda,” he concedes. “Where do we go from here?”
Scully stares into her last couple of inches of cold coffee, tilting the cup like she’s reading the future in it. “He told us they have William,” she says, growing distant. “He mentioned Fort Bragg.”
“You want to go to Fort Bragg,” says Mulder. He strokes his knuckles against his lips, studying her expression.
She believes what Spender told them, that their baby is in the hands of the Cigarette Smoking Man, if only because believing this provides the hope that their baby might still be alive.
“He also told you to kill me,” Mulder points out. “What did you make of that?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t know what he was talking about.”
“He called me a ticking time bomb,” Mulder says.
Scully puts down the styrofoam cup. “Well, it wouldn’t be the first time someone’s said that about you,” she snorts.
Mulder picks at his cuticles, replaying the encounter in his mind. “Doesn’t it bother you that he didn’t kill me when he had me by the throat?” he asks.
She frowns.
“He said some strange things,” Mulder continues. “I think… I think it was the alien hive mind speaking through him, directly to me.” He leans forward. “They addressed me by name.”
“I didn’t really catch that part,” says Scully. “I was focused on shooting him.”
Mulder nods, not really listening. “What did he want with me, Scully?” he asks. “What does it mean?”
“I don’t know.” She stands up from the desk, as if to put an end to this whole line of questioning, but her expression changes. “Mulder!” she exclaims.
Following her line of sight, he looks down to find what appears to be a black slug crawling on the toe of his white sneaker. He jumps up, kicking the shoe off and knocking his chair to the floor.
“His blood.” She brings a hand to her mouth. “You stepped in his blood.”
It was red when it left Spender’s body, but the blood has now turned black and taken on a life of its own. Mulder struggles out of his jacket as the slippery beads roll over his clothes like a swarm of insects. He removes his belt and hip holster and lets them coil to the floor on top of his jacket, preparing to strip. He grabs the hem of his t-shirt, only to realize that the droplets are already being absorbed into his skin. He yells, watching them crawl beneath the surface as they travel up his torso. Then, all of a sudden, they disappear.
“Scully.” He lets go of his shirt and stares down at his palms, frozen in shock. Pins and needles spread from every point of entry.
“Okay,” she urges him. “Let’s just— Let’s try to stay calm.”
She walks around the desk and he backs away, afraid of somehow infecting her as she reaches for him.
“It’s going to be okay,” she insists. “We’re both vaccinated. The virus can’t kill us.”
“Right,” he says, even as his vision begins to swim.
He follows her out into the corridor, his heart pounding in his ears. Every few seconds, the urge to start tearing his skin off peaks and then subsides again.
“I’ll just take a look at you,” Scully is saying.
They ride the elevator down to the phlebotomy lab, where she guides him into a chair with a special padded armrest designed for blood draws. Her face is neutral, but her hands are moving a lot. She touches the back of one of them to his forehead and searches his eyes.
“How do you feel?” she asks him.
He notices the long scratch across the backs of her knuckles, and wonders if that one will scar after all.
“Scully, I don’t think it’s going to kill me,” he tells her. “I think it’s going to do something a lot worse.”
“You’re feverish,” she says, ignoring his words.
“You heard Agent Spender,” he continues. “He was trying to warn us.”
All the talk of their father could only have meant one thing. Mulder and his half brother, though he’s not used to thinking of Spender in such terms, were equally cursed to share that man’s genes. Spender was talking about the Cigarette Smoking Man’s plans for both of them, plans that were encoded into their DNA before they were even born.
Scully wheels a patient monitor over to him and holds the thermometer in front of his mouth.
“Scully,” he says, denying her access to the underside of his tongue. Realizing he left his gun in Dr. Hathale’s office, he looks at the one attached to her hip. His skin is burning, and they both know it’s not from any ordinary fever.
The thermometer hesitates in the air. “No,” she says.
Their eyes meet and she shakes her head.
“Scully,” he says slowly. “You don’t have to be the one to do it. Just give me the gun.”
The thermometer clatters to the floor and she backs away from him before he can even think of snatching the gun from her holster. “I don't know what you’re talking about,” she says.
“I think you do.” He droops in the phlebotomy chair. He’s growing lightheaded, the surfaces in front of him drawing farther away.
Scully turns away from him and towards the lab counter.
“There’s no time to argue about this,” he says to her back as she rifles through the cabinets. “We don’t know how long it takes. I could be a danger to you very soon.”
“Quiet,” she snaps at him over her shoulder. “You’re distracting me. I’m trying to think.”
