Title: In the Clearing
Author: Rae Lynn
Written: January 2005
Rating: PG
Classification: SA
Spoilers: Through "Requiem."
Keywords: Post-episode for "Requiem." Character death.
Disclaimer: With a few tiny exceptions, all the characters contained within are the property of Chris Carter and Ten Thirteen Productions. No profit will result from this story and no copyright infringement is intended.

Summary: More than two years after "Requiem," Mulder is returned.

Warning: a character is already dead at the beginning of this story.

From Skinner's point of view -- here, let him tell you himself: "He weighed 132 pounds when we found him -- bone-thin, his legs knobby like Erector Set legs, swollen and disfigured at the joints. It almost ached to see him; my voice died on my lips like I was eighteen and back in the jungle where I'd seen so many things that would make this man -- this ragged, tortured shell of a man -- look like a blessing. But this wasn't 'Nam and Mulder wasn't my CO or even my friend, Mulder was just a guy who'd put his ass in the fire for so many people that it was starting to look a little scorched around the edges."

He weighed 132 pounds when we found him -- bone-thin, his legs knobby like Erector Set legs, swollen and disfigured at the joints. It almost ached to see him; my voice died on my lips like I was eighteen and back in the jungle where I'd seen so many things that would make this man -- this ragged, tortured shell of a man -- look like a blessing. But this wasn't 'Nam and Mulder wasn't my CO or even my friend, Mulder was just a guy who'd put his ass in the fire for so many people that it was starting to look a little scorched around the edges. What I saw first were the burns -- radiation burns, as it would turn out, but at the moment they just looked bad, a patchwork of smooth white scars across his back and legs. I knew the moment I saw them that nothing on this earth could have caused those burns. Yes, Virginia, the aliens *are* among us. For a split second I was living in a twisted Aesop's parable: <Skinner and the Flesh of Fox Mulder.> And the moral of the story is...

He tried to stand when he saw me. I searched his eyes for a shadow of that old shit-eating grin and when I couldn't find it I searched again for a hint of that old weary defiance, and when I couldn't find that either I tried for fiery determination and it was there, thank God or a lifetime of particularly painful strife, I don't care either way because it lasted him a good five seconds, that resolve, long enough to push himself off the mattress halfway until he sank back into its soft sheets and drew his knees into his chest.

"Agent Mulder," I said, as evenly as I dared. "We've been looking for you. For a long time."

At the sound of his name Mulder's head jerked up, and in his dark eyes I could see the gears in his mind processing, rapidly clicking into place. God. So he hadn't known me when I walked in, then. There was a low rumble in his throat -- the sound of years of screaming and silence clearing away. Maybe more. He licked his parched lips and was silent for longer than I could hold my breath.

"Sir?"

I was still "sir" to him. I could have cried with relief, but I doubt Mulder would have believed his eyes.

"Come on, Mulder," I said as I offered him my hand and he took it, his legs struggling to stand while his eyes struggled to comprehend. "We're going to get you out of here."

At the hospital, I paused in the doorway to take stock. Mulder was facing away from me, his lips moving wordlessly, and from the door I imagined I could count his ribs through his back, even mottled as it was with those burns. Jesus, Mulder. What have they done to you?

He must have felt me standing there -- Mulder always did know when he was being watched. He shifted in the bed, painfully.

"Sir," he said, the word coming more easily to his lips this time. I took it as an invitation to step fully into the room and cautiously pull up a seat by his bed.

"How are you feeling?"

The corners of his lips curved briefly, as if he was set to crack a joke. <Mulder Wakes Up in the Hospital, Vol. 2 -- Greatest Hits.> But his mouth drew back so quickly that I wondered if I'd imagined it.

"I feel -- " He spread his arms tentatively, as if taking stock. "I feel...intact, I guess," he offered, as if "intact" was the best he could do.

"What do your doctors say?"

Mulder leaned his head back against the pillow. "That there's nothing wrong with me that some cortisone cream and a few Big Macs won't cure." His eyes flittered from me to the doorway and back and it was obvious from the look in them that Mulder wasn't sure he agreed. He drew in a deep breath.

"Sir," he began haltingly. "Nobody's told me anything. I need to know what..."

"What do you remember?" I asked sharply. Mulder's eyes were lost, far away.

"I don't -- I can't..." He shook his head, frustrated. "It's gone," he said, "it's all gone. I remember...the forest. A bright light. There was...there was screaming."

Screaming? Christ. His own, no doubt. Mulder's eyes were darting around the room and I was positive it wasn't the hospital room that he was seeing.

"Mulder." I touched his shoulder and he winced. "Why don't you take some time."

He shook his head, swallowed hard. "I know how much time I've lost already, sir," he said in a low voice. He paused, then looked at me, hard.

"How did you find me?" he said quietly.

How did we find you? We looked, Mulder. We looked every day. We sent teams of federal agents streaming over every inch of the Oregon forest. We put out bulletins to every hospital and homeless shelter in four states. Every John Doe, every unidentified suspect, every unclaimed body. We devoted an army of manpower. We devoted our lives.

But I didn't tell him that, not yet. Instead I said, "An anonymous tip pointed us toward the shelter. They said they'd picked you up on the outskirts of the Bellefleur forest. You were..."

I trailed off abruptly. When they'd found him, Mulder had been murmuring a name. Scully's name. And I didn't want to be talking about Agent Scully, not yet.

But it was too late; Mulder had picked up on my hesitation. His eyes tracked to the doorway again, as if he expected her to be standing there. Hell, I almost expected it myself. But then, Mulder always had been mentally three steps ahead of everyone else inhabiting his sorry universe. He'd probably known as soon as he recognized me in that shelter instead of his partner...who wouldn't have let an army stop her if she'd had any chance in heaven or hell of reaching his side.

Mulder bowed his head, as if gathering strength. "Where's Scully?" he asked, almost inaudibly. I knew I looked uncomfortable.

"Mulder..." I trailed reluctantly.

His next breath was sharp, almost a gasp. We'd waited two years to hear that breath again. And now -- how was I supposed to explain this to him?

Christ, Scully will never forgive me for this, I thought wearily.

Mulder broke our silence first. "She's dead, isn't she," he said flatly as his eyes flickered and then died, his lashes sliding shut. When he opened them, they were wet with anguish.

"I owed her -- I owe her -- my life," he said hoarsely, looking away from me. "I..." He rubbed his face with his hands, hissing in pain as the motion disturbed his IV. Letting out a last shaky sigh, he turned back to me and his eyes met mine, half devastated and half defiant.

"How?" he said stiffly. We were locked in an eye standoff. As weak as he was, Mulder was still Mulder, and I broke away from his gaze first.

"There was an explosion," I said, biting off any useless words of sympathy. "Almost a year ago. A fire, in her lab." Suddenly Mulder's eyes were seized with a kind of desperate hope that I felt it was better to extinguish before he could get any further.

"There was a chemical screw-up. Explosives stored in the wrong location. She was there, Mulder. She was in the building."

His words were sharp, insistent. "You don't think they can't make it look like -- " I cut him off, knowing what he was about to do. "It doesn't matter what they made it look like. What matters is what happened."

His eyes were harder than I had ever seen them. "How can you say it doesn't matter?" he hissed in a low voice. "She *fought* for you!" And it was true; she had. They both had, even though Scully had been convinced more than once that I had betrayed her-betrayed the X-Files, betrayed them both. Jesus, as far as we were concerned, they were all the same thing. I watched his jaw work, his face as though he was swallowing bile.

"There's something else," I said rapidly, knowing full well that it might be more than Mulder could bear. Christ, he had barely survived the three months Scully had been missing and now I was asking him to endure a lifetime without her. I knew he was exhausted. He sank back into the bed, a hand over his eyes. "Just after you..." He nodded once, hearing my hesitation; he'd rather I didn't use words like "missing" or "abducted" right then, either. "Agent Scully discovered she was pregnant."

Mulder's hand, which had been gently rubbing his closed eyelids as if willing the moisture beneath to go away, froze. I could hear his harsh breathing, in and out, as if he had to will himself to work at it.

"Mulder, you have a son."

Two days later I found myself boarding a plane bound for Washington, D.C. with Mulder, who'd slept fitfully for the remainder of his hospital stay and said little more than two words together since I had unceremoniously dropped the bombshell that destroyed what was left of his life. I'd made damn sure we were seated in first class -- in the bulkhead, no less, the better for flight attendants to reach us should he come close to dropping dead en route -- but Mulder scarcely seemed to notice.

I'd argued unsuccessfully -- the same way Scully used to, I imagined -- for further hospitalization. "You can't tell me you're thinking of releasing him," I had growled to his doctor. "The man's been gone for over a year. He can barely stand."

But Mulder's doctor was, like me, six foot tall, a Vietnam veteran and not easily intimidated.

"And I'm telling you there's nothing else we can do for him here. He needs physical therapy and, I'd wager, some emotional therapy as well, but not hospitalization and not any more tests. Take him home, get him into a good rehabilitation program. I have some numbers you can call."

On the plane, Mulder's legs quivered with the effort of boarding as he folded himself gracelessly into his seat and closed his eyes. My throat burned at the sight of him: <Still Life With Destroyed Mulder.> Damn them.

"What's his name?" Mulder whispered raspily, his eyes still closed. I startled; I should have known better than to think he was sleeping.

"Who?"

Mulder's eyes slid open, and with great effort he pulled himself upright to look at me. His eyes told me I knew damn well who he was talking about and he resented me making him say it. "My..." I let him stumble over the words, willing him to finish. "My son."

I felt myself letting out a breath. "Liam," I told him. And after the briefest of pauses: "Scully chose it to...honor you." Off his look, I continued, reluctantly. "It means 'unwavering protector.'"

Mulder made a sound deep in his throat, somewhere between a laugh and a sob. "Scully," he said, his voice strangled and tight.

"She spent every day looking for you," I said. Mulder nodded wearily, as if he had been expecting this: me telling him what he doubtless already knew. All of a sudden I saw some of her in Mulder's eyes -- the grim firmness of Scully's face those many months he had been missing.

God damn, but the universe was cruel.

When the stewardess came around Mulder tiredly asked for some ginger ale. I watched closely as his hand trembled slightly bringing the cup to his lips. "So," he said carefully around small sips. "Tell me about him." His voice caught on the last word, betraying him as easily as it used to when he was called on the carpet in my office.

