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1. I was twelve when it happened. My sister was eight. She just disappeared out of her bed one night. Just gone, vanished. No note, no phone calls, no evidence of anything.
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He’s walking down a long corridor, been walking down it for hours, Days, possibly. It’s windowless, painted a flat blue-gray color, and the gloom is tempered only by flickering fluorescent lights set into the dingy ceiling. He runs his right hand along the wall, feeling for panels or doors, though he’s certain that he’s been here before and that no door will be found.
A flash of movement up ahead, perhaps a skirt fluttering around a corner, perhaps the tip of a woman’s ponytail. “Hello?” he calls into the dead space. “Someone here?” There is no reply.
He follows the hallway until he comes to a vast, empty place. Snow is falling thickly, but he is not cold. He sees his mother sitting atop a drift, knees drawn to her chin, face upturned. Despite the snow, the sky is clear and starry. Green light moves across it in waves, falling down around her. She looks like a mermaid at rest in the kelpy shallows.
“Hello, Fox,” she says, gesturing for him to sit.
He settles down into the snow and realizes that he’s an adolescent again, all coltish knees and elbows. “Aurora borealis,” he says, pointing to the light. “We learned that at school.”
“You’re a smart boy.”
“Come home, Mom,” he says, cuddling close to her. “Nobody’s mad anymore.”
She kisses his forehead, and he smells cookies and cigarettes. “Non est ad astra mollis e terris via,” she whispers, then explodes into a million pieces, spattering him with blood and bone.
He screams, sits upright in bed with a hand to his pounding chest.
Phoebe rubs her silky cool fingers along his neck and shoulders. “Which one was it?”
“Snow,” he replies, shuddering, the scent of viscera still lingering.
“You need to talk to someone,” she says for the hundredth, the thousandth, time. “It’s been getting worse since Samantha had the baby.”
He shrugs her hands away. “I’m a psychologist, Phoebe,” he says with exaggerated patience. “Not much left to cover in therapy.”
She flops back against her pillow. “You’re going to have to reevaluate your status as a non-Freudian, Fox. Why do you care so much about a woman who abandoned you? Twelve years of motherhood, and she just decides she can’t handle it any longer and vanishes one night. I doubt she’s thought about you even a fraction as much as you’ve thought of her. It’s pathetic. ” Phoebe watches him through half-lidded eyes, beautiful as a jungle cat.
He examines her with a certain detachment, her short hair businesslike even in bed. Her nipples are hard against the thin satin of her nightgown , belly concave between the ridges of her sharp hips. Phoebe’s latest paramour is an unctuous man with a braying laugh and an obnoxious pinkie ring. As per their unspoken agreement, all three parties are decorous enough to pretend that Dr. Mulder is unaware of his wife’s bad behavior. He finds it much easier than dealing with things, and has lately toyed with the idea of returning the frank overtures of a certain student with hair like spun sunshine and the body of a centerfold. Turnabout is fair play, after all.
“I’m getting up,” he says, fumbling at the nightstand for his glasses. “I’ve got a lecture until noon, then three patients before my dad’s flight gets in.”
Phoebe groans. “I still can’t believe you invited him here again after what happened last time at Stonehenge. He’s mad!”
Fox rummages through his closet for a sport coat. “I know. But it’s only for a week.”
“Wear the brown corduroy and that light blue pinstripe shirt, it makes me feel like fucking you. Has your dad finished his book? I still don’t know who buys that rubbish.”
“He said he’s about halfway done, but Kurtzweil wants to interview a few more people about microchips in their necks or some crap.” In the decades since Teena walked out, Bill’s been in the throes of denial, insisting that he was forced to surrender his wife to aliens by a group of shadowy power players. He and his equally crackpot buddy Kurtzweil spin Byzantine tales of conspiracy, rife with cover-ups and clones and secret government agencies hell-bent on collusion with intergalactic invaders. Fox tries not to dwell on the lunacy.
“It’s bloody embarrassing,” Phoebe gripes, pulling off her nightgown. She stands on the bed to examine herself in the mirror. She sucks in her cheeks, pouting, and cocks her hip.
“What time are you home tonight?”
She shrugs, climbing off the bed. “Dunno, might have dinner with some friends after work.”