“Scully,” he pleads with her.
There’s a smudge of blue dry erase marker on the side of his hand from being pressed against the whiteboard. He runs his fingers over it, imagining his flesh turning to jelly and sloughing away to reveal his alien replacement. He wonders if he’ll remain aware, as Spender seemed to. It doesn’t bear contemplating.
“We don’t even know if you’re right,” she says, pulling down a sharps bin to search behind it, cotton balls bouncing across the countertop. “You haven’t even let me try anything.”
“What are you going to do?” he asks. “Experiment on me? There’s no time.”
“You don’t know that,” she says. “You just said we don’t know how long it takes.”
When he opens his mouth to argue with her, he’s cut short by a stabbing pain in his chest. The room flips so that he’s looking up at the ceiling and he realizes, in a third person sort of way, that he’s lying on his back having a seizure. He hears, rather than sees, Scully run from the room as the pain intensifies, whiting out his vision. His teeth clamp down on his tongue, filling his mouth with the taste of iron.
The fear is autonomic, but the sadness takes him by surprise. He realizes he’s missed his chance to say goodbye, or thank you for everything, or hug our son for me, or any number of other things he might have said.
Scully reappears, her blurry face emerging from the glare of the overhead lights. He tries to speak to her, but it’s impossible. A mixture of blood and saliva is threatening to choke him.
“It’s going to be okay,” she chants, combing his hair away from his face. “It’s going to be okay.” She kisses him on the forehead and plunges a syringe into his heart. He feels himself sink into the floor as the world becomes liquid light.
He doesn’t remember having any dreams, but when Mulder wakes up, he has the distinct sense that he’s been asleep for a long time. He feels transported. When he opens his eyes, he’s half expecting to find himself in Purgatory, so it’s a bit anticlimactic to find himself staring up at the same acoustic tile ceiling.
At least, he thinks it’s the same ceiling. The colors are different, the surfaces more granular, the edges sharper. He breathes from the diaphragm, inhaling the scents of antiseptic and death. Everything feels tender and uncanny. His skin is hot and his mouth tastes like metal. Becoming aware of his nakedness, he realizes he’s lying on some kind of foam mattress pad on the floor.
He holds a hand up to his face for scrutiny. The shape seems right, but the two dark brown freckles on the back of it are missing. Noticing the needle in his arm, he looks up to see a tube connected to an IV drip and pulls it out.
His arms and chest are covered with a light fuzz; Not stubble, but the tapered ends of brand new hairs. He reaches up to find the same virgin hairs sprouting from his face and the top of his head. The consistency of his skin is all wrong.
“Scully?” he asks the empty lab.
The layered quality of his own voice makes him pause and listen to the sounds of the deserted clinic. Even the silence sounds different. He can hear what he thinks is the electromagnetic hum of the LED lights on the ceiling.
“Scully?” he tries again.
Deciding to just rip the bandaid off, he sits up and looks down at himself, only to immediately regret it. His hair and clothes and other small possessions lie across from him in a puddle of jellied gore. He’s been rinsed clean, but not very thoroughly, leaving the bloody crust around his nail beds, his nostrils, the helixes of his ears.
He brings a hand to his chest, trying to imagine a diminutive Scully hosing him down over the drain in the floor and rolling his weight onto the foam mattress all by herself.
His nipples are flat and gray, and there are ridges of this pearly gray skin along his collarbone, the blades of his hips, and the insides of his thighs. He flinches from the sight of his groin.
“Okay,” he says out loud to himself. He closes his eyes, feeling the air currents against his bare skin. The gray patches feel different, so he can tell without seeing that there are more of them on his back.
“Yo, Fox,” he says, in his best 80s hip hop voice. “What’s good? What’s crackalackin’?”
He stands on shaking legs, brushing off the scales of dried blood.
“Sheee-it, you know me,” he answers himself. “I’m keepin’ it really really real.”
Flexing his feet against the cold vinyl floor, he takes his first cautious steps towards the stainless steel sink at the end of the counter.
“Maybe a little too real,” he says to his reflection in the mirror. He scrubs his nails with two pumps of the pink liquid hand soap, taking in his own appearance.
The supersoldiers are designed to be able to pass as human. Wispy eyebrows and the peach fuzz on his head make him look oddly neotenous, but his hair will grow back. With clothes on, he could walk down the street without drawing the suspicion of strangers; But someone who knew him would notice the differences. The mole on his right cheek is gone, along with his old skin. His features are too symmetrical, too smooth, lacking any of the markers of having lived in the world; But they are his own features, and not someone else’s.