Wordlessly, I reached into my wallet and pulled out the photo I'd been carrying for weeks. I didn't need to look at it to know exactly what he would see: Liam with his wispy red hair, so like Scully's. A grin that exposed his front teeth. The New York Yankees overalls Scully had purchased for him. Mulder's face was impossible to read as I passed it to him, but as soon as he looked at it his face seemed to crumple. Two fingers absently stroked the glossy surface of his son's face.

"He looks like her," he breathed despite himself.

"Scully always insisted he looked like you."

Mulder looked up at me, his eyes somehow hooded and wild. "Is he..."

"Agent Mulder, I know this is hard for you," I interjected. *Agent* Mulder. The words slipped out before I could help myself -- before I remembered that the man sitting in front of me was not Agent Mulder but the shell of him.

Mulder shook his head fiercely. "No, it's not hard," he said brusquely. "It's not hard, it's impossible."

"He's with Scully's mother," I said after a few moments. At the mention of Margaret Scully Mulder sucked in a breath.

"God, Scully's mother," he muttered under his breath.

"Mulder, she doesn't blame you for anything that happened to Scully."

His head snapped up. "No?" he said bitterly.

"Agent Scully made a choice," I said neutrally. "And she chose her life with you."

Abruptly Mulder looked away from me, his jaw clenching and unclenching. "Why are you doing this, sir?" he said, his voice sounding muffled as it echoed off the plane walls. I couldn't decide what he was really asking me -- why had I come to Oregon myself to retrieve him? Or why was I torturing him with information about his dead partner and his 22-month-old son?

Mulder cleared his throat. I could tell even without looking at him that he was attempting to compose himself, something I had seen him do so often after losing his temper in my office. It was perversely reassuring -- Mulder, the shadow of his former self fighting his way back. Mulder, sprung from the darkness.

"Where are we going?" he asked, fighting to keep the roughness from the edges of his voice. I glanced at him out of the corner of my eye.

"Your things are in storage," I said. "You'll stay with me."

Mulder made a sound very nearly like a snort -- a pained snort, I thought. He closed his eyes and I could see the lines spreading across his forehead. The young agent I'd met those many years ago -- cocky, defiant -- was gone.

"Thank you," he said, so quietly I could barely hear him.

"It's good to have you back, Mulder," I said. But Mulder was already asleep.

Mulder slept so deeply for the remainder of the flight -- through not one but two in-flight meals he sorely needed -- that I feared I would have to dump a cup of ice water in his lap to rouse him as we landed. When the pilot's voice over the PA system welcomed us back to our nation's capital, though, he awoke with a gasping start, sucking in a breath as he bolted upright in his seat.

"Easy, Mulder!" I said as he sagged back against the window, rapidly rubbing his face with both hands. Damn it. Privately I had always thought of Mulder as an emotional man, prone to passionate outbursts and unable -- or unwilling -- to rein in his emotions. When Scully had been returned, I arrived at the hospital in the middle of the night to find three rather large security agents restraining Mulder while he ranted and raved about justice, revenge and punishment for Scully's assailants. My stomach twisted at the memory -- Mulder was never going to protect his partner again.

But this was different. I'd never seen Mulder's private pain so raw. Exposed. Until, that is, I remembered his sheer desperation when Scully was missing -- the dark circles under his eyes, the way his clothes hung off him. It wasn't, I thought ruefully, all that different from the way he looked now.

Mulder was moving cautiously as we deplaned, but he was alert enough to be aware that I was watching him attentively from behind.

"Is there something I can help you with, or are you just admiring the view?" he said caustically as we headed out of the airport.

"Of your bony ass? Get real, Mulder."

The sun felt warm on my shoulders as we stepped out into the D.C. sunshine, and I glanced over to find Mulder stopped dead in his tracks. His face in the light of day was somehow even more pallid than it had been at the Oregon shelter.

"Mulder?"

A shudder seemed to run through him. He shook it off with a twisted smile.

"Yeah. I just haven't been outside in..." He took a deep breath of the fresh air and it seemed to revive him. He turned to face me and I once again caught sight of that wobble in his legs.

"It doesn't matter," he said quietly. "It's been a long time."

"It does matter," I said as I hefted our bags onto my shoulders and nodded toward the car I'd called for. "Come on."

Mulder paced my apartment like a caged animal, his unsteady gait becoming firmer in the enclosed space. After his third lap around my bookshelves I cleared my throat audibly.

"Sit down, Mulder, you're making me dizzy."

Without turning around he lifted a book off one of the shelves.

"I never figured you for a Dickens man, sir," he said conversationally. "Hemingway, maybe."

"Hemingway, Mulder?" I said to his back. He turned to face me.

"He's a man of few words," Mulder responded, studying me guardedly. He glanced down at the book he was holding and smiled again -- that twisted, recriminating smile.

"'A Christmas Carol,'" he said. "I guess that makes you the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. 'I fear you more than any specter I have seen' and all that." He flopped onto the couch and tipped his head back onto the pillows.

"Your doctors in Oregon couldn't stop telling me how lucky you were to be alive."

He glanced at me through slitted eyelids. "Do you think I'm lucky?" he said unemotionally.

"I think you look like shit, for one thing," I replied. Mulder's only response was a short bark of laughter that quickly disintegrated into a cough, choked off at the root by Mulder's grim swallow.

"Scully used to say the same thing to me."

Scully. At the mention of her name all the air went out of the room. Mulder stared ahead at nothing. I had witnessed him without her enough times to know that Mulder without Scully was a desperate, ferocious man, recklessly driven even to the edge of sanity. But this Mulder merely seemed haunted, adrift.

"I assume there was an investigation," he said without looking at me. I didn't need to ask what he was referring to.

"I headed up the task force myself," I offered grudgingly. At this Mulder's head whirled around to face me, his eyes dark and accusing.

"You didn't tell me that before."

The anger I felt at the reproach in his voice was irrational and sudden. "So you could do what, Mulder? Demand that I bring Agent Scully's autopsy photos to you in the hospital?" I spit.

At the mention of the word "autopsy" Mulder's face had gone white. Unsteadily he rose to his feet and moved painfully to the window, gazing out as if he expected to see her walking on the street below him. Something told me Mulder was going to be seeing Scully everywhere for a very long time.

"Please," he said haltingly, bracing himself against the sill with slow, measured breaths. "Just tell me what you found."

I could feel my jaw clench; it was impossible to keep the tension from my voice, but I knew that Mulder would not be denied.

"I know what you believe, Mulder," I said in a low voice. "Hell, I expected it too. But all the indications -- *all* of them -- are that what happened to Agent Scully was an accident. Four other agents perished. All of them died of smoke inhalation. Their bodies were intact, there was no indication of external trauma. The alarm system was working, the sprinklers went off. It appears that they just...didn't make it out of the building in time."

"What was she working on?" Mulder asked without turning around.

"What?"

"A case, was she working on a case?"

"No." I paused as Mulder seemed to take it in. "She'd gone back to teaching at Quantico. Nine to five. She hadn't performed a consult for VCU in several weeks."

Unconsciously Mulder rubbed a hand tiredly over his eyes. "The X-Files?" he asked. I was surprised to note that it was the first time Mulder had mentioned them. There had been a time, I thought ruefully, when his work there had been all that mattered to him -- and his impassioned defense of it all that mattered, professionally, to me.

"The division's still open," I told him, registering the note of surprise that flitted briefly across his face and was gone. "Two agents are assigned to it. John Doggett and Monica Reyes. They're both familiar with your work."

His lips curved with the ghost of a bitter smile. "Mulder and Scully, the next generation?"

"They're doing solid work. Though I must say their expense reports are much less...creative...than yours."

At this Mulder didn't come close to cracking a smile. Instead his head dropped forward until his chin was nearly touching his chest.

"Scully," he whispered aloud tonelessly, more to himself than to me. I stepped forward, intending to put a hand on his shoulder, but I found I couldn't bring myself to touch him.

"Why don't you sit down, Mulder, you look like you're ready to collapse."

It was an unfortunate choice of words. When Mulder did look up at me, his eyes seemed to burn with despair. In his time with the X-Files Mulder had saved my life -- and the lives of many others -- more than once, and in return I'd found myself doing my damndest to save his career, but we had never had a close relationship outside of the terse, clipped arguments upon which the fate of Agent Scully's life and sometimes the entire world seemed to rest. Now, with Mulder in front of me barely able to speak his unspeakable loss, I found that I had no earthly idea how to help him.

Before I could try, we were interrupted by the insistent drone of my doorbell. As I moved to answer it I could feel Mulder's deep breaths behind me, concentrated, as if he'd forgotten how. Christ, maybe he had.

I'd intended to ask any visitors to kindly take a rain check, but when I looked through the peephole I knew there would be no turning the three men away. Even Mulder's pale face seemed to regain some of its color as the three Lone Gunmen paraded single file into my living room. A slow smile spread across his face, though it was obvious from the look in his eyes that there was no real joy in it.

"You boys come to see what a dead man looks like?" he said, his voice rough as though it hadn't been used for a long time. Frohike let out a low whistle in response.

"Jesus, Mulder. I'd say it was good to finally see your pretty face again, but -- "

"I know, you'd be lying," Mulder cut him off somewhat good-naturedly. "How'd you know I was here?"

"Do you even have to ask?" Langly responded. "We've been looking out for you, Mulder."

"All of us," Byers added, throwing a significant glance in my direction. Mulder followed his gaze to meet my eyes.

"I know," he said. I looked around my living room and could hardly comprehend the scene: three conspiracy geeks and Mulder, back among the living.

"Well." I cleared my throat. "Why don't you gentlemen get settled and I'll set you up with some lunch."

"Say no more, Skinner!" Frohike responded with a flourish. "We brought Mulder here a present. Figured he could use it." He nodded toward Byers, who was setting down a parcel I hadn't noticed he'd been holding. When he stepped aside I could see what it was: a caseful of Ensure.

"Chocolate," Langly nodded encouragingly at Mulder. "Know how much you used to enjoy the stuff in the hospital, Mulder. Bulk you right back up."

"I knew there was a reason to live," Mulder murmured, then flinched as if he'd been struck. All three men studiously looked down at their feet, but it was Frohike who broke the silence.

"I'm sorry about Scully, Mulder," he said, in as gentle a way as he probably knew how. "We looked into it, of course." His own voice seemed choked, now. "It was a damn shame."

Mulder was looking away as if he couldn't bear to see Frohike start to cry.

"What about Liam?" he said suddenly.

"What?" Langly said.

"Liam," Mulder repeated tightly. "Her -- our -- child. Have you 'looked into' him?"

The three men exchanged startled glances. "Well -- yeah. Of course we've been keeping an eye on him for you, Mulder," Frohike offered.

"And?" Mulder's voice was pressing, insistent.

