Summary: Mulder and Scully gave up their entire lives and began anew with different identities in order to protect their son almost 15 years ago. What would their lives be like now? (This is my attempt to give a middle-aged Mulder and Scully a happier fictional life.) Disclaimer: These characters do not belong to me. They are the property of Chris Carter and 1013 Productions.

Note: Although Mulder and Scully are married in this it's not part of my usual "married" series (the ones where they got married in Las Vegas). Sorry for any confusion!

Professor David William Carter stretched his hands over his head, trying to work out the kink in his back. He was usually so involved in his day-to-day life – teaching college classes, coaching his son's baseball team, attending his daughter's gymnastics meets, going to church, playing with their dog, doing tasks around the house and trying to find time to spend "alone together" with his beloved wife -- that he gave little consideration to his age or former identity as FBI Agent Fox William Mulder. But today he was feeling every moment of his actual 54 years...not the 49 years his driver's license and now-not-so-new birth certificate listed him as.

His wife walked into the room as he was wincing. Once Dr. Dana Katherine Scully, she was now Katherine Marie Carter (maiden name: O'Hara), a part-time biology instructor at the same small community college in Oklahoma where he was a psychology professor.

"Back bothering you again, honey?" she asked, placing her hands on the aching area and rubbing it with professional precision.

"Ah, yeah, thanks!" he said. Checking to make sure that neither of their teenage children was in earshot he muttered, "Why did we ever allow them to make us five years younger than our actual ages when we went into Witness Protection? If I retire when I'm actually 67, I'll only get the minimum Social Security benefits for somebody who retires at 62. To get full benefits, I'll have to work until I'm well into my 70s!"

"You know why they did it, David," she replied, too accustomed to using his current name to even be tempted to address him as Mulder (she'd rarely called him Fox; and, in any case, she could get away with that by claiming it was a nickname). "It would have seemed suspicious for a couple in the late 30s to still be relatively adrift in their professional lives. By making us both under the age 35, it made it more believable that we were just getting started on tenure-track career paths."

"I know. It's just...I get so tired of the constant worrying about money. It's funny, that's the one worry I didn't have back then. And it's only going to get worse. William is brilliant, but he's also a white male from Oklahoma; that's going to limit his possibilities of college scholarships."

"He's only midway through his freshman year of high school," Katherine said dryly. "I think we can wait another year or so before we start panicking about how we're going to pay for his college education. Besides that's not what I came in here to discuss; I've got some ideas for this year's vacation."

About 18 months after they'd gone into Witness Protection, they had cautiously reached out to one person: her mother. Through a complicated process involving snail mail letters sent to Maggie Scully's sister's house and unregistered cell phones, they'd been able to establish contact. After a couple of years, they'd begun experimenting with meeting each other at popular vacation destinations. Maggie never came to their house and they never went to hers; but they had a shared vacation with Grandma every other year or so. That way, even if the FBI tumbled onto the fact that they'd been in contact, Maggie could tell them – honestly – that she had no idea where the family lived. She knew their new first and last names, but not their middle ones or new birthdates, and the names were common enough that they'd be virtually untraceable without additional data. Maggie traveled fairly frequently in any case – to visit her sons and other grandchildren or to visit various friends she'd met during her years as a Navy wife – so the random visits to well-known vacation destinations were unlikely to arouse much suspicion.

"Where were you wanting to go?"

"I suppose Washington D.C. is still out of the question?" she asked with a sigh.

"Absolutely," he replied. Even after more than a decade, the chances of them running into someone in the nation's capital who had known them when they were "Mulder and Scully" was too high. Their previous vacations had included trips to Florida, Colorado, San Diego, San Antonio, Seattle, the Grand Canyon and Branson, Missouri.

"How about New York and/or New England then?"

"Maybe," he said. "I suppose I'd be paranoid if I thought they'd been keeping a stakeout on the houses in Massachusetts and Rhode Island for the past 15 years. And neither of us ever lived in New York City or even spent much time there."