Folding up a paper towel, he wets a corner of it and uses it to wipe the crusted blood from his nostrils and ears, and from the corners of his eyes. His eyes look normal, he thinks, though his perception of color is different. At least, they are not black.
Stepping away from the mirror, he straightens his spine and closes his fists at his sides. His breaths feel deep and satisfying. A powerful heart thumps in his chest.
Whatever he’s got going on below the belt will have to be its own matter entirely. He finds one of those mint green hospital gowns in the cabinet and puts it on, if only to remove the visual distraction. Standing over the semilucent marmalade of his own remains, he tries to see if there are any bones or organs, but all he can make out are indistinct masses, like chunks of fruit suspended in a jello mold.
“Scully?” he calls, louder this time. She will be able to explain all of this to him, he's sure.
Deciding to go and look for her, he leaves the lab and walks down the corridor, calling her name. His movements feel unnaturally smooth and mechanical, his muscles too eager, his joints too lubricated. He paces himself, alarmed by the coiled urge to break into a run.
When he reaches the end of the corridor, he hears the click of a gun being cocked and turns towards the source of the sound.
“Don’t come any closer!” Scully yells at him.
Mulder’s feet freeze in place and he raises his hands into the air. “Scully,” he says, taking her in.
The scratches on her face have faded, confirming his suspicion that at least a few days have passed. She looks like she’s showered, and she’s dressed in black sweatpants and a pullover embroidered with the seal of the National Institutes of Health that he thinks is navy blue. Her hair is no color he’s ever seen before. It occurs to him that he has no idea whether he’s actually seeing beyond the human visual spectrum or if he’s simply been cured of his color blindness.
“St-stay where you are,” she says, with a little less conviction. The Glock trembles in front of her.
“It’s okay,” Mulder says slowly. “It’s…” He hesitates, unsure if what he’s about to say is even true. “It’s me.”
Scully shakes her head so minutely it’s more like vibrating in place. Her eyes are round with terror.
“I don’t hear them,” he tells her. “There’s no one else in my head. It’s just me.”
“I don’t understand,” she says. “I don’t…” The barrel angles downward by a few centimeters.
His feet start working again and he takes a step towards her.
“I said stay back!” Scully pulls the trigger, striking him just below the ribs, and he doubles over, clutching the wound in shock. Hot blood gushes between his fingers, soaking the front of the hospital gown.
“Why would you do that?” he asks her.
“I-I don’t know!” she sputters.
“We already know that doesn’t kill them!” he says. “It has to be in the back of the neck!”
“I know!” she says. “I’m sorry, I guess it’s a reflex!”
“Dammit, Scully!” He feels a lurch behind his ribs, the muscles contracting until the bullet rolls out onto the floor. The nose is flattened from the impact. “That really hurts!”
“Sorry!” Her feet slide towards him without really taking a step as she lowers her gun.
“Oh my God.” She blinks. “It’s really you!”
Mulder looks up from clutching his belly to wince at her. “Hi.”
She runs to him, holstering the gun so that she can cup his face with both hands and he stills under her touch, trying to stand up straight. “Oh my God,” she repeats, frantically searching his eyes.
The feeling of her hands on his face is so arresting that he almost forgets about the pain.
“What did you do?” he asks her.
Her forehead ripples. “What do you mean?”
“You injected me with something,” he says.
Her hands slide down to cup his shoulders. “It was morphine,” she says. “I thought if I kept you sedated, then maybe I could buy some time to figure something out.”
“Sedated, so I couldn’t hurt you, you mean.” His fingers curl. He wants to reciprocate her touch, but he’s hesitant to make any such moves.
She lowers her chin.
“What was in the IV?” he asks.
“Sufentanil,” she says. “It’s another opioid, used to maintain general anesthesia. But it took absurdly high doses to keep you under. You, you metabolize it so fast.”
“And then what?” he prompts.
“And then I ran out of general anesthesia drugs.” She gives a laugh that’s more of a sob. “And you woke up.”
He sags into her arms, realizing what she’s saying, and she clasps the back of his neck. “You should have killed me,” he says.
“I know.” She pushes the top of her head against the underside of his jaw. “I know.”
He winces when she tries to hug him closer.
“Sorry.” She lets go and takes a step back, her hands hovering around his chest. “Are you alright?” she asks.
“You mean this?” He nods to the bullet wound. “Or in general?” The bleeding has stopped, requiring no compression, and he can already feel his flesh knitting itself back together.
