Archive of Our Own

everything was perfect all day long - but something wasn’t right…

Langly could not find a single solid touchable thing to point to and say THIS IS WRONG.

it was always sunny, The Ramones were always playing, there were always hot dogs, nothing was wrong… really… right? but he missed someone - right? didn’t he? more than one someone…. Someones, important someones…

he almost had hold of them once…

and then after a very long time, Karah was there -
yep, that was it -
everything was perfect!
except -
something still wasn’t right

something about stars?

the someones were in danger..
everyone was in danger…
he had to do something.

Once upon what seemed a hundred years ago, John Fitzgerald Byers had aspired to the American Dream. He would wear a suit and go to work every day for the United States government in a bureaucratic role. At the end of a day spent assisting a country he believed in, he would return home to a house with a white picket fence, a wife making dinner, his children, and a dog. He had been on his way. Byers had even worked for the FCC once. He had plans.

The universe had different plans for Byers.

Byers thought about all this in the thirty seconds between when he heard a vehicle come up the dirt road, and when he pushed up the sleeves of his blue flannel and grabbed a shotgun.

Wearing worn jeans and a raspberry colored t-shirt, Jen Alden came out of the shed where she’d been working with plant cuttings. She let her work gloves fall to the dirt, tied back her curly hair, and grabbed the other rifle before joining Byers in front of the fire pit near the driveway.

Byers whistled for Melvin Frohike. The older man with the cane stepped out of the cabin, and clipped a leash fixed on the porch to their large black labrador retriever, Cujo. Frohike would release the dog if he had to. While Cujo was a sweet old dog, he was still very protective of his people and made an excellent alarm system.

“You expecting anyone?” Jen asked Frohike over her shoulder. Very few people came to visit, and they needed to know it wasn’t Winnie, Frohike’s longtime girlfriend who lived just down the road.

“Nope.” Frohike put his leather jacket on like he was putting on armor. “She’d have called.”

Jen looked at her watch and then at Byers. “It’s almost four.”

Byers scanned the forest. Nothing appeared to be out there in the dappled sunlight stillness. But he whistled anyway, sending four notes that carried a message into the trees.

After a second, a whistle repeated his notes right back.

He heard Jen suck in a breath. Byers lifted the rifle and readied to protect all the things he held most precious. A shiny black SUV became visible through the trees.

Maybe this was it. Maybe the US Government had found Byers, Frohike, and Jen after fifteen years and was coming to bring them back to face unspeakable horrors. Maybe they’d go down fighting instead.

The SUV turned the final corner. Jen cocked her gun. Byers did the same.

Byers couldn’t see the driver or passengers through the tinted SUV windows. He scanned to see if any more vehicles were following, but there was just the one. There was some hope in that. He and Jen might be able to take one vehicle full of enemies.

A hand reached out the window. A man’s hand. And it was…waving.

“It’s Skinner,” Frohike called out.

“What the hell?” Jen asked. They all knew FBI Assistant Director Walter Skinner. He was a friend, and the reason they had come to the cabin in the first place. But for Skinner to show up without warning when he never had before was strange, and Byers and Jen didn’t put their guns down.

The engine silenced. Walter Skinner, still broad and bald and intimidating despite the years that had passed, stepped out and spoke quickly in his deep voice, “Sorry to drop in unannounced.”

Skinner’s face wasn’t cheery. Something had happened, something huge.

“What are you doing here?” Byers asked, still on alert.

“There’s no threat here, Byers.”

The passenger door of the vehicle opened. When Byers realized who was getting out, he immediately lowered his gun. A woman with long red hair and a face Byers had not seen in far too long got out. She was small and lean and wore black pants and a gray sweater that almost drowned her. He knew her. He would have known her in any clothes, any hairstyle, anywhere.

Byers could not move and could barely breathe. Frohike rushed past him toward the woman as if pulled to her by some force greater than him.

Dana Scully stared at them both with her huge, beautiful eyes. “Melvin?”

She practically flew to Frohike and pulled him into a tight and almost desperate embrace. A second later she brought Byers in, gripping them close and touching their faces. Scully went back and forth between the two men. Memories flooded over Byers, of strange cases and narrow escapes and friendship so deep there had never been a question of facing danger together. Scully was astonished. “I was at your funeral. Oh my God, I cried at your funeral.”

They were all three crying now, and not even pretending they weren’t.

“Hello boys,” a man’s voice broke into the reunion.

Byers saw the unmistakable face of Fox Mulder. A little older, tall, stoic but cocky, walking towards them with so much confidence but also wearing an infuriating smirk on his handsome face. Frohike embraced him, and while Mulder tried to appear aloof, Byers read his true feelings. Mulder, too, would have cried if there hadn’t been so many eyes on him. He let Frohike embrace him and glanced over the man's shoulder to Byers, who Scully was not letting go of. “You know, I saw you three once, after… I thought you were ghosts,” Mulder said.

Because Byers and Frohike had died. At least as far as the US Government was concerned. They had saved the world but contracted a virus in exchange, had survived by luck and science, and had been forced to go into hiding in the aftermath.

And no one had apparently ever told Mulder or Scully, their oldest allies.

“We are,” Byers answered.

Scully held onto Byers tightly. “How are you? Are you alright?”

She meant physically. Scully was a medical doctor. “We're okay.” He knew she would have a million questions about the bioengineered virus that they had been exposed to and how they had recovered. When she asked, which he knew she would, he would tell her honestly about the headaches he got that knocked him out for a full day. Before the virus, he'd never experienced them before. Now, they were a miserable but blessedly infrequent part of his life.

Byers caught Skinner’s attention and asked a question without saying a word. Skinner understood immediately. From his slight nod, Byers knew the secret was still safe.

Mulder smirked at Jen. “And Medusa Alden. We used to call her that.”

Jen scoffed. “Only you ever called me that.”

Skinner also scoffed. “Yeah. Mulder, you're making that up.”

Mulder held up his hands. “I asked her out once and she glared at me so hard I turned to stone. God’s honest truth.”

“And yet you’re still here and talking,” Scully only rolled her eyes a little. She released Byers and wiped her eyes. He did the same, setting the rifle on the bench by the fire pit.

“Dana Scully, Jen Alden,” Skinner made the introduction and the two women shook hands. It seemed strange that the two women had never met before.

“Nice to finally meet you,” Jen said. “I’ve heard a lot of stories.”

Scully smiled at her while subtly glaring at the rest of them. “I wish I could say the same. Apparently I’ve been kept in the dark on a great deal of things.”

Byers asked Skinner. “Where’s Doggett?”

Scully answered the question she thought had been asked. “Doggett left the bureau. Moved to California."

“Is he with Monica?” Jen asked.

“Never was,” Scully answered.

“That's a real shame,” Frohike said. “I thought they really had something.”

“Does Doggett know you’re here?” Jen asked Skinner.

“Doggett knows, too?” Scully asked, growing even more annoyed.

Skinner shook his head in surprise because none of them had ever mentioned that John Doggett had found them at the cabin. “I wasn’t aware that he knew. I didn’t tell him.”

Frohike smiled. “He’s a damn good detective. Showed up on a bike fifteen years ago and Jen almost shot him. Came by a couple times over the years. I think he liked the quiet. Said the fishing was good.”

“I lost touch with him a couple years ago, “ Jen said with sadness. For some reason, she had a soft spot for the former FBI Agent. They hadn’t liked each other when they’d first met, but there was some bond between them that Byers couldn’t have explained if he tried. Maybe it was because they’d met while running from an exploding building…the world was a weird place.

Skinner glanced between Mulder and Scully. “We kept it need-to-know to keep everyone safe.” As if that helped anything. As if Mulder or Scully knowing the truth would have put anyone in more danger than they had been in all these years.

“So what are you doing here now?” Byers asked the obvious question.

He saw the way Mulder, Scully, and Skinner communicated without speaking.

“Should we talk inside?” Scully asked Skinner.

“We can stay out here. It’s safe,” Frohike said quickly. “I scan the area once a week.” There were things inside the cabin that the former FBI agents would notice, that would reveal things it was probably better they didn’t know yet, and Byers needed to keep them from noticing those things long as possible. Maybe even for forever.

Mulder blurted, “Langly contacted us.”

It felt like someone shot him in the chest, but Byers didn’t hesitate. “Where is he?”

That made Mulder’s expression change . “You don’t know?”

Frohike shook his head. “He left fifteen years ago and didn’t tell us where he was going. We haven’t heard a word from him since. Is he alright?”

Mulder spoke directly at Byers. “He’s dead.”

Byers didn't even blink because that didn’t mean anything. As far as the world knew, he was dead. “But he contacted you.”