“Ah,” he says, knowing she’ll be out all night with Pinkie Ring. He’s sick of being married to her, sick of his slack-jawed students, his whiny patients, his crazy father. He has the occasional fantasy of becoming a skydiving instructor or a carver of whimsical birdhouses, but lacks the passion to make such an upheaval worthwhile.
Phoebe heads to the bathroom. Fox flips through his class roster, searching for the blonde’s name. Kelly. He thinks of her languid gaze, her candy pink lips wrapped around the end of a pencil as she uncrosses those Rockette legs.
His wife emerges from the bathroom, fidgeting with the belt of the silken robe she’s wrapped herself in. “Fox,” she says in a low voice. “There was a lump in my breast at my yearly.”
The room narrows to contain only her long, lean body, her thin face and tired eyes. “Phoebe…?”
“They did some bloodwork, a biopsy, whatever. Anyway. It’s cancer.”
His stomach lurches, the implications of this news settling like an anchor in the pit of it. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
She sits on the bed, shrugs. “I know you want a divorce.”
He does. He wants it so badly that the longing is a perpetual companion, leaving the taste of Vermont maple syrup and Maine lobster on his tongue. He wants to put an ocean between them; leave her to die with one of her lovers, let her be the consumptive heroine of Scotland Yard while he watches Sam’s kid grow up. He closes his eyes, puts his arm around her slender shoulders and draws her near.
“Oh, Phoebe,” he mumbles into her hair, “I’m not going anywhere.”
---
2. That was the deal. Her instead of me.
---
He swallows hard before going into the hospital room, his thumb flicking at a corner of the video box. Scully’s reading through a stack of get-well cards when he enters but looks up, smiling as best she can.
“Mulder,” she says quietly, holding out her free hand and beckoning him to the chair next to her bed. He notices that her knuckles are raw and bandaged.
Mulder walks to the bed, leaning over to drop a gentle kiss above her cheek, which is swollen and purple as a plum. He sits awkwardly in the chair, trying not to stare at the Frankenstein stitches across her lip and chin, the sling supporting her dislocated shoulder, the patch on her left eye. “Brought you a present,” he says, holding out the cassette. "Superstars of the Super Bowl."
Scully runs her fingers over the box. “I knew there was a reason to live.”
“I know you want to get some rest, I just came by to see... how you were doing and say hi,” he mumbles, gazing at the chipped petal-pink nail polish on Scully’s thumb. It seems terribly undignified that she should be in this condition with her nails chipped to boot. “I’ll, uh, head out now.”
“No, stay. It’s nice to be allowed visitors.” She takes the tape onto her lap, studying the cover. “How’s Barry?”
“Died during transport. You got his hepatic artery pretty good with the letter opener.” Scully had been taken to the hospital before he arrived at her place two nights ago, barely conscious and in danger of losing her eye. He tries not to think of what happened in that apartment, the story he read there in spattered blood and shattered glass.
Scully sighs, shaking her head. “I can’t pretend I’m sorry, but he was a very sick individual. It’s a shame all around.” She touches her cross, a pensive expression on her battered face.
Mulder senses anxiety in her, reticence. “What is it?” he asks, his muscles tensing like he’s waiting for her to throw a punch.
She gives him that sad smile again. “I don’t know how to say this, so I’ll just be blunt. I’m resigning.”
The blow catches him hard. “What?”
“I’m sorry, Mulder, I am, but I can’t do this anymore. Tooms, Pfaster, this, those firefly things... even cats are only supposed to have nine lives, and I’m burning through my human allotment at an alarming rate.”
He is unaccountably angry with her. After Deep Throat, after Aricebo, he thought she was on his side. He thought she was in this thing as deep as he was now. But then he’d thought that of Diana too, hadn’t he? “So you’re quitting because it turns out catching bad guys is dangerous. Gotcha. “
She straightens up, managing to glare at him even as she winces in pain. “You think I’m happy about this?”
“Clearly I don’t have a good grasp on what you’re feeling about things in general. What did you suppose the FBI was, Scully? Paperwork and promotions? Shiny gold stars on your personnel file with no real risk?”
