Title: Jeffrey and Samantha
Author: Megan Reilly
Written: February 2000
Spoilers: Closure
Disclaimer: If I was really doing something bad in stealing these characters, they would have turned to starlight before I could. Although I hate to think what that might have done to my word processor.

Summary: Spender remembers his sister.

This is my first fanfic in almost six months. Which means you can be my first feedback in almost that long. :) Tell me what you think.

I went to school today. I wanted to like it. It's normal. It's what normal kids do, and I want to be a normal kid. Don't I? But the way the other kids looked at me...like they knew about me.

I wish I could ask them if any of this is normal, but I can't, because I know their eyes would go wide for a moment, with horror, and then their tangible disgust would turn to laughter, as all children's do. It's unfair for me to think of them as children. They're the same age as I am. But somehow they are, even with their shiny new lip gloss and layered hair. As though anything you can put on will make you an adult inside.

I think he knows. My brother. His eyes slide away when I try to meet them. It hurts most of all. He used to be mine, my baby, my doll, my best friend. We used to play together. I used to try to beat him up and he used to call me names. When he started being able to beat me at games, I would tip the board and send the little plastic pieces flying. And I would laugh.

No one laughs in our house any more.

I wake with a start, breathing hard, feeling the pain in my chest again. It isn't real, and I know it, but there's nothing in the darkness that can convince me I'm not going to die here, alone in this motel with holes worn in the carpet.

The wound has healed - even the worst of them do, eventually, given enough patience, but the nightmare doesn't stop. The nights where I wake up tasting my own blood, convinced that I am dying again, will probably continue to occur. Despite the work it took just to survive, it makes me wish the rest of my days will be mercifully short.

Cars roar on the freeway just beyond my window. The vinyl backed curtains are jammed in their track, half open and half closed. The smog has rolled back in, obscuring the mountains and the skyline and anything except the filth of the city.

Do more people kill themselves in Los Angeles than anywhere else on earth? Or maybe it just seems that way because it is a city filled with the walking dead.

The night manager eyes me cautiously as I slip from my catacomb, fearful I'll have a gun that can penetrate the bulletproof glass of his office. Worried I'll skip out on my rapidly accruing bill. I don't look in his direction.

The city is different at night. It sleeps. Cars roam the streets like predators always, but they seem deserted without the daylight gridlock. Businesses are closed, even grocery stores, even diners that would be open twenty four hours in a city less enamored of violence, or less perceived as violent. Statistics say crime has dropped in Los Angeles every year; at this rate, the sensationalist newscasters will soon be covering county fairs and elementary school sack races, but no one would believe it.

I drive up Hollywood, the street of dreams, where people sleep on pink marble stars celebrities work their entire careers to earn. I'm looking for her. I won't see her, because even though she's frozen at fourteen forever in my memory, days and years keep passing, and nothing can stop them.

I should do something else. I should be propelled forward by the near loss of my life, by the blood I can still taste in my mouth. I should not have let it zap me twenty years backward into the past. But it has. I have to find her. I don't know why. But I have to.

It's my fault she's gone.

I didn't do what I was supposed to. I was mean to her. I was never mean to her, before. I pretended to be, but her smile gave her away.

The smile has faded now. It's gone. And I'd do anything to see it again. See her again. But she's gone.

Just like my mom's gone too, now. Leaving me alone with him. Will he make me sick, like he made her sick? I won't be able to smile through the pain, to be the bright flower in the children's ward. I wouldn't refuse visitors like she did.

But no one would visit me, because there is no one left. He gives me that look, the one that says "be strong" and I know I'll never be strong enough. I should still be a little kid. But no one in this family hangs onto happiness for very long.

There have to be records.

The thought is stronger than the January sun. Natives are bundled in heavy winter coats, warily eying the sky. They don't trust it now, since it betrayed them with rain the day before. Despite their silliness, it's almost eighty here at the beach and I am the only one here, begging the sun to brown the stark white scar, tempting fate and melanoma just to feel some warmth and solitude and the eternity of the sun and the tide.

She was in the hospital more days than she was out, towards the end. The end being the day she ran away. How could a girl so sick run away? It's not so shocking she could disappear without a trace - this was before the kidnapping of Adam Walsh, before the features of every kid lost or stolen or merely misplaced were plastered across milk cartons and post offices and freeway billboards, like LA violence, another myth inflated. I used to work these cases, for the bureau. I know what really happens. A child wanders away and is reported missing, and the statement isn't retracted even when the child is found two hours later with a babysitter. Or if she ran away with an older man, 'married' at fifteen. They don't get their lives back, but they're not lost, either.

There was no older man in my sister's case. None except my father. Possibilities swirl through my mind and I close my eyes and lay back, giving in to them. Munchausen by Proxy had to have been virtually unknown then. If he was poisoning her...

The facts remain the same. He drove her away, whether he was responsible for her illness or not. And based on what I know now, about my mother, about all of the other things he's done, that he was willing to shoot his own son for attempting to do the right thing...

There was no trace because she didn't want to be found. But that's what I do. I find people. Like the detectives we used to watch on TV, who cruised with their big wigs and tight shirts and long sports cars. Every thought leads back to her. She is haunting me now, where for years I had been able to forget.

She is begging me to find her.

I open my eyes and the world has been bleached blue by the sun. I sit up and button my shirt, compelled into action. The merry go round on the pier has begun its spinning for the day and the mechanical melody drives me. There have to be clues. Records.

