Spoilers, disclaimer and other information with first part.

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I walked slowly back to the office, hand still twitching from being in gun-mode, index finger still curling around an invisible trigger. As I approached our office door, I hoped fervently that Scully wasn't there, and stared, disappointed, at her empty chair. Wish granted. I wanted to touch base with her, find assurance in her face that I wasn't losing every last shred of lucidity, but at the same time, lying to her wasn't easy for me to do. Besides, she knew when I was lying. I bit my bottom lip and widened my eyes, according to her. I had joked that I would only lie on the phone after that.

It was funny at the time.

I shrugged out of my jacket, stared at the pile of papers scattered in all directions on my desk, and pushed the heap to one side, ignoring the fact that some of them hit the floor. Out of a bottom drawer, I lifted the telephone directory. Had to find the name of a storage place in the Arlington area. Had to lend a little credence to the lie. Of course, at this point, I'd be lying if I said I knew exactly what I was doing.

I found the name of a storage place, memorized it and the street it was on, and pushed the phone book out of my sight before I fully realized what I was doing. There was a note under it, Scully's handwriting. It was like I'd been caught in the act. I closed my eyes, opened them again, and read, glad to see that the words "so long, sucker" were nowhere therein. She'd gotten a break on one of the cases -- listed it by number, as if I would know by 5 digits which of our bullshit cases it was. Said that if it panned out, we'd be filing a 302 to Florida. Florida? Oh, smuggling case. "Nowhere near Gibsonton, Mulder, so don't get any weird ideas," she wrote. I could hear her saying it in my head.

I filed the note away. One folder in particular had become a sort of Scully-file, with all of the letters and little notes she'd left me over the past few months. Memories in suspended animation. I remembered summers back in Chilmarc where Mom would send Samantha and I to different summer camps. She'd pack stamps and envelopes in our luggage, tell us to write each other, to write to her, in the weeks that we were gone. Samantha would write and tell me that Mom had sent her substantially more cookies in the care package than she had me. I would write and tell Samantha that a picture of her stapled to my bunk had successfully scared the mosquitoes away. Silly little one page letters in sloppy kid handwriting. I winced now as I remembered coming home from those camps and dumping all of the letters into the trash, like they were garbage. It wouldn't happen again.

9:21 now. Time for me to figure out what I was going to say. To him. The Cigarette-Smoking him. Something disarmingly snide, I'm sure. Everytime I conjured up an image of him in my head, my throat constricted.

The phone rang and I answered warily to McGrath's voice.

"Looks like Spender's going home, right to his apartment. He's making it easy. Too bad it's only a bluff, huh?"

I didn't comment.

"It *is* a bluff, isn't it?"

"I hope so."

For a minute, I thought he had hung up, and almost put the phone away, but it was just his silence on the other end. "You're kidding, right?"

"Yeah, a bluff. Always a bluff. Whatever."

"You know, Mulder..." He cleared his throat. "I was hired to surveil and intimidate, in that order, and to protect, where you and Agent Scully are concerned. I don't know if you're aware of this, but the point is to *not* kill. If you were a politician, I could lawfully, um, remove a person who I thought was a threat to your well-being."

"I was a member of the Mayor's Kids Council when I was ten."

"Shut up," he sighed, exasperated. "I just hope you're not under the impression that you hired a hitman. What Jonson's doing...what he's agreed to do for you, is work in a vague, gray area of the law. 'Course, I always said that man had no moral core. You know he was Salman Rushdie's bodyguard? Took a bullet for it, too."

I checked my watch again. "You called me, to chat?"

McGrath snorted. "Spender isn't the only one wondering what it is you hope to accomplish."

"Maybe you and he could start a club and find someone who gives a shit." I reeled around in my chair so that my back was to my desk, knocking something of it in the process. "I'm just making a move. They made one, I'll make one. If it's wrong, what's the worst that will happen? I'll walk out of that meeting looking like a moron. So what? At least I've made a move. You just tail him."

"What if it doesn't work?"

"Let me worry about that."

"What if he's waiting for you with a gun? Have you thought about that, Mulder?"

"Thank you for the moral support. You're the greatest."

"You're not paying me for my moral support," he said coldly. "Things are under control on my end. If yours isn't, then I guess it doesn't matter. No one's going to die from my gun today, Mulder. And you'd better hope I walk out of this shit's apartment building with my head intact."

"You're just there for looks, okay? You're there to be the voice on the other end of the line. That's all."

"I could do that from home."