“Dammit, Mulder, stop making it sound like I’m a traitor, all right? It’s not what I wanted either, but I have to be realistic. I didn’t know I was signing up to live out some James Bond meets Paul Bennewitz action flick. This is not about abandoning you; this is about doing what’s best for me and my family.”
“Your family? Are you feeling guilty because of your dad? Is that what this is?” He barely manages to keep the contempt from his voice. People-pleasing is a foreign concept to Mulder.
“It has to be guilt because I’m Catholic? Look, my mom’s not been doing so well ever since my dad died. She’s getting old. My sister’s a flake, and my brother Charlie’s gay and he and his boyfriend don’t have the greatest relationship with Mom, who is very pre-Vatican II about some things.” Scully picks at a scab on her wrist. “I’m going to talk to her about moving out to San Diego to be near my older brother and his wife. It would be nice for Mom and me to be nearby when they start a family, plus the climate’s good for her arthritis.”
“So you’re giving up your career to play nursemaid? Your mom’s not the only old-fashioned woman in the Scully family.” He gets to his feet, wishing he didn’t give a shit about her.
She slams the cassette onto the side table. “You want to be angry, fine. But I am being pulled in too many directions and I can’t keep it up. I barely see my friends, I can’t remember the last time I had a date, and I’m constantly replacing my houseplants because my schedule’s so goddamned erratic that they keep dying of neglect. I want kids. I want a life. I want to go to work in the morning and not worry about which side of the Stryker saw I’m going to end the day on. I’m not even your partner anymore, Mulder, so I don’t know what the hell you expect from me.”
There are tears in her eyes, but he pretends not to see them. He’s too busy trying to hold back his own. “I don’t expect a damn thing. Do whatever you want, Scully. You’ve never made it any secret that you think my work is a joke. I was fine before you came along, and if you can’t be an asset, you’re just another obstacle. Let me know when you move, I’ll send a houseplant.” He goes to the door and opens it, unable to stand the loneliness of being with her.
“Don’t leave like this,” she pleads. “I thought we were friends, Mulder. I don’t want this to be the end of everything, not after all we’ve been through together.”
He thinks of Boggs, of Scully so heartsick she was ready to dance with the devil to see the face of God. He’d foolishly thought her head was level enough for him to set a halo on. “You’re not my partner anymore,” he says, then walks into the hall and lets the bridge burn behind him.
---
3. Who are the men who would create a life whose only hope was to die?
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It’s nearly three weeks before they find her, cornered in an abandoned barn a few miles outside of Roanoke.
“Emily,” Scully says softly. She approaches her daughter with the same uncertainty of twelve years ago. Afraid of rejection, of loss. She stops several feet inside the doorway, Mulder behind her. “I’ve been so worried.”
Emily is wide-eyed with panic, her back flat against the wall. She is lanky at sixteen, nearly a head taller than her mother, and a high school track star. She’s got the nervous beauty of a racehorse, tossing her grimy, matted hair as she squints out at the ambulance, the officers and agents milling about on the grass. “I had to go,” she says in a jittery voice, edging toward a nearby window. “They needed me, Mom.” Her fingers dance along the sill.
“They?” Mulder and Scully ask in stereo.
“Three faces of Eve,” Emily says in a conspiratorial whisper. “Silver bells, cockle shells, pretty maids all in a row. Couldn’t do what they did, couldn’t cook you up some cream of toadstool because you’re actually mine and I’m yours and that makes it all so different than it was for them. I didn’t want you to have to leave so I took a hike...”
“Leave? Emily, I would never leave y-“
“Maybe you’d want to draw yourself a bath like the other mother. Down the street, not across the road. Know what I mean?” She holds up her hands, blue-veined wrists bared, and winks. Her laugh is not sane.
Scully gasps in the same heartbeat that Emily vaults out the window, racing across the grass towards the woods behind the barn.
Mulder’s after her in a flash, but she makes it nearly to the treeline before he catches her by the hair. She shrieks and claws at him. “Run!” she screams into the trees. “Run!”
There’s a rustling in the underbrush. Two deputies draw their guns and disappear into the foliage to investigate.