“Lemme take a look,” she murmurs, gesturing for him to move his hands out of the way. There are no voices in his head, but there is something, a compelling kind of pressure, and when she touches him again, he realizes it’s her.
“How long was I out for?” he asks her.
“Four days,” she says.
Mulder rolls this information around in his mind. “So what have you been up to this whole time?” he asks.
“Eating hospital food,” Scully says.
They return to the phlebotomy lab to retrieve Scully’s notes and, she decides once they get there, to run a blood panel. Mulder’s gunshot wound is closing too quickly for her to even bother dressing it, and at this rate he should be completely healed in a matter of hours.
He hops up onto the lab counter next to her, watching her scribble something into a spiral notebook. Her close, slanted handwriting is too small for him to read, especially upside down.
“Are those your field notes on alien-human hybrid supersoldiers?” he asks her.
“You could say that.” She spares him a sideways glance.
“Does it say ‘I captured one of them live’ in there?” He wags his eyebrows.
“Not in so many words.” She puts down her pen and starts preparing a needle for venipuncture.
“Probably needs a more concise name.” Mulder kicks his heels against the cabinet beneath him. “Are you gonna be the species-namer?”
She ties a rubber tourniquet above his elbow and uses her finger to palpate the vein. “This may hurt a bit,” she warns, before raising the needle and stabbing it as hard as she can into his arm.
“Ow!” Mulder flinches. The same woman shot him in the abdomen less than an hour ago, he reminds himself, so this shouldn’t even rate.
“Sorry.” She removes the tourniquet, letting the test tube fill up. “I took some blood samples while you were under,” she explains, “and I discovered that your skin is very difficult to penetrate.” She removes the full test tube and hooks up another, and then a third, before withdrawing the needle.
“What color is it?” he asks her.
“What?” She drops the tubes into a plastic rack.
“My blood,” he says.
She frowns.
“The colors look different,” he explains, “and there are more of them. I don’t know if what I’m looking at is red.”
“It is red,” she assures him.
“Why doesn’t it turn black, like Spender’s did?” he asks.
Scully looks down, pretending to consult her notes. “I think that’s… only the fluid in the brainstem,” she says.
They sit in silence for a moment and Mulder cups his knees, growing restless. He wants to ask her everything she’s learned about what he is, but he doesn’t even know where to begin.
Scully faces him, seeming to sense this. “How do you feel?” she asks gently.
“Like I took a pill at a rave,” he says. Despite the sensory strangeness, he feels physically well. His whole body is aglow with the kind of pleasant soreness that promises to resolve itself into strength.
“Are you in any pain?” she asks. “Aside from the obvious.” She nods to the narrowing gouge below his ribs.
“Why do I remember everything?” He answers her question with a question.
She presses her lips. “What do you mean?”
Behind her, on the floor, lies the gelatinous cocoon from which he emerged, a gory mucilage in roughly the shape of a man.
“That was Fox Mulder,” he says, pointing past her. “So why do I feel like I’m him? Why do I have his memories?”
“Because… you are him,” she says, without turning to look. “You said so yourself. Right before I shot you.”
His toes curl against the cabinet door. “What if I’m actually the thing that killed him?” he asks her. “A thing that consumed him from the inside in order to create itself?”
“Then why would you have all his memories?” She shrugs.
“If I’m Fox Mulder, then how did I get from in there…” He points. “…to in here?” He taps his sternum. “Do you think it’s— what? —my soul, or something?”
“Maybe,” says Scully. “Maybe the brain was preserved.”
“But we aren’t just brains in jars,” he says. “What about the entire neural architecture? The whole body is involved in sensing and processing experience. And if you credit, as I do, any of the common notions of physio-psychism or chakra, then every individual cell is potentially its own—”
“Mulder.” She claps her hands over his knees. “Breathe.”
Her touch startles him into silence. Like everything else, it doesn’t feel the way he remembers. The sensations are recognizable enough that his mind is able to parse them, but they are manifestly different. This red is not the same red, this heat is not the same heat, this pain is not the same pain.
“You’re doing that thing,” she says, “where you ramble because you’re afraid.”
“Hey, gimme a break.” He draws a shaky breath. “I just got here on the Ship of Theseus over there.” He points again.
“I know.” She squeezes his knees and the pressure touches his mind with a similar warmth. He wants to tell her about this psychic touch and what he thinks it means, but he’s worried she won’t believe him. He’s even more worried she will believe him, and that everything will change for him in an even more terrifying way.