“Yes. And he’s actually dead. No conspiracy. No shadows and subterfuge.” Mulder spoke softer, letting his words land on Skinner. “He's…in a virtual world, like a virtual heaven now.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Jen asked. She was a little outside the circle, a curious expression that Byers couldn’t read on her pretty face.

Skinner answered. “He uploaded his consciousness to a server to be activated upon his death. He must have died not long after he was uploaded…probably about fourteen years ago. He’s really and truly dead.”

“He died…years ago?” Frohike asked, visibly upset.

Because if Langly had stayed with him and Byers and Jen, he might still be alive.

Skinner nodded. “Yes.”

“Where’s his body? It’s not at Arlington where our tombstones are.”

“We’re working on that.” Skinner replied, shaking his head. “I know that’s not a good explanation.”

“I sorta hoped you’d all built a secret bunker beneath Arlington,” Mulder muttered to Byers. “Stranger things have happened.”

Scully turned to Frohike. “Do you know the name Karah Hamby?”

“No.”

“Yes,” Jen dropped her eyes to the dirt. “I mean…He had written it in his notebook. I saw it. That’s all I know.”

“Out with it,” Frohike demanded of Mulder. “Stop dancing around and start talking.”

Not knowing the whole story, so not sugarcoating anything, Mulder held up a phone. “Langly appeared on my phone. And as soon as he did, soldiers arrived and they shot at Scully and me. Skinner bailed us out and we went to Arlington to find your graves. Langly’s headstone was backwards and his birthday was wrong…I know because he and I share a birthday.” Mulder waved his hand as if to fast forward. “There was a medallion on another grave and it showed us a building in New York called Titanpointe, an NSA mass surveillance station. Oh, and the XFiles are digital now, by the way, if you can believe it.”

“What’s in the files belongs to everyone,” Skinner sighed as if he’d said it before. “That’s the whole point.”

Mulder ignored him. “Langly’s file was gone, but your files were still there and they led us to Karah Hamby. She’s a math professor in Bethesda. She told us that she and Langly wanted a life eternal together, and when a group called Purlieu Services offered the chance, they uploaded their consciousnesses to be activated after their deaths.”

“A life eternal?” Jen asked.

“She’s dead now,” Scully said. “They followed us and the same man who tried to kill us killed her.”

“Oh my God,” Byers breathed.

Mulder held up another phone. “This is her phone. We’ve talked to Langly on it. He’s in what should be his own personal heaven. The Ramones are always playing and the Patriots never win…but he knows it's all wrong. He knows he’s not real anymore. And he says the world’s great minds are all there, but they were all deceived and they’re just slaves.”

“Slaves to what? For what?” Frohike demanded

Mulder took a big breath. “To turn theories of space colonization into reality.”

“Holy shit,” Frohike breathed.

Scully rushed ahead. “We went to New York, to Titanpointe.”

“Scully killed the servers,” Mulder said with admiration.

“And we thought that was the end,” Scully continued. “But then Langly appeared on Mulder’s phone again and told us to destroy the backups…and the man who tried to kill us, the man who killed Karah Hamby…he was there with Langly.”

Wherever Langly was, he was in trouble. Byers could barely stand it. Frohike sat in one of the Adirondack chairs. Jen seemed to have frozen where she stood, gun still by her side. Byers saw that her hand was shaking. He walked over and took the gun from her, setting it on the table by his. She kept her eyes on her feet and did not look at him.

“A life eternal? So…Karah Hamby is uploaded too, if she’s dead?” Frohike asked.

“That seems right,” Scully said. “I’m not certain we understand all of it.”

“The crazy bastard did it,” Frohike shook his head, realizing the answer to a question over a decade old. “That’s what he left to go do. All that time he spent on the computer, he was communicating with her and maybe with other hackers about this…project.” Frohike turned to Byers and Jen. “That’s the why we’ve always wondered about.” He explained to Scully, “We never knew why he left.”

Scully went to sit on the bench beside him. “The FBI found the backup servers. They’re in a top-secret facility outside Atlanta. They’re readying to move in now. It should happen in the next few hours.”

“And that’ll be the end of him. The actual end.” When Scully nodded, Frohike asked, “Is that why you’re here?”

Skinner sighed. “I’m here because you deserve to know what happened to Langly. And because maybe I’ve kept this secret too close for too long.” He looked between his two pet agents, and something passed between the three of them that Byers didn’t even bother trying to decipher because he could not believe what he was hearing.

Mulder held up both phones again. “He just appeared with no warning. So, now we wait and hope he does it again. He might not. He might not be able to even if he wanted to.”

“If he reaches out again…” Skinner said. “Well, it just felt right to be here. And once the backups are destroyed, he’ll really be gone forever.”

“He’s been dead all this time?” Byers asked, still hung up on that point. Grief threatened to bring him to his knees. He remembered Langly and the good old days, living in the converted Maryland warehouse and publishing The Lone Gunmen newspaper. The broke days and adventures, and all the times they’d almost died side by side. Chimpanzees, Nazi poisoners, disguises and blue face paint and cheesesteaks and stakeouts and Jimmy Bond and Yves Adele Harlow. Writing stories until the sun came up powered by coffee and snacks. Trying to fall asleep while Langly blasted The Ramones. The arguments and the bickering and how the tall blonde man with the thick black glasses had always been there with a grin and a quick joke. The way Langly had been one of the best friends Byers had ever had. More than friends. They’d been blood brothers. “The whole time?”

“The whole time,” Scully answered solemnly.

All the moments of hope Byers had ever had that Langly would return. All the times he’d heard weird static or a song on the radio and thought it might be him - it hadn’t been.

But also, maybe the only reason Langly had never come back was because he couldn’t. Maybe if he’d lived, he would have. Even if he’d come back to them in rough shape, they could have helped him. Maybe they could help him now.

Byers felt like he might pass out, and only stayed upright because he knew the others around him were feeling the same. Jen’s jaw was set hard and she wasn’t talking. She had loved Langly with her whole heart. Byers could not look at her for too long, or he would see the agony on her face clearly and he would crumble. She had loved Langly and he had left her to go love someone else and what he left behind was…

Byers realized he would have to tell Jimmy and Yves. They had no idea.

There was work to be done. He could not give into his grief yet. Byers glanced at the trees.

“Excuse me.” Jen spoke quietly at last. Oh, but her voice nearly cracked despite how hard she was clinging to being cool, and she walked into the woods via the well-worn footpath, but Byers knew exactly where she was going.

Skinner stepped forward as if to follow her, but Frohike held up a hand. “You just told Jen the love of her life left her to live forever with another woman and also that he’s dead. Give her some time.” Frohike stared at Skinner until the bigger man backed down.

Then Frohike shot Byers a look, and Byers followed Jen into the trees…

Langly had been gone about seven weeks when Jen realized what was happening. The exhaustion wasn’t surprising given the non-stop physical work and emotional rollercoaster of the previous six months of caretaking and backwoods survival, but it was after she was sick for the third consecutive morning at the smell of coffee that she sat down on the bathroom floor. “Shit,” she whispered.

She hadn’t had a period since early September.

She could not tell Jimmy, Frohike, or Byers.

Maybe it was just a bad dream.

Because if there was a baby, it was Langly’s. And Langly was long gone.

Mostly a reasonable woman, Jen quickly made a plan. In two days, Jimmy Bond would make the weekly run to the town of Paradise for supplies and groceries. She would simply swap turns with him, buy a couple pregnancy tests which she would take in the WalMart bathroom and go from there. Then, she would know for sure. Only after that would it be alright to panic.

“You feeling okay?” Jimmy asked after she emerged from the bathroom after washing her face and brushing her teeth. Of course all three of them were up and active already. Jimmy and John Byers were at the table eating breakfast, and Melvin Frohike was at the stove scrambling eggs.

“Yeah, I just slept badly.” No one would doubt that. She rubbed her neck as if to demonstrate.

“Coffee?” Frohike asked her with concern.

The thought made Jen want to run back to the bathroom, but she grabbed her cold water bottle from the fridge. “I think I should drink less coffee, honestly. I’m too wired lately.”

“Eggs?”

Jen needed to get outside away from the kitchen smells. “Thank you, but I’m not hungry.” She headed out the door and went to what remained of her garden at the end of the season as winter rolled in. She spent most of the day fussing with seeds she’d gathered from the vegetables and flowers for the next year’s garden while trying to remember to breathe.

But, it took Frohike less than 24 hours to put it all together.

When the same scene played out the next morning, he caught her with his words before she made it out the door. “When are you gonna tell us about….you know.”

Damn. Her hand was on the door and she had almost made it outside. “Melvin, drop it.”

“What’s going on?” Byers asked. Oh no, Jimmy perked up, too.