"I wouldn't insult you like that, McGrath."

"Fuck you, Mulder." He said, only in half-jest. "You go in there, and you keep me on the line, the entire time. I have to know what's going on in that room."

"Just so you'll know when I screw up?"

"So I'll know when to duck." He waited for my follow-up, and it didn't come. "10:30."

And the dial tone.

At 10:11 a.m., I was already climbing stairs, trying to get my breathing modulated.

It occurred to me that I'd never been more afraid in my life. Well, that was a lie, but it definitely ranked in the top five. This was more than having a gun trained on me. More of a bomb, actually. Depending on what I said and did in that room, it would or wouldn't explode, like picking the right wire to sever, the right one to leave be.

So I consider it a breakthrough when I actually end up on the fifth floor. Deep down, I didn't think I'd do it. It was a show for Spender back there, a show for McGrath, a performance. Now it was just me, standing in the hall, hating the disconcerting lack of familiarity.

It always came back to hallways. All of my memories did, in a way. The long, stark white halls of the doctors dad took me to see after Samantha disappeared. The dark, book-scented corridors of Oxford, where everything moved smoothly around me. Then Quantico, with its harsh flourescent lights and dirty lime-colored walls, stains in the ceiling where water pipes had busted through the years. To here, the FBI, where I stood in a hall like this one, thinking I was a bad-ass, thinking I would be the next John Douglas, and promptly ended my daydreaming by running into a water cooler. The sterile brightness of all the hospitals where she and I had found ourselves over time, and the dim, barely-lit walkways of the Pentagon.

But I had been here before. ISU was in the opposite wing. Old stomping grounds. But the strangeness remained.

So the unfamiliarity resided in me.

10:18. For crying out loud...

I stayed at the far end of the hall. I wasn't anywhere near the conference rooms. That would be another breakthrough altogether. A cool draft seeped in around the windows. What advantage did the Bureau have by jacking up the heat? It must've been 85 degrees. Then again, maybe it was psychosomatic.

My phone rang. McGrath was getting antsy, too.

"Mulder," I said, feigning boredom.

"Here's something that should interest you."

Scully. Oh shit.

"Scully..." Seize the lie, I told myself. "I'm kind of tied-up here. I, uh, only rented this trailer-haul for half the day and I want to get all of this stuff in before --

"Why don't you cut the crap?"

I stopped, chilled into a standstill by the tone of her voice. "What?"

"I just think it's *intriguing* that, for someone who's supposedly been moving out all morning, your apartment looks remarkably the same since I left it last night."

I opened my mouth, with no audio. And with that pause, I damned myself. Speak, Mulder. "Well, I had to -- "

"Think carefully."

Her impersonation of A.D. Kersh. I thought it was cute before. Alright, so I was lying. So she knew, I thought, trying to convince myself. I checked my watch. 10:23. "I'll explain later, Scully. But right now, I really have to go."

"Where are you, Mulder?"

(I'm in hell. Thanks for asking.)

"I'll talk to you *later*." I hung up on her, fairly sure that the B word she had started to say was more along the lines of Bastard and not Bye. Why did she have to stop by my place? Damn. I should've actually made it look like I was packing up, and not talking to myself and wearing a path in the carpet all night. I kept looking over my shoulder, expecting that at any minute, she'd sneak up on me in full Valkyrie mode and kick my ass. I took a breath. Okay, there was no way she could know. This whole thing, I told myself, was a hoax.

Spender. I laughed, a short insane sound in the empty hall. Give us back the X-Files, or Spender here gets it. Quick pantomime of a knife slash across the throat.

But that's what I was doing, wasn't it? With a little more panache, but the same premise. Like my father barking over my shoulder, little tolerance for my confusion -- Do something, Fox, even if it's wrong, for god's sakes, do *something*.

At 10:27, the phone rang again. McGrath. Finally. "Mulder."

"Tell me what you're doing," Scully said, voice low with menace, "in the fifth floor east conference room."

Suddenly, all the blood rushed to my head. "What?!"

She enunciated the words clearly. "Fifth floor, east conference room C. You have a conference, Mulder?"

(Fuck!)

I shook my head, tried to clear my thoughts. "Who -- ?"

I heard a click, the mechanical whirring of little gears and, "that's a rhetorical question, right?" Pause. "Wanna be a girl?"

My hand went immediately to the inside of my jacket. No Dictaphone.

"I've had enough of being left in the dark, Mulder." Hard, crystalline edge to her words. That was what scared me...her anger was always so coherent. "I should've known you were up to something. After last night. I knew by your eyes. But I didn't want to believe it."

