Subcutaneous, 3 of 8
Disclaimers and notes in part 1

April 21

On the fourth day, she died. 

She died in the morning, a little before 9. It was Byers who called 
him, and Skinner didn't recognize his voice, both because Byers had 
woken him up from the first sound sleep he'd had since this had 
started, and because Byers' voice was clogged with tears.

Later, Skinner would remember only flashes of that day. His confusion 
about Byers' identity as he had reached over for his glasses to read 
the clock--9:48 a.m. How the florescent lights had reflected off the 
floor as he walked down the hospital hallway. Mrs. Scully's voice, 
but not her face, as she talked to him: "Bill was sitting with her; 
he came in at 8 so that I could sleep a little later. He said it was 
peaceful. But I didn't even get to say goodbye. They'd taken her
body away by the time I got here, for the autopsy. She'd told them
she wanted one done as soon as possible, to help the others."

The warmth of coffee through the styrofoam cup. The brown, scuffed
loafers of Mrs. Scully's priest, who had told Mrs. Scully that maybe
it was a comfort that Dana had been spared the rest of the disease.

The expression of hatred on Bill's face, and the expression of 
blankness on Mulder's as he had hugged Mrs. Scully, patting her back
as she'd cried. No one had called him ("I couldn't tell him on the 
phone. What if he were driving?" Mrs. Scully had said), and he had 
come to the hospital at 9:30, expecting her to be alive.

The bleakness on Mulder's face as his friends had drawn him away from
the hospital. Byers had murmured something to him, and Mulder had 
pulled away, arguing. Frohike had said, loudly enough that Skinner 
could hear, "Either we go home with you or you go home with us," and
then Mulder, incredulous and angry: "She put me on a goddamned suicide 
watch, didn't she?" 

He'd gone with them docilely enough, despite the surge of anger that 
had been the only emotion Skinner had seen from him that morning.

He spent the rest of the day at the bureau after all. It was an
odd day. Parts of it were spent making and answering phone calls about 
Scully: to the appropriate people at the bureau, from her mother 
about the funeral arrangements. The rest of the time, he spent typing 
up employee evaluations, a supremely ordinary task.

That night, he lay in his bed, on his back, wanting desperately 
to turn back time, as he had when his father had died in a car 
accident when he was twenty-five. It had made no sense to him, that 
one minute he could be joking with his mother, sitting with her on 
their front porch during a visit home, and that the next the police 
car could pull up to the front of the house, and Sheriff Taylor could 
step out and pause by the car as his mother's voice died with a gasp. 
It had been a sunny day, and the sun had glinted off the car as 
Sheriff Taylor took off his hat.

The first few days after his father's death, he had kept expecting 
that he could do something to repair events as his mechanic father 
had been able to repair cars, meticulously rearranging the pieces 
until they made sense again.

But he had learned again then, as he had learned first in Vietnam, 
that some events were beyond repair.

Except, except, except...

He thought of Scully's words to him in the hospital, about the bank 
robbery.

If it had happened once, it could happen again.

I'll play that woman's role, Skinner bargained, staring up at his 
ceiling as the tears began to slide down his face. I'll be the one in 
hell for fifty times, the one to remember, if Scully doesn't die on 
the fifty-first.

When he woke up several hours later, time had continued as it usually 
did. If the day had rewound fifty times, no one knew, and the outcome 
hadn't changed. Scully was still dead on the fifth day.

***
April 22

The wake was that evening. Skinner went after work, tired and sad. 
He disliked funeral parlors: their smell of flowers and preservatives, 
their faux-Victorian decor, their chill. He disliked the small prayer 
cards that had Scully's date of birth and death stamped on them above 
the Prayer of St. Francis. He disliked the atmosphere of hushed 
silence. 

Signing the guest book, he saw the names of many people from the 
bureau, but few were still remaining. He suspected that a lot of them 
had only stayed a short time, oppressed by the silence.

Mrs. Scully, Bill, and his wife were towards the front, talking to a 
younger man and two agents that Skinner recognized from the bureau. 
"That's her other brother, Charlie," said Byers from next to him. 
"His wife isn't here; apparently, she's too pregnant to fly. He was 
supposed to come in today to see her, but then..."

