By Amanda Finch
[email protected]

Disclaimers, etc. w/ first part.

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I was afraid to be relieved.

Since I'd awakened in the decon chamber, I'd been mainlining their force-fed
adrenaline and acceptance like China White. From that moment, I was a blip on
someone's radar screen, a puppet on invisible wires. I held my hand to the
back of my neck, imagining them there, anticipating the opening of the
drawer. The Doctor found the moment very important. All of his moments had
been exact, precise. So far.

Under the pad of my thumb, I traced the vertical scar at the base of my neck.
I wanted it out, gone, but I had so few connections. I couldn't afford to
sever even one of them.

(If this is the rehearsal, motherfuckers, then when do we start the show?)

His personal vendetta was nothing compared to the one he'd just crystallized
in me. Whether Scully was alive or dead, whether I lived or died... I was
going to kill tonight.

I remembered his face, his feigned superiority there in Pam Wyeth's bedroom.
Then, I hadn't been able to fight, hadn't even been able to stand.

I wondered just how brave the man was when the hit squad wasn't flanking him
on both sides. I recalled his seeming disdain for the guns they carried. Oh,
he wasn't a fighter. He wasn't a simple machine. He was the ingenuity.

(So you take out the hit squad as fast as you can.)

Right.

(Just like removing the pawns around a king.)

Swallowing back the fatigue that wracked my body, I stood straight.

Skinner's contribution was still loaded and holstered to my hip.

I'd pawn myself, just to see.

The bogus paramedic report had an address where "Dana Doe" had supposedly
been found. It was probably more bogus than the EMT who rolled her through
the doors, but something told me it was my next bread crumb. The mindgame had
one more act.

x

2:15 AM

Outside conference room doors, I'd stood. A man behind them had died. It was
still my home turf, still not as foreign to me, even in retrospect. By
completing the act, I had misplaced some of the bravado that hastened my
finger around the trigger.

Besides, if I hadn't fired that bullet, I wouldn't be sitting in this car on
the crumbled pavement of a driveway outside of a house on 98 Dovecrest Cove.
A house that was, for all intents and purposes, just an anomaly among the
trees. The neighbors, if they could be called that, were more than three
miles away in either direction. I'd checked. This wasn't suburbia.

It had, at one time, been someone's expensive home, but the paint was flaking
away in long spirals. The grass covered and poked through the sidewalk, as
high as the handle of the wrought iron door. No lights were showing from
either of the two floors.

I dug my flashlight out of the trunk, firing the beam along the edge of the
overgrown lawn to the mailbox.

Against the black aluminum, ornate white letters had faded over time. I
dropped the flag on the side, and it gave way with a fine spray of rust. The
letters spelled Maynard.

Swivelling the light back around to the house itself, I thought about what it
was going to be like to die here. This was no longer a red herring thrown
into my path. I had my gun - Skinner's service weapon - tightly clutched in
my hand, ready. There could be no dropped guns now.

It felt like the end.

(And it *will* be if I keep thinking like that.)

I kept the flashlight high above the grass itself, hating the obscurity of
each motion. The dead were everywhere, just like the men with guns. I walked
carefully through the grass, keeping a constant trajectory with the
flashlight until I made my way to the door.

It opened at the slightest pressure from my hand. I rewrote the unofficial
obituary in my mind: "Could've saved his partner, but got taken in by what
anyone else would've recognized as a trap."

(Of course it's a trap.)

Traps could be sabotaged.

The house was completely black inside except for errant curtains that let a
suspicious light faintly peer in through the dirty windows. It wasn't the
moon. There were too many trees for that. And no streetlights. I pointed the
flashlight beam to the floor so I could find the source.

Instead, I found the blood trail.

Every few inches, a dark blot of red had fallen onto the uncarpeted floor. It
was mussed by a misstep and a smear, but was intact. I thought of fingers
tangled in the back of her head, holding her face at the right angle. He'd
hit her. He'd told her that the scene had to be just right. The blood had
fallen then, either at his order or because she bled and he liked the effect.
Nothing was random with him. Blood fell where he wanted, decoy women died at
his whim.

That's right, I thought to myself grimly. He's just a profile, just like any
other killer. I maintained the dialogue with myself to keep my mind focused
as I walked through the house. Was the doctor a bedwetter? No, he was too
strident. A fire-starter? No, fire was boring, too out of his control. Animal
mutilations? No. Those had been interesting for awhile, but like the fires,
they got boring.

So he'd moved on, to women. What more was he, anyway, than Ted Bundy with
medical training? He raped with incisions and technology. He raped, and the
government looked away until the reports were released. They'd read the
findings all day, but don't make them look at the blood.

I looked up now. I had followed the trail to the back door. I turned off the
flashlight.

So this was it.

Like the front door, the back door was pushed open easily. A light bulb
glowed too brightly beside the door, obviously new. The glass fixture that
had once gone over it was shattered on the concrete below. My eyes adjusted,
marred by the glare.

