Title: Reunion
Author: Sue
Feedback: susieqla@yahoo.com Website: None
Category: General/Het/JTS
Rating: PG
Disclaimer All the X-Files characters and references are property of C. Carter, 10-13 Productions and FOX.

Summary: Long-standing fellow travelers regroup.


Staying underground, literally and figuratively, for too long did funny things to a person, the older and stiffer man told himself as he raised the bubbled trap door and breathed in the invigorating air of early morning. The smells of the extreme northwestern hinterland were sharp and keen.

Not really one for the great outdoors, Frohike performed a pair of deep squats before lifting his arms high over head for a good stretch.

"Hey you two," he shouted down into the hole in the ground, "haul your asses up here before you two turn into moles. Shock your lungs.

It's been seventy-two hours straight." Frohike sucked his bottom teeth, trying to remove something stringy wedged in-between two in front.

When Byer's head popped up through the hatch of their survival bunker, whose layout was patterned along the lines of an expansive igloo without the narrow entry, Frohike had eked out the bothersome bit of pulp from the quarter section of orange he'd had for breakfast.

Byers breathed in deeply, and despite his fatigue, smiled at his fellow fugitive from public life. "Forgot that second cup of coffee you grumbled through preparing." He proffered the steaming mug to Frohike. "You keep growling like that, you'll attract whatever bears there are within a two-mile radius," Byers said while emerging into the rugged backcountry's pristine Canadian morn, "I think we'll have enough time for the three of us to take a stroll to the ocean, hmmm?

Really get a forceful dose of what you say we need."

Langly, toting an olive drab mug containing the swill he had brewed, which he euphemistically termed coffee, scooted up from the ground like a jackrabbit. It was becoming not as novel seeing Byers out of his traditional suit of perma-press armor. Coming to stand beside his beardless friend who was wearing instead a pair of somber green Dockers and a dark gray thick-pile sweatshirt which had 'Chesapeake Tool-and-Die' written across its front in bold lettering, he said, "This much fresh air's gonna kill me." He quickly exhaled with a noisy gust.

"Or make a man out of ya," Frohike badgered.

"What the hell's that supposed to mean?" Langly spat back all prickly.

He dripped a little of his coffee to the ground purposedly.

"Everyone. Let's take that stroll," Byers mildly suggested again, hoping to ward off what seemed to be brewing between them. An overdue case of raging cabin fever in search of an outlet.

For some reason mysterious to his bosom companions, the blond wasn't combative all of a sudden. He stared at the sky with a pensive look on his face, as though testing wind speed which happened to be negligible today. "I hope to high heaven they make it here okay."

His companions nodded in total agreement.

"Which is why I don't think it's a good idea to stray too far from the pre-determined coordinates," Frohike blended into the conversational mix. "If they're holding to schedule, they're due here within the next couple of seconds. Which is why I said for you to haul ass."

"It's that late already? I hadn't realized," Byers confessed, checking the time his watch read. "I guess I lost all track, recalibrating those differential signatures."

"Yeah it's that late. If they show up, miss the sum total of us while we're off sightseeing, both of 'em could jump to the conclusion that we met up with more foul play."

"Yeah, 'Hike's right," Langly concurred, and the shortest of the three looked over at the tall, conceding blond and showcased a delayed look of surprise for his benefit. "We've come too far to screw everything up at the last moment."

"No vector of contention from me," Byers said, nodding. For a moment or so his attention was arrested by the crisp lilting song of a jay.

At this distance, the communications expert couldn't quite identify the type of bird by its singing alone. If he'd had his seasoned binoculars for one of his favorite pastime with him now, he would know clearly, but they were back in D.C., presumably still in that pawnshop. His opportunity for redeeming them, a moot point now that their new permanent address was here.

"Think they got their kid back minus any hassle?" Langly was kicking some pebbles around with the scuffed-up toe of his left foot. "How d'ya walk in, tell the folks that adopted your kid you're here to take him back, and ya do?" He compounded hope back-to-back with hope though, that the pertinent information they had supplied had won their friends the boy. Having Mulder in Scully's life again was good, but Scully having her baby back would be even better.

