by jordan

For a long time Scully had been aware of the voices, but they seemed to have nothing to do with her, like falling asleep with the television on. She yawned, opened her eyes drowsily, and came to realize she was sitting in a hard wooden chair, her hands bound behind her back.

She sat up straight. Mulder was also tied to a chair, though his hands were in front of him, one wrist cuffed on each side to a thick rung, by two separate pairs of handcuffs, so he had much more freedom than she did.

Roger Young was on a chair across from them, his hands bound like Scully's. She looked around frantically and saw Skinner on the floor, leaning against the wall, untied. He looked totally out of it, and she stared hard to see if he was breathing.

Issie stood in the middle of the group, his body strangely tapered, like a narrow V, with tiny feet in slippers beneath what seemed to be black silk pajamas. It made Scully physically uncomfortable to look at him for any length of time.

Apparently he and Mulder had been engaged in conversation for quite some time now, while Roger looked as drowsy and slow to wake as she felt.

"You amuse me," Issie was saying. All traces of his accent were gone, except the very slight stiffening of vowels that sounded not exactly British, but more like someone raised in British schools in India. "You recognize that good and evil are exclusively human constructs, but you never think beyond that, to what it really means."

"Enlighten me," Mulder offered.

Issie shook his head slowly, his lank hair moving at its own speed, like a badly dubbed movie. "You search the whole universe for truth, Fox Mulder, and yet you never see it walking right at your side."

(Does he mean me?) Scully wondered. At that moment Issie turned his head slowly, like something mechanical on well oiled hinges, and his eyes found Scully's. She tried to stare at the bridge of his small flat nose.

"And you, Dana Scully," he said in his soft, scary voice. "Would you like the truth to be known?"

"I'd like to know where those girls are," Scully said.

"How badly would you like to find them? Would you offer up your truth as the price of four lives?"

Scully looked around, not sure whether he meant the lives of the four girls--weren't there five?--or the lives of the four prisoners in the room. She felt something thumping under her feet. Mulder looked down as if he felt it too, like something moving around under the floorboards. But Scully knew instantly what it was. It was the sound of the headboard in the motel room where Skinner had made love to her, had tried to touch her in some secret place no one had ever touched before. And had succeeded. She felt him there now, solid, real.

And then she looked at Mulder, who was scowling, puzzled, watching her, and she knew with absolute certainty that if he ever found out she would lose both of them forever. There was no doubt of it.

But still. She put her chin up and said, "Yes. Yes, I would."

Issie laughed, an oily, rolling sound. "Little flower," he said affectionately. "I believe you would."

"Are they still alive?"

"Alive. All sweet and toothsome." He turned to Mulder. "Empty vessels waiting to be filled."

"They're human beings," Mulder said. "You can't just buy and sell people."

Issie's smile seemed sad. "But of course you can, Fox Mulder. You can buy anything, with the right currency. You can satisfy any appetite. Roger Young knows that, don't you, Roger Young?"

Young's voice was pleading. "I just want to see Tanya," he said. "She's my daughter. I just want to be with her."

"Oh, you will, Roger Young," Issie said softly. "You will."

Mulder spoke in a loud, angry voice. "He's lying to you, Roger. I'm sorry, but...Tanya is dead."

Both Young and Scully stared at him in surprise. Young said, "But you said...you said...I thought you talked to her."

"I did. I talked to Flower, as well. But they're both dead now. She wanted me to come back here and find Issie again, to help the other girls."

Issie said, "This is the truth? You talked to Tanya MacClean?"

Mulder just glared at him. Young let his chin drop to his chest. Tears ran from his eyes to his chin and dripped to the front of his shirt. His nose ran, and he took one ragged sob, but otherwise wept silently.

Mulder said, "She was a brave girl, Roger. I think somehow she must have managed to get away from the Arab and the other guy. They must have left her for dead. But she got away and she tried to help the others."

"Yes," Issie said. "That is just how it must have happened."

Skinner groaned and began to move. Everyone turned to look at him as he pulled himself up into a sitting position, bracing his back against the wall. He blinked at them, raising a hand to his face to rub his eyes. His glasses were tucked neatly in his pocket, and he took them out to put them on.