Frohike stared at Jen, keeping all the attention on her. She thought of pushing him into the oven, but the damage was done. They were all too goddamn smart. With a loud sigh, she turned to face all of them. “I’m not one hundred percent sure yet but…I’m probably pregnant.”

When all three of them practically exploded - Byers with confusion, Frohike with a smugness she could have slapped off his face because he’d figured it out, and Jimmy with way too much exuberance for what the situation warranted - Jen shouted them down. “Stop! Please. I…don’t know anything for sure yet and I won’t until I take tomorrow’s supply run. If that's ok with you, Jimmy.”

“Absolutely,” Jimmy said, still grinning.

“Cool,” she said. “So until then, everyone….with love…just shut up about it, ok?”

“Absolutely,” Jimmy repeated. The best of buds, that one.

They let her make it out the door, and Jen didn’t stop walking until she was standing at the edge of the riverbend by the picnic table. She debated walking right out into the water and never coming back.

She heard a noise behind her and knew it was Byers. The sweet man was going to try and comfort her because his heart was huge and he couldn’t ever stand by and let someone be in trouble. Only a thread held her from breaking down. If he stepped forward it would snap. “You know I adore you but if you come at me with your goddamn radical optimism right now I might punch you and I really don’t want to do that.”

Byers, bless him, understood. “Fine.”

“Fine.”

He stared at her. “How sure are you?”

“Pretty sure.” She didn’t explain the missed period, the nausea, and the fact that the timing lined up with the night Langly had come to her before he had run away from all of them. She didn’t need to explain anything. Byers believed her.

“Let us help you, Jen.” He got a little quieter. “Let me help you.”

“I appreciate that but you don’t need to saddle yourself with my problem.”

“This isn’t just your problem.”

“Bullshit. I’m the idiot who got myself into this situation and I am the idiot who will deal with it.”

“You didn’t do it alone.”

“What good does it do to remember that?” The words came out angry and louder than she’d expected, but it was the truth. Yes, it took two people to make a baby but Jen was the only one left at the cabin. They didn’t know where Langly had gone, or if he would ever come back. He probably wouldn’t. They didn’t even know why he had left in the middle of the night. The wound of his departure without explanation was still raw and bleeding for all four of them.

After surviving a bioweapon, after recovering and months of depression, Langly had come to her in the night. He had climbed up to the loft where she slept and they had made love and she had convinced herself it was because he would be alright and he loved her and they would make it work. In the morning, he had vanished, and Jen's heart was still just a pile of shards, sharp and scattered.

Byers returned to the cabin. Jen sat with her head in her hands for a long time.

In a Walmart bathroom the next day, Jen saw a positive result. She took a second test which was also positive. “Shit,” she whispered. She was going to have a baby. That was overwhelming enough, but the more immediate and pressing problem was that she had disappeared from society six months earlier. She lived off-grid and out of the system now, and a hospital would throw her right back in and could expose Byers and Frohike, who had had to leave the system after saving the world from a bioengineered virus.

Should she leave them to keep them safe? Could she leave like Langly had?

Work the problem, then the next one.

She bought prenatal vitamins and a copy of What to Expect When You’re Expecting and stole a phone book from the pay phones on her way out of the store. When she arrived back at the cabin, all three men happened to be nonchalantly waiting for her outside. Jimmy was putting a screen door on the smaller second cabin he had built, Frohike was reading, and Byers was pacing but pretended to be studying a tree when she arrived.

She didn’t need to say a thing. They knew her too well. But, to their credit, no one said a thing about it while they hauled all the groceries and supplies she’d bought inside. The exhaustion swept over her again, and Jen yawned and started for the ladder to climb up to her loft. Maybe she could go to sleep for nine months and wake up and it would have all sorted itself out.

Jimmy stepped forward, the first to talk. “Ok I know you want us to shut up about it but…the only thing I’ll say, other than congratulations, is that you can’t sleep up in the loft anymore.”

“I’m pregnant, Jimmy. I didn’t break a leg.”

“I know, but like…you’re gonna be super tired, and then you’re gonna get bigger and it’s gonna be hard and uncomfortable, and I would feel terrible if you slipped or something…” Ugh, the sweet doofus meant well and made a good point.

“He’s not wrong,” Byers said gently from the other side of the room. “Move down here.”

Jen nodded in silent agreement and Jimmy immediately got to work changing the two rooms over. Letting herself rest, Jen sat on the couch and flipped to the yellow pages of the phone book so she could look for hospitals and doctors. How in the world was she supposed to actually deliver this baby? She stopped when she saw a listing for a midwife, and an address that was just a few miles away. Jen tore the page out and shoved it in her pocket for later before falling asleep on the couch. The guys let her sleep for the rest of the day.

A week later, she drove to the address. She got out of her car and walked to the door. Then, she panicked and immediately turned around.

A woman’s voice called out to her. “I’m Winnie Dietz. What’s your name? Honey?”

Jen saw a woman with long straight white hair and a lot of beaded necklaces standing in the doorway of the house holding a mug. “Jen.”

“Well, Jen. Are you gonna have a baby? That’s usually the reason women I don’t know show up at my door.” Winnie held the screen door open. “Come on in. I just made some sweet tea.”

Winnie was a former nurse and excellent at soothing nerves. She talked Jen through all her options and timelines, gave her a notebook to write down dates and symptoms and issues, and advised her on diet and things to do for the next couple months. Jen was to call her once a week, see her once a month until the seventh month, and at that point she would check in more frequently. Winnie’s only requirements were that Jen agree to go to a hospital if things went bad.

Delicately, Winnie asked, “Is there a father?”

“He’s not gonna be part of this. He doesn’t even know about this and I don’t know where he is.” She sounded pathetic even to herself.

Winnie nodded. “Happens more often than you know, girl. Don’t lose too much sleep over it.”

The amount of sleep Jen lost over the following months could not be quantified.

Byers forgave her snapping at him and they continued their nightly tradition of going outside and looking at the stars for a few minutes before going to bed. Jen often thought maybe Langly was somewhere looking up at the stars, too. Or maybe he was a star by now.

“I was going to bring you a beer,” Byers said one night.

Jen groaned. “I’m not supposed to have alcohol, caffeine, soft cheeses, sushi, happiness, a good night’s sleep, comfortable pants, or any of the joys of life for the next seven-ish months.”

“Oh, don’t worry. Pregnant women can still play Monopoly.” Jen groaned and it made Byers laugh. Jimmy forced them all to play the endless board game at least once a week.

Sighing, Jen pulled her knees up to her chest. “I didn’t dream about any of this when I was a kid, you know. Kid me imagined that by now I would be a fashionable lady reporter talking like some Katherine Hepburn character.”

Byers chuckled. “Hey, I used to literally dream the American Dream. House with a white picket fence, wife and 2.5 kids, a dog…”

“Well, if Jimmy actually adopts a dog and names it Cujo, and I have this baby, you might be on your way, pal. Shoot, Jimmy would build you a white picket fence if you asked.”

Byers took a second, then asked, “Are you gonna have it? Either way, you have my support.”

“Thank you.” Jen shrugged. “It feels like the last piece of him I have. Is that a stupid reason?”

“Not at all.” She knew he would get it. They were all mourning Langly’s departure in their own ways. Byers was spending probably too much time working on relaunching The Lone Gunmen newspaper as a blog as if Langly would magically reappear and everything would go back to the way it was.

“But, if I have this baby, I can’t ever run off again.”

“Were you planning to?”

The urge was always there, but she had roots now. “It feels like I’ve run to the edge of the world. Funny, I’m mad at Langly for leaving, and he just did what I always did. There's poetry in that, I suppose.” Byers hesitated. She felt the way he wanted to say something, and knocked her shoulder against his. "Spit it out, bud.”

“I…I’ll be the father. If you want me to be. I’d like to be.”

Jen’s heart nearly burst at the kindness in his offer. There could be no better partner for something like this, but she could not let him in yet. “I appreciate that, really. I know you would be an amazing Dad. But this is my mistake, and I can’t let you tie yourself to me and to this forever. If the day ever comes when you want, or need, to leave here, I don’t want to be the thing that holds you back.”

Clearly, he had more to say, but didn’t speak. So they left it there.

Jen considered leaving. She thought about how she could put all her things in a bag, take the car, and drive off in the night and go make a new start somewhere else. She could do it. But then Jimmy would set up Monopoly or Melvin would start telling her a fascinating story, and she would push it off for another day…and another…and another…

Jimmy came home from town one day with a crib, but he put it in the shed and didn’t say a thing. Jen bought some baby clothes and folded them into a drawer. She caught Byers reading What to Expect and laughed to herself at the idea of him learning about clogged breast ducts and why many women needed stool softeners while pregnant.