It sounded like she was moving. I hung up. Dialed Jonson, and didn't give him a chance to answer. "Where are you?"

"Shit, Mulder." He spoke with the same frenzy I did. "I lost her. She walked into this group of people, and -- if I didn't know better, I'd say she did it on purpose."

"She *did* do it on purpose!" I said under my breath, in the middle of the hall where I couldn't hit anything. "Where are you?"

"I'm in the third floor lobby. I'm right next to the -- "

"Get up on the fifth floor. *Now*. She's on her way up here. I don't know if she took the stairs or the elevator. She *cannot* be up here."

"On it." He hung up.

I needed to break something. Anything.

10:33. I walked quickly down the hall, towards the conference rooms, thought of myself kicking the doors in, firing. That wouldn't do. I dialed McGrath.

"Three minutes late," he said, matter-of-factly.

"Scully knows."

"She what?"

"She knows. She knows where I'm at, and might have an idea what I'm doing. I don't know."

"What'd she do?" He asked. "Talk to Spender?"

"I guess you could say that. Stay on the line. Here I go." I put the open phone back in my pocket, and walked inside.

I didn't see him at first. And when I did, he hadn't seen me. Hadn't looked up. I fought to get the thought of Scully approaching, of Jonson running, of McGrath holding the gun, out of my head. It was just me now, and him. Maybe not a level playing field, but a playing field nonetheless.

So why did I want to turn around and run?

(I won't.)

He turned. "Agent Mulder."

Not a question, not a greeting. A fact. "You don't sound surprised."

"I'm surprised that it took you so long." A tendril of smoke curled around his hand, a cursory look over my shoulder. "I take it Agent Spender couldn't make it?"

I didn't answer. How many times had I wished for this moment to come? I took it in, like a captured moment -- a photograph, a saved letter. He stared at me, like watching eyes move in the side of a cave. I wondered if he'd aged like my father. So young looking one day, packing on 20 years the next. So sudden. And in the end, so deserved. I took out the phone.

"Aren't you going to sit down?" He motioned to a chair. "Or are you going to do the predictable thing? Wave your gun ineptly in my face?"

I walked over and sat down, quieting everything that spilled through my head. That was Scully's secret...she let the anger creep out slowly, not in one unwieldy moment of rage like I did. So I held it back and looked him in the eye. "Agent Spender dies...then what happens to the X-Files?"

Now he was surprised, as much as he didn't want to be. "Very speculative of you to ask, Agent Mulder." He took a drag off his cigarette. "Hypothetically, you mean?"

"Sure. Hypothetically."

"Nothing drastic, really." His voice raked over the words, acrid like the smoke I was breathing. "There are other cards in the deck. Other hands to be played."

"So your misinformation, your lies..." I was still, calm. "You used us to perpetrate them, and then we were replaced by someone who, if it *is* his job to help spread your lies, is doing a piss-poor job of it. So either you've made a serious misstep, or the agenda has changed. Which is it?"

"Agent Spender does not have your idealism," he answered. "I didn't think it was necessary to have it, to replace the right answers with the wrong ones. It was the very nature of your conviction that made our lies so believable. Have I not thanked you for giving us such an impenetrable smokescreen?"

I felt the tremble, to my hands. Anger. I caught it before he did. I focused on him with my stare, made him uncomfortable with the unwavering force of it. "Like any mistake, he should've been corrected by now. A month ago, he turned a tactical plan into a fiasco. Honestly, I'm surprised he's still breathing. Agent Scully is."

"Nepotism is a double-edged sword, Agent Mulder." He gestured to the phone in my hand. "I suppose your sniper friend is on the other end, waiting for you to say `Kill.' "

Nepotism. I blinked, looked down at the phone in my hand, back up again. "What?"

"You didn't know?" He stubbed the cigarette out, and the tendril of smoke dissipated with his soft exhale. "Of course you didn't. And you wouldn't have guessed. That idealism in you...it's not as dead as you might like."

"He's your *son*."

"It's a shame that this meeting with him was a hoax. You see, had you been him..." From under the table, he brought a .38 Smith & Wesson, equipped with a silencer, barrel turned towards my chest as it rested on its side. "I was going to kill him here. I'd been debating it for some time. And, this *would* have been the more convenient way to do it. I guess now I'll have to resort to other alternatives." He mocked pleasant disbelief at whatever facial expression I had failed to contain. "Oh, I see. It did take me a moment. There goes your bargaining chip. Right?"

