Archive of Our Own

Agent John Doggett wasn’t sure what to do with his hands during the funeral. By his side, they felt twitchy. Putting them in his pockets felt disrespectful somehow, though he knew the three dead men would not give a damn. Finally he settled on holding them together in front of himself. He wanted to be able to be still, to take it all in. Because something wasn’t right.

Goddamn Lone Gunmen.

He watched everything during the ceremony. More faces than he expected gathered, and he wondered which people were family to the three journalists he’d come to know through a handful of strange cases in the last months. How many months had it been since he’d walked into his office in the basement of the FBI and found three strange men not only at his desk, but on his computer. And then they were just in his life - a constant (if random) source of support and information even on the weirdest days. Especially on the weirdest days.

Just because he didn’t understand them didn’t mean he wouldn’t miss them. 

Worst of all, he hadn’t been there fast enough to help when they’d needed him. To save them.

Next to him, his partner Monica Reyes kept her eyes down and didn’t say a word. And next to her stood FBI Assistant Director Walter Skinner, face somewhere between stoic and pissed. Both emotions were understandable.

“Arlington? You musta pulled some big strings to get those guys in here,” Doggett said to the A.D.

“It’s the least I could do.” Skinner spoke flatly and walked away without saying anything else.

“Ready?” Monica asked, her sadness obvious.

“Yeah,” Doggett answered. There was no more to say. Doggett led Monica away, past the last few people at the gravesite; A blonde man whose name was Jimmy who had been presented the folded flags of the military funeral, a dark-haired beauty who stood close enough to Jimmy that Doggett figured they were an item, Morris Fletcher, and FBI Agent Dana Scully. 

Doggett trusted his gut. His gut was telling him something was off. Heroes who had probably saved the world from a virus? Absolutely. But an Arlington burial? They were civilians. And it was only a few days after the men had died, and they were already going in the ground? Wasn’t there research to be done on the virus that had killed them - its origins, its mechanics, its future ramifications?

He’d watched Dana in the last couple days while arrangements had been made. She had gone stoic, quiet, lost somewhere in memory and thought. He hadn’t expected her to be as sad as she was at the loss of three men he hadn’t expected her to even know, much less like. Much less love, if he had to guess based on how wrecked she seemed to be. He didn’t know how long she’d known them, but he knew she had trusted her son to them when his life had been in danger. That spoke volumes. 

After everything, Dana Scully had offered to do the autopsies and handle the treatment of the bodies but had been denied. That rubbed Doggett wrong. 

Something was strange.

The Lone Gunmen were Fox Mulder’s friends. And Fox Mulder was not there to say goodbye, probably didn’t even know they were dead.

Something wasn’t right.

The main thing bothering him about it all was that he hadn’t seen the hide or hair of Jen Alden. Jen, who loved Richard Langly with the whole of her heart, wasn’t at his funeral? Jen, who adored Melvin Frohike and John Fitzgerald Byers like they were family, wasn’t standing at the graveside sobbing as hard as Dana Scully, inconsolable and crumbling?

Something absolutely wasn’t right.

Sometimes you find yourself in a weird place.

Langly’s words played over and over in Jen’s brain, pushing her forward to the door of the cabin. With her backpack slung over one shoulder and an open cardboard box of plants under one arm, she dug a key from the pocket of her jean shorts and jiggled the old doorknob until it unlatched. Then she straight up kicked the door open.

“And they say you can never go home again,” she muttered. To no one, for no one else was there except maybe a couple ghosts and a whole lot of dust.

Nothing had been the same since April 22nd. That’s when FBI Assistant Director Walter Skinner, had shown up at the door of Jen’s Georgetown apartment wearing a deeply serious expression and turned the world upside down with what he’d told her.

The Lone Gunmen, her favorite humans, were dead. 

At least, that was the official story. In fact, Melvin Frohike, John Fitzgerald Byers, and Richard Langly were at a top-secret government medical lab being treated after exposing themselves to a virus while saving the rest of the world from the same fate. 

“Of fucking course they did,” were the words that first came out of her mouth, furiously. And then she felt like she was going to throw up. Walter settled her on her couch and got her a beer from the fridge. He got himself one, too, and they were both halfway through their bottles before he started explaining.

The virus was a bioweapon. 

Jen chugged the rest of her beer.

If the guys survived the treatments they were undergoing, all of which were completely experimental, they’d need to go into hiding and never return. Bless Walter, who had worked it out, gave Jen all the instructions she needed, and told her to make everything look very real. As Langly’s girlfriend of almost a year now, she had the best excuse for erratic behavior. If the love of your life died tragically, disappearing out of pure devastation wasn’t a weird thing to do. People would feel bad for her, but they wouldn’t suspect a thing. Jen was good at disappearing. She had done it before many times.

Jen’s father, the late psychedelic radical Chuck Alden, owned a cabin deep in the forests of the Michigan Upper Peninsula that had been sitting in a trust for Jen for twenty years. While it wasn’t a place she ever wanted to return to, she had always sort of figured it would be her retirement plan, either to sell it or go there and live completely off-grid. It would be a perfect place for a couple people to get lost. 

Walter extended a set of keys. “Go to Takoma Park. Take what they’ll need. Take the van. Leave your car. Lock the place up. I’ll deal with the rest.” Jen nodded to everything he said and reached for the keys, but he didn’t let them go immediately. “I’m asking you to leave your life behind. You understand that? It’s entirely your choice.”

Before them and their friendship and care and love, she had been a disaster. “There’s no choice, Walter. I can be up there in a week.”

He sighed as if he had hoped she would refuse, but he let her take the keys. “Go. We’ll bring them when they’re clear. If they’re clear.”

By we, she assumed he meant FBI Agents John Doggett and Monica Reyes, who made up the XFiles, were friends of the three men, and were also very used to strange things. Maybe Dana Scully, but she had a baby now and might not be able to deal with this on top of that. Jen thought about calling Monica but decided to do exactly as Walter had said and call no one.

When Walter left, Jen leaned against the door and rubbed the small star tattoo on her wrist. Langly had a matching one. They’d gotten them impulsively one autumn afternoon after going to see 2001: A Space Odyssey and then missing most of the movie because they were kissing.

“Fuck,” she whispered.

She could hear Byers and his damn eternal idealism in her head. “There’s still hope.” 

The guys might not live, but they weren’t dead yet. And as long as they weren’t dead, there was hope.

The next morning, Jen went into the DC office of The Herald, walked into her editor Ned Nelson’s office to drop her resignation without notice but with apology, gathered the items from her desk, and left. Thankfully, she had a good relationship with her landlord after five uneventful years and told him she’d be out in the next week and he seemed almost delighted. (He was going to repaint and raise the rent, she knew. Landlords were parasites.) in 48 hours, she packed up what she needed from her apartment with almost clinical methodology. She brought home a bunch of boxes and garbage bags and started filling them with the clothes and items she was taking - her DVD player (the cabin probably still had a TV) and a dozen DVDs because the nights were awfully quiet out there, her laptop, her ipod, coffee pot, some bedding and linens bc anything left at the cabin was likely moth-eaten, important documents and toiletries and a full box of her favorite books. Also, most of her plants. A first aid kit, photo albums, a few knick knacks with sentimental value. She boxed up all the shelf stable food items and tossed the rest. Everything fit in her car by the grace of the Subaru gods. A bunch of stuff she didn’t want got left in the common area by the building’s laundry room with a “Free” sign. There would be no call for the sexy dresses and kitten heels she kept for stupid encounters and cocktail parties. 

Two days after Walter came by, she dropped off her keys and walked away from her apartment.

Then she went to Takoma Park. 

The van, front dented after an accident a few months earlier, was parked at the Maryland warehouse and for a second she felt normal, like she would walk in the doors and they would be there bickering but also working hard to uncover some great big secrets meant to stay buried. Langly would be at a computer, Byers over his shoulder, and god only knew what Melvin would be up to - soldering some metal together, developing photos he’d taken, or making huevos rancheros in the kitchen. 

After unlocking Frohike’s complicated lock system (“I don’t think you can be paranoid enough,” he’d once told her after showing her the secret) she stepped into the headquarters of The Lone Gunmen. The dark warehouse hummed with the noise of a hundred running electronics and felt like a crypt. Jen tried not to think about all their work - the programs and the projects that would be abandoned and forgotten. She knew they’d been selling off things over the past couple months to cover the expenses of the newspaper. Skinner would follow behind and maybe he should shut everything down. What about the last of the things? Would he lock the place up or sell it off for them? Who even technically owned the building? 

Jen could not think that far ahead.

First, she went to Langly’s room and laid down on his unmade bed, burying her face in the pillows. After they had come back from the wild six days on the run, the guys hadn’t let her immediately return to her apartment until they’d swept it for bugs and cameras and made sure it was safe, so she had slept here next to Langly. They’d settled into a near-blissful year of staying at each other’s places, only parting when they had to work, and coming back together for midnight movies, Korean food, and so many hours upon hours spent in each other’s arms and beds. They would make love and, satisfied, fall asleep clinging to each other. She knew he got up in the night and went somewhere else, into his computer and whatever he did there. She understood being lost in work, letting your mind go someplace else..

For only a few minutes, she let herself cry from fear and overwhelm at the tasks ahead of her before rolling over to stare at a weathered Ramones poster on the wall. If only Langly were there to give a full-throated spiel about how Joey Ramone never gave up. If only, wherever he was, he wouldn’t give up. 

Jen couldn’t give up so she got up and packed their things. Langly’s band shirts, his laptop, as much of his music as she could fit, D&D dice, and the small collection of photos and papers from the childhood he hadn’t enjoyed and barely spoke about. There was a notebook on the nightstand filled with his wild script. Most of it was systems and things she didn’t understand, but maybe he would want it. 

In Byers’ exceptionally orderly room, she took a second to press her face to the collection of suitjackets, but only packed the ones he wore the most, as well as the things in his nightstand and the book he was mid-read, Deception Point by Dan Brown. “Aliens under Antarctica. Ridiculous.”

Frohike’s room was somehow both the cleanest and the most cluttered, but she immediately found his camera and all the rolls of film. She grabbed his clothes, putting on a pair of his leather fingerless gloves because it made her feel connected to him, and fit as much as possible into boxes. She swept everything from the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, found all their important paperwork, a collection of tech she figured could be useful, and walked around touching everything and grabbing items here and there they would maybe want.

There was a spare key to the van inside a fake can of shaving cream in the bathroom. Frohike had thought the prank can was both stupid and hilarious. She loaded all the boxes - theirs and hers - into their van. When there was still some room, she went back inside and grabbed more things, including the boxes of a decades worth of print versions of The Lone Gunmen newspaper.

Finally, she had to make peace with the fact that something would be left behind. 

She got gas plus a large fountain Coke and a bag of red skittles. She drove northwest and barely stopped for 900 miles. Focusing on driving was a good distraction. She found a Top 40 radio station and turned it up very loud, hoping that wherever Langly was it would piss him off enough to wake him up, and the drive became greener and greener as she entered the Great Lakes region.

Outside Lansing, Michigan, she stopped at a big farmers market store to walk around just for a short break as well as to grab actual food instead of fast food garbage, as her body was remembering she needed to do things like eat and sleep. She took a two hour nap in the parking lot and drove on.

The Mackinaw Bridge crossing was beautiful. The lake below sparkled in the morning sun. 

She stopped at a grocery store in the town of Paradise and bought a few days worth of food, a big bag of ice, and some cleaning supplies. A few hours later trees were hugging the road as she made the last turn into the familiar property, the driveway of which was just a dirt road you would miss if you didn’t know to look. In the last twenty years, nature had taken over and grown wild, and it made Jen smile. Like The Secret Garden, or Mandy’s secret cottage, or the house from We Have Always Lived in the Castle or any number of wild places she had loved to read about when she was a happy and too smart little girl before her Dad had gone to jail and her family had fallen apart. 