I was eight...ten...when we lived in Sacramento. Dad was gone, but not gone for good, like he was later. We lived on the army base. He wasn't an army officer, really, so we shouldn't have lived there. But he said he wanted to make sure we were safe. Safe from what, we never asked. Maybe because the memories of the cold war were still vivid. Once, in school, we had to climb under our tiny metal school desks, as though that would protect us from radiation. Although maybe it was an earthquake drill and I don't remember right. Standing here now, the day I remember happened during the summer. Days usually filled with boredom and daytime television shows, half-hour sitcoms from the 60s to educate us about Monkees and F-Troop and the hills of Beverly. My mother used to lock us out in the afternoons, holding her head gingerly and telling us to be quiet. Days when she changed out of her pink quilted bathrobe were rare. The other kids on the base didn't usually play with us, and we were picked last to play baseball when they let us play at all, because our mother was weird, not like the other mothers with their neat hair and matching pantsuits. Sometimes they offered to let my sister play, because she got along with everyone, and because she could hit the ball. I couldn't, and when they said I was too small and scrawny to play, she would give them her meanest, darkest look and hurry me away, protective like our mother should have been.

I don't know where the other kids were that day. Maybe they were playing baseball under the power lines on the other side of the fence. I remember the smell of hot cement and watching the workman sweat as he finished the sidewalk in front of our house. He didn't mind that we hung back and watched him.

The doors were locked to us, but she'd left her window open. She always did, just in case something happened, in case we forgot something important or if mom didn't unlock the door when the sun went down. With promise in her smile, she slipped through the opening and appeared eons later with the scarred green plastic water pitcher from sears.

"It's Kool-Aid," she said, offering it to the workman almost apologetically. She was getting old enough to realize adults didn't like to drink pure sugar on a hot day, bright red liquid that stained their teeth. But the workman took it from her with a grateful, grownup smile, and drained it. Looking back in memory, his grin implied he was trying to impress her, even though he was an adult and she was young enough to ask to write in the pavement.

He looked the other way, drinking a gallon of Kool-Aid, as she carefully pressed her palm into the cement. She didn't say anything to me, just grinned as she drew the letters of her name with her finger. Then she turned her eyes to me. My turn. But I was nervous. I couldn't. Everyone would see it. Dad would see it when he got home and I would be the one who got into trouble.

She grabbed my hand as I screamed like a child much younger than myself. The cement was cold and squishy, like the cold wet sand beyond the water line at the beach. She wrote my name and smiled at me. I had to smile back.

After that, we left. There was a big shade tree on the other side of the base, where we were expressly forbidden to go. We went there, hiding in the cool semi-darkness, feeling the cement crust on our skin, never wanting to go back.

She tried to tell me that day. "I'll never leave you," she promised, her eyes sadder than I'd ever seen them. She tried to put her arms around me, but I was old enough to squirm out of her impulsive hug. I didn't understand why she was doing this, but I was scared.

She never tried to tell me why. And she never offered to take me with her.

We never got the green pitcher back, and that night when our mother discovered it missing she screamed for what seemed like hours. Her fury wasn't really over the plastic she'd gotten free in exchange for a credit application. She was angry at our father, at the man who drove her beyond the things she knew about herself and then left for months at a time, ill equipped to deal with a pair of growing kids. Unwilling to try.

That was the only time my sister ever talked back to our mother. Her glare turned into words, angry words I didn't understand, but I hadn't been excused from the table, so I sat frozen there, listening as I wished I could run to my room and hide from them, from these crazy women I didn't recognize any more.

"Wait until your father gets home!" my mother screamed. She slapped my sister, hard across the face. It was the first time she, and not my father, had done the hitting. It was the last time she touched my sister, and every in every smack I took in the years that followed, I felt she was trying to reach my sister, trying to punish her still for daring to rebel.

She went to her room and slammed the door, the way teenage girls on television did so often. Such things didn't happen in our house. Only on that crazy night. After we finished our dinner with lukewarm pudding, chocolate, with a thin hard skin on the top from sitting on the counter too long, I scratched at her door, not wanting our mother to hear me. She wouldn't let me in, even when I whined, even when I cried.

I was still sitting there on my knees, pleading through the crack under the door, when my father got home. I didn't know he was expected - his homecomings were rarely announced, but the smoke from his cigarettes was different from the familiar smell of mom's, insidious, immediately flooding through the tiny house. He shoved me aside the way he might kick A dog out of his way and pushed the door open. Her bed was made, with the dolls she never really played with piled neatly on top of the bedspread. The window was closed. And she was gone.

It's vivid now, standing on that street, looking at concrete proof we were here, that we existed in that past that seems so faraway and forgotten. I get down on my knees and press my hand now against the outline of the little-boy handprint and I see her fingers snaked around my wrist, forcing me to do her will. I can feel the August humidity dampening my striped shirt, even if the snow of winter has barely melted.

I press my eye up to the smudgy window. The house is empty. Like most California bases, it's been closed and deserted for some time. I glance behind me at the deserted street and push open the window at the back of the house. It still opens silently, although the opening is tighter around my adult body than it was all those years ago.

There's graffiti inside and I stare at it, wondering how it got there. Did the nation's soldiers paint it there, defacing the property of the country they swore to protect? The thought is frightening, but as I turn my head I catch the scent of my father's cigarette smoke and a chill runs through me. I glance around, convincing myself he's not there.

The rooms seem haunted, not just by my ghosts, but those who haunt everyone who ever lived there, ever passed through, ever crashed for the night on the couch because there was nowhere else to go. All the graffiti is in her room. For a second I think bad spirits must dwell there, that evil draws evil. But it's probably only because the window never latched right.

The bookcase was in my room and it's still there, barely clinging to the wall, the paint chipped away and gone. A few remaining flakes crumble under my fingertips and I'm tempted to touch them to my tongue, to taste lead. One snow day we traced the outlines of the books and toys stacked there with our pencils. Late one birthday night we had a treasure hunt.

I find the treasure now. As I stand there with my hand against the shelf that used to hold Seuss and Sendak, something crashes to the floor and smacks me on the foot. It's a book. I look at the bookshelf, wondering how it's remained there all this time. I know what it is. I bought it for her.

Her diary.

My hands tremble holding it and I stagger backward, landing hard on my butt in the dust.

He's not my father.

I remember now, and can't understand why I didn't remember before. Why I never suspected before. I thought there were no photos and no keepsakes because mom is the way she is. But it's the opposite - she is that way because there can be no albums, because her entire family is a lie.

