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Complicity (1/29)
By: promise64 (AKA Morgan)
e-mail: promised64@yahoo.com

Rating: NC-17 for content, violence, and language.

Keywords: casefile, MSR

Timeline: Takes place at the very beginning of season 6 -- during the era of Kersh and background checks. No Mulder with a brain disease. No baby William. No Doggett and no Reyes. I'm old school, people.

Summary: A journey through the shadows of guilt, regret, and responsibility, as a horrific case teaches our heroes about the fragility of trust and the cost of a promise broken.

Brief Note: In its way, this story has become my homage to the world of XF fanfiction; it has evolved into something of a pastiche of all my favorite “cliched” fanfic scenarios–Profiler!Mulder occupies a central place in this fic, as does the traditional casefile; Mulder-and-Scully-in-the-Wilderness tm., figures prominently, and it’s even a “First Time” fic; Injured!Scully and Injured!Mulder both make cameos, and there’s angst aplenty. I did, however, leave out the kitchen sink <g>. I have tried, in my attempts to honor all that I have so dearly loved about XF fic (my very first fandom, ::sniff::), to render these scenarios in my own way, to challenge (or subvert) the genuine cliches while, at the same time, embracing what I adore about XF fanfic, and I have endeavored to give each of these scenarios my own proverbial “spin.” Even as I have branched out into other fandoms, and left XF behind for a considerable amount of time, this creative universe has remained my “touchstone,” the fandom by which all other fandoms have been judged. My sincerest hope is that my affection for this universe and its characters can be discerned within the content of this story.

Caveats: I’m not a medical doctor or a law enforcement agent; any technical inaccuracies pertaining to terminology and/or procedure are the fault of my own ignorance. Also, any canon established after season six has been largely ignored.

Disclaimer: The characters as I once loved them live only in our imaginations now (and on DVD). I promise to treat them with the respect that they deserve (oh, and that whole “fair use” thing, too).

Archive: Gossamer, of course. Otherwise, please just ask first.

ARCHIVIST’S NOTE: Please archive this under the new pseudonym. I realize my older work is under a different name, but I would prefer this to be archived under the “promise64" appellation. Thank you.

Thanks and more rambling diatribe to follow at the end.

This fic can also be found at my journal:
http://memento64.livejournal.com

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Part I -- Descending

Without the skin,
beneath the storm,
under these tears,
the walls came down.

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Prologue
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Emerging from sleep, the mother's awareness returned slowly, hazily. The pre-dawn spill of lamp light from the street outside filtered through the gap in her curtains. The night had turned cold and cruel. Chill tumbled from the windowpane, washed over her, and stung her bare face and arms outside of the heavy blankets. She shivered. Under the covers her toes were painfully numb, and although she desperately wanted to sink back into sleep, she knew that rest would not come again until the fierce chill had abated.

Disregarding the light switch, she reached for the spare quilt on the bedside chair and cursed as her palm met wood. She'd left it in the living room. They had fallen asleep there last night watching an old movie, and she'd left it behind when they'd finally gone to bed.

The hall carpet was plush and soft beneath her feet, cushioning her from the chill of bare floors. Arms wrapped stiffly around her chest, she tried to stop her teeth from chattering as she padded down the corridor. A momentary pause at the thermostat -- to hell with the electricity bill -- she wound the dial up to 72 degrees and was about to turn around when she felt the faint exhalation of unfamiliar breath against her neck. She froze.

"No more lies."

It was a whisper. As she registered the sound and began to turn, burning pain suffused her thigh and darkness stole over her eyes. She never felt the gentle arms encircle her waist, didn't realize as she was lowered carefully to the floor.

The second time, when consciousness found her, it was accompanied by a pounding headache and a sense of panic deep in her belly. She blinked fiercely, trying to maintain her tenuous connection with awareness. Her legs were weak, swaying when she rose to stand. The carpet's blue swirled momentarily; like rising up from under deep, dark waters, she struggled to focus and stay afloat. Leaning into the wall for support, the mother squeezed her eyes shut with determination and then opened them wide.

Daylight had arrived, sweeping in and over the floor in long swaths of pale gold. It was warmer, slightly. She took one step forward, then another, a third -- until pain tore into the soles of her feet, and she faltered will a yelp. Sleep's haze driven back by the pain, she lowered her terrified eyes to the ground.

Littering the floor was a violent confetti of shattered glass, a million tiny mirrors reflecting the sunlight, brilliant and surreal. Her fingers fumbled up along the wall's surface, over stubbly, rough plaster, found the crippled frame of a family portrait, and pulled back before she sliced her hands as well. Looking down the hall, chaos reigned. Every picture was demolished, each pane of glass now lying broken and scattered, fracturing and dispersing the sun's errant rays.

Her senses turned on one by one, and her hearing seemed to sharpen at that moment. The pain was forgotten along with the destruction when all she could hear, all she registered now was her baby's hollow whimper of distress coming suddenly, and with new clarity, from two doors down the hall.

Her blood was scarlet, savage on the cream carpet of the nursery, a grotesque trail as her mangled feet moved, heedless of pain, to the side of the crib. Red-faced and angry, hunger and a full diaper manifesting now as tiny, plaintive whimpers, the baby fussed quietly, exhausted in its grief.

"Hush, darling."

The words dissolved into an incomprehensible litany of soothing sounds. Scooping up the tiny bundle, she rocked slightly by instinct on battered feet. The baby felt real and reassuring in her arms. Its cries subsided at the sudden human contact, thankful it was no longer alone in the cold. The mother, feet still bleeding, thigh stiff and sore, hugged her baby to her chest and then stilled in sudden terror.

"Tristan!"

The hallway's evil carpet snagged again at already broken skin, but she felt no pain.