I'd sprung a trap for myself. And I was sitting right in the teeth, waiting for it to snap me in for the ride.

"Whoever it is on your phone," he offered politely. "They obviously have something to say."

Numbly, I lifted it to my ear. McGrath, yelling. "Mulder! Fuck! Pick it up! What happened? Are you there?"

"I'm here."

"Scully is *inside* the building!"

A few seconds, and it hit me. "What?"

"It's Scully! She -- Jonson cornered her, on the fifth floor, but she got away from him again. She called me, and asked me where I was..."

"And you told her?" I had almost forgotten he was sitting there. Bemused, he lit another cigarette.

"She told me if I didn't tell her, she was going back up to the fifth floor and go into the conference room." He was out of breath. He'd been running. I could hear the blood in his throat. "So I told her, thinking I could keep her back when she got here, but she -- " He gasped for breath again. "She came up behind me while I was on watch. She...put her gun to the back of my head and asked where Spender was. I -- I didn't tell her. She called the Bureau and got his address. She's...She's headed that way."

"What in the hell does she want with Spender?"

"She said, Answers. Said that -- " It was almost painful to listen to him talk. "Said that it would be hard for him to call a tactical plan on her when she was standing behind him."

"His sniper is in there, McGrath! She can't go there! You can't let her go!"

"If you'd been listening on the fucking line -- !" He punched something and came back to the phone. "If I go anywhere near him, *his* guy is going to take my head, so what do you suggest I do?" I could see him moving frantically, like his words. "I can't move!"

I watched the man placidly smoke his cigarettes, trying to think. "If you move, Spender's sniper takes you *and* her."

He smiled at me then, took another long drag. "What makes you think the other sniper belongs to Agent Spender?"

Before I could even respond, I heard the gunfire sound in my ear, over the phone. One shot. Then another.

"McGrath!"

"Ohhhh, shit! Shit!"

"What did you do?" I wasn't just asking McGrath. I was asking the smoking man the same thing.

"That wasn't me!" McGrath screamed. "I didn't fire!"

"Who fired?!"

"The -- " I heard something hit the floor. "The other sniper."

"AT WHO?"

"I can't -- I can't -- They're both down."

It was hard to hear him over the pulse in my head, quickening with the blood rush. "What? Who's down? Talk to me, McGrath!"

"The first shot, Mulder...went wide. Didn't...Scully was inside the apartment. He...he put her in front. He put her...he used her to block the..."

"No..." It was barely a breath as I said it. "No. Wait! She'll get up..."

(No no no no god please no...)

"Mulder." Was he crying? "She's not getting up. She's...she's down, Mulder. She's..."

I stood up and turned to him. He smiled. He fucking *smiled* at me. I picked up his gun, tested it in my hand.

"Once again, you don't have the heart," he said, exhaling. "You never will."

If I died today, my one moment of equilibrium with the force that held us down will be those ten seconds...those seconds where his look of triumph turned quickly to the realization that I *did* have the heart. I had a needle-sharp rage that stung me throughout.

"Surprise," I hissed.

I took a deep breath, bit my lip, squeezed the trigger and shot the sonovabitch in the side of the head.

He deserved torture. He deserved the kind of pain that allowed for disassociation, no mental escape or oblivion.

"You stupid fuck." Who was that? I turned, everything slow-motion and fuzzy. Jonson. "You waiting around until you get caught?" He put his cell phone to his mouth and said, "Here he is" and then handed it to me. "Listen."

I lifted the phone to my ear like a gun to my head. That would happen later.

And I heard it. The most beautiful sound -- weaker here than I'd ever heard it before. Her voice saying my name.

She took her bullet in the shoulder. It was a clean wound, straight through. But they found the bullet in Spender's chest.

She'd been inside the apartment, finding Spender's door unlocked. He was at the kitchen window, staring out, not at McGrath, but at the man his father had assigned to him -- the man he believed *I* had assigned to him. He'd probably never even noticed McGrath.

Everything was fine until the first shot came. It swung wide, and Scully gave away her presence when she, knowing that Spender's death wasn't actually part of the deal, screamed at the asshole to duck down. Spender had come into the living room where she was hiding, grabbed her by the arms and used her as a shield. The shot pinned her in the shoulder, and when the force of the bullet's momentum propelled her back, it very neatly killed Spender.