It explains so much. Answers my question: how could he treat his own daughter this way. I'm not his. I've never been his. Does that mean that somewhere out there, someone's looking for me? Did I have other parents, who loved me? Why can't I remember?

The thoughts aren't right in my head and I can't make them right and it scares me. I catch glimpses of the shadows everywhere I turn. They're following me, and I don't want to be afraid of them. Sometimes I think if I could remember, then I'd be okay. If I could have proof...real proof...then I wouldn't feel this way. Is this how mom feels when she's "jangled"? When she can't be bothered to pull herself out of bed? When she looks at us that way, like she'd just as soon put rat poison in our sodas as not?

He did this to her, and I feel bad. But she didn't save herself. I can. And I will.

This hospital is familiar, even all these years later, with its additions and modernizations. The nurses are different, have different clothes, but somehow they're the same. It takes several minutes before I realize everything looks different because I'm bigger now, seeing it from an adult's height for the first time.

I don't like hospitals, but the smell reminds me of my sister. And my mother. Makes me miss them so much that big empty space in me aches.

The nurse is looking at me, and I decide which lie to tell her. I should have telephoned first, but I didn't. Impulse made me come straight over; fear made me hesitate in which story to tell. In keeping with my new life, I choose the truth. "My sister was a patient here," I tell her.

She gives me the look of a sullen teenager - dead eyes that say "So?"

"Now there's some suspicion against my father. I was just a child. I didn't know what was going on. I'd like to know now."

"you want to see her medical records," the nurse tells me. Didn't I say that?

"Yes."

She waits. It's against the rules. She has no proof I am who I say I am, that I have a sister, that any of this is true. But she leans her hip against the counter and looks at me. "What kind of suspicion?" the hard look of surviving in her eyes makes me look away. It's all the answer she needs. Moments later, she's pushing a card toward me with numbers written on it. When I hear her telling me what the numbers are, I get the impression it's not for the first time, that like a needle on a scratched record I skipped over the first explanation and went straight to the second. The card is for their records retention service. The long number is my sister's patient records number. the short number is the authorization access code.

She smiles at me, and I mumble thanks before I have to turn away. The elevator leaves me standing there, unhappily, nervous, so I turn and run down the stairs, fleeing to the safety of my car.

Iron Mountain doesn't look like either of those things at first. It's a cement walled building, just like all the others in the industrial park surrounding it, with its logo on a sign hanging above street level on its side.

The office looks like a rental car office, or a motel check-in desk. The fluorescent lights bounce up from shiny tile. The man behind the counter has beefy forearms not hidden by the logoed polo shirt he wears. I slide the paper toward him. "Medical records," he says with a smile that belongs in the city I left, white teeth splitting an eeriely tanned face. He picked up the phone and types into his computer, and several minutes later, leads me through the "employees only" door into the back.

It's a Warehouse, and while it doesn't look like an iron mountain, it's definitely a cavern. There's no heat and cold radiates up from the cement floor, burning through my shoes. In the summer it must be sweltering. Row of boxes are stacked onto shelves, what seems to be a mile high. I want to look for the ark of the covenant from Indiana Jones, or even Citizen Kane's sled Rosebud, but all of the boxes are white, neatly labeled and barcoded.

We stop in the middle of an aisle, where boxes have been lowered to the floor and block our path. "You're lucky," the guy says. I eye him, not understanding, and he taps an area on the box's label. "Only have to keep medical records ten years. These were scheduled for destruction two months ago."

My heart races. They're still here. I look at him, feeling the sweat forming on the palms of my hands.

"Once you're done with them, they'll go to the shredder," he says, and I feel like his solid gaze is telling me something. He's telling me to take anything I want, anything I might need again. Because tomorrow it will all be gone. He turns and walks away, his muscular bulk interfering with a graceful stride. Amoment later I'm alone with the boxes. They seem frightening. Threatening. I don't want to know.

But if I don't open the boxes, if I don't even look, if I give in to the panic tearing at my heart, it will become noodles of paper before I make it back to LA to resume my empty life of hiding. I've had some experience with shredders. It seems almost ironic.

The box lid trembles in my hands as I slide it off. It clatters to the floor and I leave it, sitting on the floor and running my fingers across the tops of the files. Dust erupts upward, tickling my nose. Amoment later my eyes flood with tears, and it's not from allergies.

My sister's file. I lift it out. So many pages for such a little girl. It seems strange to think of my big sister as a little girl, but she is now that I've grown up.

I flip it open, looking for something, anything. I've read medical records before and tell myself now that I'm just investigating a case. The most recent page is on the top. "7/30/79 - becoming increasingly agitated and paranoid. Believes everyone is out to get her, &c. Recommend observation. Possible onset of schizophrenia, although there is no family history."

All that time...she was hospitalized for mental illness, and I didn't know. She wasn't sick. No family history...apparently he'd never met mom.

The metal clip on the inside of the folder cuts my fingers as I struggle to unfold it to release the papers. I stare at the bright red blood and instantly remind myself I had a tetanus shot just a year ago. I'm not going to come down with lockjaw. I shift position on the cold floor, getting comfortable, picking pages off the stack in front of me.

Test results. Blood workup, irregularities noted. Something very strange, off the scale, in her blood. The doctors didn't know what to make of it. They probably wouldn't know what to make of it now, except for a very few doctors associated with my father. Goosebumps crawl like army ants across my skin - not just my arms, but my stomach and my back, every inch of flesh alive and repulsed by what this insinuates. My mother was not the first. And if my father would use the woman he supposedly loved in such a way, why not his daughter?

Why not his son? I whisper, my lips moving to form the words, asking myself, but I know the answer. I'm not good enough. I never have been good enough.

Releasing the pain of childhood slights instantly, as I've trained myself to do in order to simply be able to function, I tell myself there's a more practical reason. I've heard of men being "abducted by aliens." I don't believe them, even after all I've seen, but it happens. But not one case in Mulder's cabinet, not one patient I heard about working for those ghoulish old men, involved a man. The women who were monitored with implants, who were tested and experimented on, they were all female. Maybe there's something in the makeup of the female body that makes it more open to the changeover. Or maybe women are more useful to the project for other inherently obvious reasons.

