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.

Lainie gave Mulder a daughter a few weeks after Debi's wedding. Dana forbade him to leave their little village until he could wipe the goofy smile off his face, saying she didn't want to lose her best friend to a phantom, one of the wolflike creatures that roamed the plains and occasionally stalked the hunters. He just grinned at her. Samantha was particularly pleased with getting a niece, and not only for the sake of baby Teena. "Maybe Fox will stop treating me like a kid," she hoped, helping a recovering Lainie change the wet moss that lined Teena's diaper wrap.

Lainie smiled. "Don't count on it," she warned. "You'll always be his baby sister; and he searched for you so long that now he's found you, he's guaranteed to be a bit over-protective. But I appreciate how grown-up you're getting." She re-fastened the diaper wrap and picked Teena up, pausing to put one hand on Samantha's shoulder. "You're a great help to me, Sammie," she added softly, dropping a kiss on the girl's forehead. "Thank you."

Samantha smiled up at her sister-in-law, pleased by the recognition. "Is there anything else you need, Lainie?" she asked, eager to help more.

Lainie considered. "I ache all over," she admitted. "I'd like to sit in the sun for a while. Would you mind bringing one or two of the bedding hides outside and spreading it out for me? Right now I have all I can deal with just to walk and carry Teena."

Leading the way outside, Samantha held aside the tent-flap doorway for Lainie, then found a place where the morning sun had already burned the dew off the grass, and spread a soft bed-fur on the ground for her. "I'm going with Debi and Kira to gather whatchadiggies," she told her. "We should be back in a couple of hours. Will you be all right that long?"

"Who's going to provide protection?" Lainie asked, a frown betraying her worry. "Debi's pretty good with a spear-thrower, but she's not enough, and Kira's getting so she waddles more than walks --"

"I heard that, Lainie," Kira told her cousin from her own teepee. "You were no picture of grace yourself, coming outside this morning."

Lainie snorted softly. "We'll see how you feel in a couple of months," she grumbled. "Does Paul know you're taking the girls out to dig roots? Does Eric know, Debi?" she asked as the pretty blonde newlywed joined the group.

"They went fishing with Mickey and Walter this morning," Debi replied, setting her basket down as she knelt to say good morning to Teena. After a couple of minutes admiring the newest addition to their village, she rose and looked from Kira to Samantha. "Are we ready?"

"I have to tell Fox I won't be around for a while, so he can keep an eye on Lainie and Teena," Samantha told them, adding with a little grin, "since Dana won't let him leave camp."

"What about Harrison? Or Norton?" Lainie insisted.

"Picking berries with Suzanne, Tierney, and Dana," Kira replied.

"We'll be okay, Lainie, really," Samantha told her. "The rooters never bother groups of people, and the phantoms don't like marshy areas."

One thing the three cousins had in common was tenacity, and Lainie stubbornly refused to be reassured. "There might be a notlion," she said.

"This close to camp?" Debi asked. "Where they have competition for the zagelles and dinettes? We're only going to the patch by the peachfruit grove. Kira can't walk any farther than that."

Lainie looked hard at her cousin, a faint crease appearing between her finely arched brows. "Do me one favor, Kira," she requested. "Check with Dana and Suzanne first. I mean it. You might be farther along than we thought."

Kira sighed and lowered herself carefully to the ground beside Lainie. "Dana already knows. She said walking's good for me, so I might as well go somewhere with it. Now stop fretting or you'll sour your milk."

Debi giggled. "You don't look like an old wife, Kira. Why're you spreading old wives' tales?"

"Help me up off the ground and I'll give you old wives' tales, young lady," Kira threatened impotently.

Both younger girls laughed, pulling on Kira's outstretched arms to assist her to her feet. "How do you get out of bed in the morning?" Samantha wondered.

"Same way I did, probably," Lainie mused, "with a little help from hubby."

"If Paul moos at me even once, I'll get even, I swear I will," Kira grumbled, picking up her basket. "I'll move half the bedfurs outside for him, or something. I still can't believe you put up with that from Mulder." Her voice softened. "Don't stay outside too long, Lainie," she said, gauging the angle of the sunshine with a practiced eye. "You still need to rest. We'll tell Mulder to get you back into your bed when the shade from those trees falls on you. That'll give you a couple of hours. Okay?"

"Lovesick bulls moo, too," Lainie reminded Kira gently. "I'll be okay. I still wish you'd take some of the guys with you. Or at least Ginger or Trudy."

"They're even more pregnant than Kira is. You worry too much," Debi told her as the three turned toward the marsh that bordered the lake west of their village.

**********

"Norton!" Tierney cried urgently.