"He's a healthy, active toddler," Byers responded guardedly. "There's no indication that there's anything...unusual about him."

"And more importantly, none of your government goons have shown any interest in him whatsoever," Langly added. He glanced at me.

"No offense."

"None taken," I answered grimly. "Mulder, I appreciate your concerns, but believe me, I have done everything in my power to ensure Liam's continued safety."

Mulder's tense shoulders seemed to relax slightly in response, but his eyes were no less wild.

"Now c'mon, Mulder," Langly said brightly, "how about that Ensure?"

The three Gunmen were true to their word, refusing to leave the apartment until Mulder -- who looked more pained with each sip -- finished every drop of a can of high-calorie Ensure. By the time they had gone, Mulder was positively glowering, which I chose to take as an improvement over his previous state. When I noticed that my answering machine had messages waiting, I hit the button without thinking...only to be confronted with the last voice I wanted Mulder to hear.

"Mr. Skinner, this is Margaret Scully. When you called a few days ago you mentioned following up on some kind of lead in Oregon and I just wondered -- "

Fuck. Automatically I jabbed at the 'delete' button, but the damage had already been done.

"You spoke to her," Mulder said. His voice still had the accusing tone from earlier in the afternoon, but now the venom had gone out of it and he merely sounded tired.

"We've been in touch. She wanted to be kept informed." I paused, taking in the unspoken question in his eyes. "Look, Mulder. I'm sure you've realized that there are those who thought your disappearance might not have been...entirely outside your control. But I assure you that Margaret Scully is not one of them." Not after seeing the way the loss of Mulder nearly destroyed her daughter, and Agent Scully's stubborn insistences that Mulder would be found. Mulder looked as though he wanted to say something else, but only nodded.

It wasn't until later that night, when I was sure Mulder was fast asleep in the guest bedroom, that I returned Margaret Scully's call.

"Mrs. Scully? It's Walter Skinner. I'm sorry I didn't get a chance to return your message earlier."

"Of course," she said tentatively, obviously afraid to ask the question that was clearly on her mind. "And your lead...?"

"Mrs. Scully, perhaps we shouldn't be discussing this over the phone."

Her tone changed immediately. "It was Fox, wasn't it," she asked, but there was no question mark in her voice. "You've found him."

I sighed. It had been almost two years of these awkwardly painful phone calls, two years during which I was sure Margaret Scully had lived and died by the ringing of her telephone. There would be no keeping her from the truth.

"Yes," I said reluctantly. "He's badly malnourished and he appears to have suffered some...radiation burns. But he'll be...he'll be fine."

She let out a long breath. "And he knows about Dana," she said. Of course he knew, I wanted to say, he would have known even if I had never told him. But instead I only confirmed her query. "He's devastated," I said honestly. The line was silent for a moment.

"So am I," she said finally. Then, anxiously: "Is he with you? Can I speak with him?"

"He's asleep, Mrs. Scully, he's exhausted," I answered. "But I know he'll want to see you -- "

"Please," Mrs. Scully said. "Sometime soon. I need to see him. And he needs to see his son."

Mulder had been too shell-shocked since receiving the news to demand to see Liam, but I didn't even want to try to contemplate the shit-storm that was sure to go down if anyone even entertained the thought of attempting to keep him from his son.

"I will be in touch," I agreed.

On the other end of the line, just before Mrs. Scully hung up, I imagined I could hear Liam crying.

As I pored over Mulder's medical reports -- "severely malnourished," "evidence of prior second-degree burns to the legs and back" -- I could hear what sounded like a scuffle coming from the guest bedroom. Mulder tossing and turning in his sleep, no doubt.

The doorway was open. As I stepped into it and my eyes adjusted to the light I could make out Mulder, whose own eyes opened, huge, as his whole body seemed to shudder.

"Mulder," I said forcefully. But his eyes stared through me.

"Agent Mulder," I said again. "Do you know where you are?"

Suddenly awareness seemed to set in. His body slumped forward, and he ran a hand repeatedly through his short hair.

"Sir," he said. His breath was coming in short gasps as he waved off the glass of water I moved to offer him.

"You were having a nightmare."

"My life is a nightmare," he managed to mutter in response as he pushed himself upright.

"You experienced episodes of pronounced night terrors in the hospital," I told him. In response he merely stared at me, the vacancy in his eyes replaced with a slow, sharp anger.

"When I was gone I prayed for death," he said, his outstretched palms turned up toward his face. "But this? This is worse."

I couldn't argue. Instead I watched him sit there, silent, for a long time.

In the morning Mulder seemed drawn, easily startled by mundane noises like the coffeemaker and the neighborhood garbage trucks.

"I want to see Scully," he announced forebodingly over a physician-recommended high-calorie breakfast that seemed to make him more nauseous than energized. For a split second I felt an encroaching horror -- <he's having delusions, he'll have to be hospitalized> -- before I realized that he had meant her gravestone.

I opened my mouth to protest, but immediately relented. I couldn't deny him this.

"And," he added in a quieter voice, staring into his plate, "I want to see Liam."

"Fine," I said, "but first we've got to get you some clothes that fit."

The only clothes that seemed adequate for his tall but emaciated frame were in the boys' department. I'd made it my policy to be honest with Fox Mulder since his return, but I was goddamn certain I would never tell him about this. An hour later Mulder was outfitted in jeans and a dark green sweater, because despite the unseasonably warm weather I was sure that otherwise I would catch him shivering.

Dana Scully had been buried next to her sister in a small Catholic cemetery almost a year ago. Liam had wailed inconsolably through the entire service despite the entire Scully family's attempts to soothe him, and toward the end of the ceremony Frohike, with his flair for dramatic mourning, very nearly joined in. Even Kersh had the decency to wear a dark suit and scowl uncomfortably from the back row. As we walked back to our black cars after the ceremony, I had been certain I saw cigarette smoke wafting towards her headstone. Out of respect for Agent Scully I had resisted the urge to duck behind a tree and punch the living shit out of the tall, dark figure I was sure I would have found there.

I'd expected Mulder to stumble on the rough ground at the cemetery -- hell, he was barely capable of sitting up straight without snapping in two-but as we approached Scully his steps were somehow surer than ever and his voice, which had seemed stretched so thin yesterday, was unhesitating and strong.

"I'd like a minute alone."

Of course. I nodded, not trusting my voice. I'd chewed out Mulder's ass more times than I could count, but to choke up in front of him was unthinkable. I stepped away and Mulder's gaze followed me from out of the corner of his eyes, waiting until I was well out of earshot. From a distance I watched him stare hard down at the gravestone, and I turned away. If he wasn't back in twenty minutes I'd have to make sure he hadn't fallen and cracked his head, but until then I left him to grieve in private.

When Mulder returned his hands were trembling. He must have felt the tremors, because he shoved them in his pockets and turned his face up to me defiantly, his gaze clearer than it had been since I had first seen him.

"When Scully was...returned," he said suddenly, turning his face into the breeze, "her sister made me stand by her bedside and...wave my arms, around her body. I told her I felt ridiculous. Do you know what she said to me?"

I shook my head mutely.

"She said, 'Her soul is here.' She told me that I could feel it." He paused. "I told her she was wrong. But now..."

He looked at the ground. "If Scully were alive," he said bitterly, "I would feel it."

I was treading on thin ice, but I asked the question anyway.

"What *do* you feel?"

It was a cheap question to ask a man who'd been educated in psychology at Oxford, and I didn't anticipate an honest answer. If I had, I might have guessed anger...sadness...guilt. But to my surprise, Mulder seemed to consider the question for a beat longer than I'd expected. Then he turned to me with a small, humorless smile.

"Tired."

Mulder's breaths came quick and shallow in the car on the way to Margaret Scully's house. "Mulder," I finally growled, glancing over at him, "you keep breathing like that and you're going to knock yourself into a heart attack." "That might be for the best, sir," he shot back immediately. So there was some of Mulder still lurking there beneath the surface, then. As we pulled up I could see Mrs. Scully's head duck out of sight through the front window. She had obviously been expecting us.

"You all right, Mulder?" I asked as we started up the driveway. It was a preposterous question; Mulder was never going to be all right again. But he nodded without looking at me. If they had only known it would be so nearly impossible to break this man, I thought, they might never have dared to try in the first place.

Mrs. Scully answered the door almost immediately and, like the Gunmen, drew back, stunned into momentary silence at the sight of Mulder. It wasn't his gauntness, I had decided, having suffered through the same reaction myself, but the mere presence of him. Surely there was an apt metaphor somewhere -- <like seeing a ghost> -- but I had yet to unearth it.

Scully's mother recovered quickly, though, as Mulder's mouth attempted to form words. "Fox," she said quietly, reaching out to grasp both his hands with hers. "Please, come inside."

With great difficulty, Mulder seemed to regain his power of speech. "Mrs. Scully," he said, in a voice that was almost a whisper. "I am so sorry about Dana."

Mrs. Scully managed the ghost of a smile. "I know you are," she said. "And I know that Dana would be so...pleased...to have you home again." She paused. "She always believed that she would find you."

There was a fleeting moment of panic in Mulder's eyes, but he managed to compose himself and took a step closer to Scully's mother. "And she has," he said brokenly. "She has."

Christ, we were a maudlin bunch, I thought as Mrs. Scully retreated to the kitchen to make tea. Mulder's eyes flittered nervously around the living room, drinking in the obvious significance: a high chair here, a playpen there, a photograph of Scully holding Liam that Mulder gazed at reverently before shaking his head to break the spell. Mrs. Scully reappeared in time to answer the question that was clearly written on Mulder's face: "Liam's just down for a nap," she reported gently. "He should be waking up any minute now."

Mulder nodded uneasily. One uncomfortable round of tea later, Mrs. Scully seemed to gather her strength and turn to Mulder, who was staring vacantly into his cup as if he expected the tea leaves to reveal Scully's face.

"Fox," she said. "Would you like to see him?"

Mulder opened his mouth to answer but instead merely nodded. As Mrs. Scully left the room, I attempted to think of something encouraging to say to my former agent but came up completely empty -- Hallmark, I thought bleakly, had never made a card for this. I settled for a brief nod in his direction that escaped his notice completely as he clenched his fists to keep them from trembling. I had seen Liam just a month ago, but he looked twice as big as he had then. Margaret Scully was whispering soothingly into his ear as he drowsily rubbed the sleep from his eyes with chubby hands.

"Liam," said Mrs. Scully as she smoothed his hair from his forehead, "do you remember Mr. Skinner? And this," she added slowly as she reached Mulder, who had begun to rise painfully from his chair, "this is Fo -- " She cut herself off, momentarily stricken. "This," she said, "is your father."