There was more, of course. Enough to give me nightmares for the rest of my life. I had some inkling of the things they did. But I held in my hands what seemed to be an alphabetized list of every medical procedure ever invented, and several more that were just in the testing phase.

I wanted to put it back in that box and have it shredded, as though sending the reports into oblivion could wipe out the truth or horror of their statements. As though erasing a chalkboard could make it cease to exist, to never have existed. I wanted to invent a time machine and rescue everyone ever hurt by their plans.

Instead, I neatly shuffled the papers back into a stack, lining them up at the edges so the two hole punches at the top showed light through the other side. The metal prong sliced at me again, drawing new blood from the cut that had already sealed itself. How long had I been sitting there? The file, now neat, sat by my side, ready to leave with me. I didn't know what I would do with it, but I had to keep it.

I moved to put the lid back on the box, to escape from this place, but the tag at the top of one of the files set askew by removing my sister's file caught my eye. I saw my name and my stomach turned to leaden ice. All this time, maybe I'd been asking the wrong question. Maybe my sister had begged to be found not for her sake, but for mine. The prospect of learning secrets about the person I knew most intimately -myself - terrified me, but that only drove me to open the file, scrabbling frantically through the pages. There at the bottom of the stack, the first document, was my birth certificate.

Checkups. What seemed to be hundreds of them in my first few years of life, never any reason explained as to why, always the same doctors. What were they looking for? The files were only half complete, sanitized for the general consumption of the hospital staff. I thought I'd found so much but I'd only found half the story. I would need my father's files to complete the puzzle, and that would probably mean facing the man who'd left me for dead. I didn't want to see him again. I really didn't want to die.

This time I looked in the box, to make certain I had something. At that point, I'm not certain what I expected to find. An unremembered baby brother named "ET" perhaps. All I found was my mother's file. It was slender, and x-ray films poked out on one side, bent from being shoved into the box. A cleanly broken bone. I'd forgotten my father broke my mother's arm.

One other file intrigued me, because it was out of place in the alphabetical box. Jane Doe. Opening it, I realized it was my sister's file, again. From after she'd run away. They found her, unable or unwilling to speak, approximate age fourteen. She'd been living in the woods like a wild thing, driven out near the road by cold and starvation the weekend of her birthday. I'm sure she didn't know the date, she only knew she wouldn't survive much longer. Her stay in the hospital was one week long.

Some of the same doctors examined her. I didn't understand at first how she'd gone unidentified by men who knew her, but the clues were there in the Jane Doe file with everything else. At the time she was found, she weighed only 80 pounds and was completely emaciated. Even after they cleaned her up, her face was scratched and lacerated, her hair had been cut off.

A Polaroid photo slipped, unbound, from between the pages. The color had gone off in twenty years, all faded blue and aged yellow, but it didn't temper the image. She looked like a victim, like the walking dead. It was a picture I never wanted to see again, but I couldn't stop looking at it. Finally I had to close my eyes to close the connection in my brain like electricity holding an unsuspecting body to the circuit they'd accidentally completed.

It wasn't that the doctors hadn't recognized her. They just didn't turn her over to our father. Because they knew.

There were no explanations as to where she went after that week. Family services had become involved, then drifted away when she refused to cooperate. As far as I could tell, there was no reason except will why she couldn't speak to them. Foster care wasn't likely for A girl as old as she was, as damaged as she was. She would have to go into some sort of hospital or institution. But no arrangements were made. At the end of the week, Jane wasn't released. She disappeared.

I knew my sister, and I knew the doctors. My father had controlled them for years. They would be too fearful to keep the truth from him for long. If he hadn't associated the unidentified girl with my sister, he might have thought her desirable to add to his project. No one would miss a girl who lived starving in the woods. He would probably expect her gratitude for having saved her.

But none of those things happened. She disappeared first.

Another dead end. A cold trail. I tossed the lid back onto the box and carried the files out, not bothering to hide my blatant theft from the guy at the counter. I got in my car and headed back to LA.

It's hard being around people. It always was, because I didn't trust them. What had trust ever won me? My father told me I was a sick little girl and that the doctors were helping me, that they would help me overcome the things that caused me pain. Except it was the doctors who inflicted the pain.

It was peaceful in the woods. It reminded me of the afternoons we spent hiding beneath the boughs of the old, big tree at the edge of the base. No one knew to look for us there, so all of our time was our own. It felt safe there, and it felt free. Free of all the terrible things in life and that people do to one another. For so long my only goal had been to survive my illness ridden life. In the woods, my only goal was survival. Period.

Winter was colder than I'd expected, and people encroached on the trees. Every day they came a little closer to the nest I'd fashioned for myself. Men in plaid lumberjack shirts and quilted jackets and orange vests, working for the county or some construction company. They came in their truck and made noise all day. The animals fled, and the snow fell. In building whatever haven they were working on, they destroyed mine.

I'd been worried someone would discover me, living so close to home. I knew my father would look for me. I was his prized possession, his object of unhallowed arts to show off to his monstrous cohorts. He wouldn't let that go easily. So when one of the men spotted me and called an ambulance, I fought. Especially when they took me to the same, familiar hospital. I know the doctors recognized me. From the minute the construction worker grabbed me, I began formulating my plan for escape.

There always had to be a plan for escape.

I wasn't going to find her hiding out in LA. So I told myself. It wasn't likely I would bump into her at the laundromat after all this time. I couldn't trust my luck any longer. I had to take action, to make things happen.

Of course, the decision that I wanted something to happen, that I wanted to return to the world of the living, was enough to make something happen. Or maybe I was just able to see for the first time in a year, through the haze of pain and mistrust. On a sunny Tuesday morning in the Ralph's market on Labrea, I got in line behind Alex Krycek.