That raw, rainy day, the day following her giving William up for adoption was the saddest the Gunmen had ever seen her. She'd hung around the Warehouse the entire afternoon, well into the wee hours of the next day, with blood-red eyes that bled tears practically non-stop.

"We'll know real soon, won't we?" Frohike commented, feeling clumsy doing so, almost in a ham-fisted sort of way. "They deserve to be a family after so many punishing years."

"Yeah--real sucky ones." The long-haired hacker picked up a stone and threw it at the nearest spruce. The jay's singing ceased instantly.

"Even if the kid's one of those so-called super soldiers, he couldn't ask for a better mom than Scully," Langly insisted with a mashing stamp of his foot that drove the pebble his foot had hovered over deep into the earth littered with pine needles.

His next statement seemed to indicate to his partners that his mind was leapfrogging from one disjointed thought to the next, or so it appeared. "I gotta get to see 'Attack Of The Clones' some way. Even if we are in long-term hiding. Hell, I've *never* missed an episode when the flicks have hit the wide screen. Not one, and I sure as hell ain't gonna start now. Screw the stupid powers that be that want our heads on a cruddy platter."

"You'd risk everything that's at stake now to see some hyped to the max Hollywood make-believe? We're livin' the real deal, man," Frohike sniped, his ire un-sugarcoated. "Factions of the 'evil empire' are alive and well and after us for keeps. It's high time you grew up."

"It's high time you quit gettin' on my case every damn day," Langly fumed, stepping up into Frohike's face that was put out of joint by tension.

"What was the family's name again, Langly?" Byers asked, diverting his attention away from the bird's twittery call that had vanished, and quickly to his friends who sounded overly sharp with each other.

Langly looked away from Frohike and over to Byers. "Van De Camp," he replied, his terse response sounding like an epithet. He was about to return his singeing glare back to Frohike when he got caught up then with the faint thrumming sound of a vehicle's tooling, coming from the distance. It wasn't his imagination. "It's them," Langly said in conjunction with throwing Byers first, then reluctantly to Frohike a look of honed anticipation.

They quickly parted to make way for the gleamy black SUV barrelling towards them, with Frohike and Byers standing together on one side of the pebbled road, and Langly poised on the other.

"She's got their kid, right?" Langly asked, the anxious hitch in his voice gave away how unlikely that might very well be, but at the same time how much he wanted it to be true.

"Can't tell," Frohike answered tentatively. From their distance it was still unclear to him whether he counted two big heads, and a little one.

Goaded by expectation and wish fulfillment, Byers walked up a few paces to see if he could get a better look. Right now, there was nothing else he wanted to see more, it was a dead tie between wanting to see Susanne, and seeing little William cradled in Scully's arms.

Father, mother and son reunited.

"I think she does," Frohike alerted his raptly- attentive brethren.

"She does," Byers generously confirmed, breathing so much more relaxedly as opposed to a few moments ago. "He's grown some..."

Mulder wheeled the SUV sharply, over to the upraised bubbled hatch.

He had his hands gripped white-knuckled to the steering wheel. The trio saw him turn his head to say something to Scully. His friends looked at one another, for an exchange of wry, but somewhat wary looks.

Allowing for the passage of a few more moments, Mulder popped his door, got out, and the Gunmen crowded into him, taking turns clapping him soundly on his back and then hearing Scully say with a stark inflection of affection, "Hi, guys. It's good to see you alive and kicking."

"Good to see you with William," Byers said, emphasizing the child's name.

"The next time it's decided we'll have to fake our funerals--"

Langly sneered at Frohike. "Wha'd'ya mean the next time? There ain't gonna be no damn next time," he was compelled to remind everyone.

"Between now, and when the invasion is supposed to go down--hey, Mulder, when's that supposed to happen, again? I forget the date."

Scully lowered her watery eyes, as though she was studying the soil in the flooring of the floorboard. The date Mulder had told her several times she remembered with a good deal of sadness, and regret.

The man who had driven non-stop from the Van De Camp's place in Wyoming all the way here did not look informative. "Do we have to talk about it this very moment?" He turned to Scully, sitting like a shadow, and his bloodshot eyes scoured her tired face. She looked at him, and he nodded, seeing William's face contort in preparation for nosily broadcasting his overtireness and therefore his being out of sorts.