Opening one of the cabinets to produce two sterile plastic jars, she sets them both down on the counter next to his thigh. “Alright,” she says. “You could probably use a shower, correct?”
Mulder eyes the jars. “Yeah.”
“So while you’re in there, if you can manage it…” She visibly marshals her medical detachment. “It would be helpful to get a urine and a semen sample.”
Mulder exhales. “About that.” He hops down from the counter, arranging his bloodstained hospital gown in as dignified a manner as he can. “You may have noticed,” he says, “that I’m missing my… original equipment.”
Scully tucks her notebook under her arm, preparing to take him to him where the shower is. “Yes,” she says.
“So, so.” Mulder rubs the back of his neck. “How am I supposed to…?” His heart squeezes painfully. “There doesn’t seem to be any way to, you know…”
“Ah,” says Scully. “You haven’t seen it, um. Extended.”
He opens and closes his mouth. “What?”
“Can you lift up the gown?” she asks.
He obliges her, exposing the triangle of smooth gray skin where his genitals ought to be.
“Okay,” she says. “Now just, um. Try to relax, and see if you can get it to come out.”
“Jesus Christ,” he says. “Are you serious?”
She winces in sympathy. “In terms of function,” she says, “it may not be as different as it looks. But the samples will help me clarify—”
Feeling something slide out of him, he backs up against the counter and stares down at it. “Um, um, Scully,” he stammers. “What the fuck— in your medical opinion —am I looking at?”
The thing is pearly gray and smooth like the skin of a dolphin, uncurling from some unknown orifice between his legs to hang more or less where his penis should hang. It’s sort of flat and flipper-like, and has what appears to be a silver ball bearing in the end of it, which the gray skin largely conceals. Before he can really get a good look at it, it curls up like a prawn, returning from whence it came. He drops the hem of the hospital gown and presses the heels of his hands into his eye sockets, as if he can grind the image of it from his brain.
“So, um,” he says. It hurts to swallow. “Are they hermaphroditic?” he asks, with what he hopes is an academic tone.
“I don’t think so,” says Scully. “It wouldn’t really make sense for that to be a vaginal canal. I think it’s just a sort of, you know.” She attempts to demonstrate with her fingers. “A sort of blind cavity, into which the, uh… the phallus retracts, when not in use.”
“Mmhm, mhm.” Mulder nods. “Yeah, that makes sense.” He grabs the sample jars from the counter and gestures for Scully to lead the way.
The corners of Scully’s mouth twitch in a kind of poignant frown of concealed laughter. “You alright there, Columbo?” she asks, reaching up to stroke his short hair.
“Yup, yup, yup.” Mulder knocks on the counter.
The patient bathroom consists of a toilet, a sink, and two large showerheads that drain directly into the tile floor, turning the whole room into one giant shower stall. There are stainless steel handles on the walls and a plastic chair, for the benefit of elderly and disabled patients, which Mulder uses as a table for the sample jars. Shedding the hospital gown, he balls it up and tosses it into a corner before flipping on one of the showerheads and grabbing a new bar of soap from the edge of the sink.
The hot water pours down his back and he closes his eyes, the wax paper wrapper around the soap growing soggy in his hands as he stands there, forgetting himself in the feeling. There are gray ridges over his vertebrae and shoulder blades which react differently to the temperature; This skin is more sensitive, or at least, sensitive in a different way. Unwrapping the bar of soap and discarding the paper, he washes himself in meditative silence, not whistling or humming the way he might have in the past. The gunshot wound is a pink macule, still tender when he runs his fingers over it, but well on its way to disappearing entirely. Not bothering with the mini shampoo, he uses the same bar of soap to wash the short fuzz on his head.
Objects feel flimsier in his hands. The soap warps under his fingers, but he’s been careful not to break the plastic jars. He can tell by feel how much force is required, just like he could as an ordinary man, so calibrating his strength is not too much of a problem. The main difference is that the threshold for force is lower, making the plastic feel like it’s paper mâché.
Satisfied that he’s clean, he picks up one of the clear sample jars and unscrews the cap. He hasn’t urinated since he woke up, so it shouldn’t be too difficult to summon the urge.
“Here goes nothing,” he says, standing with his feet shoulder width apart and positioning the jar in front of him.
He tries to imagine what urinating ought to feel like, the release of pressure, and this seems to do the trick. The thing between his legs unsheathes itself, pissing on the tiles, and he grabs it, directing the stream into the cup. The urine itself appears comfortingly normal, even if the thing it’s coming out of is anything but.
“One down,” he says, screwing the cap back on and setting the full jar on the seat of the chair.