Jen kept it all very close and did not involve them as they made it through that first winter at the cabin, cozy and warm together. Hours upon hours of Monopoly were played, and there were squabbles like any close-knit group has. Jen got bigger and took to wearing stretchy dresses because her pants stopped fitting. She felt the baby kick, but kept it to herself. She kept a lot of things to herself because she still felt this was her problem to deal with. She slept a lot. If she had said one word, or let them see her on the days it got too hard and she would go to the shed and cry for a while, they would have encircled her with support and love. But she couldn’t put it on them after everything they’d been through.

Spring came, leaves emerged, and Jen knew the day was coming. Someone always kept an eye on her, and she wondered if they had collectively discussed it. She sucked in a sharp breath one afternoon out by the garden as she felt a sharp pain in her stomach, and Jimmy was suddenly right there beside her. It passed, and Jimmy nodded sagely. “It could be a Braxton-Hicks contraction.”

She looked at him. “Have you all read What to Expect?”

“Duh,” Jimmy said. “We wanted to know what to expect.”

One morning at 4am, Jen’s water broke.

The guys were asleep, so she threw her white sweater over her pink nightgown, grabbed the bag she had readied and her keys and drove to Winnie’s slowly while breathing as she’d been taught while the contractions were still far apart. When she got there, she honked and Winnie rushed out to help her into the house.

“Is it too late to rethink this whole thing?” Jen asked.

“You got this,” Winnie assured her.

Jen closed her eyes to bite back the panic as Winnie got her into the house and into the bedroom she had readied for this exact thing. Now or never. A part of Jen wished she had done it all differently, that she’d turned Langly away that last night, or that she’d leaned on the men who had offered their help. She wished Melvin was there to try and make her laugh with stupid jokes and that Jimmy was there to be her best bud. She wished she had let Byers be the partner he’d offered to be and that she’d told him everything, but it was too late now. Jen would do this by herself. History was full of women who had birthed babies in fields and by themselves and made it through.

An hour later, Jen was in full labor. Sweaty and grunting, not at all beautiful.

The sound of a honking horn from outside broke into the Enya music Winnie was playing to set a calm mood. Winnie stepped to the window. “There’s a van out front.”

“Oh Lord…” Of course there was.

“Do you know them?”

“They’re my friends.” Of course they had figured it out. Of course they had come for her.

“Do you want them here?” She did. She really did. Fear and panic swirled in Jen’s head. More than anything she wanted her friends. But she couldn’t answer because it all landed on her at once, the grief and the fear and the hope, and she started crying too hard to speak.

Winnie went out the door of the bedroom. Jen only heard parts of the conversation, but Winnie would later tell her that Byers burst in the screen door first, and Winnie had stepped in his way and faced off with the man she had never met.

“Is Jen Alden here?”

“Are you the father?”

Byers had not hesitated. “I will be. Please.”

Making a judgement call, Winnie had shown them into the bright bedroom. Frohike made it to Jen first, rushing to grab her hand. Byers came to the other side of the bed with Jimmy right behind him. “You take one photo of this and I will throw you in the river at the first opportunity, Melvin.”

“Only after the tyke is born, I promise.”

Fear, delight, and a little bit of hurt all shone in Byers’ eyes as he smoothed her hair back. “You really thought we’d let you do this alone, didn’t you?”

“I told you it’s not your problem.” But he held one of her hands and Frohike held the other through the next contraction and the rest of the ones that followed, as Jimmy encouraged her like he was cheering on a sports team, and she screamed and pushed and at last there was relief and Winnie held a small pink wriggling body in her hands.

“It’s a girl,” Winnie smiled at Jen.

Jen saw her perfect little girl.

And then everything went dark.

When she woke, she saw the relief on Winnie’s face. Byers stood at the foot of the bed, holding the baby now wrapped in a yellow blanket, and Frohike and Jimmy were staring wide-eyed at her.

“There you are. Gave us a little scare, but looks like you just fainted. That happens.” Winnie leaned in to wipe Jen’s face with a cold cloth and whispered. “That’s a good man you got there.” She meant Byers.

“He’s not mine,” Jen managed.

Winnie raised an eyebrow. “You sure about that?”

Jen lightly raised a hand to swat her.

Byers brought the baby over and sat beside her on the bed while they both gazed at the tiny scrunched face and wee little fingers. Winnie signaled to Frohike and Jimmy and the three of them stepped away to give some privacy.

Jen took in the beauty of her daughter as she held her against her bare skin for the first time.

Her daughter. Langly’s daughter.

“Did you think about names?” Byers asked.

“I thought about naming him after a President if he was a boy, but I’m not naming a little girl Grover or Ronald or Bill.” Byers, named after JFK, laughed softly at the idea. “But I don’t hate the idea of naming her after a historical figure.”

“What do you have in mind?”

Jen had spent hours thinking it over. “Rachel Carson. Silent Spring changed my life. And, being that she’s gonna have to grow up in the woods….”

Byers smiled and put his finger in the baby’s tiny hand. The little fingers wrapped around him instantly. Jen had never seen his face like this before. Clear, open, as if all his troubles had lifted and so damned bright it almost hurt to see. As if hope was surging back into him after so much sadness. “Rachel Carson Alden. I like it.”

She made up her mind then and there to let him in if he still wanted in. “Or…Rachel Carson Byers.” Byers was shocked. “Hey, you said you were all in. Time to put up or shut up, pal.”

Tears rimmed his big blue eyes. “I’m all in.”

They put Jen C. Alden and John F. Byers on the birth certificate that Winnie would file with no fanfare at the courthouse the following day. One little baby born in a remote area of Michigan could probably go unnoticed. It was a risk but it had to be done. Jen slept on and off for the rest of the day and night, in between holding Rachel and learning how to feed her and memorizing her. Byers never left their side, and Winnie taught him how to swaddle a baby, which he mastered immediately.

The next morning, Frohike and Jimmy returned to take the new family home.

Overnight, they had moved things around to make space for Rachel. Jimmy had assembled the crib in the big bedroom, and Frohike had moved into the smaller bedroom. There were two beds in the big room now, and Byers and Jen immediately shoved them together so Jen could nurse Rachel in the night and she could sleep between them.

All four of them were suddenly in the all-consuming trenches of having a baby. 2am feedings, diapers, feedings, baby swings and strollers and a baby carrier and a floor covered in toys and clogged ducts and tears and utter exhaustion - but also, so much joy. Rachel took their sadness in her tiny little body and defeated it every minute, every day, as she grew to sitting, then standing, then walking, talking, and becoming a small person and the love of all their lives.

Jen struggled. Sometimes, she saw her perfect blonde child and saw Langly. Rachel was a happy baby who became a happy toddler. While she loved the girl, Jen fought against a depression that sometimes made her sleep all day for the first two years. She would never have admitted it, but Byers loved Rachel long before she did. On the days when she and Byers both faltered - when she sobbed until she slept and his headaches knocked him down so he had to go sleep in darkness - Frohike or Jimmy swept in like the best uncles in the universe.

When Rachel was six months old, Jimmy finally made plans to head back to his life. Before he left, he brought home a black lab puppy and named it Cujo. Jen knew it was for their protection, that Jimmy didn’t want to leave them to fend for themselves. Jimmy left, but returned on Rachel’s first birthday and brought Yves Adele Harlow with him. An astonishing beauty, Yves surprised Jen with how down to earth she was and how being in the woods didn’t faze her at all. Uncle Jimmy and Auntie Yves never missed a birthday and excelled at being the cool Aunt and Uncle who always showed up with the best presents. Yves, an excellent hacker, worked a little magic to keep them protected - aliases, rerouted bank accounts, whatever. Somewhere along the way she unloaded the Maryland warehouse where The Lone Gunmen had formally lived to a developer and dropped a weirdly large sum of money into a bank account.

Jen made herself sit outside every night, come rain or come shine, to see the stars. Even on the hard days, she would force herself to spend a few minutes. Byers almost always came with her.

On the night of Rachel’s second birthday, he handed her a glass of red wine. “Frohike is showing Rachel The Rocky Horror Picture Show before bed. Says she’s old enough to experience the classics now.”

“Perfect,” Jen answered and then fake gasped at the wine. “Wine? But what do the books say?”

“That one glass of red wine never hurt anybody.”

“Can I stop at one is the question?”

“We could make moonshine out in the woods if you really want to go nuts.” He toasted her. “Happy Birthday, Jen.”

“Happy Birthday, Byers.”

