A New World

by Wesa

Series: War of the Worlds, The Equalizer, and The X-Files. Guest appearances in future parts from characters from Due South, The Man from UNCLE, and The Pretender; perhaps from others as the whim takes me.

Standard disclaimers apply. All characters belong to their various creators and the powers that be. Some of these characters belong to Chris Carter, Fox, and 10-13 Productions. I've just invited them over to play for a while, and I promise to send them home when the party's over. Others belong to Universal or Paramount, but it doesn't look like anyone is playing with them at the moment, so I'm going to let them stay as long as they want. Littlehawk belongs to Jan Harley. Thank you, thank you, thank you, Jan, for your wonderful story. I hope you don't mind if he comes over to help chaperone the party; of course, he can come home whenever you need him. Tierney, Lainie, and Kira are mine; they live here.

Constructive criticism is welcomed.

By Wesa.

The early morning mist gave the woods near the stream an eerie, mysterious feel. In the branches overhead a troupe of the playful, colorful monkeykats kept in contact by means of their echoing hoots while chasing after the little yellow-feathered flits that searched for the trees' ripening seeds. Kira lay in Paul's arms and watched the animals as daylight brightened the mist from grayness to whiteness, too comfortable where she was to make the effort to stir up the fire and add wood.

"Makes you wonder why we don't hunt them, doesn't it?" Paul murmured in her ear. "They're so fearless, they'd be easy prey."

Kira shook her head. "There's a reason Mickey called them monkeykats. They have characteristics of both cats and primates, neither of which anyone in our group would consider a food animal," she replied. "If we found one dead, I wouldn't be above skinning it and using the fur. Those furs would make wonderful baby blankets. But I still wouldn't eat it. And they're so damned cute."

"Baby?" Paul repeated. "You aren't - I mean, are you?"

Kira chuckled softly, that sound he so loved. "My silly new husband likes sex but wants no part of the consequences? Littlehawk will be pleased." She turned in his arms and reached up to trace the outline of his lips. "I've been suspicious for a week. I'm pretty sure."

Paul grinned from ear to ear, but sobered quickly. "How are you feeling? Is all the walking going to be too much for you?" he asked worriedly. "Are you getting enough to eat? We have to find a place to settle. I have to build you a better house."

Kira kissed away his worries. "Hey, I'm still me," she told him. "I'll be able to walk longer than Tierney and Sydney, and neither of them is exactly an invalid. Although Tierney was walking funny last week, or didn't you notice?"

"I just married the most desirable woman on the planet a month ago and already you want me to start noticing other women?" he teased. "Besides, Norton would get jealous."

"Then Norton had better start thinking about marrying her," Kira retorted, "not that I think it will make any difference to Tierney, but if he's the possessive type, he needs the reassurance."

"I don't think he's that insecure." Paul chuckled at the very notion. "But I'll mention it to him anyway."

"Don't you dare," Kira chided. "Tierney would think he was only bowing to pressure, that he didn't really mean it, if she ever found out. No, it has to be his idea. I sure hope he figures out soon that no one here is going to object just because he's black."

Paul snorted involuntarily. "It's not like anyone in our group cares," he said. "I think the only person here who has even noticed is Control."

Kira choked on her own laughter.

"What?" Paul asked. He drew back and looked at the woman in his arms. "You know," he accused gently. "How did you find out?"

"When Aunt Susan knew she was dying, she asked me to mail a letter for her. It was to Robert McCall in New York," she explained. "Three days later, Control came. He practically lived at the hospital until she died, then after the funeral he took Tierney back to New York with him. I was seventeen. I knew Aunt Susan had never been married. I didn't need a road map. How did you know?"

"Littlehawk told me," he explained. "He didn't tell me that Norton was still alive, or that he was going to be family."

"If he doesn't get with the program, he won't," Kira pointed out.

**********

Ironhorse stood at the top of the slope, staring down at the broken rock. Beside him, looking from the slope to the Colonel, stood Kostmayer, McCall, and Control. Harrison came up behind them.

"He just stopped," Mickey told him. "He's just standing there. Staring."

Harrison touched the Colonel's arm. "Paul? What is it?"

"Something's wrong," Paul told him. "There's danger here."

They all had known Paul long enough to respect the soldier's instincts, but Harrison - just because he was Harrison - couldn't leave well enough alone. "The slope isn't that steep," he said, stepping one foot out. The rock broke and crumbled underfoot, and if Paul and Mickey hadn't already reached to draw him back, Harrison would have fallen. As he scrambled back to firmer ground, Dana cried out a warning, and Sydney screamed in fear and loathing.

All over the slope below, small gray reptilian heads had popped out of holes, sharp teeth glistening in the sunlight, their owners alerted by the crashing rocks. There were hundreds.

"I agree with Sydney," Mulder murmured.

"Look at the skeletons," McCall said. "Jackalopes, mostly, and some of those rodent pigs, I think. But there are some zagelles down there, too."

"They wait until you're down, then fifty of them jump on you," Paul said.

"I think we'll go around," Control decided.

"Thank you," Suzanne said faintly.

"Don't you ever do anything like that again!" Dana scolded Harrison angrily. "You could have been killed!" Harrison looked down at her in surprise, then at Mulder, who stood with his arm around Lainie, still staring down at the reptilian carnivores as the others in the group started to move further along the top of the slope.