"Tristan, are you awake, sweetie!"

Neither gentle nor calm, panic and fear, dread all screaming out, as she stumbled further down the hall and into the next room. The door opened with a swish.

More glass. Everywhere. The collection of pictures she kept on his dresser, pictures of his father, of their family still whole, to keep that presence in his young life, were toppled and overturned, some landing face down on the floor, and all of them violated. The glass ringed the bed, found its way up onto the covers, the covers that were turned back and empty.

"Tristan, where are you?!"

But the boy didn't answer, and the baby started wailing, still hungry and afraid. Her shrill cries grew in strength, as blood from fresh wounds seeped into thick, absorbent carpet and glass sparkled under the morning sun.

~~~~

The first time it happened (finally, after so long), it was dark and cold, quiet. The air outside was gelid, brittle; sounds of the city filtered up to find her in her bed, the distant hum of cars and sounds of strange voices. She rolled over, squeezed her eyes firmly shut, pushing memory of sight and smell and texture to the back of her crowded mind.

There had been the expected bombardment of questions, a torrent of clamoring media less interested in the victim than the sensationalism of the story. She had pushed past them all, past the SAC who screamed her name, past officious EMTs unloading their gear, past police officers urging calm from the gathering crowd.

His hands had been covered in blood. Not just his hands, either -- his arms, the front of his jacket. Two smeared, tiny, grasping hand prints, one on his neck, the other just along the curve of his jaw. She had gone to him, huddled on the floor of the warehouse, fallen to her knees -- a collision of bone and concrete -- and her speech had been lost in the reek of blood and his desolate eyes.

If he had spoken, it might have reassured her. If he had moved, she might have sighed with relief. Instead, he was as cold and vacant as the lifeless body in his arms, and as she reached down to close unseeing eyes, her hand had squeezed his, still clutching the small blood soaked t-shirt. He had been like stone, smooth, cold, and unresponsive to her touch.

Weaving an arm around Mulder's despondent form, she dragged him up from the filthy ground, away from the tiny life he had been unable to save. She ignored the questions and accusations and flashing lights. She left despite her own better judgment.

The ride back to the motel had been like a particularly vivid nightmare.

"I'm going to sleep."

He had said it without looking, turned away from her seeking glance.

"Mul..." But the word had died in her throat, and there was only the sound of his door swinging open, a slight pause as he stood in the open frame. She tried to reach out, to breach those few inches and graze the side of his arm, his shoulder. She tried, but that motion, too, was lost, and he closed the door slowly, deliberately, without turning around.

Her thoughts were wretched and cold now, like the night.

Was he still poised half aware? Still standing unresponsive in gory clothes thick with congealed failure? Had he moved at all beyond the few inches he had advanced into his room? She could feel him, a desolate, aching part of herself that would not, could not rest.

Eyes snapping open, the room was enclosed by shadows, the floor unutterably cold. She had enough forethought to drag discarded sneakers on over bare feet and pull on a thick jacket against the night wind. Slipping out onto the walkway beyond her door, the city lights were a gaudy blur to her right, simmering insubstantial below. His room was a floor above and two doors down. The metal clanging beneath her feet was cast iron and loud, three stories above ground, and the wind whipped her hair into a fury as she climbed the long, exposed flight of stairs.

The first night it happened (finally, after so long), she found him standing mute before his bathroom mirror. Steam rose in dense clouds, his haunted image long obscured by the curtain of condensation. She knocked twice, let herself in, found the bathroom door ajar, and pushed her way inside.

"Oh, Mulder..."

Reaching a hand up, holding a damp cloth, she rubbed away the brown smears, obscenities dotting his face like the devil's finger-paints. No response. She wiped his unyielding cheek, dropped her eyes from his granite gaze. Her fingers pushed the FBI jacket from his shoulders, worked the bindings on his bulletproof vest and lifted it away, pulled the dark shirt from the waistband of his pants. Suppressing heartache and horror, her fingers grazed blood caked and flaking, damp and still smearing.

The sound was that of an animal in pain, a convulsive sob unaccompanied by tears. Her reflex was to comfort, to find haven in shared warmth, to lend him whatever strength she could. Her arms moved gently around his waist, under his loosened shirt, and across the smooth skin of his lower back. His head fell heavy and limp to her shoulder, those noises of anguish quieter and more muffled, delivered into the curve of her neck.

The first time it happened (finally), it began with a scorch of unexpected kisses, fumbling and hot. Whispers delivered against her throat, stuttering, slow, and then needy. She could not react, felt frozen, as wind howled along the streets below. Protests formed and uncoiled in the recesses of her throat, never actually becoming words.

<No. Oh God, no. Not like this.>

His fingers, cold and trembling, found the hem of her pajama top, pushed underneath, sweeping over chilled and tingling skin.

The winter jacket slipped down to the tiled floor. His hands were rapidly warming, and his mouth moved steadily upward, lips and tongue finding her ear, jaw, the hollow beneath her chin, forcing the black walls of the warehouse into hazy memory, the stench of blood becoming less bitter in her nose.

There was no grace, no elegance in this lovemaking. There was hungry agony. There was death, the shadow of a little boy, a statistic now, third victim, fifth gone missing, cold and limp, lifeless. There was frustration, anger, and resentment over a case that would not end, a stop-start investigation, a thousand leads to nowhere. There were arguments and caustic words and angry glances, things they hadn't dared to speak, left hanging in the air... easier to leave the venom in the freeze of momentary eye contact, to not let the words become real, because then they would have had nothing.

His hands were grasping at those things between them intangible and lost, stealing over her hips and waist, crushing their bodies together in the search.

There was no asking or granting of permission, no preliminary exploration. There was desolate cold and ragged breath in the first moment, invasion in the next. All that hung unresolved and unseen between them, around them, was echoed by his teeth dragging across her lower lip, her ragged moan of despair and arousal, his fingers rough in her hair, her hands clutching at his back.

His kiss tasted bitter; he tasted like blood.

The edge of the counter top was a painful obstacle, digging into her back. His hands on her hips lifted her abruptly, placing her on the cold, damp surface next to the basin. She winced, the pain of fresh bruises on her back and shoulders.

He stepped back, for barely a moment, pulled the shirt from his body, and descended upon her once again.

That spark always between them, nurtured by so many things -- love, trust, respect -- fed the fire, ignited something that, in the end, could consume itself, lead to its own destruction. Unspoken things, hurt, blame, things that simmered beneath the surface, threatened to dominate now with this act she had imagined and always feared. She kissed back desperately, unsure when the room had grown so dark, the air so thick, her resolve so weak. When his hands began loosening buttons along the front of her pajamas, she didn't stop him, and that was the worst of all.

The room was cold; he hadn't bothered to turn on the heat. Chilled air assaulted her skin, tightening already tight nipples, leaving trails of goose flesh and shivers. Large hands, warm now and demanding, covered her breasts. Her head dropped back, tapping lightly against the dark, misted glass. She opened her eyes to the black of the ceiling above, felt the ragged shush of his breath rasping across her skin, in the valley between her breasts. Her hips lifted instinctively, his hands working the pajama bottoms down and away, and marble was frigid on bare skin.

<No, not like this. This can't help.>

Tristan Oliver was dead, and more would die soon. But they didn't belong here, hadn't belonged here from the start. Hundreds of miles from home, winter raging a steady and winning battle outside, she wondered how much longer this could go on, this struggle only they seemed to fight, where enemies were vague shadows, where everything they fought for was spirited away out of reach, where everything that had once seemed to make sense was lost and strange and unyielding.