From across the table I inspected Mulder's face. The expression I saw there was like nothing I had ever witnessed from him: a sharp blend of sheer terror and gentle longing. For a moment he only looked at Liam in open-mouthed wonder before finding his voice:

"Hey there," he said softly, as if worried he might frighten the baby. "Hey, Liam."

Liam had never warmed to my presence, likely because I had been the bearer of bad tidings to the Scully household more times than I wanted to count. But he seemed positively transfixed by Mulder, reaching his arms to him as if demanding to be held.

"He recognizes your voice," Mrs. Scully said, looking fondly at her grandson. Startled, Mulder said, "I don't...I don't understand." Mrs. Scully glanced away, embarrassed.

"Dana had some audiotapes...of you. From your work. Not many," she added hastily, "that were entirely suitable for a baby's ears. But..." Her eyes were wet. "Dana thought...she always said I was being foolish. But I played them for him."

Mulder looked stunned, his eyes uncertainly darting from Mrs. Scully to his son and back again. Finally he reached out, gently, and carefully lifted a chortling Liam from Mrs. Scully's arms.

"Well, kid," he said, the ghost of a smile on his lips, "that must've made some pretty kick-ass bedtime stories for you."

In response, Liam grinned wildly and lunged for Mulder's nose with both hands. "His fine motor skills appear to be intact," I observed.

"He can play with it all he wants, I'm just grateful he didn't inherit it," Mulder retorted mildly as he disentangled himself, glancing at Mrs. Scully and appearing relieved to find her smiling.

"Mrs. Scully," he said hesitantly as Liam attempted to chew on his fingers, "thank you. For...for taking care of him."

Scully's mother pressed her lips together and glanced away, toward the window, as if she didn't want Mulder to see her face as she spoke.

"Fox. When Dana told me...about her pregnancy..." Her eyes met his reluctantly. "I didn't know what kind of father you could be. What kind of life you and Dana could have without putting your child in danger."

It wasn't an invalid concern; Mulder, with his penchant for running off in search of personal truths and government secrets, had unquestionably endangered Dana Scully's life a thousand times. Even so, hearing Mrs. Scully speak out loud what Mulder was undoubtedly thinking, he flinched as if he had been struck. He nodded, slowly, a choice seeming to spread across his face.

"I can't argue with that," he said in a low voice as Liam watched interestedly. "But..."

Mulder swallowed hard. He watched Liam tug at his fingertips for a long time. Then, taking a breath that seemed to signify his resolve, he looked directly at Margaret Scully's face.

"He is my son," he said, his voice shaky but firm. "Mrs. Scully, my father..." Mulder paused, and sighed.

"My father," he continued in a quiet voice, "thought he could have both. A family and a conspiracy. He tried to have both, and it destroyed us." Unconsciously Mulder reached out to stroke Liam's head. When he resumed speaking, his voice seemed to stretch, taut, across the past ten years.

"I will not do that to my son."

If he had expected a seismic shift in the order of the universe at his pronouncement -- a bolt of lightning, perhaps, or a foreboding directive from above-I wouldn't have blamed him. Over the past decade I had watched Fox Mulder devote every fragment of his being to what he had more than once referred to, without any hint of irony, as his "quest"...and the Holy Grail, in my opinion, had nothing on Mulder. Pursuing the truth with a fervor born out of a passion I had always respected but could never understand, Mulder had sacrificed everything. Everything. Let the truth be known, though the heavens fall.

But the Mulder I saw in front of me was not the same Mulder who had gone into the woods in Oregon two years ago. Mulder was gripping his son with a fierceness that seemed almost painful. His son, I realized-the core of both Mulder and Scully, the life they had built together, the truths they had sought. The essence, as it were, of Mulder's heart.

"If Kersh and his agents want the X-Files," he said intently to me, as if he had suddenly forgotten Margaret Scully's presence in the room, "they can have them. And if the Director wants my badge, even my gun, he can have that too. But I want assurance -- I want an oath in *blood* -- that my son is not to be touched. Or I *promise* you," he hissed, "that I will bring them down."

In response, Liam's face crumpled and he began to wail. "Fox," Mrs. Scully interjected, touching his arm before plucking Liam from his hands and allowing the crying baby to bury his face in her shoulder. Mulder only stared at me, harshly, his eyes communicating what he and I both knew: that Mulder without Scully, without Liam, would be a more brutally dangerous man than any of his betrayers had ever imagined.

It was several deep breaths and one ear-splitting shriek from Liam before Mulder could speak again.

"I know I put Dana's life in danger," he said in Mrs. Scully's direction, his voice dangerously low. "But I lo -- I loved your daughter." It came out as a croak. "And I would be lying if I said I didn't want justice for what was done to her or answers to the questions we sought. But I need to take responsibility for my actions. I need to protect my son, Mrs. Scully. You have to let me protect him."

Mrs. Scully gazed at him wearily but unflinchingly over the top of Liam's head. "And you think you can do that," she said finally. "Protect him."

"Whatever it takes," said Mulder forcefully. They seemed to be at a standoff: Mulder and a Scully, just like old times. Hell, I could only imagine what Mulder would give to have an argument with Dana Scully again. I found myself briefly imagining what the outcome of a custody battle between Mulder and Margaret Scully would be -- Mulder was destined to lose, that much was obvious, but I wouldn't have been surprised if the judge threw in a restraining order and possibly involuntary commitment for good measure. Fox Mulder, paranoid investigator of paranormal phenomena and government conspiracies, father of a toddler. What a sitcom that would make.

Mrs. Scully drew in a deep, shuddering breath. "Fox...he has already lost his mother. And my motivations are not that malicious. I would never want to...keep him from you." She paused, her face drawn and tight.

"I think Liam's had enough for today," she said abruptly.

Mulder's voice was imploring. "Mrs. Scully, please..."

I stepped in between the two of them. "I think we've all had more than enough to deal with for the moment," I said in a low voice, letting Mulder read the message on my face: <Don't push this right now.>

"We'll talk soon, Fox," Mrs. Scully said as she led us to the door. "When you're feeling -- " Her voice shook. " -- stronger."

Mrs. Scully had obviously been misreading him. Mulder may have been physically frail, but the intensity of his eyes and voice as he pled for his son had been stronger than ever.

"That went well," Mulder observed caustically as he slumped into the front seat of the car, flinging a hand over his eyes. I glanced over at him.

"She just needs some time," I said, striving unsuccessfully to make my tone as gentle as I knew how. "She's lost her daughter, she's -- "

"Due respect, sir, are you really going to sit there and talk to me about loss?" he interrupted.

Touche, I thought.

"Mulder. I have spent the last two years updating Margaret Scully weekly -- sometimes daily -- on the federal investigation into your disappearance. And believe me, she has wanted nothing more than for you to be found. Not just for your own sake but for Liam's."

At the mention of his son's name, all the wind went out of him. Mulder's eyes seemed to soften, losing the bitter glint in them that had surfaced when he had first mentioned the X-Files.

"I-I never saw myself as a father," he said, choosing his words carefully. "I never wanted to...to take the risk that I might have the same impact on my children that my own father had on me."

"If what you said in there," I replied cautiously, "about the Bureau, about the X-Files -- if that's any indication -- then you won't."

Mulder closed his eyes and tipped his head back against the seat. Our tender moment, I thought grimly, was clearly over.

"How can you be so sure?" he said, his voice betraying a quiet agony. I could tell he didn't expect or want an answer, not the empty platitudes I'd been attempting to offer him since his return. Instead I shut up and drove, and by the time we reached my apartment I had to shake him so forcefully to wake him that I thought he might snap in two. He gasped violently as he awoke -- a characteristic of Fox Mulder's I had become all too familiar with lately -- and startled us both.

"Jesus, Mulder," I said before I could help myself. "You sleep like the..."

"Dead?" He smiled twistedly. "You should be so lucky."

I glared at him, sharply, but he was already beginning to push himself out of the car, refusing the hand I offered him and sagging against the door frame at the same time.

"Mulder, would you let me help you?" I said, exasperated.

The look he gave me in return was piercing.

"You can help me," he said evenly as he started for the door, "by getting me in touch with some of our mutual friends at the FBI. It's been a long time since they've heard from me, and I have a feeling they're about to get an earful."

I sighed. There was no stopping Mulder; there never had been. In the past, his relentlessness had saved lives on countless occasions.

It had also come damn close to costing him his own.

"I don't have that kind of access, Mulder," I said carefully as we entered the apartment.

"I think you do, sir."

I shook my head, suddenly uncomfortable. Christ, as if the past few days hadn't been uncomfortable enough. "I'm not your boss anymore, Mulder, you don't have to call me 'sir.'"

"Well, then, Skinman, I need you to do me this favor," Mulder replied promptly, sounding perversely more cheerful -- if that were even possible -- than he had since his return.

I couldn't hold back a small sound of disbelief. "It's a hell of a favor." I paused. "Are you sure you want to do this?"

"As opposed to what?" he retorted angrily. "Ignore them and hope they'll go away? Or should I just turn my son over to them, save us all the trouble?"

"Look, Mulder, I'm not suggesting -- "

"Then what are you suggesting?" he interjected. "If you've got ideas, I'd like to hear them."

He was breathing hard, almost panting, when it hit me that we'd been here many times before, Mulder and I. The dead ends, the defeat. The unvoiced specter of Dana Scully hanging in the air between us like a heavy weight on both our hearts. God. I couldn't give Mulder his life back. I realized that.

But I could do this for him.

"You can't make a deal with the devil, you know that better than anyone," I said finally. Mulder's eyes glittered dangerously.

"I'm not asking for a deal."

"Then I'm asking you to agree to certain conditions," I said warningly. "First, that you keep your own death wish in check for the sake of your son. You heard Mrs. Scully, Mulder, she wants you in his life."

He didn't even blink. "And the second?" he said evenly.

I had to speak quickly to get my entire sentence out because when I knew that when I had, the proverbial shit would hit the fan. "That before you get involved you let me have someone evaluate you."

Unconsciously Mulder glanced down at his wasted body. "You heard the doctors in Oregon, they said I was fine."

My jaw was clenched so tightly I thought I was have to unhinge it just to speak. "I'm not talking physically, Mulder."

He stared at me, realization brimming. "You want me to see a psychiatrist," he said flatly. "No, I'm sorry -- you want to 'have me evaluated.'"

"I don't think you're crazy, Mulder."