Bracing one of his hands against the tile wall in front of him, he takes a deep breath and reaches for his crotch with the other. The thing curls around his fingers, trying to slip itself back inside, and he gently pries it away from the opening. Laying his forehead against the wet tile, he tries to relax and think about sex as it grows less flat and more cylindrical in his hand. It’s slippery to the touch, coated in a thin, clear mucus that rinses away in the shower. It feels almost painfully sensitive, and not in a very promising way, but he closes his eyes and keeps trying.
Relaxation is more or less impossible under these conditions, but it doesn’t really seem to matter. The thing swells in his hand anyway, and when he dares to peek, he can see that the skin has stretched, exposing more of the silver sphere, which seems to rotate independently like the tip of a ballpoint pen. He can’t figure out where the urethra is supposed to be, but otherwise, it’s starting to seem a little friendlier as he handles it. A jolt passes through him and he leans more heavily against the slippery wall. Images of sex flash through his mind, too fleeting to identify, almost the mere artistic suggestion of bodies and poses.
Curious, he reaches down with his other hand to feel the lubricated opening. He manages to slip a finger inside, but it feels unnatural and uncomfortable, the muscles clamping around it in protest. Evidence in favor of Scully’s hypothesis.
Letting go with both hands, he stands up straight and looks down at his erection. It doesn’t seem to flag at all when he stops touching it, and despite his decidedly unsexy mood. He waits, letting the water wash over him, but the thing is insistent. Once summoned, it doesn’t seem to have any intention of going away on its own.
He grabs the other sample jar and unscrews the lid.
“You’re not the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen,” he mutters defiantly, taking said thing in hand.
Stroking the underside produces more of those metallic jolts to his system in increasing succession. Sensing the end is near, he holds the cup in position and leans against the wall again. There’s a flash of white light in his mind, and a feeling not dissimilar to that of missing time. He pushes off the wall, disoriented and unsure if he even hit the intended target.
When he opens his eyes, he almost drops the cup. The ejaculate he managed to catch with it has the exact color and consistency of mercury. What didn’t make it into the cup is traveling in beads towards the drain in the floor, being carried along by, but never mixing with, the water.
With mechanical detachment, he screws the cap back on the sample jar and turns off the showerhead.
“Well, that’s going in the field notes,” he says.
He grabs a towel from the rack on the opposite side of the room and dries himself off, folding it around his hips before approaching the sink. Wiping the fog from the mirror with the side of his fist, he uses the disposable safety razor on the sink counter to remove his pubescent-looking beard.
All showered and shaven, he takes a step back from the mirror to reevaluate his appearance. It’s definitely an improvement. He still looks a little undercooked, but he figures it’s nothing getting some sun won’t fix.
Dropping the towel, he grabs the folded bundle of clothes Scully gave him and puts them on. It’s a pair of gray sweatpants, a gray tank top, and a navy blue pullover like the one she has, all culled from the NIH gift shop on the ground floor. Once dressed, he is more or less indistinguishable from a normal man— a realization that causes a strange pang of sadness.
Under different circumstances, it might have been thrilling to join the ranks of eldritch creatures lurking just below the surface of ordinary reality. There was always the half-conscious, childish hope that some day some Dracula or other might turn around and say good job Fox, you found us, and induct him into their secret world. But the secret world has become the ordinary world, and all the ordinary things they once took for granted are now sinking into the darkness.
Scully figures they have about twenty-four hours of electricity and water left, so she runs whatever lab tests she can that evening and leaves for the morning what must be left for the morning. They eat granola bars, and goldfish crackers, and those weirdly shelf-stable pudding cups, avoiding the more odious hospital foods that need to be heated up in a microwave, and then brush their teeth with allegedly bubblegum flavored toothpaste. The notebook goes in a nylon backpack Scully took from the gift shop, along with a box of blue ink pens and a ring of elastics for her hair. They talk elliptically about leaving for Fort Bragg and what they’re going to bring with them.
Mulder lies on his side in the hospital bed where Scully has been sleeping, running his tongue over the backs of his teeth in search of a chip that used to be there when she finally decides to turn in. Her hair is down, still loosely imitating the shape of the ponytail it’s been in all day. The overhead lights are off, but there are enough ambient monitors and emergency lights to illuminate her tired expression.
“Well, the good news is, it’s not mercury,” she says, sitting down on the edge of the bed. “The bad news is, I have have idea what else it could be.”
Mulder stares up at her, tallying up the faint freckles he never knew existed. “You look so different,” he murmurs.