I couldn't believe it, of course. Running into him was bad enough, but to see him standing there with a little plastic red basket with a quart of milk and a box of Cocoa Crispies and some Crest was absurd. I watched him toss a packet of Reese's peanut butter cups into the basket and then thumb through an issue of a supermarket tabloid foretelling alien invasions.

Knowing I had to say something to him, anything, only made it impossible for me to speak. He went through the line, never looking behind him, tossing the tabloid onto the conveyor with his order and flashing the cashier an impossible smile. He paid in cash and requested plastic bags. He was gathering them in one hand before I realized he was getting away and I couldn't let that happen.

"Alex."

He turned and managed a grin, though his eyes were cold. The checker didn't look up from running my food across the scanner. "How are you?" he asked.

I nodded. "I need some answers."

The checker made an effort not to look at us now. We were in West Hollywood; she probably thought this was going to turn into a bad breakup reunion and turn ugly. "What makes you think I have them?" he asked.

"You're the only one who could." I handed over my debit card. The cashier didn't have the nerve to ask for my Ralph's club card and interrupt us. "I need to know about my sister."

"you know who you sound like," Krycek said with a laugh. I glared at him. He nodded imperceptibly, agreeing to my request. Then he shifted the bags and slipped a matchbook into my hand. A moment later, he was gone.

I gathered my groceries and ran after him, but no cars were stirring in the parking lot. There was no movement anywhere. He might as well have vanished. I looked down at the matchbook in my hand. It wasn't my only hope, but...

who was I kidding? Of course it was.

Someday I want to have children. I'm too young to have them now, of course, but too old to play with the girls at school when they try to figure out who they're going to marry and pick out cute names for their future offspring. I'm not so shortsighted as to make such important decisions when I'm only eleven and a half.

But I know I want to have them someday. I don't care if they're a boy or a girl if they look like me or whoever my future husband will be. I just want them to live in a happy house. Where they don't ever have to ask themselves if anybody loves them. I want to have more than one - child*ren* - just in case they ever have those doubts, anyway. I know my little brother loves me. And I hope he knows that I love him. Sometimes we're all each other have.

That was my essay. I think it was good. I'm not sure why the teacher sighed when she handed it back, or why it didn't have a grade on it, just the scariest words there written in red pen: See me. I see her every day. She can give me an F, I don't care. I said what I wanted to say and I'm not going to say anything else. What's the problem with adults anyway?

This seems like the sort of place Alex Krycek would choose. It's so dark I wonder how the bartender knows what he's serving, or to who. Then I realize that's precisely the point. I sip my drink and sit back, confident he'll find me. A Krycek is a cat. He can see in the dark. He lives there. It's his home, just as mine is in the grey shadowy fog of nonexistence.

Someone sits down across from me and leans forward into the dim light. I recognize him. "What can you offer me?"

I'm stunned. I don't have anything to offer. I'm out of that business, and he knows it. "I need answers," I tell him again.

"I didn't ask what you need," he reminded me. We sit in awkward silence. I can feel the tension in him. He's hiding from someone, too. LA's a good place to get lost, but that makes it a good place to get found. "Mulder's only half a step behind you. You're lucky he didn't dust that book for prints."

I remember, suddenly, stuffing the diary back into its hiding place, wedged through the gap between the backboards of the bookcase, resting against a nail, pressed against the wall. My hands bare and cold in the empty house. I shouldn't have left it there for him to find.

At first I didn't realize that we had her in common. I'd heard about his quest, his sister, but I thought it was coincidence. Kids go missing all the time. And the name didn't mean anything - in the 70s, everyone was named Melissa or Jennifer or Samantha. I didn't realize it until my father came forward with his identity and then I felt incredibly foolish.

I never told him because he never asked.

"He thinks she's starlight," Alex Krycek told me.

"What?" I snorted alcohol through my nose, surprised and trying hard not to laugh.

He shrugged.

"You know," I realized, urgently. "Is there anything you don't know?"

"I can give you his files. But I need something from you first."

I wait for him to tell me what it's going to be. This is exactly the right place to make a deal with the devil. I read that in the old, spanish days of California, a letter addressed to "Los Diablos" would find its way to Los Angeles just as well as one bearing the actual name of the city.

"I need your solemn promise."

Since when has Alex Krycek ever believed in words?

"We're both men of honor here. I need the promise of your help in the coming fight."

He really believes in colonists ready to invade, just hanging out in space until the moment seems right. Despite his holding all the information he does, I find it impossible to believe that. "Of course," I swear, raising my hand like a boyscout and everything.

His eyes bore into mine and I realize the promise I've made is going to be unbreakable. For a second I even feel fear that there is such a thing as flame throwing aliens coming to kill us all.

"Watch 20/20 tonight," Alex Krycek says, sliding toward the edge of the booth, ready to go.

"You're joking." I catch his arm. He looks at my hand touching him like I'm a flea that accidentally landed on him, ready to be smushed. "I need to know everything."

"You can," Alex Krycek promises. A flash of his cocky grin makes me drop my hand. "When you make good on your word," he disappears again, into the night. This time I don't bother to go after him. He's a madman, I think, eying the bar and considering another drink.

But it's almost seven and I have a long drive across town if I want to catch 20/20.

In the future, I believe everything will be good. People will drive cars that fly. And no one has to drive them. And everyone will be happy. There won't be no war. And nobody who gets sick will have to go to the docter's. In the year 2000, I will be 35 years old. I will have children and a husband and a dog and a cat and a bird and maybe a giraffe. In my house. And everything will be nice and nothing will be bad and that's all the end.

This motel room is becoming too comfortable, I realize, as I stretch out on the bed in front of the huge, ancient TV set. There's no remote, but I can reach the dial from the end of the bed and I twist it, searching through the channels. I don't have the faintest clue what channel 20/20 is on. Did he really mean 20/20 or did he mean Dateline? Dateline's on at eight, now. I figure I'll watch it just to be sure.