"Hell of a homecoming," said Skinner, moving with Byers away from the 
guest book and towards the back of the room, where Frohike and Langly 
and Mulder were sitting in the last row of folding chairs. All three 
men were wearing suits; Langly was wearing dark sunglasses. "Closed 
coffin, hmm?"

"Apparently when she last had cancer, she wrote down what she wanted 
for her wake and funeral, and she requested that then. Since her mom 
didn't know...they didn't talk about it, so her mother went with those 
instructions."

Skinner was grateful enough. He didn't want to see Scully still and 
motionless, her face changed and slackened by death. "Hey," said 
Mulder softly when Skinner and Byers filed into the row in front of 
him and turned in their chairs.

"Hey." Skinner nodded at them all. "How are you doing?"

Mulder shook his head a little and looked down at his shoes. Skinner 
looked over at Frohike, who just shrugged.

"Did they find anything in the autopsy?" Skinner asked cautiously. 

"Nothing that explains anything satisfactorily," said Byers. "We've 
been receiving death reports all day. People have been mailing us the 
chips to look at. But they're very fragile. When we examine them, we 
destroy them. There's nothing that explains why Scully would have 
been affected differently than the other women and died first."

"If you need anything on this, bureau resources--" offered Skinner.

"I'll call," finished Mulder. "But I think it's safer to keep the 
investigation low profile for now. Anything that goes through the 
bureau goes back to them, you know that."

Yes, Skinner did. He sighed and twisted back towards the front of the 
room. The two agents had left the family. "I should go up and pay my 
condolences."

He met Charlie, who seemed bewildered to be shaking his hand, 
and more bewildered by Skinner's description of his sister as a fine 
agent. He met Bill's wife Tara, who hugged him as tears ran down her 
face, which was discomfiting. Skinner patted her shoulder awkwardly, 
thinking that he couldn't remember ever hugging Scully. "I know she 
had the greatest respect for you," said Tara.

"Yes," said Bill, from behind her, with a shapeless antagonism in 
his eyes, "she always did speak of you with respect."

"Have you seen the pictures?" asked Mrs. Scully, drawing him away 
from Tara and over to a poster board with snapshots thumbtacked to 
it. A baby cradled in the arms of a young, dark-haired woman, a 
red-headed toddler tugging at the leg of a man in uniform, a picture 
of four ginger-headed kids lined up by height in front of a small 
house. School pictures, Dana with freckles and a gap between her 
teeth. An adolescent with braces and glasses standing next to her 
taller sister. A senior portrait from high school, a pretty girl with 
a round face who was beginning to have the level gaze of the adult 
Scully.

"This was her med school graduation," said Mrs. Scully, tapping one 
of Dana in a black gown, surrounded by her family. "I think that's 
the last picture we have of the whole family together. Bill was so 
proud of her. My husband Bill, I mean."

"I think any father would have been proud of her," said Skinner. 
"Of what she accomplished, of what she was."

The later pictures of Scully were fewer. She slimmed down, hardened. 
She put a little more space between herself and the other people 
in the picture with her. Her smiles were smaller.

"Yes, he was always proud of her," said Mrs. Scully. "All of us were 
proud of her." He could hear the pride in her voice, but there was 
something doubtful in her face, as if she were not sure whether 
having a daughter of whom she could be proud was worth the cost.

***
April 23 

The funeral was unbearable, not because anything went wrong
but because everything went smoothly. People said all the 
right things, but the words of the Mass and the eulogies from
Charlie and Bill seemed to have little to do with the Scully
whom Skinner remembered. Mulder, sitting towards the back of 
the church with a crowd of other FBI agents, was polite to 
one and all, and Skinner, who had been prepared to run 
interference for him, was disconcerted by this stranger who 
accepted concerned platitudes without sarcasm or irony.

He pulled Byers aside at the funeral luncheon. "Is he okay?"

Their eyes both went to Mulder, who was calmly listening to
one of Scully's former students talk about how wonderful and 
precise Scully had been as a pathologist. "He hasn't cried," said 
Byers. "He doesn't rant and rave about revenge. He'll eat if we 
suggest it to him. He makes jokes when we talk to him. He doesn't 
sleep much."

