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Title: Tear a Petal From the Rose Summary: The offspring of Marita Covarrubias begins to bloom. Third part in a universe that includes The Wrong Kind of Paradise and Lost Boys and Golden Girls. It is not necessary to read these prior to reading this story; however, it may not be obvious to those who do not read them that the narrator here is Gibson Praise. May 4, 2012 The house was far too silent for the mayhem that had spilled out of the windows and the open front door like a wave and that hit me with the full force of a tsunami. The screams, long silent, were churning in the invisible wall of water as it flowed over me, and I at once knew what had happened and who else was in the house. The house. Our house. It had been our refuge for the past thirteen years. The Lone Gunmen had brought me here and stayed on to help raise Eileen, the daughter of agents Scully and Mulder, and Sophia, Marita Covarrubias' daughter. We welcomed Scully and Mulder here when they returned to our lives about eighteen months ago from their years on the run. They remained for a time while the girls evolved and developed their gifts. After our period of sadness several months ago, they - Mulder, Scully, and Eileen - decided to make a go of it on their own, and the rest of us wished them well. Perhaps it is a good thing that they got out of here while they still could. We entered the house and found two bodies, twisted and tangled, as if they had been marionettes whose strings had been cut and had fallen upon the floor. A pot of tea, now grown cold, rested on the sideboard and the cups, on a table not three feet away from the bodies, were left undisturbed. Langly was riveted to the spot. He could not move or turn away from the sight. I am sure that when the shock wears off, he will begin screaming, but for now his trembling jaw draws forth no sound. He had no warning as I did, no way to prepare himself to find old friends who had been destroyed. Yes, destroyed. There is no other word to describe their deaths. The act was deliberate and with no reason beyond that of getting someone's attention. Yes, John Byers and his wife, the former Susanne Modeski, were sacrificed upon a whim. I sensed a movement from a room upstairs. Of course, she had not left. Why should she leave? This was all for my benefit. I do not hurry up the stairs. To do so would give Sophia notice of panic on my part, but I am concerned as to any injuries left upon her. I found her in her room, the windows thrown open with her standing in the spring breeze. "Your father will know of this," is all that I can think to say. I should have saved my worries for those left downstairs. She did not blink at the scolding, and her only movement was to still the lace curtain blowing beside her. "I am counting on it." We both know this to be true. For even though Fox Mulder does not have the powers that she and I possess, what Sophia knows, Eileen also knows. And Eileen will tell her father of the things that her sister has done today. I sit on the bed, the breeze from the open window gently lapping my face, watching as that same breeze lifts and bounces the waist-long white blonde hair of the young rose of a woman who stands in front of that window. The hair of a cold-blooded and heartless killer. And then it hits me. This is not the first time that she has taken a life. Another human life. It is all becoming so clear. She has been able to hide this fact from me. I do not know how - perhaps I did know of her involvement but did not want to believe that she could do something so damning, so evil against someone who had lovingly and carefully raised her. Someone who had cradled her in his arms to feed her, clothe her, protect her - to kill, if necessary, to protect her - and to allow himself to be killed if only to give her the split second of escape. Of course, the broken bodies downstairs only reinforce those thoughts. Of course she can kill someone close to her; she has done it before. Frohike's mind had been eaten away. Literally. At first, the deterioration affected only his sense of balance. He would slip on a stairstep before catching himself; his shoulder would bump into the walls, his body taking a sudden turn when none was needed. He lost the ability of coherent speech a few days later. It was as if listening to a record being played backwards at varying speeds. Frohike himself understood what he was saying and was probably hearing exactly what he intended for all of us to hear. But for the rest of us, it was an exercise in futility as Frohike attempted over and over again to communicate with us. He would sit at the computer, staring at the keyboard as if the letters were in some language he could not understand before summoning the strength to knock it off of its stand in frustration. The following day, Fox Mulder, Dana Scully, and Langly took him in to the University Medical Center for evaluation. The news was confusing but no less devastating. Tiny pockets of Frohike's brain were missing - either eaten away or simply eroded - and it had apparently been going on for some time. It was as if someone was periodically tearing a petal from a rose - one here and there did not make much of a difference but after a while the flower looked ravaged. How this had happened the doctors could not adequately explain. Perhaps it was some sort of brain cancer or an advanced or mutated case of Alzheimer's, they offered. But they also offered no hope of recovery. Within thirty-six hours, Frohike had gone from having periodic convulsions to full paralysis. Bedridden with no control over his bodily functions. But his mind still raced, still processed information. We could see it in his eyes but could not understand. Even when I tried to reach out for those thoughts, the only ones that I could grasp were the same word being desperately repeated over and over again - Why. In