And now she was inside the house again. She set the box of plants on the kitchen bar, hung her leather messenger bag on the back of a chair, and inhaled. The front door opened on a kitchen and living area surrounded by windows that looked onto thick forest and a very algae covered curve of a bigger river system. She looked up to the peak of the room and remembered sleeping in the loft up there. On the main floor, there were two bedrooms - one much bigger than the other - and a small bathroom with a standing shower. That was it. This was the world now. 

Jen had all the boxes inside stacked in some order against the wall before it got dark. She heated up a can of chicken noodle soup on the stove, which still worked and the water still ran thank goodness, and sat at the four person round dining table to eat it, but barely tasted it.

It was so quiet. She closed all the curtains, locked the door, fell on the couch, and slept hard.

During the days that followed it was easy to keep moving and come up with things to do. The big bedroom already had two twin beds, so she moved the third one from the smaller bedroom to join them. She hauled out all the mattresses and beat them until the dust stopped coming off, dusted every surface, and added a vacuum to the shopping list. She wiped every surface, cleaned the windows, and aired everything out. 

At night, it was quiet and Jen was alone and more scared than she wanted to be. She found her Dad’s rifle in the bottom drawer of a dresser and made sure it worked and kept it beside her as the sun went down. She would put on a movie (usually The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Harold & Maude, or Little Shop of Horrors because they were her comfort films) and lock herself inside the cabin and draw all the shades. Making her bedroom out of the loft space above the living area gave her the best vantage point and would give her a second should anyone break in. Hauling bedding and her things up the ladder was hard, but there wasn’t any choice but to get it done. 

As each day grew dark, all the fear rushed in and she started expecting men to come out of the trees, and would barely sleep until dawn with the rifle next to the bed.

“I think I’m paranoid enough now, Melvin,” she muttered to herself. 

The fire doors sealed them in with the man with the virus. The waiting started. The Lone Gunmen waited. Jimmy and Yves watched from outside with horrified expressions and waited. The waiting was the worst part. It took maybe an hour or two. 

Langly shouldn’t have, but he hoped they’d be rescued. That John Doggett or Monica Reyes or, by some miracle, Fox Mulder would appear and this would all be solved by morning with the aid of the FBI resources and Dana Scully’s medical genius. 

“There’s still hope…” he whispered, repeating words Byers had said to them a hundred times. Byers took his hand, and his blue eyes held no hope. That’s when Langly realized it was fucking real. 

Byers hit the ground first, doubling over. Langly moved forward to help him but a jolt of pain struck him like a lightning bolt and he dropped to the ground on his knees at nearly the same time as Frohike, who already had a glowing purple liquid coming from his mouth. Both of them tried to get to Byers, and wound up laying with hands touching on the ground as the world faded away. 

Jimmy screamed and pounded outside the metal door, unable to do a thing. Yves was there, too, but she had gone silent and just watched like she was bearing witness. Jimmy’s banging was like a clumsy drumbeat from a crappy band. Langly thought, with horror, that this would all be covered up. Jen might never know what happened to them. He curled into a ball as the pain tore through him and thought of her smile. Jen…

Langly knew he was dying. They were dying. 

For a very long time there was only darkness. It could have been seconds or eons. Calm darkness. So quiet. Like when a cassette ran out and there was that bit of time before the leftover tape clicked and stopped. He did not feel his body, except that sometimes there were little pricks and it felt like he could sense movement, though he wasn’t doing anything to move and nothing around was anything other than black. 

Darkness. Darkness. Darkness.

hello darkness my old friend…

Suddenly it all brightened like when you close your eyes on a bright sunny day. He could not open his eyes. He could not do anything but ride the waves of pain and nothingness and daydreams of split second moments from his whole life - his father’s scolding him, stars on a ceiling, Fox Mulder’s joking smile, The Cap’n Toby TV show, Frohike’s couch, cheesesteaks, The Ramones playing, his hands on a keyboard, kissing Jen under the awning of a bookstore in the rain, Bob Marley songs, rolling his twenty-sided dice, Byers’ hands tying his ties…

Up and down, crest and wave, on and off. 

The brightness came and then it stayed, unrelenting. 

Cold metal on his skin. Pushing and prodding. Buzzing. Humming. Hands.

He’d expected Ned Nelson, Editor in Chief of The Herald, to be a fast-talking, suspenders-wearing, old era newspaperman. The way Jen had talked about him, Doggett had figured he was one step away from a Guys & Dolls gangster character. 

The man across the desk from him was more Santa than Scarface. When Doggett asked about Jen, Ned had sat forward and frowned deeply. “She didn’t give notice. She just came in and told me she had to attend to a personal matter, grabbed her things, and left within the hour. Is she alright?

Doggett tried not to alarm him. “I don’t have reason to worry for her safety at this point. Just a loose end I’m tying up. Have you ever heard the name Richard Langly?”

Ned shook his head. So Jen kept her personal and professional life separate and Ned had no idea what she had gone through. “Does this have anything to do with her absence last year, when AD Skinner called me?”

“Not a thing, actually.” That was when Doggett had first met Jen Alden. Running from an exploding factory in Philadelphia in the middle of the night. 

Ned sighed. “I told her to call me if she’s ever back and wants to come back to work here. Not many care as much as she does.”

Care. Doggett rolled that word around and around as he left The Herald office and walked a few blocks back to the FBI building. He thought best when he was in motion. Sitting still made him feel stiff and old. Ned had nailed it. Jen cared. She cared too much not to be at the funeral.

Unless… The idea was absurd. But then again, Doggett did work on The X-Files.

He returned to the basement office of the FBI and almost sat down before Monica Reyes called to him from her desk. “Skinner wants to see you.”

The FBI AD didn’t look up from the paper he was writing on when Doggett came into his office. 

“What are you doing, John?”

“Sir?”

“Ned Nelson called me in a panic. Sit. Talk.”

Doggett obeyed. “Jen Alden moved out of her apartment and quit her job at The Herald three weeks ago and I can’t find a trace of her.”

“Then stop looking.” Was that a warning beneath the ADs smooth demeanor? Doggett waited for more. “A broken hearted lover, with a history of disappearing, runs away after the sudden and horrible death of her soul mate. Is that hard to understand?”

The words sounded a little rehearsed. Usually Skinner was cooler. “It’s not hard at all, sir. It’s the swiftness of it. And the completeness. Even digitally, she’s vanished. And, with respect to Jen, if she’d had their help maybe I’d get it but… Langly made fun of her bad virus protection. I doubt she could pull something like this off.”

“The Gunmen had friends. Could be one of them. The kid with the glasses at the funeral.”

“Could be. Where’s their van?”

Skinner shrugged. “Next of kin was alerted. Maybe someone took it after the funeral. I don’t know. Why are you pushing this?”

Because I know in my gut something is wrong, Doggett did not say. Whatever was up, Skinner was in on it for some reason. “I figure I oughta make sure Jen’s okay.”

‘I’m sure she’s fine,” Skinner said. “Go back to work.”

“Sir-”

“Let this go,” Skinner looked up at him and there was meaning under his words that Doggett did not need to deduce. He was supposed to look the other way now, let this become another thing that ate at him in the middle of the night. 

John Doggett went back to the basement office and started making a new XFile. If they were alive somewhere, he’d find them. If they were dead, they at least deserved to live among the file cabinets in the office that used to belong to Mulder and Scully. 

It was far from the first time John Doggett had disobeyed an order from Walter Skinner.

The plants were what showed her the slight shift in the season. The shed and the windowsills of the cabin were overflowing with the plants she’d brought from her apartments and the seeds she’d started and which were now bursting to life ready for the coming summer sun. Almost a month had passed since she’d left DC. That day, she was hand tilling the garden dirt and pulling out weeds when she heard the noise of engines and reached for the rifle.

A white transit van came up the dirt road following behind her Subaru. The car parked first and a far-too-handsome handsome blonde man in a Baltimore Ravens t-shirt got out and beelined for her. “You’re Jen.”

Immediately, Jen stood up and left the gun on the ground. “You must be Jimmy.” Langly had nailed it when he’d called Jimmy Bond a golden retriever. Big and blonde, even though he wasn’t smiling he still practically radiated good boy energy. He handed her back her car keys.

Jen looked to the transit van as Walter got out but left it running. “Are they…in there?”

“Yeah. It’s temperature controlled and a generator can run their vitals.”

So that meant… “They’re alive.”

“Yes.”

A goddamn miracle. “All of them?”

“Yes.”

An overwhelming rush of reality hit her, then. She started talking, rattling off details because if she stopped she might scream from the way her heart beat in her ears. “The cabin is clean. The chest freezer is full, I got half a cow from a local processor, there are shelves upon shelves of canned things, and I’ve got a lot of seedlings started for this garden though the deer are gonna be a nightmare. Electricity and plumbing work. The internet is really weak. Langly will hate it.” If he ever wakes up to know, she did not say. If only he could groan about the terrible internet. If only…

“Nice work,” Walter said, gingerly. 

“I know there’s things I haven’t thought of…”

Walter stepped up to her and put his hands on her shoulders. “This is too big a job for any one person. I’m staying four, maybe five days. Jimmy will stay on with you all. He’s had a crash course over the last couple weeks and knows all the routines and medicines. He’d make a good EMT.”

Jimmy unloaded three large black boxes, like tackle boxes. Each had a label with a name on it. “I’ll take these inside.”

“There’s a room with three beds,” Jen said stupidly. He’d figure out which room was meant for them.

Jimmy immediately got to work. Walter didn’t leave Jen’s side. “We’ll get them inside and settled and then we’ll talk. When’s the last time you ate something?”

“I eat.”

“Something that didn’t come in a can.” Walter cocked his head and pushed up the sleeves of his gray windbreaker. “You need to keep up your strength, too. You’re no good to them if you fall apart.” His tone got softer as he invoked a memory from what felt like a million years earlier. “Remember those morels?”

The last time she had been at a cabin with Walter there had been morels, delicious, in a pasta John Doggett had made. All three gunmen had been there and vibrant and brilliant, and Monica Reyes had been there, and…

She looked at the closed doors of the van. “I…haven’t seen them since…”

He nodded. “They’re alive. They’re ok.”

Jimmy returned and opened the back doors of the van and Jen saw them. They were most certainly not ok but they were alive and maybe that was as ok as they could be for now. 

Three still bodies secured to three stretchers, three men in white hospital gowns and blankets, and three sets of eyes that were not open. 

Jen put a hand over her mouth to stifle the noise she wanted to make as sheer panic rose in her stomach, but Walter’s hand kept her upright. “They’re alive, Jen. They’re alive. Remember that.”

Jimmy and Walter started with Byers. They lifted him down from the van. Jen reached forward and touched his hand when they moved past her to take him inside. It was warm but there was no response. His beard was thicker, wilder. He would hate that, she thought.

As the men moved him inside, Jen stepped into the van and knelt between Frohike and Langly, taking each of their hands in hers. Where were their glasses? Frohike’s leather jacket? What band shirt had Langly been wearing and where was it now? Probably incinerated because of contamination. “Hello boys,” she said, trying for a strong tone. They probably couldn’t hear her and it was probably foolish to hope they did, but… “Gotta say, you look terrible.”

Neither replied, obviously. 

They moved Frohike next, and Jen bent over Langly and smoothed his blonde hair that had been braided to keep it from tangling. She kissed his stubbled cheek. Once upon a time, he had pulled her back from a metaphorical cliff and maybe she could do the same now. She had to try at least. Lips against his ear, she whispered. “I am gonna take such good care of you.”

She tried to pretend she hadn’t been crying when Walter and Jimmy returned to take Langly into the cabin and she followed behind. 