"We're probably going to have to start focusing exclusively on the East Coast. My Mom's almost 80 now, you know. Cross-country flights are getting to be a bit much for her. If you want to avoid the Northeast, maybe we could go to South Carolina; Charleston and Myrtle Beach might be nice."

The sound of a slamming door interrupted their conversation as two teenage voices – one male and one female – called out "Mom? Dad?"

"In here," they replied from the home's small study.

"What are you talking about?" asked 14-year-old William.

"Where to go on vacation this summer," his mother replied.

"Will Grandma be meeting us?" asked 13-year-old Sally.

"Probably, but it will depend how she's feeling."

"Why don't we ever go to her house or have her come here for Christmas or anything? It's weird that we only see her on vacations."

There was silence for a moment and then her father said, "Grandma's got a bit of a . . .condition; just a mild quirk or eccentricity, not really a big deal. But she gets really nervous when she's at somebody else's house or other people are at hers. She does a lot better meeting people in public places and we indulge her because she's the only grandparent we've got!"

As the children drifted out of the room, their mother leaned down and whispered, "Nice save!" in her husband's ear.

David pulled her mouth to his for a quick kiss, then said, "To return to my previous topic of conversation: What do you think happened to all our assets from before? It's funny, I never thought of myself as rich back then, but I owned property in two New England states, I had stocks I'd inherited, an IRA . . .compared to now, I was wealthy."

She shrugged her shoulders. "The government probably confiscated it. I think if an account is inactive for seven years, they can do that. The actual property – the houses – would have eventually been seized due to non-payment of property taxes."

"Maybe I'll run a computer search on it the next time I'm in an anonymous location," he said. He was far too paranoid to run Internet searches connected to their former life from any computer that might be traced back to him. He did the searches only when he was away from home == on vacations or at professional conferences in other states – from public libraries or Apple stores.

As Katherine left the room, he shook his head. While he certainly considered his wife an equal partner, and had done so for almost a quarter of a century now, some part of him still felt that, as a man, he was the one primarily responsible for supporting his family. And, quite frankly, he wasn't doing a very good job of it. They weren't living in abject poverty, of course, and it helped that the cost of living in Oklahoma was considerably lower than on the coasts; but the house was a small bungalow built in the 1950s, with the kids' bedrooms barely bigger than walk-in closets. They had one decent vehicle, a relatively new minivan, and a beat-up 10-year-old compact that he drove back and forth to work. The family's one indulgence was their biannual vacations and even those were always within the continental United States and hardly to five-star resorts.

The problem was, he mused, that virtually any way to use his talents would draw unnecessary attention to himself. He'd had offers from other colleges. Not the Ivy League, but large state universities and well-regarded private universities in Texas and Oklahoma, but had refused them. He'd also passed over opportunities to volunteer his services as a profiler. He couldn't risk doing that would draw the scrutiny of anyone who might possibly be looking for a former FBI agent with a degree in psychology and a talent for criminal profiling.

The irony was that William had never developed any of the abilities that everyone – both his parents and the people chasing them – had assumed (or feared) he would. Oh, he was an intelligent, talented kid; there was no doubt about that. He'd been the star of his Little League baseball teams for the past several years and was now the only freshman on the high school's varsity squad. He was also almost certainly a shoo-in for valedictorian of his graduating class, as he'd never made less than an A-minus in any subject. But he wasn't telepathic or telekinetic or able to run faster than a speeding bullet or able to leap tall buildings in a single bound or immune from common childhood illness and accidents or anything else other than an ordinary kid; albeit one who happened to be somewhat above average in both intelligence and athletic ability.

Sally, born about a year after they'd assumed their new identities, was much the same. She was a talented gymnast who would probably have a good shot at winning a college scholarship based on her abilities, but she wasn't Olympic-quality level. She was equally as smart as her brother, with an aptitude for languages – she was almost fluent in Spanish and had recently begun learning Chinese – that rivaled William's grasp of science and mathematics. But at no time during childhood or since entering adolescence had she ever shown evidence of any kind of paranormal abilities.