It's sensationalist crap and I'm ready to go to sleep before 20/20 ever flashes across the picture tube. My eyes slide closed on Barbara Walters and some dire report on environmentalists. She interviews one woman who lived in a tree for two years. I wonder how that's gonna look on her resume. Probably better than living in a seedy motel for a year. Maybe Krycek was giving me career advice.

My eyes close and I don't bother to open them again, letting my face sink into the soft mattress. In a few minutes I will be blissfully asleep. And it feels warm and good.

Then I hear her voice.

**

For several seconds I know that my eyes won't open, not in time, that I'm going to miss her. It's possible I'm dreaming this, that she's haunting me again. But I wrestle my eyelids open and look at the screen.

I see a woman who looks like any other woman. She's tall and slender, dressed in jeans and a lightweight jacket. Her hair is dark and short and her eyes are brown and she has freckles. If I saw her I would never associate her with my sister. I know that my father introduced Mulder to several women claiming to be my sister, and all of them had long curly dark hair, the same hair she had when she was a little girl. I feel scorn for him now because he didn't know it wasn't her.

She's talking, on the television, about the environment. They're standing in the middle of some kind of a forest and she's talking about greenhouse gas and ozone and carbon monoxide, all the things that are usually said on the evening news. I remember my mother, with her one message the aliens gave to her to tell us - not "we're coming to get you" or even "take us to your leader." My mother's particular belief was that the aliens had come to save us from ourselves, and that they need not destroy us because we were destroying ourselves.

Something about the way the woman on the television spoke didn't sound like my mother's hysteria. She sounded, instead, like she had a PhD in something that took over a decade to study. In all, it was no more than a soundbite and seconds later children were singing about eating fast food.

I realized if they'd said her name, I didn't know it. I knocked the telephone onto the floor in my frenzy to get to the yellow pages beneath it. Televisions...no...networks...ABC...I retrieved the phone and dialed, waiting with my heart thudding against my chest. "I need to speak to someone about the 20/20 segment I just saw, "I tell the operator.

"The number for transcripts is -"

"I don't need a transcript, I need -" I pause a moment to tear at my hair for a moment, hoping the pain will infuse sense into my brain. "The woman she interviewed - about the trees - I think she's my sister."

Twenty minutes later, someone else had managed to calm me down. I could tell she was writing promos in her head: "20/20 reunites long lost relatives!" But as she looked through her notes and reviewed the tape that had aired, she told me, "We don't have her name. A lot of these activists prefer to remain anonymous."

I was sure I would die. If not from the pain, then from the disappointment. "Do you have anything?" I heard the tightness in my voice and realized I was going to cry. I also realized the woman I was talking to also had to know it.

"I'm sorry," she said.

I stared at the television. So close, and so very far away. I wanted to find Krycek and hurt him for taunting me. I wanted to insist he tell me everything he knew. I wanted to make him bring her to me.

Instead, I went to the motel lobby where they rented internet time by the minute. I was an investigator and I had plenty of clues. I should have no trouble finding her.

She took us shopping for school clothes today. I didn't really want to go - I still have my clothes from last year. It seems almost wrong to get new school clothes when I'll probably just do home study again this year. I wonder, sometimes, when I look at other kids, what kind of life I'm being prepared for. And then I realize - I'm not. They don't expect me to grow up, to lead any kind of meaningful adult life. And that's scary. It's maybe the scariest thing about all of this. Not just knowing that I'm not really sick. Knowing that I'm not going to survive what they're doing to me.

I don't think I'd be able to stand it if they did it to my brother, too. At least they leave him alone. And I hate him for that. But I'm glad, too.

It's winter in the rest of the country. You forget, living in the unrelenting sunshine. The woman sitting next to me on the most turbulent flight ever in the history of aviation has her heavy coat wrapped around her and buttoned up tight. I had to work to find a long sleeved shirt to wear. I used to have quite a collection of outerwear, but I had to leave it behind to facilitate the appearance of my death. I'm going to freeze my ass of in New York.

The seat belt buckled across my hips struggles to hold me in this battle of physics, of moving bodies striving to stay in motion when I really just want to be at rest. I look out the window and see nothing but white clouds, as though the rest of the world has ceased to exist, like the plane has entered some strange void of time and space. I'm not scared, even though I fully expect the plane's bucking to smooth out to a long, even roll, headlong down into what must be Iowa cornfields below. I cheated death once. I'm not afraid of it any more.

The flight attendant valiantly pushes her cart up the aisle. It's stainless steel, probably five hundred pounds of temptation for the whimsical gods of air current. I have a strong vision of the cart smashing into the overhead bin, bouncing off, and crushing the skulls of the unsuspecting family nervous in the center aisle. I close my eyes tightly and realize she's speaking to me. "Are you all right sir?"

I make an effort to look all right. "Fine."

She's doling out popsicles and offers one to me with an apologetic look on her face. I try to smile but the expression doesn't quite make it. I unwrap it and slip it past my lips. It's just fruit juice, but frozen solid, and it sticks painfully to my lower lip, ripping the skin away when I try to take another bite. I want to throw it away, but there's no access to any trash cans, and by the time the attendant comes back for the refuse in half an hour, I'll have a sticky pink mess all over me. So I eat it.

"Mommy, can we have popsicles? Please?"

She doesn't even bother to answer the pleading children, just gives the wire basket a harder shove down the frozen food aisle, looking for things that are inexpensive, nutritious, effortless to cook. When she was growing up, her mother cooked dinner every night, even when it was 100 degrees in the humid shade. There wasn't air conditioning back then and the oven would make the entire house swelter and water would roll down the walls, squeezed out by the liquid heat. Her kids sit in air conditioning and watch TV all day instead of cleaning up their rooms and playing outside. They complain all the time and sometimes it's all she can do not to crush their noisy little skulls. They hate everything she cooks. It never stops.

"Mommy, I really don't like that stuff."

The girl's the worst. Her whining little "mommy's" are too much to bear, considering she isn't the brat's mom. She wishes she could leave her out for the wolves, sell her to the gypsies, but that's the irony. She's someone else's little girl who's already been stolen by her husband, who is also one of the wolves. One of these days the kid will find out. But there's no reason to hurt a little girl like that.