Three men in three beds. Three monitors humming low and showing their vitals.

Jen stared at Jimmy for a moment before she spoke. “I’m up in the loft,” she said simply because someone needed to say something. “You can take that room. It’s small. There’s a camping cot in the shed you can set up until we get another bed.”

“It’ll be great,” Jimmy answered in a brighter tone than his eyes matched. God, they were both so in over their heads. When she met his eyes, she knew he felt the same way.

“What’s the area like?” Walter asked, putting his bag on the couch.

Jen went to the kitchen and, purely to have something to do, started making a pot of coffee. “The nearest major town is about an hour and fifteen minutes away. They have a WalMart and a couple other places. It should all work. Lots of people up here don’t trust the government and stick to their property and leave each other alone.”

A whole minute passed in silence.

“Now what?” Jimmy asked.

Walter sat at the table. “We…wait. Until they either wake up or they don’t. I won’t sugarcoat it, there's an equal chance of either outcome. But, they were all in pretty good health before the virus, and the medical team is hopeful. Jimmy has been trained with their medicine and functions and he can show you everything you need to know. Might be a good idea to make a schedule so you both get rest and have time to decompress, too.”

“Who all knows?” Jen turned on the coffeepot. 

“Besides the three of us? Only seven other people in the whole world.”

“Doggett? Monica?” 

“Nope.”

Damn. Jen would have found some odd comfort in knowing John Doggett was on her side somewhere out in the world. “Mulder?”

Skinner looked at her for a long moment. “No.”

So it was that big a deal that not even Fox Mulder and Dana Scully could be looped in. The enormous gravity landed in the room. “They can’t ever go back?”

“It would have to be witness protection, and even then we all know there are spiders in webs in corners everywhere. Even you two….” Walter looked between them. “If it all goes wrong, call me first. Now, Jen, why don’t you show Jimmy around the property. I’ll stay with them for a while.”

Jen was not sure where to start but led Jimmy out the door of the cabin anyway. “Not a whole lot to show you. Cabin, obviously. That’s the garden I’m starting. Fire pit. And the shed. There are lots of tools in there and some equipment. A chainsaw, a snowplow, shovels, stuff like that.” She walked him over and opened the door so he could peer in. “A lot of it hasn’t been used in twenty years so I don’t know yet what works.”

“Hey, fishing poles,” Jimmy nodded to the poles on the wall.

“I suppose.”

He pointed to the ceiling. “Does the canoe float?”

“I genuinely have no idea.”

“Can I try it?”

Jen sighed. “Listen, Jimmy. This isn’t a place I have many fond memories of. So go ahead and do whatever you want. You won’t offend me or bother me. Seriously.”

He tried a different tone. “It’s a nice place.”

“I suppose it is. But you seriously don’t have to ask me to do anything.”

The blonde man leaned in the doorway and looked at her. “What’s mycology? Walter said you were really into it.”

“Oh. Mushrooms.”

“Cool. I like mushrooms on pizza.”

Jen chuckled. Her whole life had been led by her interest in mushrooms and fungus and now she was surrounded by them completely and had zero interest. Jen of a year earlier would have been in the woods every single day, on her knees looking at the marvels of nature. “Me too.”

“So you’ve been all alone out here for like a month?”

She nodded. “And you’ve been with them?”

“Yeah. At a top secret medical center in DC. I learned everything I need to know to keep them alive. I’ll handle their physical needs, feeding and bathing and the like.”

“Don’t you have a life to get back to?”

“Not really. They’re my friends. And I owe them one, big time. I watched it happen,” he said, an edge of guilt in his shaking voice. “The man, the sick one, they pulled the fire alarm and it locked them in with him. I tried to open the door - I really did - but even if I could have…. They chose it. And Yves and I watched them while we waited and then it started and they fell, one by one, and…”

“You don’t need to tell me this,” she put a hand on his shoulder. “I believe you. I know they would choose to sacrifice themselves to save millions. Them and their goddamn radical hero shit.” Jimmy laughed a little at that, and he wiped a tear she hadn’t noticed from his cheek. “But let me tell you, if they die I will never speak to them again.”

He sniffled and wiped his nose. “If they die, I’ll kill them.”

“Who’s Yves?”

He smiled at that and it was the smile of a man absolutely besotted. “The most beautiful woman in the whole world.”

“I look forward to hearing the whole story, truly.”

That night, Walter made them dinner from the stuff in the fridge and cabinets, as well as a grocery list for a trip to town the following day, and Jimmy and Jen scribbled out a daily schedule for the foreseeable future. At 9pm, Jen started for the big bedroom. Walter called to her, “You should sleep.”

“I just want to stare at them for a while. Please.”

Three men. Three beds. Three hearts that still beat. 

“Alright boys,” she said, sitting down on the bed by Langly’s feet and holding up Byers’ paperback of Deception Point. “This one’s gonna be a doozy.”

After five days, during which Jen read to the men every night before kissing each of their foreheads and going up to the loft to sleep while Jimmy took over the night shift, Walter drove away and left Jen and Jimmy standing together in the yard. As the sound of the engine disappeared and the world became silent except birdsong again, the weight of it landed on Jen’s heart. 

“We’ll go day by day,” Jimmy said. “We have our schedule, our shifts.”

It began.

Horrors waited in the darkness that filled the universe around Langly. Things came from the dark and spun him and swirled him and poked at his mind and body.

There were voices, though. Some of the voices were familiar. In a lucid second, he heard a low, calm voice but could not make out any words. He knew that voice. He absolutely knew it. Who and where was it and how could he make himself move toward it?

Much more movement now. And music, he remembered the words; rock n roll. Hours and hours of it. 

If I leave here tomorrow

Would you still remember me?

For I must be traveling on, now

'Cause there's too many places I've got to see 

Langly didn’t mind the music at all. 

Then, a new voice seared through the dark, and it chased away the scary swirls. It was a voice he didn’t know but also knew that he knew. And he knew in his bones, if he still had bones, what even were bones, that this voice was important and it was what he had to follow.

Like the story he had always liked as a kid during his Greek mythology phase. Theseus, going into the maze to face the Minotaur. Like when he would go into systems to find the secrets, like mazes, getting lost and then getting out again.

Theseus had string given to him by Ariadne. It got him out again.

New music. Music so familiar he could have sang along if he could have sang.

hey little girl, i wanna be your boyfriend…

Follow this voice, this music. Find the way out.

Doggett added to the XFile on the death of The Lone Gunmen and the disappearance of Jen Alden but never mentioned its existence to Monica. It was secret work, done in between other assignments and cases. He went to Takoma Park and figured out how to break in (the paranoid weirdos had made it way too complicated and he nearly gave up) only to find a dark digital grave that had clearly been gone through. 

Jimmy Bond, who had taken the flags at the funeral, also vanished. Doggett looked all over but it was another too clean disappearance. Into the file he went. Doggett grew annoyed. Where could five people go to disappear in this digital age?

Monica told him to come outside and eat lunch in the summer weather one day, sensing he was getting too deep into the basement. He grabbed a Polish sausage and fries and met her on a bench in the courtyard. She was reading, but put the book down when he appeared.

“You’re keeping secrets, John.”

“I’m just tired.” They’d had a wild few months, chasing the strangest of the strange cases. Both of their belief systems had been tested as well as their close bond. Sometimes, Monica watched him as if making sure he was really him and still there, and he figured he’d never really understand her completely. 

“You’re asking about Jen Alden.”

“Who says?”

She gave him a look. He shrugged to play it off. “I just wanna express my condolences. Let her know to call us if she needs anything.”

Monica sighed. “I doubt we’ll ever see her again. After a loss like that…” She trailed off as she looked at him, realizing Doggett knew more about loss than most people. “You know what I mean.”

“I do. That’s why I want to talk to her.”

“John…”

“Monica.” He gave her a long look and she dropped it, knowing he wasn’t going to be convinced of anything that afternoon on that bench. She stood up and took her trash as well as his across the walkway to a trash can. 

Doggett looked down at the book she was reading. It was Walden; or, Life in the Woods by Henry David Thoreau.

“Goddammit,” he muttered in realization.

Jen Alden, mycology nerd, would of course go to the woods. The woods were also probably the last place on earth anyone would ever look for Langly, Frohike, and Byers with the penchant for tech and being in the middle of things all the time.

Doggett walked as fast as he could back to his desk. He searched the systems at his disposal for any records involving Jen, her parents - Charles “Chuck” Alden and Bea Malone Alden. He thought quickly that it would be helpful to be able to ask Langly, but the FBI had its own computer nerds who were literally paid to do this, and a few days later one of them knocked on the office door and handed Doggett a stack of printed records which he flipped through standing in the middle of the office until he found it, the piece of information that made it all make sense.

“Goddamn,” he grinned to himself. “Gotcha, Alden.”

The tiny triumph was the last good moment John Doggett would have for quite a while….

Jimmy and Jen worked well as a team over the next couple weeks. They settled into a tranquil but terrifying limbo, only able to forget the enormity of their task for a few minutes at a time. The waiting game ate at both of them, but they kept heads down and kept to schedules and chores and it all ran like a machine. Jimmy proved incredibly resilient as well as handy. He even hung some hooks so Jen’s plants could get better light. 

They divided the hours of the day into shifts so there were always eyes and ears on the Lone Gunmen while the other slept and existed awake to do other tasks. Jimmy did in fact test the canoe and it did work, and Jen got her seedlings into the ground to start the garden. They dragged the wooden rocking chair into the bedroom so they could sit with the men comfortably and traded off reading their way through paperback after paperback - lots of Stephen King, several Mary Higgins Clark, a couple Julia Quinn romances. Jen made Langly a playlist on her ipod and put headphones on him for a while each day, figuring music would lead him through whatever battle he was fighting. “Do your worst, Joey Ramone.”

They alternated trips to Paradise to run errands and get supplies. One day Jen went, wearing a Detroit Tigers baseball hat, an anonymous tee shirt with some Great Lakes joke on it, and shorts. She blended in with the big crowd in the big superstore as she filled a cart with their usual items; paper goods, coffee and creamer, tea, produce until the garden started up, meat that wasn’t beef, toothpaste, Dr Bronner’s laundry soap, and the scribbled items on the list which this time included a tarp, Scotch tape, bags of charcoal, birdseed suet, the Dr Pepper Jimmy was craving, and a bag of red and white peppermints Jen had been thinking about since the last bag ran out. She tossed a couple more paperbacks from the spinning rack into the cart to add to their stack of mass markets. The last thing was to get two enormous bags of ice into the camping cooler to throw in the chest freezer.

It all felt so routine and normal. 

It all felt terrifying.

Once the car was loaded, she sat in the driver’s seat and cried for a few minutes.

She would have given anything for things to be as they had been a few months earlier. To show up at the warehouse with Korean food and be whisked into whatever the latest kerfuffle was. Bugging the phone lines of Department of Defense creeps, breaking into some office or another so Langly could dig around the mainframe, or sitting with Frohike while he built some contraption out of seemingly random objects. Getting pissed off by the same corruption and treachery and actually being able to do something about it, and then writing about it in their respective newspapers afterward.

As she drove through downtown Paradise, she saw a group of teens having a small protest. Their banner had a message that was against the new pipeline being built under the lake. There were still so many people out in the world fighting for what was right.

Jimmy did the next week’s run and came back grinning. He’d stopped into the thrift store on the way out of town and bought Monopoly and Scrabble. They set up Monopoly on the table and the game went on a few minutes at a time over the course of days. 

Almost exactly three weeks after arriving,  at 11:15am, Byers opened his eyes. Jen immediately went to his side. “Hello gorgeous.”

“Frohike..” he managed, voice sounding harsh and ragged as he tried to sit up. 