Norton and Harrison looked around from where they stood guard for the women picking berries. Out here on the plain south of their lake they were probably safe from rooters, and a group as large as theirs was safe from notlions even with the children with them. But the phantoms had become a constant threat, and no one ventured far onto the plain without at least one armed guard, preferably two. Three would have been even better, but more couldn't be spared if there was to be anyone watching the camp.

"Norton!" Tierney was getting frantic.

"Do you see anything?" Norton asked, shading his eyes and scanning for danger around his wife and her companions.

Harrison shook his head; once he had seen that Dana and William were safe, he'd quickly checked on Suzanne and Hank, glanced at Tierney where she gesticulated at them, and turned to scan the plain for danger. There was a male notlion sunning himself on a low hill above a herd of dinettes, but he hadn't moved in the hour they'd been here, and if he was hungry they would never have seen him. On the other hand, if there were phantoms in the area, the notlion would have been stalking them. Notlions and phantoms did not get along. "All clear here. Maybe you'd better --" He broke off as a movement caught his eye. "Norton, there!" He pointed in the same direction that Tierney had been waving her hands.

Norton had learned to use his long legs well; he'd had to. He dropped his spear and gave chase after his son, who seemed determined to join the dinette herd. He turned the tot to face him, hugged him fiercely, then spoke to him in a low voice until Noah stopped struggling to get free. A moment later Norton swung the boy up onto his shoulder and returned to where Harrison watched over everyone. "We should have named him Lion Chow," Norton muttered softly to Harrison, knowing Tierney wouldn't approve of the observation, no matter how true.

The women and the other children joined them a few moments later. All three of the boys had a ring of smashed berries smeared around their mouths, and Harrison grinned at Dana's efforts to clean William's face, while Tierney hugged Noah in relief. "He never walked," she told Suzanne helplessly. "He crawled longer than the other boys, but as soon as he stood up he started running."

"And he hasn't stopped," Norton added. "At night he runs until he drops from sheer exhaustion. That can't be normal, can it?"

"He's not so different from the other boys," Dana reassured them, giving up on the berry stains William sported. He would just have to have blue lips for a few days. "Noah's just at the top end of the activity scale."

"It could be worse," Suzanne added. "You know how cranky Adam gets in the evenings when he's tired."

"Who could miss it?" Harrison asked. Mickey and Sydney's younger son regularly cried himself to sleep, but would not willingly go to bed one minute before his big brother, whom he adored. "Did you get enough berries, or did the kids eat them all?"

"Enough for this trip," Dana told him. "There'll be another harvest ripening in about three or four days. Just time for the boys to get over the effects of having eaten this much fruit at one sitting." She made a face. "Yech," she added.

Suzanne nodded agreement. "And I was thinking of starting Hank on potty-training," she said ruefully. "I guess I'll have to put it off a while longer. I really don't want to have two in diapers at once." Her free hand caressed her just-starting-to-swell belly, where Robert's child grew inside her.

"Oh, those effects," Harrison said, understanding dawning. He chuckled.

"Careful, or you'll be changing diapers tonight," Norton warned.

"I'm liable to be anyway," Harrison retorted. "Need a babysitter tonight, Suzanne?" he asked teasingly.

Suzanne blushed under her tan. She hadn't told anyone that Walter Skinner had asked her to go for a walk along the beach with him the night before; she should have realized it wouldn't go unnoticed that she had left Hank with Debi and Eric for over an hour. "Not tonight," she said. "Walter wants to show Hank the place where the monkeykats come to drink. We're hoping to get there just before they start coming to the edge of the lake."

Dana smiled reassuringly at her. "He's a good man, Suzanne. I think Robert would approve."

"He would," Suzanne agreed. She had never told anyone exactly what Robert had said to her that day, but everyone just seemed to assume that she and Walter would eventually get together. And even though he had approved, had even encouraged her, she still felt she was betraying his memory somehow. And then there were his children. "It's Scott and Yvette," she said.

"What about them?" Tierney asked. "I know Yvette approves, she told me so. And Scott can be ... well, a little juvenile, but he'll come around. He's basically sensible."

**********

Summer was nearly over, according to Harrison's calculations. Already the nights were getting cooler, and birds were appearing on the lake that they hadn't seen before. The ducklike but brightly-colored painted webfoots were good eating, and their feathers began to adorn clothing and hair ties, and made good fletching for spear-shafts. Beyond that, it was soothing just to watch them fly in to land on the lake in the evening, to listen to their haunting calls through the night. Other changes were happening, too. Large-fruited gourds were ripening on their vines, and the small fruits of the cheeple trees were turning red. The dinettes appeared to be migrating, and that had spurred a frenzy of hunting, and smoking or drying the meat from the kills. No one wanted another winter like the first one, when they so nearly starved.