Besides, it's not like her son's much better. He's a pretty child. Adorable soft curly hair and deep chocolate eyes. But pretty doesn't get you much in this life. She sure as hell learned that the hard way. Her skin begins to itch for a cigarette, and she can't smoke in the grocery store. She's tempted to tell the kids to stay here and flee, never look back.

But as the kids renew their begging for ice cream, she just pushes the cart with a vicious shove and moves on with her shopping.

It's colder than hell in rural New York. There's no cabs at the bus station, and he stands at the edge of the awning, looking worriedly at the sky. It's probably too cold to snow, but he doesn't think he wants to take the chance. He shifts his weight again, looking up and down the deserted road, hoping to see any sign of life. Nothing stirs, buried under the heavy blanket of snow. He shivers under his thin cotton shirt and balls his fists. The skin on his fingers burn and he shoves them into the pockets of his jeans. He can feel every grain of fabric and starts thinking seriously about frostbite. He wiggles his toes in their thick white tube socks, shoved into leather sandals. He doesn't remember when he started dressing for a part. Maybe it's something he's always done. He dressed the part when he worked for the bureau, feeling like a kid dressed up in his father's clothes, but eventually he got used to it. Unconsciously he'd selected the garments of a Berkeley hippie for this trip. Back in the sunshine he'd favored the varying shades of black of the Los Angeles vampire.

A blue VW bus backfired as it lumbered up the road and he stuck out his thumb, bouncing hopefully. Of course the bus stops. It's full of long-haired college girls in heavy sweaters and dopey grins. He can smell pot in the back of the van, but it's cold outside so he gets in. "You're going to the rally," the driver says, turning her head and he sees that she's older than he thought. Lines bite into her eyes.

"Yeah," he says, and settles into the back, not taking his hand off his duffel bag, shivering in the unfamiliar warmth. "Thought I was gonna freeze to death out there."

"I don't usually run the heater in this thing," the driver apologizes. "Fluorocarbons."

He just smiles mildly at her. He has no idea what to say. The wardrobe can make up for a lot of undone research, but not as much as keeping his mouth shut.

The bus lumbers up to a tent city, bright nylon blues and greens starkly modern at the edge of the trees, under a sky darkening gray with no hint of color. The sun can't even be bothered to set in this weather, it just fades until it's gone. He's going to have to make friends, or find a ride back to a city. Or else he's going to freeze to death.

"Why are you wearing a sweater?"

"I'm cold." She flops down on the couch, long thin legs splayed in front of her. She's grown six inches this summer. She crosses her arms over the hand-knitted cardigan and stares at the television, doing her best to pucker her pretty face into a scowl.

"It's seventy two degrees in here," her mother tells her.

She glares. She didn't say anything. They've been having this battle all summer.

"I'm a little cold, too, Mom," he says, from his traditional spot on the floor. There's only the chair and the couch, and he doesn't feel right sitting next to his sister any more. He doesn't know why. But he'll defend her, no matter what.

"Shut up," his mother snaps, and stalks up to the television, her pink bathrobe flapping against sickly-pale legs. She snaps the dial and the picture disappears. "If you're so cold, get out of here." She turns her back to the television, blocking it. Daring them.

She's been drinking. He could smell it, but he thought maybe this time it would be different. He always thought it would be different, but it never was. He just wanted to sit down and watch Get Smart like a regular family. "Get out!" their mother screams at them, and then touches her temple as though the noise of her own scream was more than she could bear.

His sister flounces up from the couch and slams the door behind her. Without looking at their mother, knowing she'll explode in a moment over the slamming of doors, he slides silently out of the house. He stands next to the screen to catch it and close it ever so carefully.

"One of these days, I'm not coming back," his sister says to him and she doesn't have to work at scowling now. He wants to say something to cheer her up, so he won't see the bitter look in her eyes that so reminds him of their mother.

The girls have a tent, so they offer to let him stay in the van. He accepts, surprised when they won't accept his money. He helps them pitch their tents and wonders what they're going to do as the sky grows darker and darker. Other people mill around, men and women, all shapes, all races, all ages. Brought together for a common cause. "What's the plan for tonight?" he asks, expecting, for some crazy reason, a singalong around a campfire.

"We're going to rest up. Tomorrow the loggers are coming, and we're going to stop them. The press will be here." One of the girls flips her long blond hair and he wonders if she's more interested in the press than in saving the forest.

"What're they clearing the forest for?" he asks.

"Paper."

He can't argue, because he wants to fit in here, but he's not sure paper is such a bad thing. He uses it, and he saw a couple of the girls heading into the woods with a roll of it to wipe their asses. But he doesn't care about the environment or the environmentalists. He just wants to find her.

There is no campfire, but shivering. He resists the urge to crawl back into the girls' van and stay there. That wouldn't do any good. She could be here and he would never know. So he wanders through the tents, glancing into the faces of the people gathered.

Something hits him, striking his back, with enough force to almost knock him off his feet. He feels cold wetness spreading and instantly he's back inside his nightmare. Nevermind that there's no one at this gathering who would shoot him in the back. As more moments pass and he doesn't fall and he doesn't die, his panic begins to subside. Not a gunshot. Something else. He turns sharply, looking for his assailant, and clumps of snow fall from the folds of his jacket to the ground.

It was a snowball.

And she's standing there with another one.

"Eat this, you little brat!" she screams, holding his face against the snow. He kicks but she's bigger than he is and all she has to do is hold his shoulders down, leaning down over him. Her long hair drags through the snow, soaking the last several inches.

After a couple of minutes she gets tired of this and releases him. He wipes his mouth and his eyes are red, but he's not going to cry. There's a clump of mud from underneath the snow clinging to his forehead. "I'm going to get you," he says without anger.

"Not today. Maybe later, squirt," she says, her eyes dancing. He wonders if that means she has something else in mind for him, but he doesn't really care. She's spending time with him, that's all that really matters. She's paying attention to him.