Years passed. Rachel grew up a child of the forest. They taught her at home to keep her out of the system, and she was incredibly bright and loved science and stories. Frohike became Uncle Melvin and read her Stephen King at far too young an age, and also taught her photography. Jen made sure she knew the names of every plant in the area and which ones were edible and which were poisonous and taught Rachel how to make block prints and tree rubbings. Byers taught her history and math, the deal being that if she sat for a few hours of school every day the rest of the afternoon was hers to run wild in the woods with Cujo.

She grew tall and lean and her hair stayed the same striking blonde. She was wickedly smart.

Langly had hated his childhood on a farm in Nebraska. They made sure Rachel did not hate hers, as a tribute to him. They gave her all the love they wished Langly had had.

When she turned ten and showed a fast skill with technology and computers, the adults all panicked a little, but Byers started showing her how to use the internet responsibly.

She loved rock’n’roll, too. Jen felt downright giddy on the day she found twelve year old Rachel listening to Hole on her old discman while laying in the hammock. How many times had she and Langly ragged on each other about Jen’s liking Hole and Langly’s liking Korn?

They took trips to all the waterfalls in northern Michigan. They canoed and camped. The swiftness in which Byers became an outdoorsy Dad was beautiful to watch. Jen saw him come alive and be free, sleep under stars and light campfires and head off on hikes and build a treehouse and…the way he smiled. Before the cabin, he had always worn suits like he needed them to keep order in his life. Now, he wore jeans and flannel and got dirty and didn’t even care.

If it had all meant nothing else, Byers found happiness. And that made Jen happy.

Together, they made their own world.

All her life, Rachel Carson Byers had known the plan. If strangers arrived without warning, she was to run to the woods and go to one of a few designated places. If she heard her Dad’s whistle, she should answer it one of two ways - either she was ok and could hold there, or she needed immediate help.

When she’d been a kid, she’d thought it was all a game. Now that she was fifteen, it was dawning on her how strange her life was; why she and her parents lived so remotely, why she had been homeschooled until this past September when she’d entered high school. Now that she was surrounded by other teens, she felt really weird. She thought she was too tall and skinny, and tried hard to get her fine blonde hair to do much of anything.

She loved Nancy Drew books and mystery novels and was starting to piece together the odd life she, her parents, and her Uncle Melvin lived in the remote cabin outside Paradise, Michigan. They ran a blog called The Lone Gunmen, which exposed local and state government and business corruption. She knew they had once all been journalists on the East coast. Her Mom had written a lot of articles about mushrooms and psychedelics.

One time she had searched for her Dad and found a grave listing at Arlington National Cemetery. There had been one for Uncle Melvin, too.

There were clearly things no one had ever told her.

So one day when Rachel was riding her bike up the road home after being dropped off by the school bus and heard an engine approaching and it wasn’t the van, the car, or Winnie’s truck, she dove for the ditch and tossed her bike into the brush. Then, she ran for the shortcut back to the cabin and arrived only a minute before the vehicle did. She saw her Dad, her Mom, and Uncle Melvin coming outside and was going to join them, but her Dad had whistled so she crouched behind some thick buckthorn brush and stayed still, listening.

Walter Skinner was there and she knew him, but there were two people with him Rachel didn’t know. She assumed they were the reason her Dad told her to stay hidden. Maybe they were the reason for all the secrets.

The conversation the adults had had didn’t make any sense to Rachel. But then the redheaded woman had embraced her Dad and Uncle Melvin with tears and said something about their funeral.

Her Mom had a strange look on her face. Her Mom was strange in general, a creature Rachel admired and loved without understanding, but a change came over her after something the man said. When her Mom left the group to walk into the woods, Rachel kept low and circled to their meeting spot.

Rachel’s Mom stopped in the clearing and spoke to the trees. “I know you’re there,” she called. Rachel stepped out from behind the oak tree and faced her Mom. “How much of all that did you overhear?”

“Most of it. Who are those people with Walter?”

Her Mom took a deep breath. “They’re FBI agents. Fox Mulder and Dana Scully.”

“FBI? Do we need to run?” Rachel rushed to her Mom.

“No,” her Mom said, setting a hand on her shoulder. “It’s alright.”

“Are they here for Dad and Uncle Melvin?”

“Yes, but not here to take them anywhere or arrest them. I’m not even sure how to explain all this to you…”

“I know there’s stuff I don’t know,” Rachel blurted.

“There’s a lot of stuff you don’t know,” Her Mom answered, agreeing with her.

“Richard Langly. There’s a photo of him on the wall above the computer. He worked with Dad and Uncle Melvin. Dad…isn’t actually my Dad, is he?”

Her Mom answered immediately, looking Rachel directly in the eyes in a way she never had before. “Richard Langly is your biological father, but John Byers has been your Dad since the second you entered this world. He has been there for every moment. He is your Dad in every way that matters and he loves you more than anything on this earth. Never forget that.”

Rachel felt as if she was standing before a big table covered in pieces of a puzzle and she had just snapped the border pieces into place. “Did you love Richard Langly?”

“Galaxies,” there was no hesitation in her Mom’s answer.

“Do you love Dad?”

Her Mom closed her eyes. “I know this is very confusing, Rachel.”

Rachel repeated it. “Do you love Dad?”

“Jen,” Her Dad was hurrying through the trees toward them.

Rachel’s Mom saw him, then turned back to Rachel. “You two and Melvin are my world. You know that.”

It wasn’t the answer Rachel wanted, so she didn’t back down, letting her Dad loop into the conversation because had a right to know everything, too. “Why did he leave you?”

Rachel’s Mom turned to her Dad, a little exasperated. “I…told her. About Langly. She asked.”

A flash of fear washed over his face, and Rachel wished it hadn’t. He was the most important person in her life, the one who understood her best. She rushed to say, “I knew something was up. I don’t look like either of you.” There was no mistaking that she was very blonde and they both had brown hair.

Her Dad nodded. “Nancy Drew is on the case.”

Rachel’s Mom spoke. “Frohike, Byers, and Langly made three. He was the third Lone Gunmen. And he was incredibly smart, and a hacker…You know how, when we’re in the woods and it feels like our very own private world, like Mandy and her cottage? Well…Langly was building worlds, just with computers. Inside them. We didn’t know half of what he was doing. We still barely know.”

Rachel cocked her head. “And he’s dead in this world, the real world, but he’s still alive in that one?”

Her Mom looked at her Dad. “I guess so?”

Her Dad shrugged. “I’m not sure I understand it entirely. Years ago, Mulder and Scully had a case where a man named David Gelman created a sentient AI and turned it loose inside the internet so it could evolve. And there were a couple hackers who wanted to upload their consciousness to a sentient AI. To live forever. I didn’t know it was really possible. There were a couple other cases, too. If Langly was this interested in it, he never mentioned it to me.”

“He spent hours doing things we never knew about,” she said. “He would get up in the night…maybe this was it.”

They spoke to each other in the way people who have been partners for decades did, with words that didn’t make sense to anyone else. Rachel watched them. “Does he, or did he ever, know about me?”

“No,” Her Dad said. “If he had known, he would never have left.” She saw the look her Mom gave him. “You know it’s true.”

Rachel’s Mom did not appear to know that at all. “It’s a very long story, Rachel. But…we live out here because fifteen years ago John and Melvin and Langly saved the world by exposing themselves to a bioweapon. They lived, but they had to go into hiding, and Walter arranged it and Jimmy and I came with them. Jimmy was a super close friend, and I…was in love with Langly. We didn’t know if they would even wake up.” She closed her eyes for a second as her voice shook, but smiled and looked at Rachel’s Dad. “But, they did. After Langly woke up, though, he was different. I knew something was happening to him but I didn’t understand. He felt he had to leave for some reason. The night before he left he came to me…” Rachel watched her Dad as he listened to her Mom’s words like he didn't know what she would say next. Even people in love could have secrets. “...I don’t regret it. I never have. But in the morning he was gone. I know he was saying goodbye to me the only way he could at that point.”

Rachel’s Dad took a step closer. “You knew he was going to leave?”

She shook her head. “I just knew he couldn’t stay.”

For the first time, Rachel had a name for the ghost that haunted her Mom, the weight she carried that never let her really be happy. Maybe she had been happy with Richard Langly once upon a forever ago.

Her Dad took over. “Langly is in some sort of virtual heaven now, but it’s wrong. It’s not what he signed up for. And, because he’s brilliant, he figured it out and wants Mulder to help shut it all down. So that’s what the FBI is going to do. But Skinner came here to tell us all this because he knew we would want to know…” Her Dad’s eyes got watery and Rachel went to hug him. He held her tight and kissed the top of her head. She was almost as tall as he was now.

“Can we trust them?” Her Mom asked her Dad, and Rachel knew it was about her.