Scully runs up, panting, and watches in a sort of captivated horror as her daughter snaps at Mulder’s hands with her teeth, his arms crisscrossed around her chest. “Mulder, what’s wrong with her? She’s acting psychotic, her speech is incoherent. We need to get her to the ambulance and looked at immediately.” Scully is reassured by the steadiness in her own voice. She is In Control of Things.
“You’d better get the medics to sedate her first,” he grunts, as Emily kicks him in the shin.
“Can you carry her over there? Have you been sick, Emily? Have you eaten anything spoiled, taken any –“
“Agent Scully, you need to see this,” comes the voice of one of the deputies from the woods. “Ow, dammit! Cut that out, missy.”
“No,” Emily wails. “I told them to run, I told them to…” She makes a keening sound and sags in Mulder’s grip.
The deputies emerge, each holding a teenaged girl by the arms.
“Oh my god,” Scully breathes in a shaky voice. “How many did they make?”
Mulder stares, open-mouthed, and Emily takes advantage of his distraction to break free and run to the girls. Only their clothing and hairstyles distinguish the three from one another.
“Let go of them for the moment,” Mulder directs the deputies in a choked voice. “They can’t get anywhere.” He does it for Scully’s sake. Personally, he’s not averse to having them in straightjackets.
The girls embrace one another and fall to the grass, shadowed by the setting sun. All three have their mother’s blue eyes, her creamy skin and nutmeg freckles. Their hair is honey colored, Emily’s long and snarled, the other two with chin-skimming bobs.
Scully crouches down, reaches for Emily’s bare foot but stops herself. She cups her hands over her mouth, rocking on the balls of her feet.
“Who are you?” Mulder asks, ignoring the gawking deputies, one of whom keeps tapping the butt of his gun.
“Laura Entwistle,” says the girl on the left.
“Caroline Entwistle,” says the other.
“Twins,” Laura supplies.
“Triplets,” Caroline smirks, making Emily laugh.
“Where are your parents?”
The twins exchange a significant look. “Deceased,” Laura replies, offering Mulder a soulful expression. “They misidentified some mushrooms. Amanita phalloides.”
“Fulminant hepatic failure,” Caroline adds, shaking her head. “It’s been traumatic.”
Mulder gazes at the three of them, the twilight bruising their long white throats and pale limbs. They’re huddled together like a cote of doves, a lamentation of swans. He chances a sidelong glance at Scully, notices her trembling hands, the naked fear in her eyes. He swallows, looks away. “How’d you know?” he asks with a gentleness that belies the icy knot in his belly.
The girls clasp one another’s hands, drawing together as though they’re perched on the rocky cliffs of Anthemoessa. “We just knew,” says Emily.
“We just knew,” echo the twins.
---
4. That virus that I was exposed to, whatever it is, it has a cure. You held it in your hand. How many other lives can we save?
---
Scully had patented the vaccine she reverse engineered, but it was seized via eminent domain. When the news of her discovery became public and its implications understood, there was panic across the globe. There were riots, mass suicides, and armed militias sprang up like mushrooms after a spring rain. Rogue nations began stockpiling the vaccine, and nearly a dozen governments fell in a series of violent coups.
Camera crews hounded the Gunmen, the Scullys, Ellen, Danny, Skinner, and just about everyone who had ever spoken to either her or Mulder. Maggie Scully fractured her hip trying to get away from them, and Scully was afraid to visit her in the hospital. Ed Jerse and his prosthetic arm enjoyed their fifteen minutes of fame, and tattoo parlors could scarcely keep up with the demand for ouroboroses.
The death threats were never-ending. Scully was accused of collusion, of being an alien brood mare, of being an alien, of being a liar. Their windows were smashed, their cars were set on fire, and a disturbingly large contingent called for her to be sterilized and then burned at the stake.
Scully had to accept her Nobel Prize in medicine via video conference, the cameraman making sure to crop her expanding belly out of the frame. No one was to know of her pregnancy. It could have created a security breach of the worst kind, and everyone was still on edge after that maniac had tried to cut her throat and drink her blood.
She’ll carry the scars for the rest of her life.
“It’s for your safety,” the director of the NSA had assured them when he all but ordered them into protective custody. “You’re not being punished.”
Mulder, who saw Scully’s barbed wire neck even when he closed his eyes, had nodded in mute assent without even reading the terms of the arrangement.