The children had both inherited their father's dark hair. William was also showing every sign of achieving his father's lanky height; while Sally, at least so far, shared her mother's petite build. David looked less like the fifteen-year-old pictures of Fox Mulder still floating around the internet than like Harrison Ford in the opening scenes of "The Fugitive"; his hair (longer now than it had been when he was an FBI agent) had gone almost completely gray and the beard he'd begun growing the day they went into hiding – and which nobody in Oklahoma had ever seen him without – was gray as well. His wife's appearance had changed less than his, but the red hair that had been her most flamboyant feature had faded over the years to first a muted auburn and now a mixture of light brown and gray that only had hints of red when the sun struck it. They both wore glasses all the time nowadays; eschewing the contacts they'd habitually worn as FBI agents.

Well, he thought, obsessing over the past wasn't going to make his back feel better; but a swim might. The open swim for faculty members and their families at the college's indoor pool would begin in just a few minutes.

"I'm heading up to the pool," he yelled. "Anybody want to go with me?"

"Sure, might as well," his son replied. Both Katherine and their daughter declined the opportunity, so the two Carter males took off together.

David felt himself relax as he and his son raced each other through the water in adjacent lap lanes. Swimming had always been his way to calm himself down, beginning more than 40 years ago when his sister had disappeared. William was mercifully free of the kind of demons that had haunted his father as a teenager, but he felt the age-old need of a teenage boy to test himself against his father and was grinning as he touched the wall a second or two first.

As they were leaving the gym, William asked, "Can we stop on the way home for a soda?"

"You had one this afternoon and Mom's rule is one a day," his father said.

"We wouldn't have to tell her," William pointed out.

David shot his son a grin and headed to the 7-11. This tiny act of subversion to his wife's rules would have far-reaching consequences.

"Hey, Professor Carter," the convenience store clerk greeted him. The twentyish man had been in one of his classes last semester and also had a younger brother who'd played on the same Little League team as William the previous spring; it was a small town and these kinds of coincidences were common.

William was debating between a Coke and a Dr. Pepper while his father selected a bag of sunflower seeds. During the family's first several years in Oklahoma, David had avoided his favorite snack, not wanting there to be any clue – no matter how small – to his former identity. His wife had eventually convinced him that assuming there was some sort of government tracking of snack foods was paranoid even by his standards and he'd resumed munching on the seeds about the time the children entered elementary school.

They had just placed their items on the counter and David was reaching for his wallet when all hell broke loose.

Two olive-skinned men in their mid-20s, wearing hoodies and sunglasses, burst into the store waving guns. "This is a stickup," one said in a curt voice. "Open the register and give us the cash."

"Do as he says, son," David said to the clerk with calm authority. "We want to end this as quickly as possible." He placed his hand on the shoulder of his actual son, who was trembling beside him, giving it a light squeeze of reassurance. Meanwhile, he was automatically noticing the details of the robbers; their height, their weight, their accents, the tattoo peeking out of the one in front, the scar above the eyebrow of the one in back.

Everything might gone okay – just another example of the increasing crime rate in Middle American – if one of the robbers hadn't suddenly trained his attention, and his gun, on William. A combination of a father's natural protective instincts and over a decade of experience as an FBI field agent, suddenly melded together inside of the man who'd once been known as Fox Mulder and he reacted without thinking. Using the skills he'd learned at Quantico more than half a lifetime earlier, he shoved his son to the ground, grabbed and bent the wrist of the gunman until he heard a crack and the gun went skittering across the floor, and pushed the man to the ground. With a knee on the back of the downed robber, he grabbed the gun and fired it at the perpetrator still in the doorway, who turned and ran.

It was over within seconds. David was reaching for the handcuffs he hadn't carried in more than a decade and said "Stay down," starting to add "FBI", but coughing and changing it to "effing moron" as his son and the clerk stared at him. "Call the cops," he said tersely to the clerk.