Jonson and McGrath, once I could bear to hear it, meshed their perspectives into one story and painted Scully as Dirty Harriet, first losing Jonson in the third floor lobby, and then again in the fourth floor stairwell. Then she had called McGrath, called him a few names that he, typically colorful speaker, wouldn't repeat. When she'd gotten there and pried all of the information out of him, she shooed him off with her gun. ("She shot out a vent, right next to my knee.") He had run after her as far as he could without becoming the other sniper's target.

Scully just rolled her eyes when she heard it.

They let her out that night, at 8:00 p.m. "Oh the joys of modern medicine," she said, wincing. They'd bandaged her arm up, put it in a sling. She complained more about the pain in her back due to her body's whiplash-like response to the bullet's force than she did about her shoulder.

I hadn't said anything to her. I was afraid to speak. Everytime I tried to talk to her, a doctor or a nurse interrupted, and as much as they would've enjoyed our tale of snipers and assasinations, I didn't think they were ready to hear it.

She slid into the passenger seat of my car to go home, which as far as I knew, for both of us, was her apartment. Wasn't it? Good thing I hadn't surrendered mine back to the owner. I put her things in the back, I braced myself for the diatribe and started the car. We had driven a little ways, with no yelling. To me, that was more excruciating. I would rather have her yelling than just silently ticking off the number of ways I was an asshole. As least let her tick off the reasons out loud.

"You fixed the heat," she said inflectionless, reclining the seat a little. She thought of fevers then, I think. "Didn't you? Or is that me?"

"McGrath fixed it. Loose hose, or something like that." I shrugged.

She nodded. I drove, radio half-blaring. She reached over and turned it off. The car was silent again until she spoke. "Jonson said you shot him."

"I did."

"Is he dead?"

I smiled wanly. "He's dead, or he's Rasputin...or not a man at all. I know where that bullet went."

"No one heard it?"

"I used his own gun on him. It had a silencer. Jonson got me out of there, out a back way." I didn't know how to tell the story, didn't know which bent she would've preferred hearing. "If anyone noticed, it was later. The Lone Gunmen are monitoring some press databanks, and there hasn't been any mention of his death." I took the long way around to her place, cushioning so that if she told me I was no longer welcome at her apartment, I could act as if I expected it. "I guess that's how it goes...you surrender your identity, and then no one really knows when you die." I stared at her side profile, highlighted under the streetlamps. "What about Spender? Did the police come while they were pulling you out?"

"No. I heard one of the neighbors calling the police as they picked me up on a gurney. That's all I remember before the hospital."

"So you're okay?" I touched her on her shoulder, the unharmed one. "You're sure?"

"I'm fine," and sounded like she meant it, too.

I couldn't stand it anymore. "Why did you go after Spender?"

"I wanted to help you," she said stiffly. "Maybe if you had *confided* in me, I could've been more of a help."

Maybe if I had confided in you, I thought, you wouldn't have gotten shot again. "Scully, I -- "

"No. You're going to listen." She turned to me in her seat, wrapped arm and all, voice firm. "It's you who started talking about this game, about the players. The tactics. The rules. Except back when we were talking about it, I was playing that game too, yet you make the first move, our first action against them, and not *only* do you do it half-assed, you do it without me!"

Half-assed? I hid my hurt pride, even though she was right, and I knew it. "I didn't want you involved!"

"A little late for that now, isn't it?" She dropped her voice a little. "You *promised* me, Mulder. If you make a move that impacts both of us, then you *have* to trust me."

"You didn't trust me," I said angrily. "Didn't think I could do it without you."

"Can you?"

I didn't answer.

She waited until I looked at her again to speak. "You *lied* to me, Mulder."

"I know that."

"Just because we're in the game now...it doesn't mean you can use those tactics on *me*." I couldn't have avoided her gaze if I tried. "Understand?"

I nodded. I understood. What I understood more was that, less than 48 hours ago, we were sitting in this same cold car, two different people. I guess I thought she was my broken-winged angel, or some bullshit like that, needing a protector, thinking I was that protector. And she'd read all she needed to into that Dictaphone tape, and made the right decision in minutes, when it had taken me a sleepless night to even *come* to a decision. I had been just as surprised to hear about the planning she'd put into her tracking of Spender as she was that I had finally pulled that trigger after a six year warm-up.

Too bad it took the belief that she was dead to make it happen.

Two strangers, headed southbound for home, I thought to myself. I half-smiled to Scully, but she was far away from me now, wrapped up in darknesses I couldn't begin to imagine.

End.

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PART ONE === PART TWO === PART THREE === PART FOUR

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