"No?" he rejoined, his eyes wide and fierce. "That's funny, sir" -- even in his rage, I thought, I would always be "sir" to Fox Mulder -- "because I do. And I doubt your psychiatrist is going to be able to tell me anything I don't already know."

But I had seen the way his eyes looked as he came bursting forth from sleep, the dark pools in them that seemed to liquefy as he brooded at the walls.

"It's not negotiable, Mulder. Do this or our deal is off."

His voice was cutting. "I told you," he said, "I'm not asking for a deal."

"Agent Mulder," I said icily, using the title I knew would get his attention, "you and I both know that you are more than capable of managing this situation on your own. Now, you *asked* for my help. Let me give it to you."

It was Mulder's second standoff of the day, and it was clearly wearing him down. He sighed wearily and rubbed a hand over his eyes. It was something I'd watched him do over and over since Oregon and I was beginning to wonder if the doctors had missed some retinal damage we didn't know of.

"Is the light bothering you, Mulder?" I said quietly.

"It was dark," he said without thinking. "It was dark and I was..."

"Where?" I asked, more harshly than I had intended.

His hand cast a shadow over his eyes. "The light was blinding," he murmured.

"Mulder, where?"

Suddenly his reverie broke and he startled, staring at me.

"I told you," he said, his voice a flat mockery of itself, "I don't remember."

I wanted to believe he wasn't lying.

There was only one psychiatrist I knew who had a prayer of surviving a session with Fox Mulder. The violent protest Mulder clearly wanted to stage played itself out only in his eyes, where a mutiny was obviously brewing. Frankly, I was surprised Mulder hadn't yet mentioned retrieving his meager possessions from the storage locker I'd rented and striking out on his own, but I figured that it was only a matter of time. Or maybe, I considered as I glanced at him in the car, he was just too goddamned tired.

"So what happened to my apartment?" Mulder asked disinterestedly as we drove. Ah. There it was, as if on cue. Spooky Mulder strikes again.

"It's up on the market," I said. "Landlord's having trouble trying to rent it."

Mulder looked over at me. "Yeah? Why's that?"

Maybe the truth would cheer him up, I thought. "Neighbors have been telling potential tenants that the place is haunted," I admitted.

I was right; Mulder looked almost delighted. "Really?"

"It seems," I said neutrally, though I believe I almost could have managed a smile, "that the last tenant suffered a rather unfortunate string of bad luck while living there. Strange noises in the middle of the night, more than one 911 call placed from the apartment -- "

"All right," Mulder interrupted.

" -- duct tape residue on the window," I finished.

"You should have been this funny when you were evaluating my case reports," Mulder muttered under his breath.

His face registered surprise as we pulled up to our destination. "Not the Bureau?" he said, glancing at me.

"So you could eat a few OPR shrinks for breakfast?" I rejoined. "It might have been fun to watch, but it's not what I had in mind, Mulder."

"It's never fun," Mulder said after a beat as he climbed out of the car. Dr. Reginald Graver had been a psychiatrist before we'd served together in Vietnam, and since the war's end and the post-traumatic stress that came with it he'd been treating psychiatry's most difficult patients -- grown men in agony, men who'd escaped from the pit of hell only to find that their lives suspiciously resembled the place they thought they'd left. Mulder shook his hand uneasily, as if measuring his own fragile grip against Reggie's powerful one and coming up short. For a moment he looked exposed, unbalanced, but just as I'd seen him do in my apartment, he quickly shook his head and recovered.

"Dr. Graver, I'm Fox Mulder," he said, glancing over at me. "But then I'm sure Skinner's told you all about me."

"Just the Cliffs Notes version, I'm afraid," Reggie replied easily. "It's good to see you again, Walt," he said to me.

"It's been a long time, Reggie. Your hair's gone gray," I noted.

"And you've gone bald," he said, grinning. Then he turned to Mulder, all business.

"Shall we begin?"

I moved to let myself out of the room, but Mulder rolled his eyes. "Knock it off, sir, you've been reading my mental health reports for years," he growled. "I know your friend here is going to give you a full run-down once we're through, so you might as well stay and enjoy the show."

Undaunted by this little outburst, I lowered myself into a chair on the far side of the room, but not before Reggie flashed me a smile. "These mental health reports," he stage-whispered, "were they a stimulating read?"

"You have no idea," I muttered dryly.

"So!" Reggie continued brightly. "Mulder, is it? That's what you prefer to be called?"

Mulder closed his eyes briefly as if to signal his impatience. "I sincerely hope you're not getting paid by the hour, Dr. Graver," he said.

"I wouldn't think of accepting payment from Walt," Reggie replied pleasantly. "Tell me about yourself, Mulder. What'd you major in in college?"

Mulder looked at Reggie as though he were itching to tell him what a colossal waste of time was being had, but he managed to swallow his irritation as he answered the question.

"I have a Ph.D. in psychology from Oxford University," he said witheringly. "What do you think I majored in?"

"Oooh, you've got me there, Mulder," said Reggie. "Let's see, I wanna say home economics, but..."

Mulder merely glared at him.

"Fine, what did you minor in, then?"

Mulder opened his mouth -- preparing to offer a sarcastic retort, I was sure -- but as he surveyed Reggie's expectant and imposing figure, he seemed to reconsider. "English literature," he admitted.

"Really! Ah, your still waters run deep, then." Reggie looked positively delighted at this little tidbit, and I had to admit that it seemed incongruous with what I knew of Mulder's personality. I might have guessed criminology, or even history, but I never would have guessed English literature. I tried to picture Mulder, refined, at nineteen or twenty, earnestly scribbling notes in an Oxford classroom and then meeting his flatmates for tea. The image seemed utterly ridiculous.

"So you're a brilliant criminal profiler and a literature buff to boot," Reggie observed. "Would you care to enlighten us with a little poetry, then?"

For an instant Mulder looked massively tortured and then his face changed, as if he'd decided he preferred this to the alternative head-shrinking that would no doubt ensue otherwise. He focused his eyes on some faraway spot on the wall and took a deep breath, his breathing slowly evening out as he acquiesced, words tumbling from his lips.

"Nor law, nor duty bade me fight, Nor public men, nor cheering crowds, A lonely impulse of delight Drove to this tumult in the clouds; I balanced all, brought all to mind, The years to come seemed waste of breath, A waste of breath the years behind In balance with this life, this death."

There was a moment of silence in the room as Mulder shifted his eyes to focus on me. His eyes looked hard into mine for a second, but then he blinked once, shaking his head as if coming out of a dream, and looked away.

Reggie was nodding sagely. "Yeats," he said. "One of my favorites."

"I'm glad you enjoyed it," Mulder said shortly. "Are we done?"

"Not quite, Mulder, why don't you tell me what happened in Oregon?" Reggie said smoothly, in one breath. Mulder looked momentarily stunned, as if he'd been blindsided. Then he smiled.

"I see. The poetry, lulling me into a fugue state from which I might reveal my twisted confession. That was good, that was a new one. No one's asked me to recite Yeats in twenty years."

"Do you know any Auden?"

"I have a photographic memory," Mulder said evenly. "I know a lot of poetry. In fact, we could sit here all day and -- "

"You know a lot of other things, too, don't you, Dr. Mulder?" Reggie asked as he leaned forward, his eyes suddenly piercing. I glanced uneasily back and forth at the two of them.

"I know you're not going to get anywhere springing questions on me like you expect me to be taken by surprise and tell you what you want to hear," Mulder said, sounding easily more comfortable than he had since his return.

"What is it that you think I want to hear, Mulder?" Reggie asked.

Mulder's shoulders moved in a half shrug. "That I'm irreversibly haunted by the memory of what happened to me. That I'm out for revenge for myself...for Scully. That I'm unhinged and I need to start dealing with it."

Reggie raised his eyebrows. "That's what you think I want to hear from you? Imagine the things I might be afraid of."

Mulder's eyes narrowed. "Dr. Graver," he said, "I'm a behavioral psychologist. I've profiled murderers -- hundreds of them -- profiles that led to their arrests..."

"I'm aware of your credentials," Reggie responded. "You were...25, 26? Weren't you? When you started with the ISU?"

Mulder nodded as I considered for the first time what that meant. Twenty-six years old, shot straight like a rubber band from the higher academia of Oxford to the ugliness of the ISU. I hadn't been just trying to flatter him those many years ago when I had told him that there were agents in the Bureau who had been talking about him when he was in the Academy. I had been one of them. The word from Quantico back then was that this Mulder kid was brilliant, intuitive, practically empathic with his instinctive grasp of the criminal mind. There were rumors that Mulder might someday give Bill Patterson a run for his money, or at the very least a solve rate that climbed through the roof as the eerily on-target profiles kept rolling in. Twenty-six years old. Christ. Suddenly I had to fight to keep the bile down. Mulder had been good at his job, so good that when he'd burned out on Patterson's exhaustive and somewhat twisted unit, he was allowed the freedom to pursue his own personal interests within the FBI in exchange for an occasional stint back at VICAP. Mulder had been so good that the FBI had allowed him the X-Files, and in exchange the X-Files had brought him to the brink of every truth he had ever pursued...and effectively destroyed his life.

Fate, I thought, had not been kind to Fox Mulder.

"So you've been doing this for a long time," Reggie observed. "Have you ever profiled yourself?"

Mulder gave a short laugh. "Haven't you?" he asked pointedly.

"Haven't we all?" Reggie responded vaguely. "Look, if it makes you feel any better, I'll go first: Obsessive workaholic haunted by the memory of a past tragic event, driven by a savior complex but prone to destructive relationships with loved ones.

Mulder looked mildly impressed. "Were you describing me, or yourself?" he said neutrally.

"You tell me, Mulder."

Mulder grimaced, obviously starting to feel pissed. Reggie leaned in further -- as if moving in for the kill, I thought privately.

"Are you tired of it yet?" he said in a low voice. "The verbal sparring, the light-hearted little dance we're having? Because I can go all day, Mulder, and we've barely just scratched the surface. Now I know you've got to be tired. And I know you don't feel like talking and probably never will. What you choose to say here is entirely up to you. But I'm telling you now -- consider this your warning -- that what happened to you will haunt you. Forever, if you let it."

Mulder had listened impassively to Reggie speak, and when he finally spoke I could barely hear him.

"What do you want me to say? That I have nightmares even when I'm awake? That losing the past two years of my life may have been more distressing that the trauma I was experiencing before I was gone? That I'm *angry*?" he spat. "Do you really want to know? It's all true. And it turns out it wasn't a nightmare, the dream I've been having for the past twenty-five years of my life, it was real. And I lived it, and I have to go on living it, whether or not we sit here for another hour while I tell you my feelings."