When the local police officers arrived, David was relieved to note that they were familiar to him. The older one had a daughter in Sally's grade at school; the younger one had been in David's Intro to Psychology class several years earlier. After taking statements from both David and the clerk – beyond ascertaining that the child hadn't been harmed, they didn't question William – the older of the two police officers said sternly to David, "I understand a father's desire to protect his child, Mr. Carter, but what you did was incredibly foolish. Even law enforcement officers with years of professional training try to avoid taking on armed assailants. Things worked out this time, but you could have made the situation much worse."

"Yes sir," David replied. "I do understand that. I didn't really think things through. I didn't think at all. I just reacted."

"Well, very much OFF the record, I do have to say that I'm impressed. You must have had some training at some point. Military, I'm guessing?"

"No," David said, glad to be able to answer at least this one question honestly. "But I did took some self-defense classes when I was in my 20s; used to do quite a bit of practicing up until about the time I turned 35 or so."

"We'll let you and your son go on home now," the older officer said. "But we'll need you to come up to the station first thing tomorrow morning to make an official statement."

"Okay, thanks," David replied.

David's cell phone buzzed just as he was turning onto their street.

"Where are you?" his wife asked. "I know the pool closed almost an hour ago and tomorrow's a school night."

"We had a little, uh, incident on the way home. We're pulling in now and I'll tell you about it as soon as we're inside."

David – with occasional excited interruptions from his son – explained what had happened to his wife and daughter.

"I'm just glad you're both okay," said Katherine, hugging one of them with each arm.

"You should have seen Dad, though, Sally!" William said. "He just grabbed the gun right out of the one guy's hand and shot the other guy."

"I shot at the other guy," his father corrected. "I'm pretty sure I missed, actually."

"But Dad, where did you ever learn to shoot a gun? You don't ever even take me hunting, like a lot of my friends' fathers do."

"As I told the Officer Parker at the scene," David said steadily, "I did took some self-defense classes during my 20s; which included firearm training. I did quite a bit of practicing up until about the time you were born."

"Why did you quit?" Sally asked.

"Do you have any idea how much time it took to take care of you two when you were both in diapers?" David said, reaching out to ruffle his daughter's hair. "Mom and I barely had time to brush our teeth, much less visit a gun range."

"You mean MOM knows how to shoot a gun, too?" William demanded, wide-eyed.

"A little bit," Katherine replied. "You two need to go get ready for bed now."

Once the children were in bed and the parents were behind their own closed bedroom door, Katherine turned to her husband. "I'm glad your instincts and reflexes haven't gotten rusty in the past 15 years," she said with a smile.

He drew her into his arms and kissed her. After 15 years of marriage, she had learned to distinguish his kisses. They were a physically affectionate couple – not only with each other, but also with their children – and kissed frequently. But this wasn't a casual kiss goodnight. It was filled with need and desire. She responded as she always had.

The next morning, as the kids and David were headed out the door for the middle school, high school and college campuses (Katherine didn't teach her first class until later in the day), David leaned down to whisper in his wife's ear "You said the "M" word last night."

"Huh?" she asked, looking at him perplexed.

"You distinctly called me Mulder while were doing the naked pretzel last night," he murmured.

"Well, I guess because, the incident with the gun and everything," she stammered for a minute, because they'd agreed more than a dozen years ago not to use their former names, even when alone together; then she taught the teasing glint in her husband's eye.

"Shut up, Mulder," she whispered back, then kissed him goodbye.

Officer Troy Parker, the older of the two policeman who'd investigated the incident last night, took David's statement when David went up to the police station between classes. Later that afternoon, Officer Parker sent copies of all the fingerprints he'd lifted from the convenience store counter to the FBI, just as a standard precautionary measure, in case the robbers were wanted elsewhere.

FBI Assistant Director Walter Skinner was just about to leave his office the next evening when his phone buzzed. He answered with a terse "Skinner" and found himself talking to a lab technician at Quantico.