Her Dad smiled. It was his real smile, the true and genuine one that came so easily to him, and his blue eyes sparkled as he reached out to take her Mom’s hand in his. “We always have.”

Mulder and Scully could still be trusted. He had to believe that.

So, Byers and Jen took Rachel back to the cabin. Jen went in first. Byers Frohike had brought everyone inside and they were standing around the round table. Coffee was brewing and Mulder was looking at the area where all the computer stuff and work files were.

Byers came in, holding Rachel’s hand to bring her into the cabin. He intended to introduce them but when he saw Mulder and Scully’s faces, he lost the ability to speak.

Frohike, however, never ever lost the ability to speak. “Fox Mulder, Dana Scully, this is Rachel Carson Byers.”

The realization, processed on their two faces, started as a unified shock, but then Mulder tried to stay stoic while Scully turned to Skinner realizing there was even more he hadn’t told them.

“There it is,” Mulder said. “The reason. She’s Langly’s kid.”

“Tread carefully,” Skinner warned him.

“She’s our kid,’ Frohike answered. Byers set a hand on his friend’s back because he was right. Rachel was the product of all four of them - Langly, Jen, Byers, and Frohike.

“Hi Rachel,” Skinner greeted as he came forward to give her a quick hug.

“Hi Walter,” she replied. But Byers saw the way she sized up the two agents, settling quickly on Mulder as the one to watch. The livewire, the danger. Too damn smart, this kid.

“How do you feel about The Ramones?” Mulder asked her.

“They’re okay,” she answered.

“I asked because of your shirt.”

“It’s my Mom’s. I stole it from her.” Rachel folded her arms over the shirt. Byers smiled. Sometimes he could hear Langly’s combative brattiness in her, and her hackles were raised by Mulder.

Mulder heard it, too. “Like looking at a picture,” Mulder muttered.

Heavy tension sat on all of them until Frohike clapped his hands. “I’m gonna make us all some dinner. Rachel, sous chef?”

“Yes chef,” she replied with relief at being able to do something.

Byers and Jen moved to Mulder, Scully, and Skinner. “Did he know about her?” Mulder asked.

“He was gone before I realized,” Jen said quietly.

Scully seemed surprised. “And you had a baby out here all by yourself?”

“I had a midwife. She lives up the road.” Jen didn’t say more about Winnie to keep her out of all this. The woman was a friend and ally, an aging hippie who lived in the woods to be alone just as much as they did. She helped women through pregnancies and grew excellent weed and heirloom tomatoes.

“But there’s a record of her in the system,” Scully said. “Isn’t that dangerous?”

Byers shook his head. “Yves Adele Harlow helped us out with that. She has a social security number and a birth certificate and all that, but she’s as much a ghost as we are.”

“Forest spirits,” Mulder glanced at Scully. “I told you things lived in the woods.”

“They’re people, not spirits.” Scully rolled her eyes at Mulder.

“How have you two been?” Byers asked them. “How’s William?”

He immediately wished he had not asked, for Scully’s face darkened and Mulder’s eyes shot to her before he spoke. “We have a lot of catching up to do,” Mulder answered quickly. “It’s been a long time.”

“Should we get a hotel in town?” Skinner asked.

“Stay. We can make room,” Byers replied, letting them change the subject. “No one sleeps in the loft anymore, so that’s open and there’s always the couch.” If they went to town and Langly reached out, he would never see his friend again. Even though it was only a slim possibility now, Byers felt like he would die for the chance to lay eyes on Langly one more time. “So…we just wait now?”

“We wait. Might not even happen, but…”

“We wait,” Jen ordered.

Scully pointed to the windows. “Was that a heron I saw on the lake?” I

It was an invitation for Jen to join her outside, and Jen understood it immediately. “Yeah, he comes by everyday.” The two women started talking and left the cabin to walk to the water and around the homestead for a while.

Rachel helped Frohike cook dinner. Byers watched the way everyone moved through the space and around each other. All the closest of friends who had years of distance between them and were trying to find ways to reconnect. Skinner stayed by the kitchen and asked Rachel about school and teenager stuff, while Frohike kept handing Skinner cans to open and vegetables to chop. Mulder kept a distance away, almost as if he was afraid to get close for fear he would lose something again.

Frohike and his sous chefs made a marvelous dinner of stir fry with chicken and vegetables, and everyone found places to perch while they ate. The conversations were nice, but they weren’t about anything of substance, just old memories and friends - names Byers hadn’t thought about in a long time; Kimmy Belmont, Morris Fletcher…

“Remember the time you three tricked me into coming to Vegas?” Scully asked.

“I thought you were gonna kick our asses,” Frohike replied.

“I was,” she said. “But after I was drugged and you all helped me get un-drugged, I figured we were even.”

The subject of the funeral came up. Mulder looked down and Byers read his unhappiness with the whole situation. He had been on the run then and hadn’t even come to their funeral, but The Lone Gunmen had gone to a funeral for him once that hadn’t turned out to be real. It was a strange friendship, but that didn’t mean it didn’t mean an awful lot to all of them.

Scully set down her fork. “I always thought it was weird that I didn’t get to do the medical examinations, your autopsies,” Scully said.

“That’s what Doggett said bugged him, too,” Jen said.

Scully agreed with her former partner. “Of course now I know why, but back then… because I could not imagine this, I imagined the worst. That there was nothing left of you.” She gave Skinner such a look of fury, and Byers felt the tension between them.

Byers saw how Rachel had stopped eating. Suddenly, she got up, left her plate, and almost ran outside.

“I’m sorry,” Scully said. “I didn’t think….”

“She doesn’t know any of it,” Jen explained. “We haven’t told her anything.”

“I’m sorry to bring this here,” Skinner said. “Maybe we should have just let it be.”

Byers shook his head. “We needed to know. All of us.” He and Jen both got up from the table.

Jen stopped herself at the door. “Go after her. Talk to her.” Jen ran a hand through her hair and spoke quietly before she grabbed Byers’ arm. “You’re so much better at this than I am. You always have been. Tell her everything. I’ll stay with them.”

Knowing she meant everything. Byers went after Rachel, and was glad when Frohike fell into step with him. “There’s a big story to tell, and you’re not gonna do it alone, pal.”

They found her sitting on the small dock they had built four years earlier for easier canoe launching.

“Wanna talk?” Byers asked. “I know this is a lot.”

Rachel whirled on them. “You guys kept so much from me. Like, this is why we live here and why I didn’t go to school until now and…why I’m not good with other people.”

Frohike chuckled. “God, you remind me of him. You’re your Mom, too, but…Langly was impulsive, bratty even. But he was also funny and brilliant and deeply kind and loyal. The best friend a guy could ever have. We had so many adventures. I can’t tell you how many times we nearly died. But we were always together. We had a lot of fun.”

“Why did he leave you guys? Why did he leave Mom?”

“I don’t know how anyone could ever leave your Mom,” Byers said. If there was one thing he would never understand about it all, it was how Langly could have walked away from Jen.

“Is this why she is like she is? Haunted?”

Byers went to her, holding her arms in his hands. “Your Mom loves you more than anything. Broken hearts are like broken bones, though. They heal, but it’s not always the same as it was before.”

“Who were you before?” Rachel asked, looking between the two men. “It feels like there’s a story I’ve never been told.”

Byers let out a small laugh despite how deeply unfunny everything was. “We were planning to tell you everything on your sixteenth birthday. We almost made it, too.”

“Might as well do it now,” she replied. “The FBI is sitting at our dinner table.”

“There’s a story,” Byers began. “It’s a huge one. Spanning decades and so many people. Us and Langly and Jen and Mulder and Scully and Skinner and Jimmy and Yves and an FBI agent you never met named John Doggett who once ran from an exploding building with your Mom and... “

“Mom ran from an exploding building?”

“Hey, your Mom got in as much trouble as we did,” Frohike said.

“Tell me everything.”

That was the curiosity he had banked on. “You might want to sit down.” Byers indicated the old picnic table by the water, but Rachel didn’t move.

“I mean, have a seat if you want to hear about vast government conspiracies…and, of course, aliens.” Frohike said the word aliens with special emphasis, knowing it would make her too curious to stay grumpy. Byers smiled.

“Aliens? They’re real?”

Frohike patted the bench of the picnic table, and Byers had never been more grateful for his friend and his ability to spin yarns and talk to anyone at any time. “Very much so. I had a hard time believing it, too. You wanna talk about aliens, you talk to Mulder. He might be the world’s greatest expert. See, he and Scully used to work for a small and much unappreciated branch of the FBI called The X-Files…”

It took hours to tell the whole story. They only paused when Rachel started yawning, and promised to pick the story up the next day.