Scully stood in the grass, too still. Apprehension hung on to her, from the
tautness of her arms behind her (were they tied?) to the emotion that was
somehow purely hers and somehow -

(Something's wrong - )

My face was rushed into the door, catching me in a vertical line from my
browbone to my chin. I tried to count the hands, and came up with six. Just
when my mind cleared to think, a sharp corner caught me in the side of the
neck. I threw my head back, randomly, catching someone's face. They grunted,
then wheezed in pain. It hurt. Good. The flashlight hit the concrete below,
just rolling off into the grass instead of breaking. They had the gun. Well,
somebody did. I flexed my empty fingers to check, and the wheezing stopped
just in time to knock me flat across the concrete.

I don't think I even had the chance to call her name.

Trying to get a fix on my position, I raised my head. The answering kick
didn't come. All I could see was a blur, and after a moment it solidified
into the doctor himself, casually holding a gun above the grass. Scully stood
there, only two or three feet to his left.

"Raise him up," he ordered. I was dragged to my feet, and stood on my own.

I stared into Scully's face. It felt like years had passed, and the longest
of them had passed between us. Her eyes moved sideways, gaze colliding with
mine. If the past weeks had been a strange place, then she was the only
familiar thing now or ever that had moved in it. I felt a childishly stupid
twinge of triumph in all this, a feeling now so alien to me that I didn't
censor it, didn't choke it down.

But she killed it with a baleful glare, only broken by the doctor's voice. I
shook my head, trying to shake it away.

"It's the guest of honor, Red." He pointed at me with the gun. "Say hi."

The glare from me to him only gained intensity.

His arm came up in a sudden, jerking arc, face suddenly red. "I told you to
say hi, bitch!"

I closed my eyes and bit down. I could've shot the bastard through the back
door. I had ten free seconds. If I'd only been looking for him and not her...

She looked at me now. I implored her for a sign, for anything, but the blue
of her eyes unhinged me. When she moved back on her heels even slightly, I
could see how the past days had treated her, even through the clothes that
were too big for her. Her arm poked through the sleeve now, not tethered to
the other. From her wrist to her elbow, she'd wasted away. Her voice echoed
none of this in the forced greeting. That bolstered me, more than a little.

I thought of how my face must look. How reassuring. How heroic. I struggled
against the both of them. They just closed their fingers tighter around my
arms.

"There," he said with finality, and the gun dropped out of sight with his
hand. "Now of course, this scene isn't exactly as I imagined. Some poignancy
has been lost in the translation. But I've got what I need." He clicked the
safety on and off in his hands. "I get to see your face when she goes down.
And that's the important part." The hyper motion of his hands stopped. "Have
you ever watched someone you love die like this, Fox? It's an experience, one
that has to be survived to be appreciated. Do you see what I'm getting at?"

Only a vague memory of the man in Pam Wyeth's bedroom remained now, and I
couldn't place it. This was not the man who'd sidestepped into my blindspot.
Vengeance had taken over.

And he was allowing it. He trembled with every ounce of it. Some bent,
skewered happiness wrung it out of him. His dark eyes were gleaming and alive
with it. "What's better than making the man who caused you pain face the
justice of his actions?"

I wanted Scully to look at me. She wouldn't. The doctor waited for my answer.
"What have I done to you that you wouldn't have brought on yourself?"

Wrong answer. He shot at the ground in front of him, enraged. Scully almost
stumbled back, catching herself. I tried to plot out in my mind some way that
she could run while I absorbed the consequences. How far was it around the
house?

"It's not what you've done!" It was as if the very nature of my question
disgusted him. "It's what you *would* do. It's what you've inherited."

I sighed sharply, as if my entire body demanded it. "Inherited?"

"Don't play stupid!" He roared as if he'd completely forgotten about her.

The gun raised to the height of her head. No such luck.

(Talk! Make him talk!)

"I think I understand some of it," I replied quickly, watching the gun the
whole time. "Is it Jacob? Or Jake? Jacob Maynard. It was your father's name
you gave to Jonson. John Maynard, of the State Department. Is that it? Is
that where this started?"

"What's better than justice?" He didn't wait for my answer now. "Making them
*feel* what it is that was done. The government has no concept of 'eye for an
eye.' They have no concept of having the pain *shared* - "

"And what you're doing? For the government?" I sought his face now. "How many
eyes for an eye does that make so far?"

"None, if you want to survive colonization. And I do." Recognizing the
conversation for what it was, he raised the Glock now, twisting his wrist so
that the gun would fire on its side. "We're all destined to finish our
fathers' work. Tonight, I tie up the loose ends."

I looked away helplessly. Scully stared straight ahead, at some point over my
shoulder out into the dim haze of grass and trees. She gave a decisive nod.

Confused, I stared back.

Jacob Maynard unhinged the safety with his thumb. His knuckle went white
around the trigger, then slack again as he turned to me. "The stomach, or the
head? There *are* certain aesthetic conce - "

When the gunfire erupted behind me, I was sure I'd been taken out, shot at
least three times. The man on my right went down hard, sprawled across the
concrete with four indistinct apertures in his shirt. I couldn't see the red,
and it didn't seem real. There was some blood on my side. I was hard-pressed
to identify it as his or mine. The vibrations of the bullet hits alone had
brainwashed my physiology. The man on my left dropped down to his knees,
checking for a pulse.