Tristan Oliver was dead, like Timothy Crane before him and Randall Lee before that. He was dead, and more would die soon. One by one the list would shorten, more would disappear, more blood would grow dark on the floors of old warehouses and abandoned cars, and again they would falter, failing in the process.

Somewhere, Tristan Oliver's tiny, innocent body was shrouded by swarms of police, photographers, and evidence teams coaxing last bits of fragile knowledge from the cold ambit of death. Yellow crime scene tape cordoned off the area. Reporters groveled for comment like starving dogs. Mulder's footprints probably still marred the dusty floor, while miles away, tucked high and distant from ruthless lights and questions, Scully's fingers fumbled with the last barrier between them, pulled his belt free, and pushed lightly on the fabric at his waist.

He entered her swiftly, ruthlessly, then stilled, frozen. Her cry was somewhere between anguish and bliss, escaping over swollen, chapped lips. Immolation. Invasion.

Starving for air, her breathing was rapid, edged with half cries that couldn't escape. She could feel his breath as it washed across her cheek, staining her hair. His soft cries were lost to her amidst the roar in her head, the panic and desperation deep in her belly. She imagined that she was burning, that the fires would claim her and only ash would remain.

Her fingers dug deep trenches in his back, urged him on with gasping need, demanded nothing less than fury. He moved, she moved, the flames danced. Faster.

<Can't save us. Oh, God... >

A few more strokes, his breath hot on her lips, and then for a collection of heartbeats -- focused, aching, telescoped moments -- the world shattered into scintillations of light and heat, darkness crystallized, and wave after wave of pure, naked bliss broke over her, a rip tide dragging her under and away. She felt safe for that single moment, as off distant he too was swallowed whole and joined her beneath the depths. Silence. Fulfillment. And despair.

Then ragged, stumbling breaths, a rain of kisses, random droplets of apology; a kiss to the curve of her ear, her neck, her chin, dotting her cheeks, bridge of her nose, brows—out of reach. He finally landed, lost and at rest on the curve of her forehead.

"Scully."

Just her name, nothing more, and she wasn't sure what else there was to be said. The counter was cold again beneath her, the air as frigid as before this had begun. Mulder's weight above her was warm and damp, strange. Her arms were loose around his back, but she continued to hold on, sure he would slip further away if she let go for even a moment.

"Scully."

Just the shape of her name, formed against her forehead, and she had nothing to say in return. She continued to hold on, eyes closed against the night, breathing in the hideous mix of sweat and death and life filling the air, blood still a poisonous taint on his rapidly cooling skin.

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End Prologue (Part 1/29)

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Chapter 1
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The tables in the restaurant had been dressed with simple white cloths, and unscented candles in small, glass votives had cast a warm glow. The unexceptional aftermath of a case had offered an excuse for shared time together that night, a reason to not simply drive home and enter into the solitude of the weekend.

"You see, Scully, I *can* pick a restaurant where every entree doesn't come with a side of fries."

She could still feel the warm press of the glass cylinder as she had wrapped her hands around that candle, could still see the play of light over the sprinkling of fine hairs along the backs of his hands. Strangely, they had not talked about the case.

Nothing, really. The wall of silence that had grown between them in recent years had been less forbidding somehow, less frightening. Instead, their silences had been more familiar, more a comfort than a reminder of losses suffered. With him there is so much silence, she had thought, in his eyes, his gestures, even in his words, hiding between the phrases. She had come to know, with time, the faces of those silences, each of their colors in turn.

Conversation, when it had occurred, had been strange and shifting, touching upon topics they rarely explored, limits they seldom pushed.

Leaning back in his chair, his fork lying discarded among the ravaged remains of dinner...
"Most of the time, it's enough. I don't think too much about it -- don't have time to think about it..." His eyes were averted, staring into his lap until he spoke again. "Aren't you ever lonely, Scully?"

Steam rising in aromatic waves from the surface of her cup of coffee...
She had glanced around the room, then leaned forward conspiratorially and looked directly into his eyes. "I know," she challenged, then dropped her voice to a whisper, "I know a hundred ways to kill a man that a regular ME would never think to check for."

His answering laughter had been soothing and rich. "Kersh will never know what hit him. I'll distract him and you can drug his coffee."

His steady gaze had unnerved her.

"I can't wait to get out of these shoes. I feel like I've been on my feet forever." Taking refuge in the mundane.

Watching her, poised in the open doorway to the apartment -- one foot still that fraction in the hall -- he'd offered a commiserating smile. "You have been."

The action had been slow and seemingly unconscious, his hand finding hers on some impulse, a tangle of fingers. She'd stilled, turned slowly back toward him, unsure. He leaned in imperceptibly, drew the pad of his thumb over the sensitive flesh of her palm. The paralyzing fusion of eye contact had held her immobile, and in that instant she thought she had seen a million things in his eyes -- half thoughts, flickering memories, and nascent desires. She thought she had seen the desperate question:

How?

And then he had let go, eyes dropping, he had turned and fled. And suddenly she was standing inside her apartment, emotions churning in confusion, her back pressed to the solid reality of the door.

<"Aren't you ever lonely, Scully?">

Three weeks ago, a lifetime, and now:

She had wanted to stay, wanted to continue drawing her hands through his tangled hair, kissing the tears away. She had wanted her pale, shadow words to be of some comfort, some meaning; but she couldn't offer him what she didn't have, and as his tears seeped warm and wet across her flushed skin, she had doubted he could even hear her.

<Oh, God... what have we done?>

She didn't move while he cried, and when he was done, when the sorrow bleached itself into exhaustion and the dry hitch of slowing breath, she pulled back just the faintest fraction of an inch. That was all it took. A chasm gaped between them, and the faint tethers of connection fell away. That small distance was suddenly a void impassible, and he watched remotely as she pulled the discarded sides of her pajama top together and jumped down from the cold marble slab. He turned away when she picked her pants up off the floor, made no sound as she slipped them back over her hips. The whisk of his zipper was an obscene sound; his ragged sigh was somehow more painful than his tears.

He wouldn't look at her.

Crushed.

In her own bathroom, the water gushed from her faucet in a torrent, almost loud enough to drown out the sound of her sobs. Practically hyperventilating, she gasped and shook without control while the rasp of the washcloth between her legs scrubbed the evidence away. Her tears burned, her throat ached, and there was no perception of time or sound or who might hear her.

The washcloth fell with a splat to the floor, and almost as soon as her hysteria had begun, it ended, abruptly and completely. She swiped at her drenched cheeks with the backs of her hands and dragged in several deep breaths. Her head throbbed. She moved out of the bathroom. She'd never even bothered to turn on the light.

Standing before the wide, dark landscape of her motel room window, a city below lay sleeping and unaware. She would not sleep tonight. She didn't even intend to try. She felt empty and forsaken, disconnected from herself and terrified at the foreign specter of her shaking hands, the gaunt fragility of her bloodless face reflected back by the window. The glass beneath her palm was cold, the sky beyond blank and starless with clouds obscuring the heavens.

<I'm sorry, so sorry. I didn't have the strength to stay.>

Closing her eyes, she found them swollen, sticky. Tomorrow morning, she would pull herself together as best she could, meet him at the car, navigate these frozen streets, and try to catch a killer.

Staring out across the city, she watched distantly as the lights in the window of a near-by building went dark, some unknown person settling in for slumber. She pulled her hand back from the glass, wrapped arms around a body still clothed in a pajama top with buttons tucked into mismatched holes -- head pounding, throat still clogged -- and waited silently for the dawn.