“I look different?” She raises an eyebrow.
He rolls away from her onto his back, giving her the space to swing her legs onto the bed. She sits up, propping a pillow behind her, and looks down at him, her pupils swelling in the dark.
Mulder is the first to break eye contact. Even the simple grid pattern of tiles on the ceiling is dense with detail, imperfections and artifacts of reflected light. The world is playing at a higher frame rate. It’s like being on a drug trip he knows he’ll never come down from.
“D’you think I can still get into Catholic Heaven?” He scrunches one eye shut.
“That depends,” she says. “Have you been baptized?”
“Wouldn’t I need a do-over anyway?” He nods down at himself.
“Not necessarily,” she says. “Strictly speaking it’s the soul that gets baptized, not the body.”
He flexes his toes, watching the lines of his body shift as he breathes. The gray markings are more aware of his clothes than the rest of his skin, not in an unpleasant way, but in a way that makes it hard for him to forget about them.
“You really think I’m him?” he asks her.
Scully sighs through her nose. “I’m looking right at you,” she says, waiting for him to meet her gaze again before continuing. “And I don’t have a single doubt in my mind that it’s you.”
He folds his hands over his belly. “Me, as in… my soul?” he asks.
She purses her lips. “You know,” she says, “René Descartes thought the soul resided in the pineal gland. Maybe it’s corpuscular.” She tilts her head to one side, then the other, pretending to weigh the possibility. “Either way, I’m convinced that your soul is in here now.” She touches his chest.
The spread of her fingers tenses something in his abdomen, but he can’t muster the initiative to act on it. He’s seen the supersoldiers rip doors from cars and heads from bodies with their bare hands. The pressure in his mind makes him still.
“But how do you know?” he asks.
Her hand withdraws, letting him breathe normally again.
“Well, as a Catholic,” she muses, “I’m supposed to believe that life begins at conception. But as a scientist, I know that life began billions of years ago with abiogenesis.”
She crosses her legs at the ankles. They reach a little more than halfway to the end of the large hospital bed.
“You were once a part of your mother’s body,” she says, “and there was no single moment when you ceased to be a part of her and became a separate organism. In some sense, you never did. There’s no platonic distinction between species, or even between individual organisms. You could say that the history of evolution is the biography of one giant pulsating organism, stretched across billions of years.”
“So, what?” Mulder asks. “So biological classification is arbitrary, so therefore I’m Fox Mulder if we say I am? That’s not a very satisfying answer.”
“Not at all,” says Scully. “The categories are invented, but they’re not arbitrary. They’re invented by human scientists, from a human perspective, to be useful to humans. Distinguishing you and your mother as separate organisms at some point makes sense, because we experience the world as individuals. We break things up into human-sized units that make the world legible to our human senses. We all do this spontaneously. Scientists are just trying to do this in a more deliberate and disciplined way.” Her gaze lifts. “And scientists from another species, from another part of the universe, would probably divide reality up very differently.”
Mulder’s tongue returns to the smooth edge of that incisor where habit expects to find a chip in the enamel. “So as a human scientist,” he says, “you’re saying it makes sense to consider me Fox Mulder, because it’s useful to you.” He smiles up at her. “Isn’t that called motivated reasoning? Wouldn’t it make just as much sense to say that I’m some sort of parasite, or even the shared offspring of Fox Mulder and another creature that reproduces parasitically? Shouldn’t your classification schema try to capture the fact that I have a different body?”
“I don’t think it’s necessarily the case that you have a different body,” she says. “I think it would be more accurate to say that your body has undergone a radical metamorphosis, which is nonetheless part of the lifespan of the same organism. The continuity between you and Fox Mulder is greater than that between the caterpillar and the butterfly, which we consider a single organism. You have his face, his voice, his memories, and probably all his DNA. It’s a bit like wondering if we’re the same person as an adult that we were as an infant. On the one hand, we change so fundamentally; But on the other hand, of course we’re the same person. Change is in our nature.”
She touches his hair, and he feels her will guiding his head onto her thigh. Bowing to gaze at him upside down, she cradles his head and strokes the sides of his jaw with her thumbs. His joints feel heated and loose, but he is unable to look away.
“You feel like you’re him, because you are him,” she says. “In every way that could practically matter from a human perspective. From my perspective.”
“Alright, you’ve convinced me,” he says.
She kisses him upside down and he shivers at the feeling of her breath against his face. Somehow the baggy NIH sweatshirts they’re both wearing are the sexiest thing he’s ever seen.