Back in the cabin, Byers ordered Rachel to bed. Skinner was asleep on the couch and Scully and Mulder were at the table, talking quietly. Byers said goodnight and went to the room he and Jen shared, knowing he would find her in the dark.

For all the years they had slept next to each other, partners and parents and the closest of friends, they had kept each other’s hearts at arm’s reach. Of course there had been nights when they had reached for each other in the quiet and come together, two bodies in need of touch and comfort, but they never spoke about it in the daylight. The intimacy they shared was deeper than sex - the knowing every raise of an eyebrow or being able to tell on sight what the other person was thinking. Knowing you could trust the other completely, on bad days and sick days and hard days. Knowing how the other breathed and slept and thrilled.

Neither of them ever mentioned love. Love seemed a frivolity. What they shared was greater. While Byers pained to know the truth about Langly, he knew Jen was dying inside from the pain she was feeling. So, as was his habit, he pushed down what he had come to feel for her.

Jen was in bed, but she was not asleep. As soon as Rachel had been born, they’d pushed two of the twin beds together and taken to sleeping side by side to trade off nighttime feedings and wakings. When Rachel turned two they had moved her into the small bedroom, but the beds had never come apart. Byers knew by her breathing and movement that she was awake, probably thinking and overthinking and riding waves of emotion.

“How’s Rachel?” Jen asked as he quickly changed into a t-shirt and pajama pants and slipped into the sheets.

Byers lay down. She was facing away from him. “She’s remarkably good for someone who just learned the entire history of The Xfiles and The Lone Gunmen and everything else. She’ll be asleep in less than five minutes.”

“Are you alright?” she asked.

“I’m more confused than I’ve ever been. You?”

He waited, knowing she would start talking. “Langly wanted to live forever with Karah Hamby, whoever she is. And he didn’t want that with me. It’s gonna take a minute for that not to sting.”

“He loved you.” It was the one thing Byers knew to be true. He had known Langly before Jen, and after, and there was no doubt in his mind that his friend had loved her as well as he could.

“Did he? Because it sure seems like as soon as I was out of his sight he was online living another life. He would …be with me and then…spend the rest of the night talking to her? Jokes on me, I suppose. Because I loved him, at least.” Byers’ heart hurt for her, but he didn’t try to convince her of anything because maybe he didn’t know the whole truth at all.. “Whatever happened to him, I’m glad he went on and loved someone enough to do….that. Sorry. I’m just pissed. And sad.”

“I understand.” Byers took her hand beneath the blankets. “Pissed and sad. Me too.”

“You are Rachel’s Dad,” Jen said, suddenly rolling over to face him. “No matter what Fox Mulder jokes about or what anyone thinks. No one could have done a better job.” She set a hand on his chest under the blankets.

“I know,” he said. “Jen, I know.”

“What a mess.”

“What a mess,” he agreed.

He held onto her hand while she fell asleep. Unable to sleep himself, Byers got up and went into the main room where he heard voices talking quietly. Skinner slept on, but Mulder and Frohike were at the table, talking and having a beer. Mulder kicked a chair out for Byers, who grabbed his own beer from the fridge and joined them.

“Look at you, Grizzly Adams. Living in the woods, not a three piece suit in sight, raising a kid who isn’t yours.”

“Yes she is,” Byers replied.

“Fuck off, Mulder,” Frohike snapped.

“My bad,” Mulder said, serious upon seeing their faces. “Funny isn’t it? We chased conspiracies, and then became them. And now you and the still-lovely Miss Alden are parents.”

“How’s she doing?” Frohike asked Byers.

“Confused. Upset. Sad.” Byers shrugged. “Same as the rest of us.”

“Was he cheating on her?”

“I don’t think it was like that. I don’t know what it was…”

Mulder glanced at the bedroom door. “You two share a room?”

Byers nodded. “It started when Rachel was first born.”

“The kid is fifteen now.” Mulder raised a suggestive eyebrow.

Ugh. He knew Mulder was going to take it that way. For all his genius, he had always been a weird hornball at his core. “It’s not like that, Mulder.”

“Byers, come on.”

“Lay off, Mulder,” Frohike frowned.

“I don’t know what it is. She’s my best friend’s girl,” Byers blurted. Even as he said it and as he saw their expressions, he realized how ridiculous it sounded.

“She’s not, though,” Mulder said.

“And she hasn’t been for a long, long time,” Frohike said, staring at Byers as if he just understood something that he’d been curious about.

“I didn’t think Langly had it in him. Two beautiful women…” Mulder raised his beer. “To the secret Casanova who apparently walked among us.”

Byers raised his beer to his friend, and remembered how much Langly had cared about Jen when they were together. That there had been another woman… It was mystifying. Maybe Byers hadn't known Langly at all, really. No. He didn’t really believe that. Langly had been different after the virus. That was the only explanation that Byers could come up with.

Mulder set his arms on the table. “If you could go back, would you? ‘Cause I think Skinner is going to offer you the chance.”

Byers answered immediately, “No.”

“Me neither,” Frohike said.

“I’ve daydreamed about that over the years,” Byers explained. “But it wouldn’t be the same. We sold the warehouse, the world is different now, and Langly…” What had been would not be again, so there was no point in pretending they could return to the old times.

Frohike clinked his beer to Byers’. “I won’t deny there are lots of things I miss. But we always said we’d grow old together, and there’s plenty to do here. There’s Rachel. We have a few more years until she’s an adult and heads out into the world. She’s in high school now and we can’t rip her away from that. She even has a friend now.”

“She does?” Byers hadn’t heard that yet.

“Girl who runs the school paper, if you can believe it.”

Mulder smiled. “Think Rachel will follow in the footsteps of greatness and be a reporter?”

Frohike shrugged. “Maybe. And I'm not going anywhere. There’s still plenty of state and local government bullshit to expose. We’re all about the lead pipes poisoning Flint right now and the oil pipeline beneath the Mackinaw Bridge.”

“And Frohike is about to move in with his paramour,” Byers said.

“Big dog!” Mulder exclaimed at the bit of good news. “You got a lady?”

“Winnie. She just lives four miles down the road,” Frohike smiled broadly. “She’s the midwife who delivered Rachel, actually. Used to be a nurse.” Byers was happy for his friend. Frohike and Winnie shared a common spirit and had made a real connection slowly over the years, leading up to her asking him to come live with him on her acres of woodland with her vast gardens and windchimes. “I think Rachel is angling to take over my cabin once I'm out.”

Mulder looked between them. “Over the years, I’d think about the three of you. Like you were the angels on my shoulder.”

“Some angels,” Frohike laughed.

“Maybe I was hallucinating.” Mulder’s voice changed. They had been friends for decades but hadn’t rarely been vulnerable together. “I suppose when I get to a hotel room tomorrow or the day after I’m going to feel a lot of things about you guys being alive all this time. I’m sorry to be the one to tell you about Langly.”

“No,” Byers said. “You and Scully are the only ones I would have wanted to hear it from.”

Mulder stood up as if he had to end the conversation before it went deeper. He also yawned, and Byers realized it was after 2am. “Boys. If Langly contacts us again….don’t tell him about Rachel. This project, Titanpointe, is a great big evil thing like we used to fight against. The backups need to be destroyed and if Langly finds out about her…he might not want to go. And we all know his abilities.” If Langly got it in his head to stop them, he could do it. “We need him fighting with us and not against us.”

Byers asked. “If he uploaded his consciousness and his memories, then…are we all there with him? Did he take us along?” Because maybe if Langly had done it knowing they’d all be with him, it meant something more. It meant that he hadn’t made the choice between leaving them forever and the strange unknown. He’d simply tried to have it all.

Neither Mulder or Frohike had an answer. Mulder and Byers went off to sleep, but Frohike stayed at the table by the plugged-in phone. Byers knew the man wouldn’t sleep that night.

Something was happening and it woke Rachel from a deep sleep. It was the middle of the night and there was a lot of noise outside her bedroom door. She threw on a hoodie and joined everyone else in the main room, all sleep-eyed and in various versions of pajamas gathered around the table staring at a phone screen.

Walter was apart from the group talking to someone on his phone. “Yes, completely destroyed.”

The phone on the table was lit bright with glitchy static. Rachel came forward and her Dad moved to let her get close.

“Mulder?” a voice came from the phone as the pixels formed into an image. “Mulder? Scully?”

“I’m here,” Mulder replied.

The static cleared and there was a face on the screen. Mulder reached for the phone, but Rachel impulsively grabbed it first. She saw him. Her father. The connection was sketchy and static-y, but she saw the blonde hair like hers and thick black glasses.

“No,” Mulder said, but Scully stopped him from trying to retrieve the phone.

“Mulder?” The man’s voice glitched.

“Are you Richard Langly?” Rachel spoke loud and clear.