"What's going on here?" he demanded, in his best surly Assistant Director's voice.

"Ah," said Issie. "The last of our little group joins us."

Panic flashed on Skinner's face as he ran his hands over his thighs. "I can't feel my legs," he said.

"No matter, merely temporary, I assure you," Issie said. "No point in struggling against it, Mr. Skinner."

Skinner slowly leaned back against the wall, looking with bewilderment around the shop. His eyes stopped when he saw the balls, moving in lazy circles around each other over the countertop. He said, "Would someone care to tell me what the hell is going on here?"

Mulder said, "That seems to depend on who you ask."

"This is not Rashomon," Scully said. "We're being held prisoner by the middleman in the white slave ring. The girls are brought here, and Issie makes some kind of a deal for them with a man they call the Buyer."

Skinner gave Issie a look of infinite contempt. "You buy and sell teenaged girls?"

"I only hold things, Walter Skinner. Things no one else seems to want."

Young said, "He killed my daughter." Skinner's eyes were filled with sympathy and confusion. "Your daughter?" "Not exactly," Issie said. "I am simply a holder of goods. If no one comes to claim those goods, then I am free to sell them."

"The girls had no say in becoming merchandise, though, did they?" Scully asked angrily.

Issie said, "Of course they did."

"But I would have claimed Tanya," Young said brokenly. "I would have given anything for her."

Issie nodded. "Which is precisely why she will never go to the Buyer. But you must see how she came to us. She didn't know anyone loved her. Nor did we." Scully said, "So you think it's all right to take girls if no one loves them enough to fight for them?" "Love redeems us," Mulder said softly. Scully saw an unexpected tenderness in his eyes as he looked at her. "It's the only thing that can."

Scully looked at Skinner, who was gazing at her with an unreadable expression. But she could guess what he was thinking.

Issie walked over to him and bent down to look into his brown eyes. He said, "If I gave you a choice right now, the choice to save one of these three lives, which would it be, Walter Skinner."

Skinner snarled, "I wouldn't make that choice."

"Then they all die."

Skinner shot a desperate look at Scully. Issie chuckled. "Ah. That was almost not even a question." He leaned down further, and Scully couldn't see what he did, but Skinner turned his face away, grimacing and coughing. Then his eyes rolled up in his head and he slumped over. "You son of a bitch!" Scully shouted. Issie glanced at her impassively over his shoulder as he approached Roger Young. "Don't worry, flower," he said. "You can save him yet."

He stepped behind Young and freed his hands. Young looked dazed, and he lurched to his feet, staggered, got his balance.

Issie said, "You are free to go, Roger Young. Free to vanish."

Young patted himself down quickly, looking for weapons, found none. He looked up at Issie from under his lowered brow, like a bull about to charge.

"Make your choice wisely," Issie warned. "You can go now, choose your own freedom, or you can stay here forever."

Young hesitated only another microsecond. Then he was striding away, and the sound of a silver bell tinkled somewhere in the distance.

Mulder caught Scully's eyes and gestured with his head. She followed his gaze to the counter. The crystal ball, still moving slowly around the others, seemed to go dull, almost black. The golden ball flashed once, so brightly Scully winced; it was like a flashbulb going off. She thought she heard a scream from somewhere far away, not far as in distance or even time, but...somehow removed, like something she only remembered. Then both balls faded back to their original colors.

Issie approached them. He uncuffed Mulder's right hand, sliding back to a safe distance gracefully.

"Now," he said. "Fox Mulder, let me see you kiss your partner here."

"What?" Mulder looked at Scully, confused. They both looked back at Issie.

"You heard me. Kiss your friend, Fox Mulder. Taste your sweet flower. Convince me, if you can, of your powers of redemption."

Scully said, "What game are you playing now, Issie?"

When he turned to her his face was like the sun, too intense to gaze upon. She looked away, wincing. "The only one that really matters," he said. To Mulder he said in a sharp command, "Kiss her. Now."

Mulder used his free hand to raise Scully's face. He looked down at her, his hazel eyes apologetic. They both closed their eyes as his mouth approached hers.

The kiss was soft, sweet. Mulder ran his lips back and forth over hers lightly, friction warming them both. Scully's eyelashes tickled his cheek. He probed between her lips with his tongue. Surprised, she opened her mouth to protest, and he gained entry.