"Does he talk about Scully at all?"

"He listens when we talk about her. He'll talk about her theories
about the cancer. But not about her, no. Langly can't talk about
her without crying, and he wasn't even that close to her. And
Frohike punched a hole in the wall of Mulder's apartment. We
spent half of last night spackling. But Mulder..."

Skinner shook his head.

"We're just waiting," said Byers softly. "We took away his gun,
and we keep the razors out of the bathroom, and we don't leave 
him alone, and we keep him out of the kitchen and away from the 
knives. We're just waiting for it, now."

***
April 24 

The next day was a Saturday, almost a week since Mrs. Scully had 
called him looking for Mulder. Skinner spent the first half of the 
day at the office catching up on work. Around 2:00, he took off
his glasses and rubbed his eyes. God. It occurred to him that
he had been moving from one confined space to another over the
last week, and that he hadn't been to the gym in several weeks.
Suddenly, the thought of spending more time sitting at his 
desk and reading was unbearable. He stood up abruptly, and then
just as abruptly sat down again, regarding his phone with distaste.
Dammit. Okay, he'd make the duty call to check up on Mulder, and
then he'd go to the gym and take out his frustration on the
punching bag.

The phone rang twice, and then a voice answered. Frohike, he
was pretty sure. "Who is this?"

"Who is *this*?" asked Skinner. 

"I asked first."

"This is Skinner. Who is this: Frohike?"

"No! Don't use any names on an unsecured line!" the other man yelped.

"Oh, for Chrissakes," said Skinner. 

He heard an odd echo, Mulder's voice saying the same thing in the 
background, and then continuing, "Frohike, give me the goddamn phone."

"Mulder, I've got it, it's ok."

"It's not gonna hurt me to talk on the phone. What do you think I'm 
gonna do, suddenly snap and wrap the phone cord around my neck? I'm 
gonna wrap it around yours if you don't..."

There was a scuffling noise, and then Mulder's voice came on
the line. "Hello, sir."

"Mulder."

"Sorry about that. Frohike isn't used to answering normal phones."

"I noticed."

"He *has* been scaring telemarketers away all day, though."

Skinner grinned briefly at the thought. "I just called to ask 
if you'd made any progress on anything."

"No." Mulder's answer, flat and unembellished, wiped the smile
off his face.

"How are you doing?" he asked.

"I'm considering suicide just to get away from this damn
apartment. (Oh, fuck off Frohike, that was a joke.) They won't
leave me alone for more than two minutes, and they won't let
me leave the apartment. Too many sharp edges in the world,
apparently."

"Mulder..."

"If you say anything about this being for my own good, I'll break 
away from the Three Stooges just to come over and wrap the phone 
cord around *your* neck."

He wasn't altogether sure that Mulder was joking. And he
could sympathize. He would be going stir crazy if he had spent
the last three days in an apartment with three other people. 
But it *was* for Mulder's own good. Skinner wasn't sure that
Mulder would actively commit suicide if left alone, but he
could easily see the other man doing something rash, or going
out and being hit by a car simply because he wasn't paying attention. 
He sighed and mentally revised his plans for the day.

"Mulder..."

"I *know* it's for my own good. That doesn't mean I have to
*like* it."

"Mulder."

"What?"

"You want to go running?"

***

Two hours later, Mulder slowed to a halt and bent over to catch his 
breath. Skinner did the same, spitting onto the weeds by the side 
of the trail. When he'd arrived at Mulder's apartment, the other 
man had already been ready to go. Byers had been gone; Langly and 
Frohike had delivered Mulder into his care with a distinct air of 
relief. There were jogging trails at a public park near Mulder's 
apartment, and they had chosen to go there rather than run on the 
streets by Mulder's home. In the car on the way over, Skinner had
begun to understand the other men's relief. He'd seen 
hyperactive children who had better attention spans, and Mulder's 
constant fidgeting got on his nerves very quickly. He'd kept his 
silence, though. Once on the trails, they'd run for a solid hour, 
keeping a even, fast, steady pace the whole time. The other man's 
eyes had been distracted and focused on the trail ahead; Skinner 
hadn't even been entirely sure that Mulder knew that there was 
someone keeping pace with him.