By the end of his speech Mulder was breathing hard, but his eyes were dry and filled with a simmering anger, not the broken and hollow grief I'd grown accustomed to over the past week. Reggie nodded at him encouragingly.

"You're right, Mulder," he said. "And I never said there was anything we could do to change that. I can tell you're a tenacious man. Passionate. And I can tell you from experience that that's what it takes."

"To do what?" Mulder said flatly.

"To do just what you said," Reggie answered, as if he were providing Mulder with the answer. "To go on living."

Mulder merely stared at him. Then, without a word, he got up and walked out of the room.

"That's it?" I said to Reggie, who was gazing thoughtfully at the door Mulder had just walked through. "That's your idea of an evaluation?" Reggie looked me over shrewdly.

"What was it exactly that you thought I could do for him?" he said. "Fix him? He's not broken, Walt. You heard him, he knows he probably needs concentrated, intensive therapy and he doesn't want it." He tilted his head towards me. "I know you, Walt. And all I can tell you is that whatever your friend Mulder's got it in his mind to do, I'd say he's going to do it whether or not you have him evaluated, tested or even committed by a hundred doctors. That man is not kidding around."

"Tell me something I don't know," I said grimly. But I couldn't help pressing him further: "He keeps telling me doesn't remember what happened."

"Maybe he doesn't," Reggie shrugged. "Maybe he does and he doesn't want to discuss it with you. You were his boss. He doesn't need to be coddled by you."

Even so, I left the room to go find Mulder. He was leaning over a water fountain in the hallway, splashing drops on his face. He didn't look up as I came towards him. I stood there for a moment, watching him -- that slight tremor in his hands, his face showing age where he once had not. There had once been men in the Bureau who envied Fox Mulder his youth, I thought.

"Yeats, Mulder?" I said in a low voice, trying not to startle him. But for once he didn't seem surprised to see me as he straightened up.

"Scully used to complain that she missed out on all the good English classes going pre-med. On long car trips she used me as her own personal literature generator. She liked Yeats because he was Irish."

Mulder almost smiled at the memory. But then he bent double, drawing in a shuddering breath, his hands gripping his knees. Some things, I thought, he did remember. And most of those seemed to be more than he could bear.

"Mulder?" I said, concerned. Almost immediately he straightened up and flashed me a weak smile.

"Bet you didn't know I used to play the piano, either," he said. I raised my eyebrows.

"And here I thought the only thing you played was Hide and Seek with paranormal phenomena," I said wryly. At the mention of his former career, Mulder's face was suddenly all business.

"Well, 'Walt,'" he said, "did you get accomplish everything you needed with this little exercise?"

I knew I had to be honest with him. "According to Dr. Graver," I said, "I can't hold you back from doing what you want to do."

"How astute of him," Mulder observed bitingly. "One point for the psychiatric profession." He paused, studied me carefully. "Now, I want to see Kersh."

Privately I was almost relieved; at least he was asking to see Assistant Director Kersh -- who was ostensibly still a respectable government figure -- and not Krycek or some other, far more dangerous arm of the consortium that had plagued his life, as it turned out, since before his sister's disappearance. But I had no doubt that Kersh was, as I had once been, an unwitting lackey for powerful men with an insidious interest in Mulder's investigations, and I knew that a confrontation between Mulder and Kersh could turn ugly in a hurry.

"Mulder." I hesitated, aware of how exasperated my voice sounded. "You can't just walk into his office and make a demand, you've got no leverage -- "

"Yeah, but I've still got my good looks." he interrupted.

" -- and you and I both know that these are powerful men we're talking about, men who can drop you in a second," I finished while Mulder glared at me.

"Are you finished?" he said. Obviously my "Try Anything Stupid and Dangerous Conspirators Will Be There to Kick Your Ass" speech had not been cleverly disguised enough; Mulder had heard it several times before and, as usual, he wasn't buying.

"I'm going with you," I said, my voice sounding to my own ears like a strict principal laying down the law. In response, Mulder pulled an exaggerated frown.

"Sir, this isn't <Gunsmoke>," he said. "And I'm not asking for backup."

"Authority, then," I said. "In case you've forgotten, Mulder, I still work for the FBI. And my personnel file is less...littered...with reports of probation and censure."

Mulder's eyes were searching. "Why are you doing this?" he said quietly, his voice stronger but no less haunted than it had been when, on the plane, he'd asked me the same question.

"Despite what you may think, Mulder, I've always thought you were a good man," I said. "I'm just trying to keep it that way."

If I had been hoping for an instant bond to form between us, man to man, as might happen in the movies, I was badly mistaken. Mulder's eyes were already looking past me as he began to stride down the hallway.

"Then you'd better call A.D. Kersh," he said, "and tell him to expect visitors."

"You want to do this now?" I said, not bothering to deny Mulder's inherent assumption that he was calling all the shots. In the two years since Mulder's disappearance, Agent Scully and I had devoted all our resources to finding him, not to probing into the extent of Alvin Kersh's position on the totem pole of government officials who were out to destroy Fox Mulder and his work. Frankly, I had no idea what Kersh's influence was, but I was willing to bet-and Mulder obviously was, too -- that whatever Mulder said to him in the relatively safe halls of the J. Edgar Hoover Building would wind its way back to the people who mattered...in what was quite possibly the highest-stakes game of Telephone ever played.

His voice rang back at me: "There's no time like the present."

I couldn't see his face, but I could have sworn he was smiling.

He was less confident by the time we arrived at the Hoover building, his eyes large and dark as he studied it through the car window. As Mulder seemed to work up the courage to reach for the door handle, I reached across the car and stopped him with a light touch on the shoulder. Mulder drew back, exasperated -- "What?" he said pointedly -- but I was reaching for the glove compartment as he watched, puzzled.

"You may need these," I said neutrally as I handed him his badge and gun. Mulder stared at me.

"You kept them in your glove compartment?" he said incredulously.

He'd forgotten, then, that by all rights he should have been carrying the two items when he had disappeared in Oregon -- and, in fact, he had. State troopers had recovered them from the forest three weeks later, tossed into a dirt cairn and splattered with mud. And as inconsequential as it had seemed, I had never been able to bring myself to remove them from my car...as if I thought that one day while I was out for a drive I might come across Fox Mulder lying somewhere in a ditch, perhaps, or wandering aimlessly by the side of some country road, and that I would be able to atone for having lost him by instantly providing him with two-thirds of what I thought of as Mulder's holy triumvirate of existence: his badge. His gun.

And Scully.

But after two years, I didn't have the energy to tell him the truth.

"What did you want, Mulder, an exhibit at the Smithsonian?"

But Mulder was preoccupied, hefting his gun in his hands as if to confirm the weight of it, staring at his badge with an expression that seemed very much like wonder. I found my own sense of wonder begin to surface: Was Mulder really about to give them up? Could he?

When he finally looked up at me, his eyes, clear and hard, removed all doubts. "Let's go," he said, his voice clipped.

Inside the building, Mulder scarcely seemed to take notice of the fact that he was back inside the halls of the Federal Bureau of Investigation after his long absence. He strode up to the desk and turned on what I could only assume was the infamous Mulder charisma I'd heard so much about, from agents completely baffled as to how Mulder could be so charming one moment and so damn infuriating the next.

"Would you tell Assistant Director Kersh I'm here to see him, please?" he said pleasantly. The receptionist obviously wasn't listening to the dangerous fringe lurking around his even tone, because she peered at him boredly over the top of her wire-rimmed glasses.

"Do you have an appointment?" she said.

Mulder flashed her a smile that revealed his teeth but contained no sense of warmth. "Just tell him Fox Mulder is downstairs. I'm sure he won't mind the interruption from an old friend."

Something in the receptionist's brain must have clicked, because her mouth dropped open slightly and her glasses seemed to tremble on her face.

"M-Mulder?" she stammered a little nervously.

"And guest," Mulder replied nonchalantly, nodding in my direction. "I'm sure you know Assistant Director Skinner...?"

There was a silence that seemed to stretch forever.

"May I ask what this is regarding?" asked the receptionist once she had regained her composure.

"I'm afraid that's private," Mulder replied coolly. I had never spent much time in the field with him, but oh, I remembered that voice -- the smooth tones of an investigator that projected total confidence in his techniques. I hadn't heard it in almost two years, and as I stood there in the lobby I felt an inexplicable pang of guilt.

"You know what?" Mulder said abruptly, turning to me. "I'm sure I remember where A.D. Kersh's office is. We'll just head on up and you can let him know we're on our way."

The receptionist took in Mulder's skeletal frame, the way he held himself tightly together and the gleam in his eyes that made it clear he meant business. She nodded mutely as Mulder walked -- no, he fairly strolled -- the length of the lobby toward the elevator.

"Mulder," I said through gritted teeth as I hurried after him.

"Relax, Walt," he said sardonically. "We're going to do this nice and civilized." As we reached the door to Kersh's office, Mulder took in a long breath before simply walking in as if Kersh had been expecting him.

In her astonishment, the downstairs receptionist had obviously forgotten to alert Kersh to Mulder's arrival, because Kersh's eyes widened in such phenomenal shock that it might have been comical had the situation not been so serious. His surprise gave Mulder momentary pause: "It's nice to see you again, sir. It seems as though someone might have forgotten to inform you of my return," he said, glancing at me.

"I may have neglected to mention it," I agreed, playing bad cop to Mulder's good. But to me, Kersh's alarm signaled more than just fear of the potential danger inherent in Mulder's presence; it indicated some kind of massive security breakdown within the consortium he presumably served. What kind of self-respecting conspirators had stopped keeping tabs on Fox Mulder? I'd assumed, of course, that they had been aware the instant he touched down -- so to speak -- and that a contingency plan had gone into place immediately, particularly at the first place to which he was likely to return. I had, in fact, surreptitiously asked the three Lone Gunmen to work counter-intelligence, as it were, and keep me informed of any movement. Could it be, I wondered, that Mulder's nemeses had simply lost interest in him?

Kersh recovered quickly, narrowing his eyes and opening his mouth to speak, but Mulder held up a hand to stop him. "I came here to give you this," he said, flipping his badge open with the easy, practiced grip every FBI agent has perfected. He tossed it onto Kersh's desk without a second glance.

"And this," he added, pulling out his weapon and cocking it expertly, the barrel aimed at Kersh's head. Jesus Christ, I thought. I'd emptied the gun of its bullets eighteen months ago -- Mulder hadn't fired a single round, that day in Oregon -- but then Mulder always did have a flair for the dramatic, especially when it came down to standoffs at gunpoint.