~~~~

The next morning. Overheated office, where the fan swirled stale air, and sweat clung to the curve of her back, the base of her neck.

"…Not to mention leaving the scene of a crime before being questioned, giving no account of the events you witnessed, ignoring the explicit orders of your superior agent, and disregarding your own well being by refusing obviously needed medical assistance."

Air rasped through the irate SAC's teeth. He shuffled papers for a moment, stalling deliberately, making them wait. Slowly, his eyes panned over from Mulder's deceptively calm facade to light on the blank landscape of Scully's face.

"Agent Mulder's actions I could possibly excuse," he said, in mock placation. "He was upset, distraught, shocked by what he had seen. Given time, I might be able to process that and find it, if not acceptable, at least understandable why he might commit so serious a breech of protocol."

Special Agent in Charge, Douglas Moore's eyes narrowed, and he paused, solely for effect. "Agent Scully, I find no such excuse for you."

"Sir..." Mulder's voice was raw, as if from long disuse.

He was cut off before he began. "I'm sure Agent Scully is fully capable of explaining her actions without your assistance, Agent Mulder."

Silence descended once again.

"Agent Scully?"

"I..." She faltered, could feel Mulder's eyes on her, wished that he would look away. "I was more concerned with the well-being of my partner at the time, Sir, than in adhering strictly to protocol." Her words sounded brittle but strong.

"So concerned that you would deny him medical assistance?"

"I *am* a doctor, Sir"

"So concerned, Agent Scully, that when I, your immediate superior, ordered you to stop, you didn't even acknowledge the sound of my voice but instead continued walking away?"

Her voice was toneless. "I was focused on Agent Mulder at that moment, sir."

Moore's mouth opened, formed the beginnings of a word before Mulder interrupted. "I pulled Agent Scully away from the crime scene, sir. She wanted to go back, but I wouldn't let her. I couldn't."

Beside him, the muscles in Scully's jaw flexed, tightened, teeth grinding shut.