"Thanks," Mulder said, and Skinner was glad that he had kept his 
silence earlier in the car. The other man really did look grateful, 
and more than that, he was standing still.

"Don't mention it," said Skinner, peeved at himself for how out of 
breath he was. He hadn't had a run like that in awhile.

"No, really, thanks. I usually run at least five miles a day. I don't 
realize how much it clears my head until I can't do it anymore."

"Uh huh."

Mulder wandered off the trail, onto the grassy park land. Skinner 
could see a family picnicking in the distance. 

"You mind if we stay here awhile? I don't want to head back to prison 
just yet," called Mulder.

"No, that's fine," said Skinner, perhaps a little too emphatically, 
and saw the gleam of amusement in Mulder's eyes. Well, what did he 
expect from Skinner? He was a decade older than the other man. He 
sat down a little off of the trail, and after a awhile Mulder came 
to sit by him. They sat for a time in silence, Skinner listening to 
his own breathing level out and return to its normal pace.

Mulder lay back on the grass beside him, covering his eyes with one 
arm. For a moment, Skinner wondered if he were crying silently, but 
his other arm was loose as it lay on his sweat-soaked t-shirt, and 
his breathing was even.

Running he could handle, but...
 
"How are you doing?" he finally asked.

"I wasn't keeping track, but those weren't six minute miles. I'm 
getting out of shape."

"That's not what I meant."

"I know what you meant."

"Byers said you weren't talking at all. Maybe if you did, it 
would..."

"What are you, my Scully-appointed therapist? Geez, the babysitters 
were bad enough."

"Scully didn't appoint me to do anything. That doesn't mean that I'm 
not concerned," Skinner snapped, losing his patience and immediately 
regretting it. It was no wonder that Scully *hadn't* asked him to 
look after Mulder.

But the harshness in his voice seemed to do something that
gentleness hadn't. "It doesn't feel like she's gone," said Mulder. 

"I know it's hard to accept," Skinner said.

"Do you know, I could usually tell when she was in danger? I'd just 
know. Like a splinter, you can ignore it but it bugs you, like when 
you know you've forgotten something. Even that day, the first day, 
I was sitting in the laundromat watching my clothes spin and thinking 
that something was wrong with Scully. But I figured that it was just 
because it was the middle of April."

The middle of April? Skinner had a confused thought about taxes. 
"Why the middle of April?" he asked.

"What? Oh. There are certain times of year, anniversaries, that 
are bad for us. The middle of November for me, Christmas for her. But
the end of April's bad for both of us--my father, her sister--I get 
pretty manic, and she gets all--well. I just assumed it was that. 
I should have called. I was going to, after I got back from the
laundromat. I purposely *went* to the laundromat and didn't bring my 
cell phone just so that I wouldn't call and bug her that morning. I 
figured that after a few hours of watching my clothes spin around 
I'd be calm enough that I wouldn't aggravate the hell out of her if 
I called. I thought that that was all that was wrong, that it was a 
bad time of year."

"You wouldn't have known any different," said Skinner. "You can't 
blame yourself for not knowing"

"Maybe not," said Mulder. "Maybe I could have, if I'd been paying 
more attention to her lately. Maybe I would have been more tuned into 
her. I'm way less tuned into her than I thought I was, though, 
because I still feel like she's there, in danger. I hate that I don't 
feel different. I should be like all of you are expecting me to be: 
I should be...mourning her loss and feeling like I've had half of me 
cut off. I should be grieving. She deserves that. But I can't. She 
doesn't feel...gone." 

"Grief doesn't follow a set course. You know that. You've worked with 
the families of crime victims; you've seen how disparately they can 
react. You don't have to rush the process."

"She deserves better than my indifference," Mulder said, and Skinner 
saw that the hand lying across his chest had clenched into a fist, 
crumpling his t-shirt.

"She deserves your honesty. Mulder, she was one of the most 
compassionate women I've ever met. She would have understood that you 
can't feel emotions on command."

Mulder didn't respond, and Skinner sighed and retied his shoelace for 
lack of anything better to do.