"Uh, no..." Langly shrugged, sensing for once that his keen thirst for knowledge denied the general public was sorely self-serving on this occasion. "Guess you'd like to rest."

Scully, wearing a pair of leg-hugging jeans and a peach-colored short sleeve T-shirt, got out and came from around the car to take her place alongside Mulder. She made the effort to sound patient when she said, "That's an idea we can live with." She handed her baby off to Langly, and the cranky whimperer settled right down, a recollection perceived through touch, as though the lean unorthodox man had cast a spell over him.

"Hey, there, shortstuff, I've missed ya." Langly straightened the baby's crooked cap, and then only to him, softly said in clandestine mode, "Whenever the aliens have got this sneaky thing planned, I'm keeping a very low profile and dealin' from the shadows. Like Luke, Han, Leia and the rest of the Rebels had to do. May the Force be with us, eh, little guy?"

"It's not the swank hotel in Beverly Hills," Frohike said, indicating the hole in the ground camouflaged by sturdy tufts of dense scrub grass, "but the air's breatheable, we've got comfy cots, and the last batch of coffee *I* made is hot, good and plentiful. Miracle lasagna's on for dinner. You're hungry, yeah?" He eyed them, knowing his question was superfluous.

On an impulse with exhaustion, gratitude and overwhelming sentimentality as its impetus, Scully lunged at Frohike, grabbed him and crushed him to herself, unaware that by doing thus, she had catapulted her avid admirer into seventh heaven, and beyond. "Thank God some things *never* change. Oh, 'Hike. Just like old times when we would show up at your place for number crunching and sympathetic shoulders to cry on. And midnight snacks you made from scratch."

Under the spell of her emotive outpour, Frohike banged his lips against her flushed right cheek. "My ol' crying shoulder's really missed ya, Scully," he gently reminded her. "C'mon let's see about getting some of that coffee into you and..." He offered Mulder his eyes that radiated compassion. "This guy you say you've still got a thing for."

Mulder turned to Byers, waited until the others had disappeared down the 'foxhole,' then said, "After what happened in Anasazi country, I don't know the direction to take, John. I want to believe there's hope, but thinking how much the odds are stacked against us as never before, makes it insurmountably hard. There's no doubt that the truth is still out there, but whoever actively seeks it becomes a target for instant destruction."

"Since when has that stopped being the case?"

"John, before the ol' smoking bastard died, *really died* this time.

Death by Stinger missles, he made it clear that the only reason I was allowed to live this long was for his amusement." The cold chill paralyzed Mulder's spine as it had when C.G.B. Spender had told him that. He's gone. Nobody's amused. I've got my precious family to think about."

Byers gave a fair hearing to all of Mulder's misgivings which had enervated Mulder's will to go on in the quest for the truth before bringing up something this complex man whom he had known for over a decade had once told him when he and his compatriots had helped him discover the true nature of the black oil years ago. "Better not to look at it as one long road to hoe. Better to take it one step at a time. Better to divide the step into: a creep, a crawl...to a stand.

One hesitant footfall following not very far behind the next."

"You were listening..." The old familiar Mulder smile was alive and well. "And retained."

"Haven't we always? The only ones who really did, and believed you right from the start. Come on." Taking Mulder around his shoulders, and indenting the skin over his collarbone, Byers, noting as diplomatically as Mulder's present frame of mind warranted, remarked, "You look as though you could use several pots of Frohike's coffee."

"And a week's worth of uninterrupted sleep."

"That too." He allowed Mulder to go first. "Frohike and Langly are sharing one of the three rooms so you and Scully can have some privacy."

"Since when do you guys know from privacy?" Mulder cracked wise. As his descent down the spiral staircase progressed, it took several moments for his eyes to adjust to the brashly abrasive lighting afforded by the subterranean bolthole.

Once the bubbled hatch closed, the bubble smoothed down, as though it had melted into the ground. A dense tuft of scrub grass, identical in appearance, in relation to the surrounding greenery, but artificial in nature, oversowed the hidden aperture of the secret, well-ventilated haven.

End

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