Scully felt something go through her like a cold shock, as if she had stepped into a puddle of ice water and someone had handed her a live wire. It was not a good sensation, or a bad one. It was only the most unbearably intense thing she had ever felt in her life.

Mulder, Fox Mulder, Agent Fox Mulder of the FBI, her partner, was kissing her. Had his tongue in her mouth, probing, teasing hers, his fingers moving on the back of her head as he held her still for it.

Mulder. Kissing her. Mulder. Kissing. Her.

She made a sound, not a whimper, not a groan. She tilted her head and opened her mouth wider and caught his tongue and sucked on it for a second before letting it go. She felt his instant response, heard the vibration of her name somewhere, subvocalized, in his throat.

There was no Issie, no pawn shop, no Skinner dead or unconscious on the floor. There was only the world spinning around them, worlds, past and future, as they kissed. Only Mulder's mouth on hers, moving, and all her feverish desire as she kissed him back, all the years of love and frustration behind them, and all the hope and need in front of them, spinning away as time focused on that one perfect point where their mouths joined, that single incredible kiss.

Then he jerked away. Scully opened her eyes, feeling the ache of loss, and saw Issie reattaching the handcuff to the back of the chair. Mulder looked up as Issie bent down, and for one weird instant it almost seemed as if they were going to kiss each other. Mulder looked strange, his eyes out of focus. Issie blew in his face, a quick short breath, and Scully saw something like a cloud of smoke pass between them.

Then Mulder went out, chin dropping down, mouth hanging open.

Scully was panting, almost crying from rage and frustration. "You son of a bitch," she said.

"You already said that." Issie pulled up the chair Young had been sitting on and faced Scully as if preparing to chat with a close friend. "Now," he said, with a satisfied sigh. "At last. We get to the true heart of the matter."

She glared at him, tears in her eyes. If hatred could kill, Issie would have withered up like a worm and died. Instead, he gave her a paternal smile.

"The real choice is yours, flower," he said. "It has been all along. The others, they bump and jiggle, and butt heads. But you." He reached out with a long bony finger, though she tried to squirm away from it, and touched her just between her breasts. "You SPIN. And to you I give the true choice. What could not be known of the others? Nothing. All foretold, all foreseen. But you. You. You." He smiled as if savoring something delicious. "You may save one man in this room. Just one. The other must go to the Buyer. A man must make his living, yes? Besides, when he comes, it will be best to have some merchandise, or he might look around for something else to play with." He chuckled low in his throat.

"You're insane," she whispered. "I won't choose. You can't make me."

"Oh, I think I can, my flower. Because if you choose the right one, the true one, the one who loves you best, then not only will you redeem him, but to sweeten the pot, I will let your little girls go, as well." He looked sad for a moment. "Only three of them now, and I can't promise they won't find their way back to me eventually. But there is only so much of the world you can save, Scully. And here it is for you to save. Choose wisely."

Mulder's kiss still stung her lips, like the afterburn of some acidic citrus fruit. She looked at him, ungraceful, asleep, his hair sticking straight up on the back of his head. Then she turned to look at Skinner, and felt the distant bump under her feet, like someone in the apartment below banging on the ceiling with a broom. Skinner's naked body on top of hers, each forward thrust shaking the bedframe. His dark eyes filled with so much emotion it made her somehow ashamed.

Then the thump thump was her heart as she looked from one man to the other.

"I can't make that choice," she said.

Issie sighed. "Then they all die. Every one of them. Poor flowers," he murmured. "All lost and alone."

Scully thought she heard faraway screaming again, children's voices, or the voices of the dead.

"I would not even for the purpose of this game show you what the Buyer has planned for that little trio, that lovely posy." He got to his feet suddenly. "But oh well. You are the only one who walks away from this place today."

"Wait!" She looked up at him desperately. "Look, I don't know which man has more love in him. But I know I love them both. And here's the deal I'll make with you. You let them all go, and you can have me. Willingly. No fight, no strings. I'll do whatever you want." Her eyes searched the dark holes in his head. "My choice is to go with you of my own free will, Issie. My own free will. You have my word on it."