“Slow down.” Jen held his shoulders to keep him from moving too fast, but moved a pillow behind him so he could sit up a little more. “He’s right there. Langly, too. Here.” She handed him a glass of water and helped him drink it because his hands shook. He blinked a lot against the unfamiliar room, the curtains blowing in the breeze, confusion clear on his face. “You need to go slow. You haven’t moved in six weeks.”

“Where are we?”

“Michigan.”

He reached for her hand. “You’re here.”

“I sure am,” she said, holding his hand in both of hers. 

“Are you alone here?”

She shook her head. “Jimmy’s outside. In a canoe, of all things. You’re the first to wake up. Frohike’s eyes have fluttered a couple times and he’s said a few things in his sleep, so I hope he follows soon.”

“I think I heard your voice,” he said, clutching at her hand like he would slip away again.

Seeing the fragility, Jen sat beside him and took his hand in both of hers. “I read to you guys constantly. I won’t spoil the end of Deception Point, but it’s worth it.”

Byers closed his eyes and lay against the pillow again. “What are you reading now?”

“Needful Things. We just finished Pet Sematary.”

“Those are both be careful what you wish for books. That’s ominous.”

She heard the squeak of the screen door and knew Jimmy was back. Moments later, having rejoiced at seeing Byers, Jimmy was kneeling on the floor by the bed grinning more broadly than Jen had yet seen and she realized how dearly he loved the three men. “How do you feel, bud? Is there anything you want, need?”

Byers looked between them. “I would like to see daylight. I’d like to take a shower and then go outside, if I can.” He looked wary of his ability to get up, but Jimmy hopped up and offered his arm. 

“You got it, bud.”

After Jimmy got him up and ready, Byers spent the next two days in almost total silence as he processed everything. Jimmy helped him go outside to the Adirondack chairs and he napped in the sun for a while. On the second day, after weeks of liquid feeding, his appetite came back full force, so Jimmy grilled steak and Jen roasted asparagus. Byers ate the real food like it was a sacrament. 

Later that night, Byers was struck by a headache so bad they put him back to bed and he slept fitlessly until morning.

“This is a beautiful place,” he said the next day after waking from a nap on the wooden bench by the fire pit in the yard while Jen sat next to him, reading while he slept leaning against her. Now that he was up, she was having a hard time leaving his side. “It was your Dad’s place, wasn’t it?”

“Mhmm. I’m glad it was available and I’m glad it’s being used for something worthwhile now.” It was a hard tossup as to whose relationship with their Dad was weirder - hers or his. “It was genius of Walter to think of it. This is the sort of place where a woman alone in the woods doesn’t even cause the tilt of a head. The nearest neighbors are a real couple of crackpots.”

“Sounds like our kind of people,” Byers quipped.

“No, the real crackpot kind. The moon landing was staged kinda crackpots.” Byers made a face. “But they think Jimmy and I are a nice young hippie couple who probably want to be left alone to grow weed. We told them we care for some sick relatives. Jimmy wants to get a big scary dog to complete the act. He read you all Cujo and then came up with the idea, whatever that says about him.”

“He didn’t understand the ending of Old Yeller either. I should probably explain rabies to him.”

A few days later, Frohike woke up but he did not wake quietly. He bolted to sitting up in a panic and it took his eyes a minute to be able to stop moving and look at Jen. “Are you an angel?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Oh good.”

And then he saw Langly and tried near-desperately to get out of the bed and go to him. Jen called for Jimmy’s help, and the two of them kept him in the bed while he struggled until Byers came into the room and Frohike’s eyes widened. “Byers…”

“Welcome back.”

“What’s wrong with him?” Frohike nodded in Langly’s direction and could not seem to figure out what was happening. 

“He’s in an in-between place, best we can tell,” Byers said quietly as he pulled the rocker close to Frohike’s bed and sat in it. 

“Can he hear us?”

No one had an answer for that. Frohike looked at Jimmy. “You were outside the door. My God…” And he cried for a long time, as all the memories swept over him. Jimmy held him and let him get it all out. Frohike sniffled and wiped his eyes and looked at Jimmy. “Where’s Yves?” Jimmy shrugged. “You left her?”

“I’ll find her again,” Jimmy said like it was obvious. “You guys needed me.” Frohike wobbled a little and Jimmy lowered him back down to the pillow. “Don’t try to take it too fast. There’s no hurry.”

“I’ll stay with him,” Byers offered, and Jen and Jimmy both heard the request for privacy in his words. Byers could tell Frohike everything he would need to know to re-center himself in the new world, and needed time and space to do it. Leaving the two men in the room, they went back outside. Jimmy leaned on the kitchen counter for a minute, taking a deep breath. Rarely did he show the harder emotions. Jen set a hand on his arm while she passed him by and went out to the garden. 

Walter had said there were equal odds each of them would or would not wake, and two-thirds was incredible. It followed that maybe Langly would never wake up again.

Frohike wound up going back to sleep and the two men didn’t emerge from the room until the next morning, when Jimmy helped him to the shower and then out to the yard for some coffee and toast and peanut butter. 

Jen downed her coffee and returned to the bedroom to see to Langly. “Listen, hot stuff. The others are awake now so I know you can do it, too. Surprise me like you always have, please.”

But she sat there for two hours and he did not move.

“Nothing?”

Byers was in the doorway. Jen looked back at him. “I check on him too much, I know.” She grabbed her ipod, clicked on the Korn playlist, and gently put the headphones on Langly.

“I’ll sit with him,” Byers offered. “You go work on the garden and stay with Frohike.”

“You need to rest, too.”

“I need a task, Jen.” He looked directly at her and she understood. He was not a man used to sitting still and letting others do the work. “And I can do both things at the same time. If anything happens, I’ll call for you.”

Jen voiced her greatest fear. “What if he doesn’t wake up? He’s so quiet. He’s never been quiet. Ever.”

“Day by day,” Byers replied. His eyes were dark because he was worried, too. “What are you playing him?”

She sighed. “Korn.” He raised an eyebrow, knowing how she felt about the band. “He would get a kick out of me willingly playing Korn. He better wake up soon or I’m gonna start playing Hole.” She bent forward and kissed Langly’s cheek. “Hours and Hours of Hole. Yes, that’s a threat.”

Jimmy ran to town a couple days later and came back from town with a bag of flannels and sweatshirts from his new favorite place, the thrift store, because the woods was not a place for Byers’ suits, plus a complete Sorry game to add to the board game pile. That evening, Jimmy won the Monopoly game at last and Jen toasted him with a cold beer, for he had also brought libations back on his run. 

Frohike got up the next day and discovered his legs were weak and shaky. Jimmy made him a cane from a piece of wood and he started figuring it out, though it was a frustrating adjustment for a man used to hustling all day long. After a few days, when he dug out his camera and started documenting the days, he became calmer.

Byers saw Jimmy’s plans for the second shed and took to the task of helping him arrange and plan everything. No one was surprised to learn Byers had once been an Eagle Scout.  

Still, Langly didn’t wake up.

Jen checked on him constantly, driving herself almost to obsession. One evening, while the others played Sorry, she went into the bedroom and lay down beside him with her head right next to his, listening to his breathing and always hoping he would make some noise or movement. She missed the noise of him so much, the explosion he could be. A world without Langly was a dark night without stars. Helpless fear washed over her but she couldn’t even cry anymore. There was still hope, but she was also starting to consider readying for the worst.

Byers and Frohike came to bed and she pretended to be asleep. One of them put a blanket on her. Every breath, every second, the clock was running down on opportunities.

Jen slept there with him and she dreamed of a dark maze. Langly was in there somewhere. She knew it. So she went into the darkness to find him. At first there was nothing but then there was a little flicker, and what sounded like a drumbeat. She walked and walked and walked and saw a shape. She reached out her hand to it, and a hand grabbed on to hers…

Like rebooting, he came back online the next morning one small piece at a time.

First came remembering. His whole life wooshed back like a movie being fast forwarded and he felt every emotion of thirty three years, wrenching fear and also joy and love.

Then came names. The first name that came back was Karah Hamby. For the past year, at night, he had logged on to a group of hackers and geniuses obsessed with the idea of a virtual heaven. The chance to be uploaded and live forever in the dark matter and the fibers that had always fascinated him. Everything he’d dreamed about as a kid. It had been a nebulous dream. And in the years since it had become more and more of a reality. The Lone Gunmen had dealt with it several times, with Mulder and Invisigoth and Adam and his virtual world and they’d even gone into a wild video game in a particularly strange ordeal.

He had lost so much time. They could have done it while he was gone.

Skin touched his skin, a hand rested on his, and a clear voice spoke, “There you are.”

A sunny blonde man - it was Jimmy, Langly remembered the man immediately and completely - was grinning down at him, sitting on the edge of a bed that Langly lay on, in a room he didn’t recognize. “Welcome back, bud.”

Langly rubbed his face. He had facial hair now. What the hell? His hair was braided, which was also weird. Jimmy handed him his glasses and the world came out of the blur. “Don’t try to get up right away. You’ve been out a long time.”

“How long?” It hurt like needles to talk and he did not recognize the room and it was all jarring. He had wires attached to him and realized he had a catheter in and the whole world spun fast.

“Uh…” Jimmy looked at a calendar on the wall. “Like ten weeks. Don’t move. I’ll get you some water.”

Panic shot through Langly as the memories of Byers and Frohike returned. “Where are-”

“They’re outside. They’re okay. They’re okay, Langly. You’re the last one up. I’ll get the guys.” Jimmy ran from the room and Langly heard him hollering.

Fragments of life surrounded him. Sun shone through the open window. The walls were wooden. He was under a blue and gold University of Michigan throw blanket. There were three beds in the room and a rocking chair and several monitors - one of which was connected to him - and there was a table covered in three groups of prescription bottles and cups and other items. Jimmy also had facial hair now. The air smelled faintly of bacon and campfire smoke.

Two faces so familiar they made him breathe easier came into the room.

“Holy shit, Langly. Took you long enough,” Frohike said. He was using a cane.

“Never tell me the odds,” Jimmy swatted Frohike, who winced.

“This one watches Star Wars one time….”

“Where are we?”

Byers wasn’t wearing a suit, but rather a green flannel and jeans. When he spoke, his voice was rougher than it had been before. “Jen’s family cabin in Michigan. Upper Peninsula. Not far from Lake Superior.”

“Where’s Jen?” He felt a desperation to see her, to touch her. 

“Doing the weekly run to town for supplies. She’ll be back in a couple hours. She’s gonna lose her mind,” Frohike grinned. All of them grinned at Langly. He wondered how worried they’d been, how close he’d come to dying. 

He remembered everything - his life before as well as the darkness of the in between place. Everything that had happened in the darkness stayed with him. Now he knew it had been Jen’s voice, the string showing him the way through. She’d been there the whole time. “Do we have a laptop?”

Byers and Frohike exchanged a look. “Jimmy…” Byers nodded out the door. Bless him, Jimmy took the hint and, after giving Langly a hug, left. Byers took over the rocking chair and Frohike settled on the bed next to him. 

“We’re alive.” Langly couldn’t believe it. “I knew we were dying.”

“Barely alive. We’re not the same. The after effects of the virus are unpredictable.” Langly saw Frohike set his cane aside as he sat on the bed, and noted the dark circles under Byers eyes. “Don’t think you’re immediately going to feel one hundred percent. But yes, we’re technically alive.”

“Technically.”

Frohike nodded. “As far as the US Government is concerned, we died. They buried us at Arlington, can you believe it? Dana Scully cried at our funeral, apparently. I knew she cared.”

“We’re dead?”

“Skinner handled all of it. We lived, but we can’t ever go back, Langly.” Byers watched him take the words in. Everything they had built, all gone. They were Susanne Modeski now, erased and elsewhere. 