But if Kersh was panicking, he didn't show it. "What can I do for you, Agent Mulder?" he said, surveying Mulder calmly. Mulder lowered the gun to his side; show's over, his eyes seemed to be saying.

"I'm going to make this quick," Mulder responded, sounding every bit the feature film gangster he seemed to be emulating. "I want out. I don't want to hear from you, or anyone you work for, ever again."

Kersh raised his eyebrows. "Would you like that in writing?" he said.

"I'd prefer it in blood," Mulder responded easily. "Yours, if necessary. But in case you think that might be too messy for the FBI to deal with, I want assurance. I want you to leave me, and my son, alone."

"We have left your son alone," Kersh said coolly, "or haven't you noticed? Don't you think anyone who wanted to could have gotten to him a dozen times already if they'd thought he was of any use to their projects?"

At the use of the word "project," Mulder blanched. It was a fraction of a movement, so small I doubted Kersh had noticed it, but Mulder had obviously caught the meaning in Kersh's words.

Kersh was gaining momentum as he continued: "Do you know what I think my co-workers would say if I informed them that Fox Mulder wanted to disappear from their radar screens?" he asked rhetorically, the slight inflection on the word 'co-workers' compounding the irony of the statement. "I think they would say hallelujah. You have been nothing but a thorn in their sides, Agent Mulder, since the day you started working for this office. And as I'm sure you're aware, there have been considerable forces devoted to the effort of...*removing* you...from your position." Kersh looked Mulder up and down, as if taking him in for the first time. Mulder's jaw was clenched, his face angry and indecisive at the same time.

"And now you tell me you wish to remove yourself," Kersh went on. "How...convenient. Be my guest, Mulder. But ask yourself: Are you willing to endure the consequences of what might happen without you around to keep these men on their toes?" He stared meaningfully at Mulder for a second. "Are you willing," he said deliberately, "to walk away?"

For a moment I thought Mulder would stop breathing, that I would have to dig up my CPR skills right there on the floor of Kersh's office. Mulder stared at Kersh, his eyes locked on him as if he were incapable of looking away. Clearly, he no longer had the upper hand. Kersh, I realized with a growing sense of dismay, was absolutely right. Mulder had always had enemies in the FBI, and those enemies had wanted to shut him down since the inception of the X-Files-first in subtle ways, with the assignment of the young and skeptical Dana Scully, and later by more intrusive means. What they strived for-what they had always sought-was nothing less than the total destruction of Mulder's career and, should it come to it, his life. Those men had no reason to oppose Mulder's resignation from the Bureau or his renouncement of his quest. The burden, rather, lay with Mulder himself -- could he walk away, knowing he might be forfeiting his only chance to stop what he believed to be the invasion of the planet, the surrender of mankind? *Would* he?

Mulder still seemed powerless to speak, and I found myself stepping forward. "You're bluffing," I said, with more bravado than I felt. "There is no project and there is no plan. And there is no reason you and your men should want to devote even one iota of your time to playing any more mind games with Fox Mulder."

Kersh raised his eyebrows. "Director Skinner," he said. "It's becoming increasingly clear to me what side you plan on."

"You can't choose sides when there is no game to be played, Kersh," I growled at him in my best "talking to subordinates" voice. "Mulder?" I said expectantly.

Mulder shook his head as if coming awake. His awakening, I thought, his rebirth, his return. They were all the same thing. For no other reason than to remind myself that Fox Mulder had not always been this driven, this haunted, I tried to picture him as I had seen him first: from a distance, of course, as he was breaking a Quantico obstacle course record to the whoops and hollers of his Academy classmates. It had been a blistering July day, and Mulder had looked tan and muscular -- a rookie with a hell of a promising future at the FBI, his instructor had confided in me as I glanced up to see what all the cheering was about.

But that man was gone, and the pale, troubled specter in front of me was what was left. His awakening, his rebirth, his return. I had told Mulder that Agent Scully had made her choices. Since his disappearance, I had come to think of Mulder as a man who'd had no choice-no choice but to hunt eternally for his missing sister, no choice but to stand against the sinister conspiracies that seemed to plague him, no choice but to drive himself endlessly in pursuit of the truth. But Mulder, I realized, had also made choices that led him to this moment, this choice of all choices: his life, or his work? His son, or his career's desire?

Mulder stared at Kersh for a long moment. Whether he was having any of the same thoughts, I had no idea. But he straightened up and looked Kersh in the eyes with the same steely resolve that had been so familiar to me in my time supervising the X-Files. Mulder, I believed, had made his choice.

"I am walking away," he said steadily. "I suggest you remember that. Because if there is any indication -- one suspicious phone call, one unmarked van parked outside -- that you or anyone you work for has forgotten, I will devote every fiber of my being to taking you down."

And without waiting for a response, he turned and strode out of Kersh's office, leaving Kersh and me to eye each other like two pit bulls circling for the kill.

"You heard him," I said to Kersh in a low voice. "He means it. So whoever you're shilling for, I suggest you start drawing up some contingency plans."

"You'd let him walk away?" Kersh responded pointedly. "Knowing what you know?"

"All I know," I replied deliberately as I turned and left the office, "is that Fox Mulder is his own man."

I found Mulder by the elevator, looking possibly more like himself than I had seen him since Oregon. "Kersh was less than welcoming," he observed. "I didn't even get a welcome-back fruit basket."

"Mulder," I said carefully. "When you worked on the X-Files you believed that these men were trying to take away from you what you valued most."

"My work," he agreed. "And Scully."

"They've done that," I said. "But they didn't count on Liam. Kersh is right, Mulder, he's of no...interest to them. His tests, his aptitude, all indicate that he's..."

"Normal?" Mulder interrupted. "Where are you going with this?"

"I think," I said, "that you and these men are at a stalemate. Stay away from them and they will stay away from you. The question is, can you do that?"

"Sir," he said, tipping his head back so that his eyes tilted away from the light, "nothing would make me happier."

Fox Mulder, happy. Now there was an image I would have to see to believe. But Mulder passed a tired hand once more over his eyes and then looked at me, closely, his eyes so clear I thought he had forgotten to draw the veil over them for once.

"I may never know what was out there," he said quietly. "Whether I was being paranoid, seeing what I wanted to see, chasing evidence of the paranormal wherever I could find it. I may never know what I believe. But it's gone on long enough. I need to stop now. I need to stop."

He smiled resignedly -- still so damaged, I thought, but somehow less troubled. I looked down at his hands and noticed with a start that the tremor in them was gone. And just like that, I thought, as long as I lived I would remember Mulder in the hallway of the FBI, tired and gaunt but otherwise awakened. Reborn. Returned.

FIVE YEARS LATER

It had been twenty-six degrees and snowing when I left D.C., and the Arizona sunshine was shockingly warm on my shoulders. It seemed incongruous, I mused idly as I squinted inside, that Fox Mulder could survive in a place so...bright.

Maybe, I reflected, that was the point.

"...also reflects the desires of our unconscious minds?" a voice was asking as I attempted to slip unobtrusively into the large lecture hall.

"Some might call that a radical interpretation of the text." The room fell silent. My eyes went immediately to the front of the room, where the lecturer was lounging by a large whiteboard, his hands loose and relaxed as his students waited expectantly.

"Which is exactly why I'm pleased to hear you bringing it up." I glanced at the girl who'd asked the question. Her face had broken into a relieved smile.

I couldn't help my own small smile. Mulder's voice. For the first time I was hearing it with no edge in it, no hardness sharpened from years of experience. It had taken five years and a move clear across the country, but Fox Mulder had finally shed some of his oldest demons. In Arizona, it seemed, he had forged a new path, and it looked for all the world as though it agreed with him. His skin was tanned, no doubt from spending actual time outside in the Arizona sun, and he had fortunately put back on the weight he had lost in Oregon. He looked strong and fit, I thought -- healthy. No longer just returned, but reborn nevertheless.

I might have expected that I would stand out in a room full of men and women in their twenties. Hell, Mulder's keen ears had probably picked up the sound of my dress shoes tapping down the hall. In any case, I watched as his face lifted up to the top tiers of the auditorium, his eyes searching the rows of students with their laptops and notebooks until they landed on me. His nod in my direction was almost imperceptible, but I felt a small buzz run through me all the same. Mulder, awakened.

"All right, that's it for the day," Mulder announced easily. "We'll pick this up next week. And Shirley?" he called over the din of notebooks being hastily shoved into backpacks and pens being capped. "Don't let go of those extremist views on Greenblatt," he said with a wry smile.

I waited until most of the sea of students swarmed past me before making my way down the stairs to the front of the room.

"Dr. Mulder?" a student was saying. "I was just wondering if you're going to give us any advance notice before our next quiz, or..."

Mulder smiled. "If we fail to anticipate the unexpected," he said breezily, "may we not also fail to confront our anxiety of it? That is, isn't it a natural facet of human nature to attempt to foresee every possibility, no matter how remote, and plan for it accordingly?"

In response, Mulder's student merely stared at him; he had clearly heard this speech from his professor many times before. "Uh...yeah," he said, sounding disappointed. "Thanks, Dr. Mulder. See you next week."

Mulder dismissed him with a nod and then turned to face me; I was relieved to see that the warmth in his eyes hadn't disappeared upon sight of me. "Sir," he said, reaching out to shake my hand. His grip was firm, self-assured. "This is unexpected."

Sir. And he hadn't worked for the Bureau in almost seven years. "It's been a long time, Mulder," I replied. "But I think you've earned the right to call me Walter."

Mulder shook his head, but he was still smiling. "Old habits," he said mildly. "It'd be like calling Frohike 'Your Highness.'"

"You look good," I said. He looked down at himself and then around at the empty lecture hall, suddenly uncomfortable. "Why don't you follow me back to my office?" he said.

The hallway was typical of any major university: fluorescent lighting overhead, crowded bulletin boards on the walls, students clustered in groups who occasionally nodded in Mulder's direction with a greeting of "Hi, Dr. Mulder." It was, I noted, utterly unremarkable. "Did you ever think," I said aloud as we threaded through the building's maze of narrow hallways, "that you'd succumb to normality?"

Mulder's response, I was reassured to hear, was a short bark of laughter. "You mean, did I ever think I'd one day spend my evenings grading papers and reading Harry Potter out loud for the twentieth time?" he called over his shoulder. "I think back then I would have eaten my gun."

"And now?" I asked pointedly as Mulder pulled out the keys to his office. "And now I'm just grateful J.K. Rowling stopped after seven," he said ruefully. "Poor kid won't even look at another book until he's done with Harry. He thinks Hogwarts might implode if he leaves it alone too long."