"It was my fault, sir. Agent Scully is not to blame."

Moore's eyes settled on Mulder. "You're both to blame, Agent Mulder."

The eye contact was long and unyielding. Moore flinched first. Gaze settling on the stacks of papers littering his chaotic desk, his voice was quiet but steady. "The fact remains that you are both guilty of direct disobedience, regardless of who pulled whom away. Also, and more importantly, the closest witness to the murder of a seven year old boy, a federal agent, whose clothes were soaked in blood, in evidence, who was the *only* person to witness the child's death at the hands of a killer we have no solid leads on, disappeared from the scene without so much as a word. That -- in the context of this investigation alone -- was a grievous mistake."

Fishing a folder from beneath the precariously balanced piles, Moore looked back up, finding his agents both standing preternaturally still. He smoothed large hands over the blanched yellow of a thick folder before speaking again.

"The fact remains that if it were any other agent, if any other pair of agents were responsible for this level of misconduct, there would be no question of the ramifications. However, because the men upstairs tell me so, and because I want this asshole caught, my hands are tied. Whether I like it or not, whether I recognized it at the beginning of this case or not, we need you on this."

The folder was opened, some papers removed.

"The fact also remains that you don't want to be here." His gaze was focused on Mulder. "You haven't wanted to be here from the start. But you don't have a choice now, Agent Mulder. The X-Files are no longer yours, but you are still an FBI Agent, and you are both obligated to uphold responsibilities you *will* be held accountable for."

Mulder didn't move, didn't blink, but the fury in his eyes was unmistakable -- a blaze of loss and sorrow that reeked of lost opportunities, and of betrayal.

The click of Moore's pen was loud and final in the silent room, and his last words were equally so. "We may need you, but this will not happen again. If it does, you will both be censured, removed immediately from this case, and I will let the disciplinary board decide your fates from that point on." He directed a final stern glare at both agents, first Mulder and then Scully.

Moore slammed his index finger into the desk. "This is your assignment now, accept it or don't, but don't waste my time, and don't dare to fuck up this investigation again."

He looked back down, scrawled something across white pages that glared brightly under the overhead lights.

"Dismissed."

~~~~

"He can't pull us off of this case, and he knows it."

In the car, the door slammed as Mulder settled into the driver's seat.

"He knows I can't leave this case. I'm stuck here. He knows it, and I know it."

She wanted the words and knew she wouldn't find them, settling instead for the desperate substitute of his name. "Mulder..." She could hear the weariness, the strain in that simple word.

He started the engine and pulled out onto icy roads.

"I'm just so sick of coming *this* close..." His words died, halting mid-breath and unable to find direction again.

She tried again. "Mulder, you didn't have to defend me back there." Her voice seemed lost in the spacious interior of the car.

He didn't respond, didn't turn his gaze from the treacherous road. Finally, car slowing at a stop sign, ice and salt crunching beneath their tires, "It was my fault, Scully." A tone of resignation to his words that she refused to answer, fearing the multiple meanings lying hidden in those depths.

The shrill blast of her cell-phone was a sharp tear in the quiet, and Mulder was easing the car forward again, as she flipped the tiny phone open, gazed back out over the snow, and raised it to her ear. She didn't so much as breathe while she listened. Scully didn't speak; she merely disconnected the call and continued to stare out over glacial upstate New York horizon.

Expectation didn't make it any easier.

She told Mulder without turning to face him, the words scraping along her insides, hollowing out the already empty. "There's been another kidnapping."

His sigh was resigned, soft, filling the interior of the car.

~~~~

The crime scene tape seemed perversely yellow against the stark white of the snow. A cadre of news vans, all bright lights and overdone anchorwomen, gathered at the perimeter of the yard, baying questions to anyone who passed. Inside a bureau issue car, Mulder grimaced as he surveyed the activity, little lines of quiescent fury sprouting from the edges of his lips, and Scully made a mental note of the lab people who were already at the scene.

Emerging from an official looking car was as good as erecting a large neon arrow above their heads, and the mob of reporters turned in unison towards its new prey. Mulder pushed them back with an occasional elbow in the gut, as Scully followed behind, edging through in the clearing he made. Arriving at the periphery, they stepped under the tape, a uniformed police officer handed them a clipboard, and they logged in.

Behind them, a chorus of impatient voices called Mulder's name, asked what had happened in the old Saks Mill Warehouse, demanded to know how many more children were going to die.

"I don't care how you do it, but I want these people out of here right now." Mulder didn't scream, but there was enough threat in his tone to straighten the young officer's posture, make him suck in a breath.

Scully watched as the man stepped under the tape and began barking orders at the crowd. Sighing, she followed after Mulder, who was standing a few feet ahead, talking to another officer. She assumed he had been first at the scene.

"You got the call when?"

Officer Grant -- according to his tag -- gestured for them to proceed up the paved walk to the front of the house. "A little over an hour ago, at quarter after eleven this morning."

The house was large and lovely, pretty under the freshly fallen snow, like a Christmas postcard. Outlines of white dusted the trees, left fringes of ice along the eaves of the large front porch, icicles dangling from the second story windows. The handlebars of a red tricycle peeked from the snow in the center of the front lawn, all but buried, taken hostage by the winter. Scully crunched along the ice encrusted path, suddenly saddened by the mass of muddy boot prints on the porch.

"Watch your step."

Walking through the front door, Scully tucked her hands into her coat pockets and looked around. Officer Grant led them around the edge of the living room, careful not to disturb anything and explained as he walked.

"The mother, Cynthia Deary, called 911 this morning at eleven thirteen am to report that her son had not returned from school on time and could not be located."

The lab guys were working in a slow procession from the outside of the room in. One man with a camera was carefully navigating around the busy technicians trying to document the scene.