“Bullshit,” he fumed. “I can put us back. Give me a computer and a couple days.”

“No.” Byers said it with authority. 

No one believed harder than Byers in hope and fighting for what was right. If he had accepted this situation, this fate, all Langly could do was throw punches at the sky.

Langly was done laying down. He got to his feet and almost crumbled, but Byers caught his arm and called for Jimmy, who breezed in ready to go. “Dude, give yourself a minute. You wanna shower?”

The process of coming back to life was embarrassing as well as painful. By the time Langly got some privacy in the bathroom and could look at himself in the mirror, he was stunned by what he saw. He was thinner now, and had grown facial hair. He unbraided his hair and showered in water so hot it hurt, shaved and put on the Korn shirt and sweatpants Jimmy had set out for him.

When the Subaru pulled up the drive two hours later and Jen stepped out, talking to Jimmy a mile a minute, he was sitting on the bench. The daylight was incredibly bright and he squinted against it as his eyes adjusted. Jen didn’t notice him for a minute and then her eyes went past Jimmy to where he sat. 

Langly saw her beautiful face. Jen was trying not to cry. He knew from the way her lips trembled and the water that spilled from her eyes that she wanted to fall to pieces, and knew in that moment how scared she’d been for him, for all of them. 

The others all but scattered to give them some privacy as she walked over to him, seemingly unable to believe he was really awake. She just stood there like she didn't know what to do.

“Come here,” he said quietly. 

She melted and slipped onto the bench beside him, pulling her legs up and folding herself around him. She spoke into his shoulder. “I played you a lot of music.”

“I heard it.”

Jen chuckled. “Byers said he heard me talking. What he probably actually heard was me reading you guys all the finest in mass market pulp.” She looked up and touched his face, his hair, taking a picture of him with her mind. 

For the rest of that day, she didn’t let go of him. They talked and talked and told their stories. Frohike made dinner and they all sat around the fire pit until it was dark and there were only embers left. Jimmy, the best nurse in the world, ordered the men up and to bed before it got too late. All exhausted, they obeyed.

“Good night,” Jimmy called as he started to leave the room. Jen kissed Langly and moved to follow.

“Jen…” Frohike called. “Where are you going?”

“You’re all awake,” she said. “I don’t think you need a night nurse anymore.”

“We’ve got a couple chapters left, don’t we?”

“Three, I think.”

“Well then…” Frohike settled back against his pillow and closed his eyes. “Sing us to sleep one last time, siren.”

“Sleep, those little slices of death,” Byers muttered, already drifting off.

Jen settled into the rocker with a foot on the frame of Langly’s bed to rock the chair when she needed, and picked up a paperback. How many hours had she spent like this, watching over them and telling them stories? Langly set a hand on her ankle and listened, though he had missed most of the book and didn’t care. He was tired of sleeping but it felt good to lay down and rest some more. He just listened to her timbre and breath and life. Her voice. That voice.

By the end of the book, Frohike and Byers were asleep. Langly could tell from their breathing. “Get some sleep,” she leaned forward and kissed his lips just softly.

“I don’t want to close my eyes again,” he whispered. “Stay with me.”

“Always.”

She slipped into the bed next to him and touched her forehead to his. He smelled lilacs and felt the softness of her as he set a hand on her hip. She gave him a delicate, light kiss. He returned it, more forcefully. They had missed so many minutes. The feel of her electrified his skin and nerves. His hand wound in her hair and he kept her there, kissing deeply.

Jen felt him hard against her and whispered. “Do you want me to touch you?”

He nodded, unable to express how badly he needed her to anchor him in his body. There were so many aches now, but this one could be released. It didn’t matter that they weren’t alone in the room. Jen slipped her hand down his chest into his sweatpants and, when her fingers brushed him he nearly lost it immediately, but buried his face in her neck to surround his senses with lilacs and softness. Her hand rubbed him, building a rhythm until he couldn’t perceive anything other than the feelings she stirred, and it didn’t take long until he exploded in her fingers.

God, he loved her. 

He drifted to sleep with his chest against her back. At some point in the night she slipped out of the bed and left the room to go back to her loft. 

Each day, Langly’s physical pain came more clearly into sharper focus.

On July 6th, Langly got up out of bed all on his own, showered, and noticed how much of his body ached and how it was only slightly eased by the hot water. Jimmy gave him some Tylenol and helped him outside to sit on the wooden bench. Jen brought them all coffee and muffins and Langly noticed how both tasted strange and also how everyone else appeared almost normal. 

Then, as afternoon became evening, Byers nearly collapsed. As if it wasn’t even unusual, Jen and Jimmy jumped to action and took care of him, tapping the other out for short breaks to attend to other things. Langly watched them and marveled. They had not known each other just a few months earlier but now were like a superhero duo. 

After they put Byers to bed in the completely dark bedroom, Jen went in and stayed beside him for hours. When Langly checked on them later, she was asleep sitting on the floor beside the bed with her hand on Byers’ arm while he slept. Langly didn’t dare move her, for fear the balance would be destroyed. So he lay down and slept until the next morning with them. 

The next day, Langly saw her sitting cross-legged in the hammock reading. If he went to her and curled up with her, she would smile and they could talk for hours. But he couldn’t make himself step forward. No matter how much he wanted to. That startled him. 

Two days later, it rained. “Movie night or game night?” Jimmy asked.

“You’re obsessed.” Jen turned to the others. “He just wants to play Monopoly again. The last game took literal weeks.”

“It’s fun.”

“It was originally designed to point out the evil of monopolies,” Byers explained. “A woman invented it. During World War Two, a special edition was made for the British POW’s and distributed to them by fake charities run by the British Secret Service.”

Jimmy blinked. “So I’m gonna be the Top Hat.”

“Monopoly it is,” Frohike declared.

Jimmy chuckled to himself. “You know, we’re like the Ninja Turtles and Jen is April O’Neal.”

Langly slowly turned to look at him, half annoyed and half waiting for the pearls of wisdom that Jimmy sometimes dropped at the moments he was seemingly being the dumbest. Everyone was looking at Jimmy in the same way but nope, it was a complete thought.

“Does that make Skinner Splinter?” Byers asked, handing out Monopoly money.

“I bet he knows some kung fu.” Frohike said it with his eyes on Langly, waiting for him to make a joke about whose kung fu was best, a joke they had made a million times while bullshitting each other over the past decade. But Langly couldn’t do it.

He played the Monopoly game for the hours it took, and he tried to feel normal, but he was miserable and he knew they could all tell. 

They had game and movie nights frequently, and Jen would sit next to him or curl up next to him. The feeling of her body against his, of her touch, pulled him back to earth most of the time, but he could not focus on a whole movie or game and found himself often retreating to bed early so he could lie in the dark and think. 

Frohike woke in the night frequently, shouting until he woke himself or Langly or Byers, whoever got to him first, could shake him awake and assure him he was alright. Jimmy and Jen always arrived in the room and the five of them would stay in the dark together and wind up sleeping in strange combinations and piles, waking in the morning feeling rough and making pots and pots of coffee to come back to feeling normal. 

It bothered Langly. The three of them had never needed people before. Now, they had to rely on Jimmy and Jen. Both of whom loved them so much they walked away from their lives...for what? To babysit?

John Fitzgerald Byers could not help but help even when it was to his own detriment. How many times had he been beaten up for a cause? 

One day, Langly stumbled and almost fell in the yard, but Byers caught his elbow. “Don’t push, Langly. It’ll come back. Probably. Some of it.”

“Says you.”

Byers dropped his voice. “I wanted to talk to you anyway. I’m worried about Frohike. His nightmares. He keeps saying he’s sorry.”

“I’ve heard him.”

“It’s about time we talked. Just the three of us.”

It was a little unfair to corner Frohike at the picnic table where he was eating an apple and reading a Julia Quinn romance novel with the shirtless duke on the cover, but it had to be done.

“We’re worried about you, pal,” Langly said.

“Lots to be worried about,” Frohike said. “Am I really top of the list?”

“Absolutely.”

Frohike sighed. “Guys, I have some experience in psychology. I am experiencing grief over my physical issues as well as guilt because I can’t stop thinking that I could have saved you two from this. Could have at least given you a chance, told you to run and pulled the fucking fire alarm myself. That’s where the damn nightmares are coming from.”

“We chose it,” Byers reminded him.

“I shouldn’t have given you a choice. I’m gonna live with that. And I’m gonna drown my sorrows in sangria and smut. Well-written smut, I must say.”

Byers looked out over the water. “We’re not beat yet.”

Langly scoffed and waved at the forest they were hiding in. “Uh, we kinda are. We’re the Ninja Turtles, remember. Hiding in the sewer.”

When Byers turned to him, there was a little bit of brightness in his voice and the very beginnings of the sparkle of idealism back in his blue eyes. “This is hardly a sewer. And, there’s still hope.”

Like someone punched him in the stomach, Langly felt anger at Byers for his words. The words he had come to rely on and had so badly wanted to hear at the scariest moment of his entire life now only infuriated him. 

By the end of July, Langly felt like he was drowning. The ache and the quiet and the inability to get his hands on a computer and reach out to the other hackers. Karah might think he was dead before he’d even had a chance to complete the upload process. He knew he was growing angrier, snipping at people more, retreating to bed and staring at paperbacks he wasn’t actually reading. He wasn’t even pretending to watch movies anymore. 

“Boys,” Frohike spoke into the darkness after they’d gone to bed. Jen and Jimmy checked out at night now and slept in their own rooms. “We need to talk.”

“Agreed,” Byers said, and he flicked on the small lamp beside his bed. Byers came to sit on the floor between Frohike and Langly’s pillows so they could speak unheard.

“What do we do now?” Frohike asked.

“The only thing we can do,” Byers answered. “Take it one day at a time. We can stay here as long as we like.”

Frohike shook his head. “And let Jen and Jimmy give up their whole lives?”

Byers leaned back against the bedframe. “They’ve already done that.”

“I don’t doubt it but is it fair to them?” Frohike frowned. “What are we without what we do?”

Byers frowned back at him. “Alive.”

Langly spoke at last. “I fucking hate feeling like this.”

Both his friends looked at him in surprise. “Langly…”

“I don’t want things to be different. I liked how it was. And I hate this. Every second.” The confession burst from him and was out in the air before he realized it.

“Stop it,” Byers was watching him very closely now. “We rebuilt before. We can do it again.”

Langly nearly exploded but kept his voice down so the others wouldn’t come into the room. “What good am I to her? To either of you right now. It’s easy for you, Byers. You’re fine.”

An angry scoff came from his friend. “I’m not. I’m so exhausted all day long I can barely stand up and my ears ring constantly and the headaches make me want to die.” Langly listened and felt even worse for being wrong. “I’m just trying not to make a big deal out of it.”

“You should,” Frohike said. “No one expects us to be invincible except us.”

Langly felt himself grow hot. “We’re not invincible. We’re useless and we’re dead.”

Byers was actually mad. “We’re not dead. We’re here right now. And there’s always something to do.”

“But do Jen and Jimmy need to give up everything so we can do it?” Frohike asked.

It hurts, Langly thought. He didn’t say the words because they both hurt. His hurt wasn’t special or worth more discussion than theirs. He saw the way the three of them were now, changed forever. Byers met his eyes and knew he wasn’t feeling at all reassured. “We saved millions of people, Langly.”

“So what?”

“You don’t mean that.” And he really didn’t. Furiously, he got up out of bed and grabbed his robe and went to the door. He stumbled a little in the dark.

“Use the fucking cane Jimmy made you,” Frohike said flatly. “Adapt.”

“Shut the fuck up.” Langly left the bedroom, and the cabin, and didn’t stop until he was sitting in a chair by the water. He threw the cane into the grass and looked at the midnight sky. In all their years, through all their arguments, he’d never spoken to either of them the way he just had. He felt worse than scum about it. 