"Byers and Langly and Frohike keep talking about her. I think they 
think that if I hear enough stories I'll crack and start crying 
and...achieve catharsis or whatever. It's not working that way. 
They'll start crying and I'll sit there patting their shoulder and
telling them that it'll be ok."

"But you don't talk about her yourself." 

"What, you think that it'd be different if I did?"

"I don't know. When my father died, we sat around and told stories 
about him. It helped. It made us all stronger."

"Did it make *you* cry?" Mulder asked, and there was a nasty, goading 
edge to his voice.

Skinner remembered the twenty-five year old he had been, his voice 
cracking in unexpected places as he had talked to his brother about 
their shared childhood, the tears that he had shed in Sharon's
arms as they lay twined together in the bed he had slept in as a 
child, as she'd rubbed his back and told him about her own memories 
of a good man.

"I'm sorry. That was unfair," said Mulder, and Skinner saw that he 
had removed his arm from over his eyes and propped himself up on his 
elbow.

"Yes," he told Mulder, and the other man searched his face and then 
nodded slightly in comprehension, accepting that the yes was both an 
agreement that the question had been unfair, and an answer to the 
question. After a moment he flopped back onto his back. Skinner 
sighed and did the same, watching the clouds move in the sky. Jesus, 
he was getting old, when a run like that could make him tired.

"Did you know she could shoot pool?" Mulder asked, his voice
small and tentative. Skinner looked over at him and saw that he had 
turned his face away.

"No, I didn't," he said, returning his own gaze to the sky.

"She learned when she was just a kid. She was damned good. We were on 
this one case, in North Dakota. Maybe the fourth year we'd worked 
together. We'd finished the case but we couldn't get a flight back 
'till some snow melted at the airport, so we went out with the local 
field office. This Harricks guy, he was hitting on Scully; he invited 
us. I think he wanted to impress the hell out of her by beating
someone at pool, and she offered to play him. She kicked his 
butt. She was damned good."

Skinner scratched his arm, carefully not looking over at Mulder.

"She was wearing these jeans. Real old worn-in ones, you know? They 
had this little hole in the seam, right near her hip. She didn't 
wear jeans that often. Maybe she did, at home. I don't know. Most 
of the people there bet on Harricks, but I bet on Scully. I figured 
it was a safe bet; she's good at everything. We weren't invited 
back the next night, so we used the money I won to go to a really 
nice restaurant." 

"It sounds like a good memory."

He heard the sound of Mulder sitting up. When he looked over, all he 
could see was Mulder's back, grass flecks clinging to his t-shirt.
After a moment, he sat up, too. "You okay?"

Mulder shrugged, and his voice was cool and distant again when
he spoke. "I'm not crying yet. I still don't feel like she's gone. 
Other than that, fine. Do you want to walk or run back?"

They ran.

End 3 of 8

Subcutaneous 4 of 8
Disclaimers, etc., in part 1.

April 25

The following morning, he walked into his kitchen to find Alex Krycek
sitting at his kitchen table, drinking a glass of orange juice.

"What the hell are you doing here? Get out of my apartment."

"You're not in a position to throw me out, Skinner." Krycek patted 
the pocket of his leather jacket. "We both know that. Why don't you
have a seat? Or make us some coffee?"

Skinner stood in the doorway, feeling enraged, feeling helpless,
wondering if he could rush Krycek and rip away the control to the
nanotechnology before Krycek activated it, wondering if the other
man was only bluffing about having brought the control along.

"Don't just stand there. Make the coffee or sit down." Krycek's 
fingers caressed the leather of the pocket, and the gleam in his eyes
warned Skinner just how much the other man was enjoying his own
power.

Rat bastard.

He sat down at the table, across from Krycek, and consciously 
unclenched his fists, choosing to fold his hands in front of him
on the table. "What is it you want?"

"Maybe I just stopped by for some coffee and sympathy."

"Yeah, playing all sides of every fence must be exhausting, Krycek.
Spender told us you were back working with the Consortium, but from
what he said, you still had your own agenda." Spender may not have
realized that Krycek had driven a wedge between Spender and his father
on purpose, but Skinner had not believed that Krycek would ever be as 
disingenuous as Spender had described him as being.

"Everyone has their own agenda. If I can save myself and my world at
the same time, what's wrong with that?"