She picks up some snow in her hands, smacking it together, shaping it between her fingers. He moves faster than she does, and his aim's not bad, though the snowball falls apart as it flies through the air so it doesn't do much damage.

"Here, like this," she says, putting her hands around his and showing him how to craft a big, tightly packed snowball. When she's satisfied, she jumps back several feet and holds out her arms. It's started snowing again, big wet flakes dropping from the sky, and she raises her face to it, sticking her tongue out to catch the snow as it falls. She starts to spin around slowly and he throws the snowball with all his strength. She exaggerates the impact, falling to the ground and staggering, smearing snow along her jeans, giving a death scene performance worthy of any silent movie.

Then she picks up her head and grins. "That was a good one!"

A moment later, a flying puddle smacks him upside the head, but he just laughs, until he sees the front door open and their weary mother appear. "You're too old to be having snowball fights! And you're going to ruin your clothes!"

Not, you're going to catch your death of cold. No hint of any concern, except for material things. His eyes sting. His mother's words hurt harder than any snowball ever could.

He scoops up a handful of snow and holds it, threatening. His heart is pounding and he doesn't know what to do. He's good at hiding the pure panic and indecision, though. She raises her hands and makes a "come-on" motion so he whacks her with the snowball. It's been years - decades - since he did anything like this. His socks are wet inside his sandals. The snow flies apart, more of a buckshot effect against her red jacket.

"Some things never change," she says.

"You know." His voice is harder than he intended, and he stares, intentionally burning her face into his retinas.

She nods, once, and turns away like she doesn't want to say any more. "Is he here, too?"

Her words hurt more than getting shot did. "I would never - " he begins, but she turns away, as though he hasn't spoken, like his words don't matter at all."You have to believe me."

"I don't blame you for when we were kids," she says and he doesn't understand what she means. He's fairly certain his mouth is hanging open now, that he is the idiot he feel like. "But you worked for him."

This is not the reunion he had planned. "And he shot me," he says, hiking up his shirt, not paying attention to his body's rebellion to the extreme cold. She doesn't flinch, although he knows the scar is ugly. "I was always a slow learner," he tells her, and she looks like she wants to believe him. "I don't want it to be like this."

"Unfortunately, life is like this." It's the way she's always talked, but somehow it doesn't seem pretentious now, the way it did when she was a little girl in pigtails. "And if you can find me..."

"As far as he knows, I'm dead," he says. He feels like a desperate kid again, trying to impress his big sister.

"Funny. Me too," she says. She walks away this time, crouching down in the snow. He watches her until he knows what she's doing. Then he moves closer to help her build the snowman. For a long time, they work together, silently, assembling the bottom of the snowman. When it comes time to lift the second ball of snow, she looks at him. Once it's in place, she doesn't move to go back to work on it. "What're you doing?" she asks. "I mean, you probably don't care about the environment."

"I wanted to find you. I thought you'd be here."

"20/20," she says, and he nods. "I knew that was a mistake. I didn't think anyone would see it." She sighs. "I'm not an environmentalist."

"Then what are you?"

"I'm a doctor."

He wants to laugh, with all the time she spent in hospitals, with all the harm that was done to her by his father's doctors, she would...

"Doctor of Psychology, working on my master's in sociology," she elaborates.

"That's a lot of school."

"I really like school," she tells him. "At first, I thought I wanted to help kids. Sick kids, help them deal with being in the hospital and all that. But it made me sad." She shrugs lightly and starts playing with the snowman again, molding the snow like a sculptress. "Right now I'm working on a long term study of the sociology of environmentalism," she says. "I always liked trees."

He nods. He doesn't know what to say. Tears are burning in his eyes when he thought he would never cry again. He wants to hug her, but he can't move. "You have a life. I shouldn't intrude on that." He's ready to leave, to walk back to the bus station through the snow in his sandals. She doesn't say anything, condemning him with her silence. "But I had to know." She nods, as though proclaiming that understandable. He doesn't know what to say to her. He wants her to be his sister again. "Did you miss me, at all?"

"I still feel guilty for leaving you there." She burst into tears and it gave him the opportunity to put his arms around her. She let him hold the hug for the shortest of moments, then pulled away, managing that every present smile he remembered. He reached out and tousled her hair, mussing it as best he could considering it was short. It felt bristly under his fingers. Another inch and it would start to curl, he thought, remembering the way his mother used to twirl his sister's hair around her fingers and fix it into place with ribbons, which his sister promptly ripped out before they rounded the corner toward school.

"Cancer," she says, explaining the haircut.

He drops his hand. "I'm sorry."

"It's a couple of years. I liked it better this way."

"Are you going to be okay?" he asks.

She nods. "It's how I found out about the others," she tells him. "I found out what he was doing. His plan. So in a way it was the best thing that ever could have happened to me."

He stares at her. He doesn't know what to do. What to say.

"You know I'm only your half sister," she continues. He blinks, as though that will answer her question. Her faces melts, softening with concern for him. "I don't want to hurt you," she says.

He shakes his head. She's not going to make him cry again. He didn't know it was going to hurt this much or he might not have come. "I didn't want to believe it."

She nods, in that knowing big sister way. He doesn't even know what it is she knows. "What's your name now?" he asks. She pointedly says nothing. "Do you have a family, kids?" He's grasping desperately now, for anything. He feels like one of his poorly made snowballs, like he's flying through the air, losing pieces of himself as he goes and when he hits something, there'll be nothing left.

"I think it's better if you don't know," she tells him and he has to accept it.

"I'll go," he offers, turning away. Prepared not to look back.

"I'll drive you," she offers, keys jangling as she follows him.

The car ride is silent. She's got a sedan, red like her jacket. Red was always her favorite color. He stares at her, knowing that when she's gone this will feel like it's all been a dream. "The time just isn't right now," she says as she pulls up at the bus station. The bus is waiting. He doesn't have much time. He doesn't want to leave.

"Then I'll see you when it is right," he says. And that's the end of it. For now.

end.