"Apparently, Garrison Elementary had a half day of school today, and Mark Deary was due home at ten-thirty. According to the mother, he walks home every day, and when he didn't show up on time, she started calling his friends."

Scully noted that someone had brought in a video camera and was filming the room as backup documentation.

"Cynthia Deary called all of Mark's friends and the school before she decided to walk back along the path he usually takes home. When she returned to the house after looking for Mark, this is what she found."

The drapes in the living room had been opened wide, and bright sunlight flooded the room. Beyond the vast picture window was a glaring expanse of pure, white snow. Inside the house, covering the carpets in a parody of the snow outside, glass from shattered picture frames blinked in the afternoon sun, reflecting and refracting the brilliant light.

There had been a large display of photographs covering the top of a piano in the corner. Another grouping had been showcased on the wall above the couch. Every single picture had been destroyed. The frames were either still hanging pictureless and shattered on the wall or bent and broken on the floor. Glass sparkled everywhere they looked.

"We've set up road blocks and have already started a house to house," Grant offered. Both Mulder and Scully knew that such efforts had yielded little in the past.

Mulder interrupted. "Is this the only room?"

Grant shook his head, nodding in the direction of a wide hall. "No. He hit the entire first floor, but not the second. Ran out of time maybe?” He paused. “Anyway, we found no sign of him up there."

Choosing their steps slowly, Mulder and Scully moved into the hall, the chaos preceding them wherever they walked. In the dining room, a large family portrait sat demolished above a fireplace. In a home office at the end of the hall, a tiny collection of frames sprinkled the desk with fractured light.

Walking back down the hall, Officer Grant turned a different corner and led them into the kitchen.

Scully stopped in the center of the large room. "How long was the mother out of the house?"

"Forty minutes, give or take."

She nodded, turned, and came to face a small art gallery that had taken shape on the door of the refrigerator. Wide, white pieces of paper, brightly emblazoned with shapes in Crayola-glory spoke of a normal little boy and two proud parents. Scully stared at a disproportionately massive orange-yellow sun with a smiley face in the center.

Behind her, Grant's voice again. "This is the strangest thing we found."

Mulder was standing next to the counter, looking down. Scully walked over to see what had drawn his attention.

"He didn't shred every photo in the house, apparently, just the big, group pictures."

On the counter nearest the back door, the small pile of shredded photographs sat innocently near the edge. The clean, cold marble slab shone in the afternoon sun, and Scully shuddered, felt nauseated.

Impervious to her discomfort, Grant continued from the side of the door. "We think this is where he came in. It was left open, and there are boot prints in the yard leading up from the back gate."

Mulder was standing mute, seemingly transfixed by the counter, avoiding her eyes.

In the large arch leading back out to the living room, an agent in civilian clothes was hunched down at ground level and had begun the painstaking process of searching for fingerprints. Soon, Scully knew, the pretty white walls of this house would be smudged and gray.

Mulder had taken a step back from the counter and was staring out through the kitchen window. The blanket of sudden silence signaled the end of the walk through, and the trio re-traced their route through the living room, pausing in front of the door.

"The parents are at the station?" Scully asked, when Mulder seemed unwilling to offer any further comment.

"No," Grant corrected. "I was told to send them over to the FBI building, that you'd want to question them there."

It would be easier that way.

Scully nodded. "Thank you."

Out the front door and across the lawn, Scully could hear Mulder's soft steps as he followed behind. The throng of reporters had been herded behind a wooden barrier in the middle of the street, leaving a blessedly clear path to their car. Scully drew in a large breath of the crisp air, trying to clear her head. Mulder paused awkwardly when they reached the car, and she almost offered to drive before he slipped without comment behind the wheel. The car pushed back the media circus as Mulder drove, a few over-zealous individuals almost landing across the hood when he refused to slow down for their questions.

Beyond the window was the safest place for her eyes, and silence was the easiest course of action. Scully was mostly terrified because this sense of panic was something she could not sublimate or rationalize. She was far too tired for such an early hour, but she hadn't slept at all the night before, and irrationality was seeping into the edges of her thoughts. Outside, streets and houses whirled by, clouds gathered in the heavens, and inside a swiftly moving car, Scully -- for possibly the first time in her life -- felt completely powerless.

~~~~
End Chapter 1 (Part 2/29)

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Chapter 2
~~~~

Cynthia Deary had spent the majority of the interview clutching her husband's left hand in a white-knuckled grip while he ran the other compulsively through his thinning hair. A perfectly normal, professional, upper-middle class married couple. One child, dearly loved. She had long blond hair in a loose chignon that had started to fall around her face in a forgotten, messy heap. Tear tracks stained his face even though he refused to cry in front of the investigators.

A mother loses a child, or her child is in danger, and there is hollowness about her, some elemental thing that goes missing and cannot ever return. Scully questioned Cynthia Deary, looked into her eyes, and recognized pieces of herself in the vacancy of that gaze.

"I knew," she told them. "I knew the minute he was late from school."

Cynthia had cried soundlessly, little, round droplets staining wet circles into the fabric of her skirt. Tom Deary spoke no more than two words during the entire interview.