First thing in the morning, Byers woke him. “We’re gonna give them an out,” Byers said as he rolled up the sleeves of a blue flannel. “Frohike pushed for it. His guilt, you know. You and I chose to do what we did, but they didn’t choose it.”

“They’re not gonna leave,” Langly rubbed his eyes and slowly got up to get dressed.

“I agree, and I’m glad for it. Even if that makes me selfish.” Byers said the next part carefully, as if gauging how Langly would react. “Frohike and I have been talking about bringing the paper back, but maybe as a blog. Use some pseudonyms. Make it look like new people took up the torch. Use something like wordpress and hotmail addresses so we could be anyone from anywhere. Help us do it.”

“Why wouldn’t I? Hell, you talked about this without me?”

Byers cocked his head. Langly realized his friend knew far more than he’d realized. Byers always read people really well. “We’re not sure where you are these days, Langly.”

“Where the fuck else can I be?”

The second Byers and Langly went out into the main room, Frohike turned to Jimmy. “Jimmy, go home.”

Jimmy waved a hand while he took a drink of coffee. “I’m not tired, but thanks. I’ll keep working.”

“I mean go back home. To Maryland. To Yves and everything else in your life.”

“Frohike…”

“We talked about it and we can’t let you and Jen give up everything for us.”

Jimmy didn’t budge, didn’t shift his weight. He looked at Langly and Byers and saw that all three men were in agreement. Jimmy’s jaw tightened. “Too late, buds. When Skinner called and asked me to do this, I didn’t hesitate and, and I’ll speak for Jen too, I’d do it again.”

“What about Yves?” Byers asked. 

Jimmy shrugged. “I’ll find her if she doesn’t find me first. If I left you guys now, she’d kick my ass.”

Langly stepped forward. “Help us convince Jen, at least.”

Jimmy laughed. “Good luck convincing her of anything she doesn’t want to do. Listen, guys, I know you don’t feel great and I know this is an awful lot to happen. But you didn’t die. It’s like a miracle. And, while I know this isn’t the life you would have planned or chosen, it’s not a bad one for as long as you’re here. So maybe just…try and make the best of it. Get better. Rest. Think. Work the problem and then the next one, right? And stop worrying about me and about Jen. We’re not kids and we’re not idiots.”

“Right,” Byers agreed. “Work the problem. And then the next one.”

Jimmy clapped him on the shoulder and went outside.

“I thought that would go differently,” Frohike said.

“Did you really?” Byers asked.

The very next morning while they were all having coffee, Jimmy burst from the cabin wearing a t-shirt with an American flag on it. “Happy Fourth of July!”

“....Jimmy, it’s the 24th of July.” Confused, Byers looked at the others.

“I know. Listen, we missed the real day because Langly woke up and it was awesome and we were all stoked. And I know a lot of stuff has happened since then but we have a lot of reasons to celebrate, so tonight we’re making a fire and hot dogs and I have some surprises. Jen, can you make your awesome potato salad again?”

“Yep.” When Jimmy ran off to do whatever he was gonna do, she turned to Frohike. “I have learned it's best to just ride the wave when he’s like this. Jimmy’s energy could power a small city.”

Byers sighed. “He wants us to be happy. I wish it was as simple as hot dogs.”

“Hot dogs are pretty great,” Langly tried to find something positive. He really tried.

Jimmy started a fire at sunset and somehow made grape Kool-Aid appear and they cooked hot dogs over the flames and Jen made potato salad and root beer floats. When they were all stuffed, Jimmy vanished for a few minutes.

“Oh lord, he has surprises,” Langly remembered.

Frohike shook his head. “If he comes out singing Yankee Doodle…”

But Jimmy returned with a pack of fireworks and a box of bomb pops.

“Are those legal?” Byers asked.

“The popsicles?” Jimmy asked.

“Narc,” Frohike teased gently and reached for the fireworks. “Give me those before you blow us all up.” He tossed a plastic wrapped six pack of boxes of sparklers to Langly. “Open those.”

While Jimmy made shapes in the air with the sparklers and forced Frohike to do the same, the sparklers lit up Jen’s face, and her smile at Jimmy’s joy was so genuine, Langly remembered every second they’d ever shared - from a diner in New Jersey as friends to a bunker in suburbia as lovers at last, from bruises to stars projected on a ceiling, from coffee to cheesesteaks and hours spent sitting and talking or together in either of their beds exploring and breathing together. She’d made him aware of his body and heart like no one before her, and likely after. 

But he hated to admit that her touch didn’t feel the same now, just like how food didn’t taste the same. Logically, he knew nothing had changed other than him.

She came to sit by him, and, fighting the thoughts, he put an arm around her shoulders like he always had. Her soft hair still smelled like lilacs and he reveled in it, one fragment that was the same. The others subtly went to the water, leaving them alone in the firelight.

Jen’s hand rested on his thigh and she kissed him. He returned it, and his body did respond.

She ran a finger over his knee. “Where do you go now?”

Fuck. Of course she had noticed. “It’s all a fog.” Jen waited for him to say more, so he did. “When I was out, it was like I was in.another world. It wasn’t just black. I don’t know how to explain it. It wasn’t just a few seconds like Frohike said. It was a whole lifetime.” He saw her listening, trying to understand what she couldn’t possibly understand. “It hurts a lot now and I…I kinda want to be back there.”

“Oh. Okay.”

He pulled away from her a little and shook his head. “Don’t say okay. Be mad at me.”

“No.” She kept her eyes on his as she spoke. “I’m only mad that you three thought your lives were tradeable. I know why you did it, and you’re heroes, but selfishly I’d have let everyone else die to save you. And I know that’s horrible but… you are worth galaxies, Langly. I wish you knew that.”

There was nothing he could say. Jen rested her head on his shoulder and let him be silent.

Watching Langly slip away a little bit each day was killing Jen. Mostly because she didn’t entirely understand why it was happening, apart from the little he’d said, so she didn’t know what to do about it. Knowing something was changing and was perhaps worse than the not knowing of the first months at the cabin. 

The three Lone Gunmen talked to each other in a clump more and more, gathering and talking so as not to be overheard by Jimmy and Jen. She knew they were making plans, and those plans didn’t need to include her - they were their own people and not obligated to her in any way - but she was still worried.

She was losing Langly. Maybe had already lost him. Like sand blowing away, the stardust of him was leaving grain by grain and there was no possible way to catch it. All she could do was love him and hope - there was still hope, right? - but also stay open to what the universe had in store for her.

They all gathered for a movie one rainy afternoon. Jen settled next to him on the couch. She rested her arm on his but lightly, for she could tell he was often in physical pain he either didn’t want to talk about or didn’t know how to talk about. After just a few minutes, he kissed her temple. “I’m gonna go to bed.”

“Are you alright?”

“Just tired. I’m fine.”

She met his eyes and saw the lie. All of the little lies. The crack between them was too big now.

A few days later, she was stripping all the beds to do laundry and saw his notebook on his nightstand. All the guys were outside and, though she felt bad for doing it, she opened it. Maybe she could learn something that would help understand all the swirling confusion.

His handwriting was scrawling, sometimes indecipherable. She flipped through to the last pages and saw names. And the name Karah Hamby was circled several times, like he’d lingered on her name.

It took her breath away. Hurriedly, she put the notebook back and grabbed the rest of the bedding. After starting the laundry load, she watched as he went to sit in the chair by the water and just stared out over the algae and reeds. 

Two days passed before they spoke. In the before times, they’d barely ever gone two hours without some form of contact. When it became too much to bear, she grabbed a beer and went to sit on the picnic table by the water. She sat for a long time before he joined her. 

“You alright?”

She answered in a meaner tone than she meant. “I didn’t realize you gave a damn anymore.”

“Jen…”

“What are you doing, Langly? Something is going on with you and either you have to explain it to me or I have to stop trying to understand.”

“You can’t understand.”

“Probably not. I’m not brilliant.”

Quickly, he shook his head. “That’s not what I meant.”

“Langly….” She held the sentence until he looked at her. “Breathe. You know what I mean.”

Like he was searching for words, he closed his eyes. “We’re diminished, Jen.”

“Nothing could ever diminish you three.” She put a hand on his chest and made him look at her. “But if you need to go somewhere else, just go. Don’t stay here and be miserable because you think I need you. I love you, and I want you, and not a thing about how I feel has changed, but I can live without you if you need something else or someplace else….or someone else.” She tried her damndest to keep her voice strong but the last words cracked. She was shattering. “If Byers and Melvin are going somewhere, go with them. And know that I will always come if you call.” 

She kissed him lightly, holding there for a long moment in case he wanted to sweep her up like he had so many times. But he didn’t. He didn’t kiss her back and didn’t hold her. She’d said her peace and he couldn’t say anything back. 

When she walked away she knew it was over. 

Frohike and Byers were playing Scrabble and trying to pretend they hadn’t seen the whole thing. Jimmy was dozing on the couch while Star Wars played on the TV again. Jen grabbed her water bottle and filled it, grabbed an apple and stuffed a couple granola bars in her pocket, stuck her feet in her walking sneakers, and went out the door without looking at or talking to any of them. She went to the (now very organized, thanks Jimmy) shed and grabbed the solo tent and a sleeping bag and walked into the woods.

The cabin melted away. The trees surrounded her until she could not tell which way she’d gone anymore. The forest had always been her favorite place, and she had forgotten to remember the way spackled sunlight and the gentle wind rustling leaves soothed her soul. The way stepping over mud and fallen branches activated her brain. The way finding the tiny little things on the forest floor and in the crevices of tree bark had always brought her focus back to the truth of her heart. The way birds and spiders and bugs lit up her brain. 

On a fallen tree, she saw white flecked lichen. Beneath her feet was a network of fibers, a universe all its own. She’d - humans - would never understand it and still she wanted to try. The fibers connected everything alive. Everything was fibers. Fungus and systems and stars. 

Langly. His mind was drifting to systems she didn’t understand. If, after everything, he needed or wanted something else, she could live with that. 

Because he was alive. They all were. And whether they stayed together or not, there were still fights to finish. 

She pitched the tent in a small clear spot by the water and made a small fire mainly so she could stare at the flames as the sky turned pink and then purple. She slept better than she had slept in weeks, in a sleeping bag in the tent listening to the life of the forest and its inhabitants all around her.

When she got back the next afternoon and put her stuff away in the shed, she felt all the eyes on her but no one said a thing. Jimmy was at work on the cabin, sawing boards on a sawhorse. 

“Mushrooms?”

She shrugged, grateful for him. “Not really the season.”

“You ok?”

She shrugged again. He stood up straight and looked up at her. “I think I’m gonna get everyone through the winter and go back in spring,” Jimmy told her.

“Yves?”

Jimmy dropped his voice so only she could hear him. “She’ll understand. But I don’t think they’ll need me forever, you know.”

She didn’t tell him her belief that all three of them were going to leave. “I’m happy you stayed this long. You saved me, you know. Your unrelenting positivity on those hard days…”

“We saved each other, bud. And I’ll get the new cabin done. It’ll be small but you and Langly can move in there and the rest of us can stay here and we’ll all have room.”

“I don’t think it's gonna be like that anymore.” It was the first time she’d voiced the thought.

Jimmy’s eyes got wide but he didn’t push. “Or, you know, Langly and Byers can stay in the new cabin. Whatever. There’ll be room. And it’ll be something to remember me by.”  He truly was the most adaptable human being on the planet. Bless him. 

Jen squeezed his arm for a second. “Like anyone could ever forget you, bud.”