"I've got a bit of an unusual situation here, Assistant Director," said the agent on the other end of the phone. "I got a batch of prints from a convenience store robbery in Oklahoma. It's just a routine thing to see if their perps are wanted elsewhere on other charges. But there was another fingerprint – just a partial – included in the batch they sent over. And it raised a red flag and said I'm supposed to alert you personally."

"Whose print is it?" Skinner asked; although he was relatively certain it had to be one of two people.

"It's just a partial, sir, so we can't be sure," the lab agent replied. "It wouldn't stand up in court as a legal means of identification."

"I know the law, agent!" Skinner snapped. "What I need to know is the name!'

"It says it's the print of a Fox Mulder, sir."

Assistant Director Walter Skinner arrived in the small town in northeastern Oklahoma late the following afternoon. He'd flown from Dulles to Dallas that morning, then made a connecting flight from DFW to Tulsa, then rented a car and driven the last two hours of the journey. His first stop was the local police station.

Officer Troy Parker seemed mystified by the visit from a high-ranking FBI official; especially as Skinner was extremely vague as to why he was there or what information he was seeking. When Skinner left the station an hour later, he was only slightly more informed than he had been when he arrived. Rather obviously, Mulder couldn't have been one of the criminals, nor could he have been the clerk on duty at the convenience store; all three of those men were under the age of 30 and Mulder would be over 50 by now. He could have been a casual customer who'd stopped in earlier that evening. On the other hand, David Carter was listed as being in his late 40s – not a difficult age for a man in his mid-50s to assume – and had a teenage son named William. The similarities made it seem likely that this was the identity of the man Skinner had known as Fox Mulder; a former FBI agent who was still, technically, a wanted man.

Skinner obtained the Carters' home address and drove there. He rang the doorbell and heard a high voice call out "I'll get it!" the door was opened by a dark-haired girl in her early teens. Skinner was momentarily startled and began to doubt his assumption had been correct. However, he flashed his badge and said, "My name is Walter Skinner. I'm with the FBI. I need to talk to David Carter about the robbery he witnessed earlier this week."

The wide-eyed girl nodded, held the door open wider, and saying "Come in". Then she closed the door and hollered "Dad! There's somebody here to see you about that shootout you were in!"

David Carter strode into the room and asked "What can I do for," he paused for just a moment as he locked eyes with the visitor, then finished with "you, sir?"

"Mr., um, Carter, my name is Walter Skinner, I'm with the FBI. I need to ask you some questions."

Before the men could continue their conversation, they heard the sound of the back door opening, the clatter of a gym bag being dropped on the floor, the sound of the refrigerator door being yanked open and a woman's voice calling out, "David? Do we have company? There's a strange car parked out front."

"Mom wants to know if somebody's here," William yelled out, in case his father had somehow missed hearing Katherine's question.

"Excuse me just a moment," David said, moving quickly, and intercepted his wife just as she was entering the alcove that separated the kitchen and dining area from the living room. Bending his head to whisper in his wife's ear, he murmured "Skinner's here".

"What?" Katherine whispered back, confused.

David gave a sort of shrug, wrapped his arm around her shoulders and escorted her back to the living room, with their son following closely behind them. "Agent, um, Skinner, did you say? This is my wife Katherine."

"It's Assistant Director Skinner, actually," said the older man with a vague trace of a smile. "Nice to meet you, Mrs. Carter. And I presume these are your children?"

"Yes," Katherine said. "This is William," with a light touch to the back of his head, "and this is Sally", with a gentle pat of her daughter's arm.

"You're with the FBI?" William asked, wide-eyed. "Cool!"

"So, was the guy that Dad helped to capture on the Most Wanted list or something?" Sally inquired.

"I'll be happy to answer everybody's questions a little bit later on," Skinner replied. "Right now I need to talk to Mr. Carter. Of course, your wife is welcome to join us."

"Why would you want to talk to Mom?" William asked. "I was the only other person from our family in the store with Dad when he shot that guy."

"William, as I said, I shot at the other guy who was attempting to holdup the store," his father reminded him. "I don't think I actually hit him."