"I'd seen the reports on the news. I heard the warnings. That's why I took the morning off from work. Our nanny called in sick this morning, and I didn't want him coming home to an empty house.” She paused, took a deep, shuddering breath. “I knew."

~~~~

Mulder stood on the opposite side of the table, holding a plastic bag of shredded photographs in his hands. The door was closed, the Dearys gone, but Scully could still see the mother’s eyes, and she wondered if Cynthia Deary would have strength enough for hope. Seeing the swarm of lights and sirens on the news last night at the warehouse, the reporters who stood against a dreary backdrop of boarded-up windows to deliver in hushed and ominous tones the news of another death, another little life lost, she would fear the worst.

<We've given her little cause for hope. The evening news reports our failures night after night to every home in the country.>

Scully wanted to tell her that she knew how it felt. But she didn't, not really. It's wasn't even close to being the same thing. Emily was never hers. Cynthia Deary's pain was something she would never understand.

"It doesn't make any sense." Mulder was muttering, facing the wall.

She was about to ask him what he was talking about when he whirled around, took two giant steps towards the table, and slammed the evidence bag down against the surface.

"He swears to us that there's a pattern. He says it over and over again. The pattern's there, we just have to be willing to see it."

"When do you think he'll call again?" she asked, trying to change the subject.

Mulder stopped, stared down at the table. "Soon," he said, exhaustion apparent in his voice. "He'll call again very soon."

She stood up slowly and backed away from the table. Mulder didn't look up as she moved.

"Mulder, I have a report to write."

He didn't say anything.

She continued, not really knowing why, perhaps offering excuses because she needed to hear them herself. "Kersh hasn't heard from us since we got here, and if I don't write something up, he's going to kill us."

She trailed off, realizing that she was rambling. He was standing perfectly still, lost in some mire of thought that her words would not be able to penetrate. She choked back a sudden, unexpected sob.

Almost running, she escaped from the room.

~~~~

Two loud beeps and the screen flickered to life. The little jingle danced across the speakers as the computer booted up. Her word program was called up from an icon on her desktop. She stared at the perfect emptiness of the page and swallowed an odd, acid sting at the back of her throat.

<Destroy. Destroying. Destroyed. We are descending into destruction.>

Not words Kersh would want or understand.

Dana Scully sighed, bit her lip almost hard enough to draw blood, and tried to sum up -- in a way that was not heart breaking, did not make her hands tremble or her lips shake -- the events of the past several weeks.

It wasn't until her typing fingers encountered dampness on the keys that she realized she was crying.

~~~~

Three weeks earlier...

~~~~

"Agents, please have a seat."

Assistant Director Kersh said the words without looking up.

Biting the inside edge of her lower lip, Scully glanced up at her partner, smoothed a steady hand over the back of her skirt, and sat primly in the hard, leather chair.

"Sir, if this is about the Griffin report..."

Raising an impatient hand, Kersh silenced her excuse. "This has nothing to do with the Griffin report, Agent Scully." He said her name in a tone of voice not unlike that used when dealing with a recalcitrant four-year-old. "Though I am aware of your tardiness in that regard."

Closing the file, Kersh looked up at his two agents. "This is about another matter entirely."

His statement was met with two identically blank stares. During their time under Kersh's aegis, Mulder and Scully had perfected the art of careful indifference, able to mix stubborn refusal to break with just the subtlest nod of disdain.

When neither agent spoke, Kersh continued.

"There's a case up in Buffalo, New York," he began. "I don't know if either of you have been paying attention to the news lately."

Scully thought she might have heard something -- some tidbit that had made the national report -- a spate of kidnappings in that area.

"Kidnappings, Sir." Apparently, Mulder had heard the news as well.

"Not just kidnappings, Agent Mulder."

Kersh slid the folder he had been looking at across the desk. Scully was closer, so she reached forward to pick it up.

"A week and a half ago," Kersh began, "the body of Randall Lee, the first of three kidnapping victims, was found in an abandoned car on Haynes Street in the factory district."

Scully flipped past the printed reports and came across the photos taken at the scene. A rusted husk of a car, front tires missing, windshield smashed in, buried under a massive drift of snow.

"A homeless man, seeking shelter from the cold, discovered the body and reported it to the police."

The next picture was of the interior of the car, snow pushed back and doors open. Sitting upright in the back seat was the unmistakable figure of a little boy. The windows, too, had been smashed in, and snow covered the inside of the car and the child as well. Eyes opened wide were clouded over with the opaque mask of death, staring into the camera lens, frost clinging to the delicate lashes. He wasn't wearing any clothes, and his skin had a terrible blue-gray pallor, tiny, frail looking ribs clearly visible under the rice-paper translucency of his flesh.

Scully stared at the photo, shivered slightly despite the warmth of the office, and passed the folder to her partner while Kersh continued. "Five days later, a fourth child was taken. Stephen Gaines disappeared from his backyard while his mother took a nap indoors and his father was at work. That was a week ago." Kersh paused, picked up another folder, and handed it to Scully.

"Yesterday morning, they found another body."

Flipping past reports again, Scully found an image similar to the first. Snow again, covering the ground. This time, however, the child lay flat on his back, resting atop the snow in front of a large garbage dumpster. Hands folded across the chest, he might only have been sleeping if not for his large unseeing eyes staring up into the sky and the dark ring of bruises that circled his throat.

"This time, the local garbage collectors found the body when they came to pick up the trash. He was the second child to go missing, Timothy Crane."

Beside her, Mulder was reading through the written reports. She closed the folder in her lap and looked up at the Assistant Director. Not saying anything, she waited patiently for the proverbial other shoe to land at her feet.

"It's started a local panic," Kersh explained, breaking somewhat under Scully's gaze. "Parents are afraid to let their children out of the house. Assistant Director Rigler, who oversees the field office up there, requested your help specifically, Agent Mulder."

Mulder looked up at this, expression inscrutable.

"I told him that it wouldn't be a problem and that the two of you would be up there by this afternoon, this evening at the latest."

Mulder nodded shortly and rose to stand. He had barely spoken the entire time they'd been in the office. When it didn't appear there was anything more to be said, Scully gathered up the contents of the folder, followed Mulder's example, and walked over to the door. She was about to follow her partner into the outer office when Kersh called out behind her.