I was too busy studying the walls of Mulder's office to respond. They looked very much as they had in the basement of the Hoover building, plastered with reports of paranormal phenomena and cluttered with newspaper clippings. I recognized a few as being from respectable publications -- "The Use of Hypnosis as an Investigative Tool in Regaining Subconscious Memories," by Fox Mulder, Ph.D., from Psychology Today caught my eye -- but many of them seemed like garden-variety X-Files, the kind Mulder had so enjoyed coaxing his partner to investigate. "CORONER SAYS HEIRESS DEATH 'UNEXPLAINED'," read one in bold letters. "THEY'RE HERE!" screamed another.

Mulder caught my survey and his eyes narrowed. "It's a hobby," he said shortly. "Nothing more." His face softened, the tenseness replaced by a calm expression I was unaccustomed to seeing on the face of Fox Mulder. "Anyway, Liam thinks it's a riot."

"He's a skeptic?" I asked carefully, knowing full well what memories the word dredged up for Mulder. His mouth quirked.

"You have no idea. You should hear him disprove Einstein." He paused and let a small sigh escape. "He takes after his mother."

His mother. Scully. I waited for Mulder's inevitable flash of anger, but it never came. His face was as impassive and as difficult to read as it had ever been.

"How much does he know?" I asked quietly, taking a seat in a chair opposite a miniature statue on Mulder's desk that looked like a cross between Gumby and a Reticulan.

"About Scully," he responded evenly, "or about the international global conspiracy that plagued my life until he was two?" Our eyes met, but in Mulder's, to my surprise, I saw no trace of bitterness.

"About either," I said, trying to regain my equilibrium. If the first Mulder I knew had been passionate and driven, and the second enraged and haunted, this new Mulder seemed unusually composed and at peace, the arid and open space of the Arizona desert agreeing with him more than the crowds and smog of D.C. For four years now I had been trying to picture Mulder as psychology and criminology professor, Mulder as Little League coach, Mulder as average neighborhood dad. The image had seemed laughable, but the man in front of me was no joke.

He sighed again. "He's full of questions about Scully -- I'm afraid I've given him the impression that she was practically super-human. Leapt tall ice floes wearing big high heels, that sort of thing. He knows I used to work for the FBI-we've got Fed-Ex coming and going all day with those packages of yours stamped with the return address of the Hoover Building. Naturally he doesn't want to tell his friends that Dad's a college professor, it's too boring, so the word slipped out to the seven-year-old set and now I've got entire Cub Scout troops pestering my son to bring in my badge for show-and-tell."

He must have decided to wait until Liam was much, much older before telling him about marching into Kersh's office and throwing his badge on the desk, then. Still-show-and-tell. I must have been fighting to hold back a smile, because Mulder glared at me warningly. "I know it's hard to believe, sir, but these are the kinds of problems I face nowadays."

"Not at all, Mulder," I said innocently, and I meant it. For all his grousing, Mulder seemed -- dare I think it? -- happier than I had ever seen him, and he deserved every ounce of it.

"So what brings you to Arizona, sir?" he inquired as he leaned back in his chair and absently began cracking open a sunflower seed.

"I came to congratulate you," I said, "and thank you for your assistance with the Glendower case. Your profile was right on the money, Mulder. Local PD nabbed the guy clean."

Mulder nodded, but somehow I doubted that he was genuinely interested. He had done so many long-distance consultations for the VCU that I thought it was likely he kept the Postal Service in business mailing profiles back and forth across the country. As far as I knew, agents at the Bureau still referred to him as "Spooky" Mulder, but it was a nickname they had come to use with admiration for his skills as a profiler. How ironic, I thought, that he had had to leave the FBI to earn its unmitigated respect.

"And you came all the way across the country to tell me in person?" He raised his eyebrows. Still as sharp as ever, Mulder, I thought.

"And I wanted to see you," I acknowledged. "See for myself how you were doing." Mulder smiled wanly.

"You could have called," he noted.

"I wasn't sure you'd want to see me," I said honestly. "Consulting for the FBI isn't the same as working there, Mulder. I know it's a time in your life you -- and your son -- might prefer to forget."

"I can't forget it," he said quietly. I followed his gaze to three small, framed photos on his desk: his sister, her hair pulled back from her face in two braids. Scully, holding a baby Liam and smiling radiantly. And...

"This must be Liam," I said, reaching for the third photo before I could help myself. There was a smattering of freckles across his face now. His red hair had darkened somewhat to a burnished wood color, and he was laughing as he swung at a baseball out of camera range.

Mulder nodded. "He's with Mrs. Scully in San Diego for the weekend. Kid logs more travel hours than I did with the FBI."

I must have looked mildly alarmed, because Mulder went on: "He was relentless. After we first moved, I had half the neighborhood kids at our house every afternoon because I wouldn't let him out of my sight. Then he wanted to do Cub Scouts, Little League, sleepovers with his friends and what was I supposed to tell him? 'Sorry, son, I'm still afraid you might get abducted by aliens working in conjunction with a secret government conspiracy.'" He rubbed his temples wearily. "I used to have him tailed. Frohike and the boys set me up with a private investigator out here who used to bring me these sinister black-and-white surveillance photos of Liam on the swings at the park or, I don't know, napping at kindergarten. Then one day some teacher at recess spotted a strange man lurking in the bushes and called the police. I had to lie to the principal about a custody battle just to ensure extra protection." He tilted his head against the back of his chair. "They've never tried anything. Not a phone call, not an unmarked van, just like I warned them. But I'm afraid the moment I let my guard down..."

He trailed off and I nodded, knowing exactly what he was afraid of, that he had every reason to be. They hadn't tried anything at the Bureau, either, though three weeks after Mulder's now-infamous altercation with Kersh, the assistant director had quietly resigned and-so the rumors said-moved to Bermuda. But I had long had a sinking feeling that they were only biding their time. Obviously Mulder had felt the same way.

"How's he doing in school?" I prompted, hoping to divert both our attentions to a less ominous subject.

Mulder grimaced. "He keeps trying to set me up with his teacher." Off my look, he continued, "...who is at least 65, and very happily married."

"Ah," I said. If there was one thing about Mulder's life in Arizona that I didn't find the least surprising, it was that he was still single. I could imagine the thoughts of the other parents at PTA meetings at Liam's school: Mulder was attractive, intelligent, an attentive father and obviously quite a catch. But it was evident to me that Dana Scully would remain, even in death, the only woman in Mulder's life.

"He's...precocious," Mulder went on, "but not unusual." His eyes added the unspoken Thank God. "He wants to be an astronaut when he grows up. If I have to see Space Camp one more time I may disconnect our television."

I winced -- I had been the one who had included the movie in my last shipment of case materials -- but Mulder grinned.

"I didn't even know they made VHS anymore, sir," he said. "I had to go out and buy a VCR just so he'd stop bugging me to see it. He's in his government servants as heroes phase; he thinks anything that comes from you must be cool because you work for the FBI." He paused. "I'm sorry he's not here so you can see him. Next time you're in town, call ahead, we'll have you over for dinner."

I fought the urge to chuckle. Fox Mulder, longtime bane of my existence, inviting me over for dinner like he was a neighborhood welcoming committee in the '50s and I'd just moved to town: Spookyville, population one.

"Well, Mulder," I said after a long pause, moving to stand from my seat, "I won't keep you. I'm sure we'll be in touch."

"Sir," he said, something in his voice stopping me. I met his eyes and was almost stunned to see something of that old, forgotten Mulder burning there, that flame that hinted of justice and passion and truth. He hadn't even asked about the X-Files, I realized with a start. After all these years.

"Thank you," he said, his voice nearly a whisper. "For everything. After Oregon...you didn't have to pick up the pieces for me. But you did."

I looked around his office: the files, the clippings, the three photographs. Samantha. Liam. Scully. "I'm not the one who rebuilt your life," I said honestly. "You take care of your son, Mulder. When he grows up he's going to learn that it's not only FBI agents who can be his heroes."

Mulder nodded shortly, as if he didn't trust himself to speak. I thought of him as he had been in the hospital in Oregon those years ago: crumbling, destroyed, crushed under the weight of Scully's memory and his missing years. The man in front of me held himself as though he knew he had been restored, piece by piece, in a painstaking process that was by no means over. He hadn't been reborn, I realized. He had been reconstructed. He had made the choices that had led him here, and he seemed determined to live with them. Mulder had once worried that he would become his father, and he had worked hard to avoid that particular nightmare. But Liam...

Liam, I thought as I started down the long hallway to the blinding Arizona daylight, would be privileged to turn out like his.

END

End Notes: This story began, believe it or not, very soon after "Requiem" actually aired...almost five long, long, LONG years ago. I have no idea what made me want to revisit it -- and I have NO idea what made me want to write a post-"Requiem" story in the first place -- from Skinner's point of view -- with NO SCULLY IN IT -- honestly! To be perfectly honest, if I read a summary of my own story, I wouldn't want to read it. But then, fanfic always did work in mysterious ways. I suppose it's fitting that this story was finally completed on the day I read that The X-Files was coming back to the big screen for another movie. XF nostalgia for everyone! Fanfic resurgence all around!

I do know that the Skinner aspect came from the "Biogenesis"/"Sixth Extinction"/"Amor Fati" arc -- as I watched those darn late-night TNT reruns, I appreciated the way Skinner always called our favorite FBI agent "Agent Mulder" and treated him with great respect even though he had presumably lost his mind, and I wanted to explore that further. Why I felt like I needed to get rid of Scully to do that, I'll never know. Also, I have read an abundance of fanfic in which Margaret Scully dotes on Mulder like he's her own child, and while I recognize that viewpoint is out there, my own Mrs. Scully -- as you can see from this story -- is just slightly more reserved.

I readily admit that I did no research at all into "Requiem" before writing this fic, which is probably why I've left out all sorts of major plot points that are better left untouched anyway because 1) I'm sure I didn't understand them then and wouldn't understand them now -- go back to 1992, Billy Miles, 2) who knows what evil lurks in the heart of Chris Carter? X-Files fans know, and that is why we must choose to selectively ignore all the crap we don't like and 3) it's my alternate universe, I can do what I want with it.

In the interests of full disclosure, I must confess that I rather cheesily took the title of this fic from Simon & Garfunkel:

"In the clearing stands a boxer and a fighter by his trade And he carries a reminder Of every glove that laid him low and cut him till he cried out In his anger and his shame: 'I am leaving, I am leaving' But the fighter still remains."

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