those last few hours, he became aware of the reason why because she had made sure that he knew. Made sure that he knew of his trespass before she reached into him with her mind and clutched his heart, squeezing it like a tomato until it was left as bloody pulp. And what was his betrayal to her? His love for Dana Scully. Yes, in years past, Frohike had a fondness for Agent Scully, but he had held it in check. It was mainly a defense in not showing too much favoritism towards Eileen, though I am quite certain that he never held Sophia's parentage against her and from what I observed, he loved both girls dearly and equally. But passing time makes an old man reminisce and somewhere in his trips down memory lane, Frohike must have given Sophia the idea that her mother was not as brilliant, not as pretty, not as vital as Dana Scully. After the funeral, Mulder made the snap decision to leave us and take Scully and Eileen away. We could see that he was upset with Frohike's passing, and no amount of reproach concerning their safety outside of our sphere was taken under advisement. Langly scrambled up his contacts to find a suitable location in a neighboring state, after which Walter Skinner patrolled and pounded through every square yard of the new homestead before giving his approval to the move. Eileen's lessons on using and controlling her gifts had only been underway for three months. Though I was concerned about her development, I was gently reminded by the others that both of her parents were highly qualified professionals who had a great deal of contact during their FBI careers and their years on the run with the very entities from whom we kept in hiding all these years. "I'm not sorry about Susanne and Byers, so you shouldn't sit there and wait for an apology." Sophia's sudden speech interrupted my recollections. I now wondered how much of it she could sense, how much of what we had all been thinking these past months had she eavesdropped upon. "Why did you do it? You shouldn't need to do something so drastic." "Yes, I did. He would not come otherwise." "He? Your father? If you had asked, Mulder would have come at some point. You know that." "I did ask. He said it wasn't safe to leave just yet. And I wasn't issued a special invitation to his ranch." She closed her eyes and leaned into the breeze, gently rocking back and forth in conjunction with the flowing curtains. "He'll come back now. Do you know how long it has been since I've set foot off of this compound?" "Is that what this is about? You want to get away? Sophia, you will get the chance to live on your own eventually but there are so many things out there that you could face that you may not yet be able to deal with." She continued talking to herself in quite a sing-song fashion, ignoring my questions. "My father never would have left this place as long as Frohike was alive, so I removed that obstacle. But then, when he did leave, he didn't take me with him. He took only his wife and her daughter." "Eileen is *his* daughter as well." There may have been something in the tone of my voice that reminded her that someone else was also in the room. She stopped her rocking motion and opened her eyes. "He's coming back. He and Eileen are already on their way." "How could you kill Frohike and then Byers? He loves those guys." I was having trouble keeping my voice in check. I had come to depend upon the Gunmen in these last years almost as much as Mulder had when he worked for the FBI. "Do you hate him that much?" She turned to look at me again with those pale blue eyes and shook her head. "I don't hate him." And then it hits me. It is Scully that she hates. She blames Scully for making Mulder spend all those years on the run, keeping him away from her. She blames Scully for not making the effort to keep the two sisters together, for leaving her behind with the rest of us. Sophia killed Frohike believing that her father would be free to leave and take her with him and when that did not happen, she killed Byers to entice him back. If Mulder and Eileen are on their way here, then Scully has been left alone and vulnerable. "It has already been done," she adds. "There is no way to stop it. They are coming for her." I can not hide my shock at this statement. "You've been contacted." When did this happen? How did I miss this - I spent years perfecting the scanning of our area for the intruders. It was like having them come and sit on the front porch, sipping lemonade and plotting the end of the world while the rest of us slept inside. "Sophia, don't do this." "Or what? Have you forgotten about Langly's well-being that quickly?" "I won't let you..." "Perhaps I won't need to invalidate him. You can keep Langly just as he is. And they will have Scully, and I will have my father." "And what of Eileen?" "What about her?" She knows my next question. For some reason, she wants to hear me say it out loud, and I already dread the answer. "What are your intentions towards your sister?" "She is not that strong - not like me." Sophia returns to her vigil by the window. "Perhaps she should stay here with you. She could be safe here." But They also know where we are, I keep to myself. None of us will be safe when Sophia leaves. I have to make plans to get Eileen and Langly out of here. But first I have burials to arrange, and I get up off of the bed to head downstairs. I should also contact Skinner to see if there is anything that he can do about getting to Scully. As I approach the doorway to the bedroom, I turn around to look back at Sophia. The wind has picked up some, and the curtains and her hair continue their silent dance in the breeze. And as I turn away to face the sadness downstairs, I can see out of the corner of my eye that another petal has been torn from the rose, and it gently falls to join the others that litter the bedroom floor. end
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