"Tell you what," Katherine said, assuming control of the situation. "Why don't you plan on staying for dinner Assistant Director Skinner? That way the kids can ask their questions and we can fill you in on any background information you might need. In the meantime, William and Sally, you will join me in the kitchen to help make dinner and Daddy and Mr. Skinner can talk privately in the study."

Mulder shut the door to the small study. It was basically just a nook with a door on it. There was barely room for the two men to both stand in the space between the door and the desk. "Ask your questions, but try to keep your voice down," he said quietly. "Katherine – Scully – will try to keep the kids occupied, but those two are inquisitive and, quite frankly, somewhat sneaky at times."

"Sounds like they take after their parents," Skinner said dryly.

"Why are you here? Is our cover blown? Do we need to start all over again with another set of identities?"

"I don't know if your cover is blown or not. I think I can keep a lid on it. I'm here because you left a fingerprint – a partial one, at least – at the convenience store where, I heard, you impressed the hell out of a couple of local cops, the clerk and your son."

Mulder shook his head. "One of them aimed his gun at William. And I just...reacted. I didn't think. My Quantico training kicked in and the next thing I knew one perpetrator was on the floor and I was firing at the other one as he fled the scene. I don't remember even touching the counter."

"You and Scully have done an outstanding job keeping a low profile," Skinner said. "It's been almost 15 years and I never even heard a whisper of a rumor that you might be in Oklahoma. Or that you'd had a daughter, in addition to your son."

"Where did the rumors place us?" Mulder asked, curious.

"There were two schools of thought but most seemed to involved the northwestern parts of the country," Skinner said. "One theory had the three of you – since we didn't know about your second child, obviously – living completely off the grid in Montana. The other theory was that the two of you had split up and that Scully and your son were living in Seattle, while you were further down the Pacific coast in the Los Angeles area. Also, in the rumors, neither of were ever doing anything as normal as . . .are you both college professors?"

"Yes. I teach psychology full-time. Katherine's a part-time biology instructor."

"Well, in the rumors you were running alien abduction support groups or ESP seminars or living off the land like a 19th century homesteader. No normal, middle-class lifestyle in a mid-western college town, I can assure you."

"Good. That was the whole point of all of this. To blend in so seamlessly somewhere that nobody would ever think of questioning us; to hide in plain sight."

"I know they've also been monitoring various websites and interest groups pertaining to anything extra-terrestrial," Skinner added.

"I gave that up. Completely. Cold turkey. The way some men give up a porn addiction or drinking or smoking."

"No profiling, either."

Mulder shook his head. "No, and that's harder in a way; because I might have been able to do some good here using those skills. There was a case here in town a couple of years back, a little girl who was in kindergarten at the same elementary school our kids had attended, went missing. I wanted, quite badly, to volunteer my skills to local law enforcement. But, ultimately, I wasn't willing to put my own children at risk to for a possible – but by no means definite – benefit to a stranger's child. The good news is the little girl was found a few days later, with her estranged grandfather; apparently he'd just wanted to spend some time with her, but her parents wouldn't allow it because he had some really weird ideas about" Mulder paused to give a slight smile "government conspiracies and things like that."

"Does Scully's mother know?"

"We've had some contact with her, yes," Mulder replied. "But we've always met up at popular vacation spots. She's never been here and, needless to say, we've never returned to the D.C. area."

"And your kids don't have any idea?" Skinner inquired.

"No. We've kept it as close to the truth as possible. When they ask about my background, my childhood, I tell them I grew up in Connecticut, that my sister and father died in a car accident when I was a teenager and my mother passed away from cancer about a year before William was born. Scully tells them she grew up in Florida, that her father was killed in Vietnam and her mother eventually remarried; that she has no actual siblings, but did have a stepsister and two stepbrothers. That explains why we don't have aunts and uncles and cousins popping up at the holidays, but also gives her an out if she slips up and mentions brothers or a sister. The kids – well, everybody here in Oklahoma, too – thinks we met when were graduate students at Ohio State University. William's birth certificate lists him as being born in California, about a month before his actual birthdate; we obviously couldn't mess with his birthdate much, since he was an infant when we went undercover. But David and Katherine are each five years younger than Mulder and Scully were. The kids know we moved to Oklahoma just a couple of months after William was born and have been here ever since; that part, actually, is true."