The digital man peered with confusion. “Yes.”

She looked at Mulder, at all of them and their wide-eyed expressions, as she said it. “My name is Rachel Carson Byers and I’m your daughter.”

“Rachel…” her Mom whispered. She saw all the faces staring at her. Maybe she’d done a dumb thing, but it was too late to take it back now. Whatever. She glanced back at the phone and saw the man looking back at her, squinting because his connection was probably also terrible.

“Hi,” he said simply.

“Hi,” she replied, because there was nothing else to say. He had kind eyes.

“Mulder,” Langly called, and Mulder snatched the phone from Rachel’s hand. All she could do now was watch how everything played out. Langly’s voice was serious. “Destroy the backups.”

“Langly,” Mulder had been so sure, but now uncertainty had crept in.

“It will kill what remains of you,” Scully shouted across the table

Langly heard her. His voice cracked. “I know. Do it, dammit.”

Mulder called to Walter. “Call it, sir.”

Walter did, and said, “It’ll take three minutes.”

In those last minutes, Mulder thrust the phone at Rachel’s Dad and Uncle Melvin.

The Lone Gunmen saw each other again.

“Guys…” Langly started.

“No…” Rachel’s Dad said. He sounded so much younger and more scared than Rachel had ever heard him, and she felt a lump form her throat. “You can stop this, Langly.”

“I can’t,” Langly said. “I won’t.”

“No!” Frohike shouted, grabbing the phone from Mulder like that would do anything. Like if he could just hold Langly there, he wouldn’t let him get away ever again.

"Hey Guys." Langly said three words, and they came through the speaker clear as day. “Never give up.”

And then there was music coming from every internet connected device in the room - all the cell phones, the computers, the speakers, all blasting so loud that everyone covered their ears.

The pounding drums and rock’n’roll voices of The Ramones. Sheena is a Punk Rocker.

Rachel saw her Mom, then. She had stood back from the whole group, but now she closed her eyes as a smile came to her face unlike any Rachel had ever seen and she did not cover her ears. Rachel saw a piece of the younger woman her Mom had been when she’d loved a hacker weirdo in a time long gone and she had been happy. Jen was laughing and also crying and Rachel watched her Dad see it all with an expression on his face she didn’t understand - grief, joy, relief, or all of them at the same time. Uncle Melvin was crying, too. Scully had her hands over her mouth and her eyes were wide as she watched everything transpire.

Mulder smiled at Rachel with tears in his eyes, and she understood why.

Richard Langly was playing himself out.

For two minutes and fifty seconds, everyone listened to his farewell. Everyone remembered him and his brilliance and his noise.

And then Mulder’s phone went black, and everything went silent.

“He’s gone?” Scully whispered after a long moment of eerie quiet.

Mulder spoke to Frohike. “It was the right thing.”

Frohike had his eyes closed and gripped the back of a chair tightly. “I know. He probably saved millions of people a second time.” But his tears showed his heartbreak, and Scully hugged his shoulders.

“Of fucking course he did,” Jen muttered.

Rachel ran to hug her Mom, who held her back tighter than Rachel ever remembered being held, and her Dad wrapped his arms around both of them.

“He’s stardust now,” Her Mom whispered.

After the noise stopped and the silence fell, bodies overrode hearts and heads and everyone parted to their respective rooms and beds and fell into sleep instead of talking because none of them had words to explain how they felt.

How do you talk about a supernova?

Jen put Rachel to bed and held her for a long time, seeing all the emotions on her face and knowing it would take hours upon hours to answer them all.

It would be alright. Jen could answer her questions. Jen could remember it all without taking the pain all over again now.

Langly had released her with one song. He remembered the diners and cabins and music and everything else, because he had loved her.

He had loved her.

She slept hard until about 7:30am, waking before everyone else and moving quietly through the cabin past where Walter slept on the couch to make the first of probably many pots of coffee that would be consumed that day. Cujo had slept on the floor beside Walter, but the dog got up and stretched and waited at the door. When Jen took her coffee and went out to sit by the water in the morning’s quiet, Cujo began his explorations.

The sky was overcast. It would probably drizzle a little later in the day. Jen pulled her white sweater tight and sipped her hot coffee. Having resolution felt strange. It put her off-balance. So many of her questions had simply gone off into the air.

After a while, Byers arrived with his own coffee. He sat on the table next to her. “Did you sleep alright?”

“I actually slept very well. I mean, I’m absolutely going to crash at like 6pm tonight but… You?”

“Me too.” He rolled up the sleeves of his red flannel shirt.

A blue heron landed on the still river in front of them, sending ripples out as it perched on the water. Cujo barked at it before sniffing something in the weeds.

Sensing Byers wanted to talk, Jen spoke first. “Remember Vegas?”

“Do I ever.”

“Did you know I was there?”

“I didn’t know at the time. Langly told me later.”

“I was in a bad place back then. Playing the honeypot to get scoops, getting caught up with bad men. Langly and I met up at the hotel bar for just…it wasn’t even an hour. And Langly saw how unhappy I was and made the hotel sound system blast that song. He did it just to make me laugh.” She remembered Langly’s eyes when he had seen the bruise on her wrist and the way he’d held her so close while they’d danced and how the sudden rock’n’roll had caused the waves of chaos in the crowd that had been around them. And then they all - Jen, Langly, Byers, Frohike, Skinner, Doggett and his partner Monica - had run from a diabolical desire serum together and they hadn’t stopped running since, though some had fallen away over time. “It was all such a long time ago, wasn’t it?”

“We’re coming up on twenty years.” Byers rubbed his beard. “I’m grayer now.”

“You’re distinguished,” she said as she knocked his shoulder with her own. “He didn’t forget me. It meant something. It really did.” She was surprised to feel her throat close, to choke, on saying the words she had for so long doubted were the truth.

Byers leaned forward. “Jen. Come on. Of course it did.” Jen nodded more to herself more than to him, and stared down at her mug. He sighed. “I’ll call Jimmy later today. Goodness, I don’t look forward to telling him.”

“I’ll call Doggett. It’s been way too long since I’ve talked to him,” Jen said. “I’m glad he left the FBI. Maybe he found some peace. Everything changes, I suppose.”

Byers didn’t answer, so she waited for what he was about to say. “That time in Vegas was the last time I saw Susanne. We made her a new identity and sent her off.”

Jen turned to face him directly. She had always known about the mythical Susanne Modeski, the woman who had brought Mulder and The Lone Gunmen all together and set them on the path they'd followed to where they were now. Byers had loved her, and lost her, because she’d needed to take on a new identity to stay safe. “You’ve known her name all this time?”

“Yes.”

“Byers. Oh my God, you could have found her. You could have gone to her and been with her.”

He considered it. "If it had ever been meant to be, she’d have come back to me. She never did, and I let that go a long time ago. But I still owe her a lot. Besides, in a strange way I got my dream. Heck, I even got a dog.” Cujo waded into the water for a second and then shook off his black fur before rolling in the dirt.

Jen felt her heart ache for him. Even though his irrepressible good nature had made the best of the life he’d been given, he deserved so much more. “You never got the wife, though.”

“Didn’t I?” He looked at her with those big blue eyes that carried something she had never seen before. “What are you and I if we’re not married?”

“Partners. Friends. The best of friends.” Even as she said it, she knew she was not capturing everything they were. There weren’t words for everything they were to each other. Jen shook her head. “You could have gone after her and been happy.”

She felt his hand come to rest on hers. “I am happy.”

“Byers, I’m not Susanne.”

“I’ll never be Langly. But, just because we can’t have them doesn’t mean we can’t ever have anything.”

It was a very good point. And Jen didn’t argue with him, or move away from him. For the first time in all the years that had passed between them, Byers slipped an arm around her in the light of day. Jen leaned against him. Solid. Warm. Real. Holding her up when she had wanted to collapse. If that wasn’t love, nothing was.

Sometimes you get lucky and find yourself in a weird place. Jen remembered Langly’s words from the bunker so long ago and smiled.

“What?” Byers asked.

“It would have been funnier if he’d played Korn.”

Byers laughed softly. “I wasn’t going to tell you but…Rachel was listening to Korn the other day.”

“Oh no…” Jen threw her head back and groaned. “It begins.”

“I suppose Mulder and Scully and Skinner will head back today,” Byers said. “And then we’ll keep telling Rachel the whole story. It’ll be good for her to know, though. No more secrets.”

“No more secrets,” Jen repeated.

The blue heron took off into the sky just as they heard the noises of people waking inside the cabin. The voices of their friends.

"We go on," Byers said. "And we never give up." He got up from the picnic table and offered his hand to her. Jen took it, smiling, and they walked back to the cabin.