For a moment Issie's face was utterly impassive, as if he was listening to something in the distance. Then something began to happen to it, a change that no words could describe, a slow distortion that was going to make his mouth perfectly congruent to whatever he was morphing into. Scully winced and looked away, turning her head as far as she could and squeezing her eyes shut.

"Above rubies, above rubies," she heard him say. "And that, my flower, was the only correct answer."

Horrified, she tensed every muscle in her body as she felt him approach her, felt his hot breath on her face. She knew he was going to kiss her, stretch his lips out like a camel, and she knew that when he did she was going to start screaming, and maybe never stop.

But his...muzzle...only brushed her ear as it moved to form the whispered words, "Thank you, flower. Thank you for winning for me the best game we ever played."

******************************

Houston, Texas
Southwest Memorial Hospital

Skinner, Scully, and Mulder sat in the hospital waiting room, their faces worn with exhaustion, their eyes doing the thousand yard stare like veterans returned from a foreign war. They didn't speak to each other, couldn't hear if they did, over the din of the crying. Angela, an exquisite black girl with long coiled braids and a ring pierced through her navel, was howling like a four year old in a checkout line. Liz Ann had not stopped sobbing since the Senator had come, and although he didn't make as much noise as she did, he had shed more tears than anyone else in the room. A third girl, still unidentified, sat by herself, sniffling and wiping long streaks of makeup across her face.

Officer Buckland held up a hand to the investigating officers, who were all too willing to let her take a shot. "Can anyone tell me anything at all?" she asked. "Where were you being held? Doesn't anyone remember anything? Agent Scully?"

Scully's eyes drifted up to the blonde and she made a gesture of helplessness with her hands. "The girls were in the warehouse and we heard them crying when we walked by it."

"At midnight. The three of you. On Main Street."

Buckland knelt before her, taking one of Scully's hands in both of hers. "Look at your wrists. You've been tied up."

Scully nodded. "There was a man..."

Fernandez said eagerly, "Yes? A man...?"

"With a big mouth," Skinner muttered.

Buckland hurried over to him. "And he had the girls?"

"Sort of," Mulder said.

Fernandez and Buckland looked at each other. Fernandez said, "Makes the old pawn shop route look pretty inviting, doesn't it?"

"Hey, they're all heroes," Buckland said. "They just saved the Senator's daughter and two girls slated for slaughter."

"Yeah," Fernandez said, "But I still wonder if this was somehow related to the other twenty missing girls."

"Twenty one," Buckland said. "They never found that MacClean kid, remember."

*********************************

Rosenberg, Texas
King Cemetery

"What exactly are we looking for?" Scully asked.

She walked a little behind Mulder as he thrashed around through the brush, pushing branches out of his way that came back to slash her across the face if she wasn't careful.

It was the first time they had been alone together since being released from the hospital. She was still a little nervous around him, and conversation had been stilted. The memory of that kiss hung in the air like a noxious cloud, and neither of them was willing to mention it first. Or at all.

Scully was so acutely physically aware of him that even the 45 minute drive to the middle of nowhere had been excruciating.

"I met someone out here the other night," Mulder said.

"Tanya MacClean?"

He gave her an appreciative glance. "Good guess, Scully."

"Not so far fetched," she said. "It's just odd that the Senator would choose such an isolated old graveyard to bury his wife in, even if he was ashamed of her. I mean, the government provides plots in much nicer places than this."

"I think she was looking for something here," Mulder said.

"But what?"

"Maybe the love she didn't find in life."

Scully gave him a sidelong glance. (Learn any lessons here, Mulder?) "I just don't think that's a good explanation for all that's happened," she said. "We--oh."

She stopped when she saw the stone angel, soft grey, rising above the soft green.

"I think we found it," she said.

The graveyard looked smaller in daylight. Mulder poked around the old ruins, the broken picket fence, the overgrown grave sites. There was not one tombstone there less that forty years old.

"Where's the Young name?" Scully asked.

"I don't know." Mulder was brushing off gravestones and peering at them, frowning. "I don't know," he repeated faintly.

Half an hour later they had inventoried seventeen graves, two of which were so old the names had been weathered away. The other fifteen seemed to belong in some relationship or the other to a family with the surname "King."