"Do you miss it? Being the FBI's golden boy and/or poster child for insanity?"

Mulder was quiet for a moment and then shook his head. "I think about it sometimes, sure. But I try to view as having been -- oh, a professional athlete or a briefly popular TV actor or something – it's a part of my past, and I'm glad I did it, but it's over now. And I don't want to live the past; I want to live in the present. Sometimes I have nightmares about a different sort of life; one where was I still an alien-chasing, conspiracy-uncovering FBI agent, but didn't have my wife and children. And that's what that lifestyle would be for me nowadays: a nightmare."

"I know one of the main reasons you had to go into Witness Protection was because there were suspicions that William might have some sort of paranormal abilities. Does he?"

Mulder let out a low chuckle. "No, not at all. He's just a normal kid. Oh, we think he's pretty special all right. He's very smart and a pretty darned good ball player; but I'm conceited enough to think he comes by that naturally, as his Mom and I are both quite intelligent and were reasonably good athletes in our younger days. Same thing with Sally; she's smart and talented, but nothing worthy of an X-File investigation."

"I think I can keep this contained," Skinner said. "But just in case I can't, I bought a couple of burner phones at a kiosk in the Dallas-Fort Worth airport. I've activated them. You keep one and I'll keep one. I'll text you once a month or so to let you know that things continue to run smoothly; or call you immediately if I think you need to go on the run."

Meanwhile, in the kitchen, Katherine was scrambling to put together a meal fit for company with the ingredients she had on hand. She'd originally intended to make Hamburger Helper tonight – it was quick and reasonably nutritious and both kids liked it – but she certainly didn't intend to serve that to a guest. She finally settled on meat loaf, mashed potatoes and a green salad, with the Sara Lee cheesecake she had in the freezer as dessert. It wasn't what she'd normally think of as a "company" meal – the kind of thing she'd make if they'd invited their parish priest or fellow faculty members over for dinner – but it was the best she could do on short notice.

William and Sally were ostensibly helping her by doing things like chopping onions and setting the table, but were mostly peppering her with questions.

"Why do you think that guy, Agent Skinner, is here?" Sally said.

"He's not just an agent," William corrected his sister. "He said he's an Assistant Director at the FBI. Do you think that guy Dad captured is a terrorist? He looked Hispanic to me, but I guess maybe he could have been Middle Eastern."

"I'm sure Skin, uh, the assistant director, will explain as best he can over dinner," their mother answered. "But you have to remember; some of what he's discussing with Daddy might be classified. He may not be able to answer all your questions."

Skinner and the man he'd known as Mulder eventually emerged from the tiny study, just as Katherine and her children were putting the final touches on the table and removing the meatloaf from the microwave.

"We're drinking iced tea," she told their guest. "Would you like that or would your prefer iced water or a beer?

"Iced tea will be fine, Scu, er, Mrs. Carter," he replied.

"Please, call me Katherine."

During dinner, William and Sally pelted Skinner with questions about his career with the FBI. How he'd got started, what his most dangerous case was and what brought an assistant director out to Oklahoma to discuss what appeared to be a routine robbery. He answered most of the questions, but said he couldn't really discuss what had brought him to Oklahoma, because it was an ongoing case. "I'll ask all four of you not to discuss this – or my visit – with anyone other than one another. If any of your neighbors noticed my car, and asks who was here, just tell them . . .well, say I'm an old friend of your father's, who happened to be passing through this part of the state, and stopped by on impulse for a brief visit."

"This is all so, so cool," William said. "I've been thinking about applying to the Air Force Academy and becoming a pilot, but now I think I'd like to become an FBI agent."

"Well, you could do both," Skinner replied. "A lot of our agents served in the military for a few years before joining the FBI; but I think you'd make a fine agent. You, too, Sally."