It took the better part of two days to work their way around the colony or colonies of ambush lizards, and no one slept well over the intervening night. Late the next afternoon, though, they left the rock scree slopes behind and moved out onto another, lower, plain.

The animals here were different. When they went out to hunt zagelles, Mickey, Paul, and Kincaid were confronted with a sight that drove home just how different.

"There were fucking dinosaurs, McCall," Mickey told his friend.

"Mickey!" Nick chastised him, with a glance toward the children.

"No," Kincaid defended. "He's right. Only, well, they were pink."

"Pink?" Control repeated.

"Pink," Paul confirmed. "Like elephant-sized brontosaurs, only with silly little wings, and they were mating, I think. The one was on top of the other, both of them were screaming, or trumpeting, or whatever you want to call it, and those stupid little wings stuck out, vibrating, and turned purple."

Tierney giggled. Norton put his arm around her shoulders and said, "Come on, Colonel. When did you develop a sense of humor?"

"Right around the time I met you and Dr. Blackwood, Mr. Drake," Paul replied. "Self-defense."

The pink brontosaurs - called dinos - were not the only new animals. There were also cow-sized green creatures that some wag had dubbed dinettes, as well as the vulture-like flyers that seemed to follow the notlions. The wave of silliness continued until the day Ginger brought some of the yellow tubers into camp and announced that she had found a patch of whatchadiggies.

That was too much for Robert, with his British public school education. "Ginger Brock, will you please stop mangling the Queen's English that way?" he protested.

Tierney snickered behind her hand, drawing McCall's glare. She gazed back innocently.

"And you, young lady," he began.

She shook her finger at him. "Don't you use that cherubic expression on me, old man," she told him. "I am not intimidated. Just what are we supposed to call them? They're not carrots. They're not potatoes. They're not parsnips. They're not any of a couple of dozen things for which the 'Queen's English' has a word. I think whatchadiggies is a perfectly wonderful name for them."

Robert gazed at her suspiciously. "You're the one who has been coining these terms, aren't you?" he asked.

"Me? I'm not that creative." She shot a warning glance toward Norton, who had opened his mouth to comment. "Quiet in the peanut gallery," she told him with a grin.

Robert raised his brows at the by-play, wondering what his best friend thought of his daughter's choice of a lover. If Control even knew ...

**********

"She's your daughter?" Suzanne asked in astonishment.

"I need your advice," Control told her earnestly. "Should I tell her? Should I tell Norton? I have no right to act like a father now, do I? I ... I was never able to be a real father to her. Hell, I never even knew about her, not until Robert brought me the letter her mother had sent me from her deathbed. I took her to New York and made sure she had the best education, the best ... the best of everything I could give her. But I couldn't be a real father to her."

"Because of your position in the government," Suzanne said. "Does she understand what you did, how dangerous it was?"

"I told her," he replied. He studied the pebbles of the streamside where they sat on a fallen log together. "She had to understand the reason why I put her in a boarding school after taking her from the only home she'd ever known."

"And the reason was?" Suzanne asked.

Control looked at her uncomfortably. "She's my daughter. I wanted her near me, but to have her with me as a daughter would have put both of us in danger," he explained.

"But what did you tell Tierney?" Suzanne insisted.

"That her mother had asked me to look after her - which was true, of course, with the admonition that I had to keep her safe." He sighed and tossed a pebble into the stream.

Suzanne nodded and touched his hand. "She already cares about you, if only because she knows you loved her mother. I think you have to tell her, but let her decide whether to tell Norton or anyone else," she told him.

***********

Mulder grinned at Dana Scully, then kissed her on the forehead. "I hope you're very happy," he said, then turned to Harrison. "She had better be," he told the taller man. "If I hear otherwise..." He left the threat hanging as he shook hands with him.

"And when are you going to make an honest woman of Lainie?" Harrison asked. "Even Norton and Tierney are talking about marriage, ever since Control caught them together."

"If he didn't know before then, he must have been the only one in our group who didn't," Dana said, leaning into Harrison's embrace.

Mulder smiled at the picture they presented. The tall, always slender scientist, now too thin from months of slim rations, and the short red-haired doctor, her advancing pregnancy beginning to show, who barely came up to his shoulder. "Except maybe the kids," he said, glancing over to where Debi and Samantha cut open the shells of yellow gourds to make bowls.

Harrison chuckled. "Control would never have caught them if he and Ginger hadn't been going to the same place for the same reason."

**********

They had been walking for nearly two months, and the weather, while cold at night and even frosty in the mornings, had moderated a great deal and was even almost warm in the afternoons. At the central fire one evening, Harrison announced his opinion that they had come far enough to be safe from the winter.

Mickey laughed. "It helps," he told Harrison, "that winter must be nearly over."

"Does that mean we can stop soon?" Suzanne asked tiredly. The oldest of the women in their group, pregnancy was wearing on her more than on the other women.

"Are you okay, Mom?" Debi asked, watching with approval as Robert McCall patted her mother's hand gently. Suzanne smiled at her daughter and nodded.

"If everyone else concurs," Control said, "I see no reason we can't stop as soon as we find a suitable place to settle." With his arm around Ginger, he looked meaningfully at Norton and added, "I expect we'll have some more weddings soon."

"Daddy!" Tierney objected.

Control blinked in astonishment.

"'Daddy?'" Norton repeated. "Uhm, Tierney...?"