A kind of small bird they hadn't previously seen was named a dickadicka for its call, after it appeared in the meadows and grasslands, eating the gnatflies that rose in swarms and bit every warm-blooded creature around. It was a striking bird, small, but marked in yellow and black, with remarkably long tail-feathers on the males, which they appeared to be molting even though the feathers still seemed to be perfectly formed. Through an accidental trapping of one of the birds, it was learned that they could apparently shed the long feathers at will, and would do so to escape from predators. Michel had given the yellow-and-black feathers to Samantha, and she had worn them in her hair ever since. Mulder began glaring at the boy a lot.

Eric was trapping dickadickas while standing guard over a group of women with Mulder and Scott, when someone called his name.

Eric jumped slightly and looked around for the source of the familiar voice. He hadn't heard it in a very long time, and yet he knew exactly whose voice it was. "Yes, Grandfather?" he said, speaking softly. Scott and Mulder weren't far away; it wouldn't do to let them hear him apparently talking to himself.

The grey-haired elder he remembered from his adolescence stood beside him, real enough to touch. Eric kept his hands to himself. He knew better than to be so disrespectful to any spirit, and this was the spirit of Albert Hosteen, the powerful shaman who had spoken with spirits as long as Eric could remember, the one who had helped to bring Fox Mulder back from near death.

Eric smiled. "Debi will be pleased to learn of your approval, Grandfather," he told Albert.

Albert grinned slyly. "Even outworld enemies cannot defeat the purposes of the spirits. We have used their greed to continue our people. This is how it should be; this is how your grandson will come to be. Where else could you and Dancing Fox have a life together?"

Dancing Fox. Eric rolled the spirit-name around in his mind. Yes, it fit Debi perfectly, he decided. "We couldn't," he admitted. "We come from different cultures, almost different worlds. There, she would have been a scientist, probably, working at a university or a research facility, and I would still have been a mechanic, stuck in a dead-end job in a backwater town on the reservation. We would never have even met. Does she know her spirit name?"

Eric waited silently. Albert would get to his purpose in his own good time.

"It is time for Starfire to come to you," Albert told him eventually. "You must go to your mate, Silent Cougar. Create the body Starfire will inhabit."

Eric grinned. "Are you telling me to make my wife pregnant, Grandfather?"

Albert looked at him in irritation. "How else will your daughter have a body? You were not so dense when we lived on the reservation."

"Debi - Dancing Fox will be pleased, Grandfather. She wants a baby," Eric replied.

"Yes, Grandfather," Eric said, obediently turning to the other men. "It's getting late," he called to them. "Let's see if they're ready to go."

He joined Debi, while Scott went to Trudy, and Mulder greeted Lainie, Samantha, and Teena. The women were filling baskets with sand lettuce, banatoes, and purple-heart herb for the evening meal. The three plants conveniently grew close together, and when combined, made a salad that rivaled the best Earth ever produced. Eric greeted the others pleasantly enough, but went straight to Debi, where she carefully picked only the ripest banatoes, cylindrical red fruits that grew in bunches like bananas but tasted almost like tomatoes. "'Bout done?" he asked her.

"Almost. What have you been doing?"

"Trapping dickadickas." He displayed the long yellow-and-black tailfeathers that were the only reason to trap the little birds; they were too small to be worth eating. "I thought maybe we could trade the feathers for a bunting for the baby."

Debi turned and looked at him in confusion. "What baby?"

"Our baby." Eric grinned at her expression. "You said you wanted a baby. Grandfather says we'll have one soon."

Debi's eyes shone. "You've been talking with the spirits?" she asked. "I'm pregnant?"

"Not yet. Would you like to be? I think we can arrange that." He tickled her nose with one of the feathers. "Let's go home and try." He caught her face in his hands and kissed her. "I promise not to moo at you," he murmured softly. "Dancing Fox, you are my princess and my refuge."

"Dancing Fox? - That's what Littlehawk called me," she breathed.

"That's your spirit-name," Eric told her. "That's what Grandfather calls you, too. And he told me that it was time for us to make a body for our daughter to live in. Not that I need any encouragement to make love with you."

"Now?"

"I think we can go home first," Eric laughed softly. "Come on, I'll carry your basket."

**********

Frost turned the trees flame-red. The webfoots and dickadickas disappeared along with the dinettes and the phantoms, which apparently followed the herds. The birds were replaced by others: white fluffy-looking wading birds that stalked the edge of the lake, and brown-and-red 'freeps' and brightly colored 'ookers,' which flocked around the seed-producing sundaisies and stipplegrass.