In my peripheral vision, Scully lunged towards Maynard. The last thing I saw
was his defensive charge forward. One of them hit the ground, and the grass
concealed everything but the frenzy of the attack.

I looked down at the dead man. And he was dead or getting there soon. His
friend crouched there, prepared to take off into the grass, but still trying
to conjure up his partner. "Hey... C'mon Brad. C'mon..."

I took his gun at the same moment that a bullet was fired from the grass. I
waited. Maynard's hitman waited, each of us rooting for a different person to
rise up from the still ground.

Holding the gun on him, I made my affiliations clear. He stood, eyes down,
and waited for the killshot.

The sudden blinding streak of pain in my side was corroborated by the hitman
grabbing his chest and falling forward. I spun around, almost knocking Scully
over with the heft of the rifle.

"What were you waiting for?" She asked angrily, expelling the spent casing to
the concrete. "A sign from God?"

I was too busy trying to reconcile that thought with her voice when she threw
Maynard's pistol into the grass and seized the sniper rifle. The ribs that
had been taped and mending were re-broken by the muzzle of the gun as she
speared me in the chest. "Scully!"

She whipped her sweat-soaked hair out of her face. "You're coming with me.
Move!"

Logic had never been my strong point, and the little I possessed was crushed
under the weight of her words as she marched me through the thick, gnarled
growth of grass and dense trees. Every paranoid delusion, every darkest
hour... they all came rushing back. This wasn't Scully. It couldn't be. This
was the woman I'd first met, the one I didn't know. The one who would let me
die out there, who would make her little notes and betray me the moment I
turned my back.

But she was bleeding red. I turned slightly, wincing. Wasn't she?

(This isn't happening - )

There was a van parked in the woods, and the hand that held a sniper with a
scope out the rolled down window hastily drew the weapon back in. If I was
willing to trust my memories at that moment, the voice from inside the car
would've sounded familiar. "Did you kill him?"

She threw the rifle in with one hand. "The motherfucker got away."

(What in the HELL is the matter with you?)

I shrugged out of her hold, making it clear that I would go with her.

Isn't that what it boiled down to? To the ends of the earth, I thought
angrily. Too bad we couldn't pick which ends those were. I tried to clear my
head, tried to break this down into its simplest components.

(This doesn't look right because it *isn't*.)

She opened the side door, and pushed me in.

The man in the car turned around, face only a vague shape in the darkness,
voice hoarse as he lapsed into coughing, trying to talk around the harsh,
ripping sound of it. "We are you - ? We can't take *him*!"

Blood sprayed against my hand as he spoke.

(Coughing up... blood...)

I raised my head from the floor of the van.

"Put him back out and shoot him! He's still being monitored!"

I matched the voice now.

Krycek.

Before I could even plan weeks-old retribution, Scully loomed above me,
squeezing through the space in the bucket seats. "I can take care of that.
Are you going to drive or just sit there and cough yourself to death?" The
roar of ignition was lit under me as she dropped to one knee, turning her
face so that her eyes were even with mine. "Come here."

Krycek stomped the gas, breathing in sharply from the coughing. "He's the
worst possible hostage."

I waited for her reassuring smile out of Krycek's range.

Maybe for her to just mouth the words, "It's okay."

Anything.

She put her fingers through the hair at the nape of my neck, jerking my head
to one side. I couldn't tell if the subsequent pain was an electrical shock
or a needle prick, and when I tried to see what had caused the sensation, my
mind simply zipped beyond my reach like a a television set being turned off.

"He's know who I am," she murmured as the colors faded. "He's the *perfect*
hostage."

The droning pain in my head -

Stopped.

(Oh god god god god - )

Is that what silence was like? I'd forgotten.

The van hurtled forward, knocking me into the side. She braced herself around
me. I felt myself being gathered up and collected. Arms closed around me.

(Hey - )

The world dropped from under me, and I let myself fade out.

(Found her.)

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END

Profuse thanks go to Becky "Do you need a butt-kicking?" DaSilva for Beta and
archiving; to Rachel, Lori, Viridian, Anna and Ashlea for pre-reading,
typo-hunting, Emergency Ego Resuscitation and the more-than-occasional
face-thwap (face is *still* sore) in response to my frequently whiny and
self-deprecatory e-mails and IMs. I would've scrapped it without the six of
you.

Thanks also to all of you who have kept tabs on the Cycle and offered your
feedback. It always provided the necessary boost to progress with a story
that was, at times, painful to write.

Feedback read, blathered over and hauled out in times of crisis at:
[email protected]

Next 2 stories in the Cycle:
The Third Collective (Oooh! A spin-off! Somebody, please, shoot me!)
Out of Proportion

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1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6 / 7 / 8 / 9 / 10 / 11 / 12 / 13 / 14 / 15 / 16

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