"It was here, Scully," Mulder said stubbornly. "Right here."

But even he had to admit, if only to himself, that no one had visited this little cemetery for a very long time. Nor had come close to it: there was no evidence of a shallow grave anywhere in the perimeter. Only berry bushes, which had taken over the area, and scratched and tore at the legs of their pants when they tried to wade through them.

A large crow flapped down through the trees and settled on a tombstone, cocking its head sharply right and left. Scully saw it and nudged Mulder. It made a strikingly eerie picture, the symbol of death perched on the cold monument to the dead. The overcast weather and slight drizzle made the scene picture perfect.

"Wait," Scully said. "There's something there."

They went to the grave. On the slightly raised earth they found a single artificial rose.

The crow flew away when they approached it. Scully picked the rose up and handed it to Mulder, who looked amazed. She said, "I guess this makes some sort of sense to you?"

"It does, actually."

She looked at him expectantly. He dropped his shoulders. "Well, okay, it doesn't," he admitted.

Scully sighed. "I thought...I guess I misunderstood Issie. I thought I remembered him saying that if I did something, he would give the girls back to me. I guess he just meant the living ones. The others must be dead."

"I thought you said you couldn't remember anything that happened."

"I said I can't remember EVERYTHING that happened. It's like..."

"What?"

Scully shook her head. "I hope you can find your way back to the car," she said, "Because I am completely lost."

"Follow me."

"You really know your way back? I'm impressed!"

"Don't be. We left tracks in the mud coming in. All we have to do is follow them out."

He jammed his hands in his pockets and strode off towards the woods, head down. Scully picked her way along, examining the tracks he was following. Her own boots left small prints, close together. His hushpuppies were widely spaced, big, deep.

Scully stopped abruptly. There was a third set of tracks mingling with theirs. It went a half dozen yards and then veered off to the right. They were the rippled soles of walking boots; she had a pair like them at home.

Slowly, as if smelling something in the air, Scully raised her head. In the woods to her right, under the dripping trees, she saw something shimmer. A figure. At first it was indistinguishable from the trees, something made from nature, or a trick of the light. Then for just a second she saw very clearly the young girl with long blonde hair, in jeans, wearing a backpack.

"Hey!" she called.

Mulder, almost out of sight, turned around. Scully started to trot towards the girl, who slipped away between two scrub oaks into the shadows. "Hey!" she called, in a louder voice. "Wait!"

Mulder began jogging back, and caught up to her. "What is it, Scully?"

"I saw someone." She was flushed, breathing hard with excitement. "Over there."

Mulder went where she pointed, and she followed behind. The place where the girl had gone into the woods was narrow for no more than ten feet. Then it opened into a kind of a meadow, ringed and shaded by old growth trees.

There the tracks ended into a myriad of other tracks. Lots of them. And evidence of digging. Lots and lots of digging.

Mulder and Scully turned in a slow circle, their backs to each other. All around them earth had been turned in over two dozen mounds.

"Scully..." Mulder almost choked on the words. "The girls. All those lost girls..."

"Mulder, look." Scully went to an oblong patch of ground. There was a whole spray of cheap artificial roses lying on top to it, battered plastic flowers that looked like they had been dragged there by some wild animal.

Mulder knelt and brushed his gloved hand across the ground, smoothing back the loose dirt. It had originally been deep enough to conceal a body, but rain and erosion had sunk it in on itself. After only a few minutes, Mulder had brushed enough dirt away to reveal a piece of cloth.

Checked cloth. The tattered remains of a shirt.

Scully knelt beside him and touched his arm, leaning her comforting weight against him. "That's enough," she said quietly. "We both know who it is."

Mulder dropped his chin to his chest for a few seconds, and Scully could not help but reach out and stroke his hair back. "She was so alone," he muttered. "Poor little soul. She never had anyone to redeem her."

Scully was looking over his head at a long broken area of dirt, earth so new turned it wasn't even wet all the way through. She saw something tucked down in it as if hastily concealed after the body had been buried. Even from where she stood, she recognized it as the Sam Brown sling Roger Young had been wearing in the car the day before.

She put her hand on Mulder's shoulder.

"It's all right," she told him. "She has someone now."

End

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