The rest of August happened. The heat slowed the days but it made for wonderful tomatoes. Walter returned in the middle of the month, and ten years of stress seemed to leave his broad shoulders when he saw the men up and alive. He brought gifts and stories of the wild cases Doggett and Reyes had been facing. Fox Mulder was back and alive, though he could not be told about all of this. Better to let him believe the same as everyone else.

He gave Langly a laptop with a wink and told him to use it wisely. Jen felt her stomach clench when she saw the expression on Langly’s face.

September came and the night air started to chill slightly.

The three men gathered more now, and Langly (now obviously finding some completion in being able to use tech again) seemed to come alive a little. Jen tried not to miss him desperately, and tried not to overhear what they talked about, and noted how they shifted topics when she came around, but didn’t hold it against them. She spent too much time picking the wild blackberries from the forest, and bought herself a notebook and started writing again. 

Byers and Jimmy finished siding the cabin and added a metal roof and a door and two windows. Jen took over the task of staining it while Jimmy moved on to finishing the interior. Frohike jokingly claimed it for himself and dubbed it the Pleasure Palace. 

Langly fell into the computer and barely looked up anymore, and she didn’t push. They didn’t argue, they didn’t fight. They simply didn’t do anything together. They barely spoke. But he seemed happier.

At the end of September, the uneasy peace was disrupted by the sound of a motorcycle roar.

Getting out of DC and onto the open highways on a Gold Wing motorcycle was exactly the balm Doggett had hoped it would be. Just riding, the wind and the sun and the things he saw along the way. Stopping in roadside motels when he was tired and wanted a shower, eating a collection of the best burgers he’d ever had at restaurants and diners that probably wouldn’t pass health inspections, and not saying more than ten words in a day. Heaven on two wheels.

Somewhere near the Ohio/Pennsylvania border he thought maybe he just wouldn’t go back.

No one knew where he was really going. Monica had her suspicions but didn’t try to stop him. She’d noticed his notes and scribbles, seen the file he’d gathered on The Lone Gunmen and their death and turned into a legitimate XFile, convinced they would have loved that. 

He needed to know this one last truth. Especially now, after…

Luke was dead. His son’s killer had been caught. And Doggett and his ex-wife had scattered Luke’s ashes at the seashore. In his pocket, he carried a pebble from the beach he would always carry with him. 

He knew his own truth now. There was just one more thing he couldn’t let rest. 

Trees grew taller and thicker as he traveled the Michigan highways north. Riding across the Mackinac Bridge was incredible, and once he reached the Upper Peninsula he had most roads to himself. After hours, he left the main road and took a series of backroads and gravel roads that, had he not written out the directions on paper, would have spun him around and left him for death in the woods. 

The trees were thick and dimmed the sunlight until he turned on a dirt road that was barely a road, and he saw a clearing ahead. A cabin. Another building. 

And a woman in a tank top and shorts with wild curly hair. 

If she hadn’t been pointing a gun at him, he would have smiled. But Jen charged forward with a rifle in her hands and the hard eyes of someone terrified. He parked the bike and turned it off , took off his helmet and called to her. “Some welcome.”

“Don’t you dare take another step.”

The edge of her voice was cracked. He had no doubt if he’d been a stranger she’d have already shot him. “You know you’re pointing a gun at an FBI Agent.”

“You haven’t shown me ID. I’m pointing a gun at a trespasser on my property. And around here, no one blinks an eye at a gunshot. You’ll be buried in the woods by dinnertime.”

Jen was scared to death of him. She’d been lost and he’d found her. “I’m not here to ruin things for you.”

It seemed like she almost believed him. Or at least wanted to believe him. “Monica?”

Doggett shook his head. “Has no idea where I am. I told everyone I was taking a bike trip to clear my head. It’s been a wild couple months. Are they…here? I just need to know.”

She didn’t ask who he meant. “They’re dead.”

“That doesn’t answer my question, Alden.”

Something moved to Jen’s right and Doggett’s eyes took in the absolutely unbelievable sight of John Fitzgerald Byers, wearing a flannel and jeans, walking towards them. Doggett hadn’t expected the lump that came to his throat at the sight. 

Byers realized who was standing there. “Doggett?”

“Holy shit.”

“Holy shit,” Byers agreed, but turned to Jen. “It’s alright.”

When she didn’t move and didn’t even blink, Doggett blurted the truth behind it all. “I found my son’s killer. Barbara and I, we…released Luke’s ashes.”

Jen’s whole body changed and she lowered the gun. “Are you alright?”

What to say to a question like that? He would never be alright again. But he didn’t have to answer because Byers was rushing him and encircling Doggett in a hug so big he couldn’t help but tear up. He had not realized how much he needed the good news of their survival. “I’m really goddamn glad you’re not dead,” he told him.

“Me too,” Byers agreed.

Doggett laughed through his tears. “I fucking knew Skinner was being cagey. I knew it.”

“How did you find us?”

Doggett pulled back. Us. “Frohike and Langly?”

“Inside. Being forced to play Monopoly yet again.”

Doggett relaxed a long breath. “Good old fashioned detective work. It took me a while. Smart move by your Dad, putting the property under a trust. Almost didn’t think to look.”

Byers didn’t let go of him. “Stay as long as you want, John.”

“Only if you say it's okay,” Doggett spoke directly to Jen.

If Byers hadn’t been there and hadn’t given her some look, she probably wouldn’t have agreed. But she sighed and said, “It’s okay.”

Doggett nodded to the thick forest. “Hows the mushrooming?”

Jen looked at the trees around her. “I…haven’t even looked.”

He watched her until she met his eyes and kept his gaze. The story she could tell was a tough one and he’d make her tell him later. They’d never been friends but some unexplainable connection sat between them anyway. Maybe it was forged in the fire of the exploding building they’d met while running from. Looking at her now, her skin was tanned but she had lost weight and gained muscle. Mostly, he saw that she was exhausted to her bones. Byers, too. Dark circles rimmed his blue eyes and he walked slowly back to the cabin.

Frohike, Langly, and Jimmy Bond stood up when Doggett walked into the tidy cabin. Both looked paler and thinner than before, but seeing them at all felt like laying eyes on miracles. Jimmy pointed at him with huge eyes. “You’re that guy.”

“So I’ve been told.”

“No. You were there. You saved them and then I saw you were at the funeral….”

Doggett felt all the eyes on him. He felt Jen staring at him and shook his head. “The FBI found them. I was just there. That’s all I knew. I was as in the dark as you were.”

“It was you,” Frohike barely breathed. 

Bristling at the attention he didn’t deserve, and not wanting to relive any of the memories, Doggett held up a hand. “I won’t take any credit for anything. But I’m sure glad to see you three.” Everyone was silent a moment. “What a collection of broken bastards we are," Doggett quipped for lack of anything better to say. He looked at Jen. “Im including you, too.”

Jen chuckled. “Am I arguing with you?”

“So…what are we doing?”

“Indulging Jimmy’s capitalist tendencies,” Frohike replied, voice shaky. 

“Seriously. He’s obsessed with this game.”

“I’m out,” Langly said.”Doggett, take my place.”

Langly didn’t meet Doggett’s eyes as he got up, picked up a laptop, and went into one of the bedrooms. It did not escape Doggett’s notice that Jen and Langly had about as much physical distance between them as was possible in the small cabin. More to talk about later.

Over the next few days as Doggett slept on the couch and folded into the rhythm of their cozy if odd life in the woods, Jimmy turned out to be a kind soul, if a beast at Monopoly. He worked hard, laser focused on the building project he was excited to have Doggett’s hands on, and let Doggett and Byers be as quiet as they wanted. When Byers started to fade, Jimmy would pause and make sure he got inside safely before adjusting.

Frohike wanted to talk. They talked endlessly about what had happened and the aftermath and how Dana Scully and her son were doing. 

One morning, Doggett cornered Jen as she was on her knees in the garden. "That canoe float?”

“Yep.”

“Come on, then.”

“Nope.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

Doggett gave her a look that lasted until she sighed. “Grab that end,” he said to Jen. She rolled her eyes but obeyed.

They hauled the canoe to the water and Jimmy came over with fishing poles and a container of worms. “Garden’s finest. That bay over there is the deepest point and there’s lots of stuff in the water.”

Jen turned to Frohike. “Melvin, this insane man is making me go fishing.”

“It’s a noble sport,” Doggett replied. Jen glared at him. “Get in the damn canoe, Alden. We gotta talk.”

Out on the water, Doggett felt a wave of relief at the peace of the gentle waves and the grass. Even the algae was neat as it swirled around the oars. He did as Jimmy had said and took them across the bay to a place where the reeds were high enough to block the view of the cabin, where he cast off his line into the smooth water.

“It’d be ironic if this canoe exploded,” she said at last.

“Sorta poetic. I can’t believe I didn’t immediately think you’d be in the woods.”

“Why were you even looking for me?”

Doggett pointed towards the shore. “They died and you weren’t at the funeral? It didn’t compute. I don’t like loose ends." Jen stared at him, waiting for him to continue. "For a long time after Luke died, I wondered and I made up scenarios. It's strange, but it feels better to know, you know? There is only one story and that's the truth, and I know it now. Part of the horror of life is not knowing things. Because when you don't know, you can still hope. And hope is like a drug."

"I'm not sure how much hope I have left in me."

"Ask Byers to borrow some."

"Even he is running on fumes now." Jen folded her arms over her chest and set her elbows on her knees. "Ok, fine. It's nice out here."

"Listen, you’ve never really liked me. But I don’t think it’s personal.”

“It’s never been personal,” she admitted. “When I was nine, the Feds raided my house. I'm sure you know that because I'm sure you've read the files. But I bet the files don't mention how they tore everything apart. They broke lamps and cut up my stuffed animals, and they arrested my Dad. My Mom brought me here for a summer, and all she did was cry the whole time. And then we went home again and I haven’t been back here since. That’s why I was determined not to like you... or this place.”

“Do they know that?”

She shook her head. “Byers knows I don’t love this place, but not all the reasons.”

“Langly doesn’t know?”

“I haven’t told him. He’s not at all the same now.”

Doggett heard all the things she wasn’t saying. “Not everything lasts, I guess.”

Something caught his line and they wound up catching quite a few fish and it was actually fun for a little while. They hauled the bounty back to shore and Doggett planned to clean and cook the fish for dinner. When they got back onto shore and the canoe was back on land, Doggett bent down and picked up a smooth pink rock.

Jen saw him do it. “What’s that about?”

“I picked a rock up at the shore when we released Luke. Figure it’ll always be a memory I can hold. Figured I’d grab one now, too.”

Jen nodded and bent down for her own pebble. “It’s a good idea. I’ll keep this one and always remember the absolute smokeshow agent who thought I was a supersoldier once a million years ago.”

“I’ll keep mine and remember the woman who almost brought down Walter Skinner in a crappy roadside motel.”

Jen groaned. “That motel was awful.”

“The worst.”

“Thanks for everything, Doggett.”

“You’re welcome.” He set a hand on her back for a second, having realized she called him by his name and not Agent Smokeshow or some other dismissive nickname. Something in it felt like the end of something, a curtain falling on a final act. “Now, let’s go make some dinner for everyone.”

The hacker collective was still online. Langly found them one night after much digging and hoping he hadn’t been left behind. They were all still talking about the project, and now there were actual details. He emailed Karah immediately and within a few hours she had replied telling him where to meet her. Doggett was suddenly there, and Langly saw an opportunity.

He had never really felt right walking around in the world with people. Apart from a select few, he’d never been great with people. The idea of something else; something bigger, out of this world, wilder than the stars, outside the bond of the body… 

Since waking up, Langly had tried his hardest to bring his focus and attention back to the ground beneath his feet and the living breathing humans around him who loved and cared about him, but he simply could not do it because maybe he wasn’t meant to do it. Maybe he was meant for something else.