Ginger gave Control a son, whom they named Robert. Suzanne cried, turning to Walter for comfort. Scott scowled until Yvette warned him to take it easy and pay more attention to his wife. Trudy produced a daughter a week later.

Paul worried about Kira. "Stay close to camp today, Laughing Brook," he told her one morning, his hand resting on her belly. "You're getting close to your time."

Kira stood up, puffing with the effort. "Like I had any choice," she gasped breathlessly. "You be careful, too, Darkeagle. There are still notlions out there, and I don't want our baby orphaned."

He looked at her with all his love for her burning in his eyes. "I'll be careful," he promised. "I don't want to leave you. But if something should happen to me, you know I'll still watch over you and our children. I'll still be around." Kira's eyes filled with tears. "No, don't cry," he told her gently. "That was supposed to be reassuring. I didn't mean to worry you."

"I know, I'm sorry," she whispered, cuddling into his arms. "I just - I never hoped to ever find anyone who loved me so much, and now that I have you, I could never bear to lose you." She held him tightly for a moment longer, then released him. "Nevermind me, I'm just pregnant," she said with a little sniffle. "I'll be better once our son is born."

He stroked her cheek, looking at her curiously. "How do you know it's a boy?"

Kira blushed. "I dreamed - Her name was Singing Lark. I think she was your mother. She came with Dusky Sparrow a couple of nights ago." She smiled ruefully. "They kept talking about our children and grandchildren in the present tense. But it was just a dream."

"Maybe, maybe not," he murmured. "Dusky Sparrow was Emma's spirit name. And Littlehawk agrees that this baby is a son." He smiled. "As much as I would like to speak with Mother myself, I'm glad she came to you. So, our son's name is settled, then?"

"Since we're likely to be the last to speak Tsalagi on this world, yes," Kira agreed. "It's right to name our children with Tsalagi names. It honors our ancestors. At least I hope they'll see it that way."

"The spirits know what's in our hearts," Paul said as Mickey called his name from outside. "You know where we'll be today if you need us?"

"Upriver, by the falls," she said. "Go on. I'll be fine."

**********

Lainie looked up sharply at Kira's exclamation of dismay to find her cousin standing in a puddle of birth fluids. She laughed softly. "Did you fill your moccasins?" she asked, settling Teena into her papoose-board and tying the straps securely.

"Uh-huh," Kira replied. She swallowed hard. "I guess it's time."

"Hey," Lainie said. She came to her cousin's side and put her arm around her. "It'll be okay. It won't hurt so bad this time. You'll see." She looked around at the few other women in camp. "Anyone know where Dana and Sydney are today? Maybe Suzanne?"

A little green around the gills with morning sickness, Debi spoke up. "Mom and Dana went with Yvette and Scott to gather reeds downriver. Sydney's picking mintbush leaves. Michel and Samantha are with her."

"We'll get her," Ginger volunteered. "C'mon, Trudy."

"No," Tierney said firmly. "It's too soon for you to go that far, either of you." She put Noah into the playpen Norton and Control had constructed for the children. Deb, let's go. You look like you could use some mintbush leaves anyway."

**********

Sydney gave Debi a handful of freshly picked leaves. "Was she having contractions yet?"

Tierney and Debi looked at each other. "No, I don't think so," Debi replied.

"She told me this morning that her back hurt," Tierney said. "Could have been the early stages."

Sydney nodded. "There's time then." She looked at Samantha and Michel, then at Debi and Tierney. "Would one of you go with the kids to get Dana? I can probably handle most of it, but she should be there if Kira needs an episiotomy."

Tierney nodded. "I'll go. I'm not sure Debi's up to it. What about Paul?"

"If we're lucky, they'll come back early," Sydney decided. "If not, well, Kira doesn't really need him for this part."

"Kira might disagree," Debi said as the two groups headed off in different directions.

**********

Paul looked up sharply.

"Something wrong, Big Guy?" Norton asked.

"I thought - Nevermind." Paul turned his attention back to his fishing line.

Not taken by surprise this time, Paul was able to react more subtly, and looked at Littlehawk questioningly.

"It's time to go home," Littlehawk told him.

Paul frowned at the spirit of his clone, wondering what he meant.

"Paul?" Harrison worried.

"Littlehawk wants us to go home," Paul explained.

"Your companions need not go, but you might want to be there," Littlehawk told him. "Laughing Brook is bringing your son into this world." He laughed as Paul tossed his fishing line to Norton and grabbed his spear, heading downstream at a ground-covering lope.

"Colonel?" "Paul!" Norton and Harrison asked together.

"Kira's having the baby!" he called back over his shoulder, not slowing.

Mickey watched him go. "I wish I had my own personal messenger spirit," he observed.