"Don't try to make yourself into the hero here. You're a cheating
coward whose main goal has always been to save his own ass."

"You're one to talk about saving his own ass...you try so hard to
save yours that you probably have marks from where you've been sitting
on the fence."

Skinner relaxed his hands once again, steepling his forefingers. 
"Why are you are? To lecture me about the art of fence-sitting?"

"All in good time." Krycek abruptly stood up and went to the 
refrigerator to pour himself another glass of orange juice. "You're
sure you don't want to make coffee?"

"I'm surprised you didn't make it yourself. You seem to have made
yourself at home."

"At least your fridge is stocked better than Mulder's. Jesus, it's
a bore breaking into his apartment. Nothing at all to eat."

"Krycek, what the hell's your point?"

The other man shrugged, one-shouldered, and pulled out a loaf of
bread, putting two slices in the toaster. "I get hungry. You want
toast?" He shrugged again when Skinner just glared at him, and leaned
against the counter. "As you surmised, I haven't been of one mind, 
heart, and soul with the Consortium for a long while, and what 
happened at El Rico cemented the split. The Consortiums' plans went
to hell, and I'm not sticking around to see what happens."

"They say rats always desert a sinking ship."

"Unlike you, who never got on board in the first place. You're not
going to make me feel guilty for surviving, Skinner, so don't even
try. I'm actually doing something to change things...and that's more
that Mulder can say, no matter how much he may shout at the heavens.
It's more than you can say."

"What do you mean, doing something to change things?"

"Colonization's closer than any of you think. I'm helping to stop it,
in whatever way I can." The toast popped up, unnoticed by either
man.

"The women who are dying...Scully...did the people you're working
with now engineer that?"

"The *people* I'm working with? God, were you born that naive or do
you have to work at it?"

"The Resistance. The rebels. Whatever. Who activated the cancer in
those women? Did you tell them how to control the implants?"

"Their lives were forfeit a long time ago, since the colonizers 
first took them."

"So who was it who reactivated the cancer now? The colonizers or the 
resistance?"

"The resistance can't afford to let the colonizers get their hands
on them...do you know how close they were to an alien human hybrid?
Do you know how fast that would propel colonization forward?"

"I know those women died. I know these women *are* dying."

"Don't be sentimental. They were only lab rats to the other side...
we freed them from that. And we're starting to learn how the chips
function. Knowing the technology--that's a weapon we can use."

"Is that how you justify these women's deaths to yourself?"

"Don't get self-righteous. I've never blown the head off a ten year
old boy."

Skinner moved fast enough that he surprised himself, wrapping his
hand in the fabric of Krycek's shirt and shaking him. "How the hell
did you know about that?"

"Let go of me," the other man said, and for a moment Skinner saw
fear in his eyes before he twisted violently away, moving to stand in 
the middle of the kitchen. He readjusted his shirt, and when he met 
Skinner's eyes again his were taunting. "How do you think we knew
about that? You think Mulder's office wasn't bugged back then? You 
think yours wasn't? I gotta tell you, it was a touching scene."

Skinner suddenly felt immeasurably old, immeasurably weary, and the
adrenaline surge that had begun when he'd walked into his kitchen
faded and died. "It was war."

"So is this."

"That didn't make it right."

"I never said what I was doing was right. I said it was necessary."

"Cut the crap, Krycek. What are you doing here?"

"The women who died...we found out that activating the chip in
certain ways did certain things. The progression of the cancer was
and is extremely predictable. Except in one woman."

"Scully."

"She died too soon. We want to know why."

Skinner stared at him incredulously. "One woman? How could it 
possibly matter that she died sooner than the others? God, after the 
past six years, it makes sense that her body was worn down."

"It's an anomaly. We don't like those. Apparently, neither does the 
other side. When we went to find her body, we found only an empty
coffin."

"What?"

"You heard me."

"You went and dug up her *grave*?"

"We needed to know. We still need to know. Maybe it had to do with
the vaccine Mulder gave her last summer."

"Nothing turned up in the autopsy. The chip that was in her neck
was examined and destroyed in the process. There's nothing to find. 
She's dead."