“It’s you.” He inhales.
“Hm?” She hasn’t let go of his face.
“It’s you in my head,” he clarifies, “instead of them.”
“What do you mean?” she asks.
They’re speaking very closely, almost whispering.
He shifts in place on his back, but he still can’t look away from her. There are no voices, no commands, just this wordless pressure. She doesn’t even realize she’s controlling him. It’s so subtle and painless that he didn’t realize it either at first.
“Our parents,” he says, gaining certainty as he distills his various hunches into a narrative he can recite aloud. “Members of the shadow government.”
He sits up, his sudden enthusiasm breaking the spell, and twists around on the bed to face her.
“They allowed us to be genetically modified,” he says, “so that we would survive colonization and serve the aliens as a slave class. That’s what Agent Spender was trying to tell us.”
Only now does Spender’s death register to him as the loss of a brother he never got to know. It’s hard to fathom, but Spender was as much his own blood as Samantha, with whom he shared the same mother, but not the same father. Mulder can only marvel at the tangled lives of these people, their parents; They have for their patrimony the adrenochrome-fueled schemes of these decadent spooks.
“They did this to ensure the survival of their own offspring,” he says. “Their own genetic legacy on this planet. Even as the rest of humanity was fated to die. Marking their doors with the blood of the lamb so that the plague would pass over their houses. That’s all this was ever about.”
A single vertical worry line cleaves Scully’s brow. “It does make sense,” she allows. “The love of one’s own children, and the need to ensure their survival, is the most powerful evolutionary drive there is.”
The moons of his fingernails used to be less pronounced, more hidden under the cuticles, he could swear. He’s sitting cross-legged, hands open in his lap, wondering how this omen might interact with the fortune lines in his palms.
“But it isn’t love, what they did to us, Scully,” he says. “They doomed their own children and grandchildren to a fate worse than death.” He slopes towards her. “Maybe they didn’t realize that,” he says. “Or maybe they just didn’t want to realize it.”
The betrayal shakes him in a way he thought he could no longer be shaken. When she wraps her arms around him, he crumples. Her warm breath rustles the collar of his sweatshirt as she props her chin on the top of his head.
“You saved me from them,” he says into her shoulder. “My entire life has been planned out for me by shadowy forces I still don’t fully understand. And the only thing that’s ever interrupted their plans, the only thing that’s led me away from the invisible path I didn’t even realize I was walking, has been you.”
He can feel her swallowing, the underside of her jaw flexing against his scalp.
“I was always going to end up like this,” he says. “I was pre-programed. My whole life, I’ve been a fucking caterpillar.”
“How could I have saved you?” she murmurs. “I had no idea what I was doing. I felt so useless.”
With great difficulty, he lifts his head from nuzzling the side of her neck.
“You interrupted my programming,” he says. “You stopped me from forming the psychic link they would have used to control me.”
“You think the anesthesia did that?” she asks.
“Exactly,” he says. “My psionic range was limited because my consciousness was submerged throughout the process.”
“And you’re saying this psychic link was established… with me, instead?” she sighs. She doesn’t even have it in her to dispute the phrase ‘psionic range.’
“Yes,” he says gravely.
“What, because I was closest?” She leans away from him on her hands. “That seems like a pretty imprecise mechanism.”
“Well, were you focusing on me?” Mulder asks. “Could you have been attempting to reach me on the psychic plane?”
Scully pauses, her lips parting softly, and lies back against the pillow behind her. “I was praying for you,” she says.
He crawls across the mattress towards her, helpless to refuse the pressure now, and lays his head against her chest. The gray markings spark with sensation under his clothes, drawing him tightly against her. She feels so soft in his arms, but he is incapable of harming her with his new strength. A peculiar gravity drags him down until his cheek is pressed against her stomach.
“I love you,” he blurts.
Her fingers cease stroking the nape of his neck.
“I’ve said that before, haven’t I?” he asks. “I, I must have, at some point.”
“I don’t know,” she says. “A lot has happened. But I think I’d remember.”
“Well, there you go.” He fidgets. “It’s said.”
Laying the pillow horizontally behind her, she nudges him over and slides her way down so that they can lie on their sides facing each other. Her arm rests in the bow of his waist.
“Can you read my mind?” she asks him. Closing her eyes, she brings their foreheads together, as if to transmit a psychic message.
“Not really,” he breathes. “Maybe a little. Not full sentences or anything.”
Her eyelashes flutter against his brow bone.
“Well, I love you, too,” she breathes. “Just so it’s said.”