Sally wrinkled her nose. "I think I'm going to be a teacher; either a professor like Mom and Dad or maybe just a regular teacher for little kids. It seems like being an FBI agent would keep you really busy and I want to have at least three kids and be able to spend a lot of time with them, like Mom and Dad do with us." Then she focused her attention on Skinner again and said, "Do you have children?"

"Yes," Skinner replied. "One. I have a little girl who's a little bit younger than you are."

"Younger than me!" Sally exclaimed. "But you look too old to have," "Sally!" her mother snapped. "It's rude to comment on our guest's age." But she noticed that her husband's eyes were wide at this news and she was having trouble processing it herself. Skinner was married with a daughter even younger than Sally?

"It's all right," Skinner said with a smile. "People frequently assume I'm my daughter's grandfather. And it's true that I am old enough to be; I was 51 when she was born."

"Why did you wait so long to get married and have kids? Well, a kid?" William asked.

"William, that's not any of our business," his father said sternly, although, in truth, David was dying to know himself.

"I got married for the first time in my late 20s, as most people usually do," Skinner replied. "My first wife had some medical problems; she couldn't have biological children and she wasn't really interested enough in becoming a mother to attempt adoption. I was okay with that; I was very focused on my career at that point in my life. Then Sharon – she was my first wife – died in an automobile accident. For a long time, I drowned my sorrow in my work. I had a younger couple I worked with at the FBI whom I was very close to. Although I was probably only about 10 or 12 years older than they were, I felt sort of fatherly toward them. They eventually married and had a baby and I figured their child would be sort of a like a surrogate grandson to me. But then, when the baby was just a couple of months old, they moved clear across the country. Shortly after that, I took my secretary out to dinner one night when we were working late. She was quite a bit younger than I was – I'd just turned 50 at the time – but not really what I suppose most people would call particularly young; she was in her mid-30s. But, well, one thing led to another and my secretary and I decided to get married; and then, about a year after we got married, we had a baby."

"Your secretary?" Katherine asked.

"What's your daughter's name?" Sally inquired.

"My wife's name is Arlene and our daughter's name is Kimberly," he replied.

Katherine was trying to remember which of Skinner's secretaries had been which. There'd been a busty blonde she hadn't liked and a slender redhead whom she had.

Finally, after dessert had been eaten and the table had been cleared, Skinner said, "I think I've taken enough of your family's time. I left you my number, Mr. Carter. Call me if there's anything else you think would be of interest to me. Anything at all."

"Yes, sir, I will," David replied.

After Skinner had left and the children were in bed, David and Katherine held a whispered conversation behind the closed door of their own bedroom.

"Do you think it will be okay?" she asked. "Or do you think we're going to have to start all over again somewhere else?"

"Skinner seems to think we'll be okay here. All we can do is trust him, like we did so many times in the past," he replied.

"Can you believe he's married and has a daughter even younger than Sally? And that he married his secretary? And which one was Arlene, anyway?"

"Arlene was the slender redhead; she sort of looked like a taller version of you."

"Oh, that's good then; I was worried that he might have been seduced by the blonde bimbo. I'm glad that he's got a wife and daughter; he deserves some happiness, even if it did arrive rather late in his life."

"Dana...Katherine...do you ever have any regrets? You gave up so much more than I did when we left our lives as Mulder and Scully behind. I was already out of the bureau and didn't have any family other than you and William; being a college professor of psychology is probably pretty close to what I would have been doing even if we hadn't gone into Witness Protection. On the other hand, you gave up the medical license that you'd busted your butt to obtain. You gave up a perfectly respectable career with the FBI. You gave up all contact with your brothers and their families and settled for only extremely sporadic contact with your mother. All to end up as a part-time biology instructor at a dinky community college in Nowhere, Oklahoma."

"That's not the only thing I am," she pointed out. "I'm your wife. I'm William and Sally's mother. I've got to spend the last 15 years with the people I love most in the world. And, no, I don't regret it. Not one single minute of it. I love you and I love our children."

The End