"Don't be an idiot...autopsy results can be falsified. They wouldn't
have taken her body if there weren't something there. We need to know
what it is."

"Why are you telling me this?"

"Because you're going to find out for us."

***

An ID, a set of keys, and a piece of paper with an address on it,
a warehouse on the outskirts of Crystal City, disturbingly near
his apartment. He stared at them for a long time after Krycek had 
left.

<They're working with a lot fewer people since El Rico. It won't be
well-guarded.>

Scully was dead; she couldn't be hurt by what was done with her 
body.

<All you have to do is drive in and look like you know where you're
going. Take a truck; here are the keys. Here's an ID in case anyone
asks.>

He was still alive; Krycek could easily kill him.

<Of course I could go myself. But I'm not supposed to be there, and I
don't want certain people to know I'm working with the other side now,
obviously. Kinda ruins my effectiveness as a double agent. Besides,
you just need to know that I'll definitely kill you if you're not of
any use to me.> 

Krycek might just be bluffing. The death of an Assistant Director 
wouldn't go unnoticed, and Mulder and Scully would at least follow 
it up...

Damn it.

Mulder might follow it up. Would Krycek risk that?

<And I'll enjoy it. I didn't like hanging off your goddamn balcony by
one wrist, you know. At least as long as you're of use to me, you
stay alive. At least this way you have a chance.>

They were probably experimenting on her body wherever she was.

<And, you'll be helping to save the world. You think some petty 
moral issues of yours should stand in the way of that?>

He had called Scully a fellow soldier. He had told her that he'd
honored her friendship.

<It'd not like you haven't come over to the dark side before. From
what I heard, you were the one to shove that woman's body into the
furnace. What's the difference?>

He would never be able to look Mulder in the eye again. He would
never be able to look *himself* in the eye again.

<You have 24 hours. And don't even think about talking to the
grieving widower about this one.>

Scully was dead; he was alive.

<24 hours. Or...it's as easy as flipping a switch.> 

He felt oppressed, as if Krycek could read even his thoughts, could
watch every move he made.

As if...he looked thoughtfully around the room.

***
Part II--April 25--Mulder

As Skinner was confronting Alex Krycek in his kitchen, Mulder was
walking into his own kitchen for the first time in four days.

They'd named his kitchen off limits to him when they'd taken him
home, just as they'd taken away his gun and removed razors, medicine,
and cleaning products from his bathroom. He'd told them that if he
were planning on killing himself, he certainly wouldn't choose a way
as painful as ingesting large quantities of Drano, but they'd only
looked at him warily and put anything they'd considered dangerous to
him in his kitchen.

He hadn't argued, though, incapable of movement or emotion through
the pall that had settled over him when he'd walked into the hospital
to be told that Scully was dead.

First drawer, second drawer, third drawer, bottom drawer...there it
was. They'd hidden his gun from him under a mishmash of rubber
bands and old, frayed pot holders, and one fairly new one shaped like
an alien's head that had been Scully's most recent birthday present
to him. The weight of the gun was familiar in his hands, and he 
held it for a moment before tucking it in his waistband and pulling
his shirt out over it.

He returned from the kitchen to see them still hard at work at
his computer. "Find anything?" he asked lightly.

"Not yet. Someone sure did a number on it. What'd you download a file
from a stranger for anyway?" Langly asked. "You should know better
than that."

"We've gotten good information that way," Mulder said. Langly
just grunted in response. "When's Frohike coming back?"

"What? Oh, about an hour. He wanted to get some sleep. Not everyone
keeps your hours, Mr. Insomnia."

"I slept," Mulder said mildly. 

"For about two hours," Byers said absently. "Langly, let's try..."
and they were off again, in their own world of recovered and corrupted
files, trying to save his hard drive from the virus that had overtaken
it sometime this morning. 

He returned to his bedroom, loading the gun quickly and as quietly
as possible. Then he walked over to his closet, which they hadn't
checked and should have. He didn't often wear the ankle holster, but
he'd kept it and the second gun.

Where he was going, it would be best to be prepared. Thinking ahead;
Scully would be so proud. 

He caught the edge of his madly grinning reflection in the dull 
reflection of the glass face of his clock.