It’s been three years since they were cloistered, and any sense of shame around the cameras has long since vanished. The cameras are in the kitchen, the bathrooms, the bedrooms – every square foot of living space is monitored twenty-four hours a day by a crew of men so devoid of affect that they make the Queen’s Guard look like Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Even Mulder has given up trying to shock them with attempts at deviancy.
They have everything they need at the estate. By all measurable standards, anyway. The house was seized from some drug lord or other, and they’ve got two swimming pools, a tennis court, a bowling alley, a kitchen large enough to cater a state dinner, and various other luxuries.
No cars, though. They’re not allowed to go anywhere. They’re not allowed cigarettes, alcohol, unrestricted access to medication or sharp blades, household cleansers, or bug spray. All of the glass has been replaced with safety glass. They’re required to provide blood samples weekly so that other scientists can study the strange materials in their cells. Their son Theodore, at two and a half, has never met another child. He spends twenty hours a week being poked and prodded in laboratories. When news of his existence and the story of Scully’s encounter with the African ship became public knowledge, a black market sprung up and an unscrupulous nurse sold Theodore’s umbilical stump for $1.8 million dollars. Mulder dryly remarked that she’d gotten ripped off.
The NSA and other interested parties are openly desirous of another baby, and have made her and Mulder so paranoid that sex is an anxious, stressful experience. Scully is severely depressed over the situation, torn between wanting another child for Theo’s sake and being terrified of what may happen if she is to conceive again.
Theo is brought home to his parents one afternoon, flanked by two armed guards and one of the researchers. They explain that he seems to be developing healing abilities, like Jeremiah Smith. He’ll be kept at the lab for several weeks for testing.
Mulder lunges forward to grab his son and gets a sap to the back of the head for his troubles. Scully screams as he slumps to the floor, as a crying Theodore is carried away from her.
Anything resembling rope has been removed from the house as well, and the pools are to be drained.
---
5. Love lasts 75 years, if you're lucky. You don't want to be around when it's gone.
---
The pain is everywhere, augmented by terror, by shock. The taste of her blood is like dirty pennies, spilling hot over her lips as Ritter’s voice fades away. This is what vampires do, isn’t it? They drink blood and live forever. Fellig has told her the truth; he escaped death somehow, but learned to stalk it. And now she is going to die, unless she listens to him and looks away.
But she wants to look. She wants to understand, even as her heart pumps her life out through the ragged hole in her belly and her brain screams for oxygen. Her vision is narrowing to a dim tunnel, but something flits around the edges of it, something made of shadows and twilight.
“Don’t look,” Fellig urges again, panic addling the words. “Don’t let him leave me here.”
He’s a hyena, scavenging from other deaths. His desperation makes her realize the horror of it; how time will blur, marked only by loss and increasing isolation. Mulder will die, her mother, her brothers, baby Matthew, all of them dead. Year after year until…what? The sun swallows the earth, perhaps. And even that she may survive, tucked in the hot womb of a star to endlessly burn and resurrect until the universe compresses back into a singularity. Will she endure that too, exploding back outward with each beat of the great cosmic heart?
Forever is such a long, lonely time.
“Starbuck,” comes a distant voice, “Oh, baby girl.”
Scully feels tears slide down her cold face. “Dad,” she whispers thickly. “Daddy. It hurts. Make it stop.”
“He’ll make it stop. It’s just like going to sleep.”
She groans in pain, turning to find the wraith again.
“No,” Fellig pleads, a sob in his throat. “Please, it’s mine this time.”
There are sirens outside, feet on the stairs.
“They can save you! Close your eyes, dammit. Close your eyes.” The hand squeezing hers is shaking.
“I’m sorry,” she murmurs to no one, to everyone. She sees Ahab condense in a haze of dust motes, hears the paramedics surging in. There are hands all over her, their faces inches from her own, and she looks frantically for the shadow man.
She finds him backlit by the window, stilled by a contained waiting. She holds her arms out as though to embrace him. His smoky hood falls back and she gasps, her back arcing as her body surges upwards.
“No!” screams Fellig. “No, no…”
“Starbuck,” Ahab says again, shimmering in the light. “We need to go.”
She relaxes then, smiles, and lets her father take her home.