He had known love, and been loved. He needed something more now. Something unexplainable and different.

The moment he decided and stopped waffling once and for all, he went to the lawn chair by the creek and sat, staring at the trees. It would get dark soon, and he would watch them until he couldn’t keep his eyes open anymore.

“I always want to ask if you’re alright but I know you’re not.”

Jen had followed him, and he turned to see her. They hadn’t spoken more than a few words to each other in all the estranged days since she had kissed him. If he could have explained things, he would have. “Everything feels weird.” It was all he could say to her, and he knew it was a crappy answer. But she felt like a beautiful stranger he knew everything about now.

“A really smart and sexy guy once told me that sometimes you find yourself in a weird place.” Jen wrapped her arms around his shoulders and rested her cheek against his head. She had held him that way a hundred times and he had always relished it. For a moment, he set his hand on her arm. She stayed there for a minute and then let go, and went back to the fire pit and the others around it.   

He hadn’t meant to be cold. He hadn’t meant to shut down.  He hadn’t meant any of this and now leaving was the only answer.

Frohike came and settled in the other chair. They sat in silence for a while, just watching the forest and the birds and the way the sky turned colors. Langly stood up to go somewhere else, but he was stopped. 

“Sit down, Langly.” It was as close to an order as Frohike had ever given him. And, he obeyed it. “What's up with you?”

“I’m fine.”

“Bullshit. Don’t do that. I’ve known you longer than anyone here.” Frohike was the first friend Langly had ever really had. Would he even have survived his twenties without the strange but kind guidance of his mentor? He’d been one step away from unhoused when he met Frohike, sleeping on friends couches and alternating hacking and getting wasted at rock shows.

“What do you do when you don’t feel right where you are anymore?”

“Leave, logically.

“What if everything you have is in the place you have to leave?”

“Have to leave?” Frohike looked hard at him.

Langly looked right back. “Have to leave.”

Frohike exhaled and sat back in the lawn chair. “Then you gotta weigh your choice carefully.”

“I don’t want to hurt anyone.”

Of course Frohike heard what he wasn’t saying. “You’ll hurt her more if you stay when you need to go. Clearly, you two are different now. But whatever you do, don’t let her think you don’t love her.”

“I’ll always love her.” Like music, Jen would always be a part of him. And he couldn’t possibly explain to Frohike that she would be with him forever in the new space. Memories never grew old and they could love endlessly among the stars. “And…you guys…”

“You don’t have to do this.”

“I love you guys.”

“We know. We love you, too.”

Langly wished he could explain all of this, that it was his one wild chance to actually be something more than himself. Stars shone and were beyond understanding, and were never alone. They burned bright and they died and that was the natural order of things. 

It took him five days to actually ask Doggett.

“Hey Doggett,” Langly called. It was now or never.

Doggett stood up from where he’d been screwing boards together for Jimmy and wiped his hands on his jeans. “Whats up?”

Langly looked around. No one was close enough to hear them talking. “I need you to do me a favor,” he said. “When you leave tomorrow, stop in town and rent a car and come back for me after dark. Like 1am when everyone is asleep. I’ll meet you by the road. Wait for me. We can drive back to your bike and split from there.”

Doggett didn’t tell him it was a stupid plan or refuse outright. He didn’t ask for any details at all, actually. “You sure about this?”

“One hundred percent.”

If John Doggett had thoughts about what was asked of him, he didn’t express them. He looked at Langly for a long time, then nodded. “I’ll do it. 1am tomorrow night.”

When Langly felt a rush of happiness, he knew it was the right thing.

That night, they spent Doggett’s last night at the cabin with a big dinner and the last of the sparklers. Langly sneaked inside and put his things into a duffel bag and stuffed it under his bed.

The next day took a million years to pass by. Every word anyone spoke to him felt like a little stab. Would he hear their voices again?

The following night, after Byers and Frohike fell asleep and the cabin quieted, Langly left his bed. He climbed the ladder up to the loft and slipped beneath the quilt to lay beside Jen one last time. She slept softly, breathing gentle breaths while her curls were spread across the pillow. He buried his face in them to inhale the lilac and soap scents that were so very her. He ran his fingers over her bare shoulders. He could record her memory and take her along. Like he didn’t know every centimeter of her already.

“Langly,” she whispered as she woke. 

He hadn’t thought this through. She wasn’t supposed to wake up. “I just wanted to…”

“Ssh.” She kissed him. Even after all that had happened she still accepted him. Maybe she understood more than he knew. Their kissing felt like it always had, fire and rain. His hands grazed her body and pulled her against him. When he slipped inside her, she let out a quiet little gasp and pulled him closer so they were cheek to cheek. She wound her hands in his hair and kept him there as he moved on her. He splayed a hand on her stomach and when she held it, their star tattoos matched up for a second in the moonlight. He touched all of her and made sure to leave her satisfied - it was his last chance to love her. 

In the silence afterward, his throat felt like it would close. “I love you.”

Her whisper cracked a little. She knew. “I love you. Fall asleep with me.”

When she went back to sleep and her breaths evened out, he left her bed.

Everyone else was asleep. He dressed quickly, grabbed his duffel bag, and set four notes, held down by three rocks from the shore and his 20-sided dice on Frohike’s, on the counter where they’d be sure to see them.

Casting one look over his shoulder at the rooms the people that meant the most to him slept peacefully in, he let his eyes water. He would cause them more pain after everything they’d survived, but the pain would fade as it always did, and the bruises would heal. 

He could stay. Doggett would eventually drive away and the others would never know he had planned this.

But if he stayed, he would never know all the things that could be possible.

Langly quietly walked out of the cabin, duffel bag over his shoulder. He made his way in the dark down the driveway to where the road forked off, and there was Doggett leaning against a dark-colored sedan. When he saw Langly, he got in the car and started it without a word.

“You feel like telling me where you’re going?”

“Nope.” Doggett nodded, eyes on the road. “Check in on them, please.”

“Always.”

“And don’t look for me.”

“Never.”

“Why are you being cool?”

“I’ve always been cool,” Doggett tried to joke but stopped when he realized it wasn’t the moment. “I might not get what you’re doing but, I get it, you know. Things that happen to us change us and it can’t be helped. You’ve got something you gotta do and you can’t take them with you. Least I can do is help you make a clean break so it all heals faster. Can’t believe the band is breaking up, though.”

“Jen will be alright.”

“I mean the boys. Though I suppose the Beatles all did decent solo projects. I like George’s stuff especially. I’m not calling Jen your Yoko, so you know.”

“Yoko was maligned by the media. She didn’t cause the breakup.” Half-heartedly discussing music, must really be a sorry son of a bitch. 

Doggett didn’t demand he keep talking. The Agent just drove in the dark through the trees and into Paradise where he stopped at a motel where his motorcycle was parked. He handed Langly the keys to the car. 

“I’m sorry about your son.”

“Me too, Langly. Me too.”

They parted ways, and Langly headed for a new life.

“You guys!”

Jimmy’s voice carried all through the cabin. Jen woke with a sunbeam shining right in her eyes and rolled over away from it, expecting Langly to be there but also knowing he wouldn’t be. She hoped he had just gone back to his own bed, but feared something else…and Jimmy’s panic told her she was right. She dressed quickly in a gray sweater and black leggings and climbed down the ladder to the main room, joining Byers and Frohike who were up and coming in.

Jimmy held up a folded piece of paper. “Langly left.”

Confusion swirled. Jen looked at Byers. “You two are still here.”

“Yeah.”

Jen shook her head to clear the confusion but it didn’t help. “I thought you were all leaving together.”

“We’re not leaving,” Frohike said. “We have no plans to, at least.”

“He left us notes,” Jimmy said. 

Each took their note and read it, silently, not sharing. Having finished his, Byers sighed and closed his eyes. 

Here comes the sun in the form of a girl

She's the finest sweetest thing in the world

Take you to heaven tonight…

Langly hated Hole. But he’d written out all the lyrics to Heaven Tonight. 

I feel the horses coming galloping

I will never grow old

I'll go to heaven tonight

Because I love you for what you are 

What the hell was she supposed to make of that? Byers tilted his head to her as she crumpled the paper in her fist. “He was with you last night.”

Jen didn’t deny it. There was no point in hiding it. “We always knew it wasn’t going to be forever.” They were senseless words like her senseless thoughts.

Jimmy shook his head, upset almost to the point of tears. “He can’t have gone far. He’s on foot.”

“He’s not on foot. He had help.” Fucking Doggett. But she knew Doggett had been asked and had simply helped a friend. 

“Let him go.” Frohike sat down in the chair.

“He could need help.” Jimmy ran quickly out the door and Byers tried to follow. 

“Byers!” Frohike held his cane so hard his knuckles were white. “Let him go.” All three of them stopped everything. “He was so young when we met. He was looking for something and he found it with us for a while but… he has to do something else now.” Jen put her hands on Frohike’s shoulders as he started to weep a little, the realization not dulling the pain of the loss after everything. 

Refusing to hear it, Byers shook his head. “No. We can go with him. Help him.”

Frohike clutched his cane harder. “If we could, he’d have taken us along.”

“You knew he was going to do this,” Byers accused.

“So did you.”

Fuming, Byers went out the door. Frohike indicated for Jen to follow him. But Byers only made it a few steps past the shed before he stopped and his shoulders slumped. He put his head back and looked up at the morning sun shining into the east trees. “He would never have left us.” There was Byers’ radical idealism and optimism again, only now it was fighting the truth all around him. 

“Yes, he would have. He did. And we’ll be alright.”

“Maybe he’ll come back,” Byers said. When he looked at Jen, she saw how badly he wanted her to agree, to comfort him and make this all stop. 

“He won’t, Byers. He won’t.”

And then Byers cracked. Jen caught him and held him and they both sobbed there in the middle of the yard while the dappled sun shone through the leaves overhead. They cried for Langly but also for everything that had happened and everything that had been lost. 

Byers wiped his eyes and looked down at her. “You thought we were gonna leave.”

“You three kept talking in secret. Something was up.”

“We’re gonna relaunch the paper.”

Of course they were. Finish the fight and never give up and all that. “You should.”

Langly never came back, so they went on at the cabin.

Jimmy completed the cabin and started readying things for the coming winter. He kept on dominating at Monopoly. He wrote a long letter to Yves/ On one of his trips to town, he mailed it without telling anyone. Not that he revealed their location, but he knew she’d see the postmark and start figuring it out. 

Frohike moved into the new building as soon as it was ready and turned it into a little apartment/darkroom for his photography. He moved a little slower, but his quips came faster and sharper. And he became a big fan of regency romance novels. 

Byers’ headaches gradually tapered, though they never disappeared entirely. He hung up his suits, and mostly wore flannel as he adapted to life in the woods fairly easily. Once an Eagle Scout, after all…

When The Lone Gunmen relaunched as a blog in the depths of winter six months later, immediately they gained a follower. It was him. It couldn’t be anyone else. Frohike framed a picture he had taken of Langly sitting in a chair looking at the water and hung it by the desk where they worked so they would always remember. The front page story of the first edition was about the student protests against the pipeline.

Occasionally Jen would feel like she was going to choke and she would have to step away from everyone and stop everything before they saw - she almost broke but would hold back because it was the right thing even if it hurt like knives in her heart. 

Once in a while Jen would feel Langly, hear him, on a radio station or in static. He was everywhere and nowhere, the dust and air and every one of the stars. It hurt to look at the stars now, but she made a point to do it anyway each night. Byers must have figured out what she was doing because he started stepping outside each night and standing there for a few minutes with her. Rain, cold, snow, sleet, it didn’t matter. For a few minutes every night they stood and looked at the stars.

Other things happened, too… Because this is hardly a good place to end a story like this one. 

The End

(A third and final part is coming because “This” happened.)