Running with Skinner had shaken something loose in him, or made it 
coalesce. In the shower, afterward, the deadening of feeling that
had overtaken him in the hospital had begun to disperse. Feelings
hurt; the physical absence of Scully was a dull ache that could easily
become a jagged, twisting thing. Nonetheless, he'd begun to smile in
the shower, as thought had returned as well. For the first time
in days, his mind had begun to consider possibilities as if they were 
skipping stones, turning them over to marvel at their smoothness and 
their edges, testing their weight.

He pulled on his shoes, lacing them tightly, even tying them with a 
double knot. Wouldn't do for him to trip over his own shoelaces,
which, he ruefully admitted, he was capable of.

In the shower and throughout yesterday evening, he'd thrown out lines 
of ideas like stones, watching them skip and sink, thinking through 
the ripples of possible consequences. Scully's physical absence ached, 
but her voice echoed in his mind, pushing and prodding at his 
thoughts; she had long since gotten under his skin until she was now 
as much a part of his mind's workings as the cancer had been part of 
her body, or the nanotechnology part of Skinner's bloodstream.

He, unlike them, was blessed by the invasion.

He searched through his sock drawer for his extra set of keys, 
muffling their jingle as he slid them into his pocket, and walked
back out into the living room.

He'd considered the possibility that he had simply gone insane, from
several angles, and had dismissed it. Maybe he was, but he didn't
think the evidence pointed to that.

"Will you be able to recover what I was working on?" he said quietly,
and they grunted, both completely absorbed.

In the end, it had been surprisingly easy. He'd spent the past eight
days sifting aimlessly through information, but last night he'd
narrowed his search and changed his assumptions. The whys and hows, 
the hard questions, could wait. As methodically as he knew how, he'd 
set out to find the where instead.

"Yeah, yeah, whatever, Mulder," Langly finally said, waving a hand
in dismissal. They had forgotten he was even there, lulled by four 
days of his apathy and sidetracked by an interesting puzzle.

There were any number of wheres, of course, not all of them in the 
country, but the events at El Rico would have taken a toll on their 
finances. Those who were left would be regrouping, in flight, after
what had happened to their compatriots. The events at El Rico and the 
subsequent attention to their doings in the media would keep them 
away from government-owned places, or the railways. Maybe. He couldn't 
get onto military installations or in the Pentagon anyway. But they 
had had ties to pharmaceutical companies, and those pharmaceutical 
companies had holdings in the area, warehouses that might hold any 
number of things. He'd chosen six addresses within easy driving range 
of the hospital. Places to start.

He walked out the door, not looking back.

***

The first warehouse really was abandoned, in fact as well as in name.
He toured it, seeing signs of fairly recent activity...lines where
boxes had been dragged through the dust. No one there, though.

Frohike would be arriving at his apartment just about now, glancing
around the place and asking where Mulder was. 

The second warehouse was their property, although ownership records
listed it as the property of Jenkins Pharmaceutical. He felt the skin 
at the back of his neck prickle. There were a lot of people walking 
around; he could see more inside through his binoculars, through the 
windows.

Too many windows, too much activity. 

He paused, biting his lip and turning the problem over to the cool,
detached, questioning part of his mind, the Scully part.

A possibility. Not a probability. If nothing else panned out, he would
come here after dark.

He nearly got lost on the way to the third warehouse. The address was
somewhat near Skinner's apartment, and he almost stopped to ask for
directions...Hey, sir. Wanna go break into a warehouse that I think
is being used for nefarious purposes? Come on, it'll be fun.

The boys might have called Skinner by now, to ask him if he had any
idea where Mulder would be. Mulder abruptly sobered and swiped his
forehead with one hand, unsurprised to discover that he was sweating.

The sight of the third warehouse made him swallow, hard. There were a
few cars here. No trucks, no signs of loading or moving that he had
seen at the other warehouse. Expensive cars, two Lexuses, one Mercedes.
The sorts that doctors would drive. It was a closed place, a secretive
one. ("Are you anthropomorphizing a *warehouse*, Mulder?" Scully asked
with dry amusement in her voice.)

More than the cars, more than the appearance, the quickening beat of 
his pulse told him everything he wanted to know.

End 4 of 8