"Agent Scully."

She turned, hating the way even her name could be an insult from his lips.

"You can leave the Griffin report on my desk on your way out of the building."

She closed the door.

~~~~

The flight up was tedious and cramped. Mulder spent the first half reading the reports they had been given and the second passed out against the unforgiving airplane window. A stopover in Newark yielded a massive cup of bitter coffee and a hastily grabbed bagel to tide her over until they could find something more substantial, and then they were on their way to Buffalo. Reports were circulating about another big snowstorm due to hit the area within the next ten hours. Scully stared out through the windows across the aisle into a dense morass of clouds and prayed that it would be later rather than sooner.

A rental car was requisitioned, and the first sticky flakes began to fall as Mulder steered the vehicle out onto the already iced over roads outside of the airport.

At the field office, they walked briskly and efficiently down the long hall. Scully was busy preparing her traditional "I hope we can be of some help, Sir" speech, already anticipating the familiar resistance of primary investigators to the intrusion of outside ideas and influence.

In her years with the bureau, she and Mulder had been met with everything from outright derision to genuine gratitude. Usually, reaction to their participation ran somewhere in the middle, treading the line with veiled distrust and mild insult. It didn't help when they solved the case within only a week or two of entering an investigation that had been ongoing for several months, disregarding all popular theories in the process.

Most agents in the bureau held positions in a field or regional office, always investigating cases within their own jurisdiction. Agents brought in from outside were often referred to as "hired goons." Mulder and Scully had no such limited jurisdiction. They had never been assigned to a field office. Almost every case they investigated -- at least the ones prior to their assignment to what Mulder so graciously called 'shit detail' -- was an invasion of someone else's playground. They stepped on a lot of toes, made very few friends, and as a result, she had mostly perfected the little recitation she was about to give.

Beside her, Mulder was tall and dominating, a grim presence sheathed in fine black wool and surrounded by the swirl of a long, ebony trench coat. He knew the speech, too, but was always reluctant to give it. Her skills of placation and cooperation had always far exceeded his, and they both knew it.

He would defer to her when they entered the room, waiting until the pleasantries were over before sinking his teeth in for the kill. Often, any headway she made could be erased with only a few simple words from Mulder. She still tried, playing the politics game like a dutiful little Special Agent. She wasn't out to make any friends and didn't care to. She just wanted things to run as smoothly and quickly as possible.

The bullpen was through a pair of unmarked glass doors. Mulder held them for her, stepping back completely by habit to allow her entrance. She didn't even recognize the gesture anymore, any more than she recognized the occasional intrusion of his hand resting almost imperceptibly at the base of her spine. *That* particular gesture was less common these days, almost gone completely, and when she allowed herself to consider it -- which was not often -- it was with a distant, muted sorrow.

Metal desks, some divided from their neighbors by low walls, marched in neat rows from the door, across the large room, and all the way to the back wall. Windows dominated most of the wall facing the street, allowing a spectacular view of downtown Buffalo. The wall at the end, opposite the doors they had entered through, was another facade of glass, made opaque this time by beige mini blinds on the other side. In the center of it was a door with the title "Special Agent in Charge Douglas Moore" clearly stenciled in neat, black letters. The whole effect was stark and vast, practically surrounded on all sides by those high, glass shields.

They walked across the room, glancing mildly at the scattering of agents present. Most of the desks were unoccupied, though they showed obvious signs of recent use. Several agents were seated at desks, absorbed by their computer screens. One was busy absent-mindedly picking at the remains of his lunch.

A short, firm knock on the Agent in Charge's door, and they were admitted with a terse "Come." Whatever speech Scully may have had prepared was forgotten the moment they entered the office.

"Agent Mulder," Moore began, without introduction, as soon as the door was closed. "The first thing I think you should know is that I did not request your assistance on this case."

The partners traded quick, slightly bewildered glances. Scully spoke when Mulder did not. "Sir?"

"Agent Scully," Moore acknowledged. "My men have been handling this case since the first child went missing. They've been working their collective asses off on this thing for months."

Moore was in his early fifties with sandy blond hair stained by intermittent streaks of gray. He had serious, dark eyes, a simple, attractive enough face, and the shadows of two-day-old stubble shading his cheeks. When he continued, Scully uncharacteristically thought that his eyes might be quite pleasant if he wasn't tired and frustrated.

"We haven't achieved much, but we haven't had much to go on, either. Progress has been slow and painful, but it *is* being made."

Moore paused, coughed roughly, a long-time smoker's cough.

"I'll be direct, Agents." His gaze shifted from Scully to Mulder. "I don't hold a very high opinion of profiling as a method to help capture a suspect. I think it may only serve as a distraction in this case. I did not request your help as a profiler, and if it wasn't a direct order from AD Rigler, you would not be here right now."

Scully took in a sharp breath, surprised at the direction the conversation had taken. Mulder didn't say a word, clearly not surprised at all, and this worried Scully. She didn't glance over at him, but she knew the inevitability of his interruption. She dreaded his silences; they were always portents of unpleasant things to come.

Again Moore's attention changed, switching back to Scully. "I am, however, sure that the pathology department will be more than happy to turn this thing over to you, Agent Scully. Though I don't know what else you'll be able to find. The deaths have all been fairly straight-forward."

She merely nodded.

Mulder's voice was a shock after his long silence, and she almost jumped at his sudden, quiet, even tone, despite the fact that she had been expecting it.

"The Investigative Support Unit has spent years and countless man-hours interviewing and studying hundreds of serial murderers, rapists, child molesters, and mass murderers in an ongoing effort to understand their motivations, personalities, crimes, and methods. These agents are *trained* psychologists. Their findings are not manufactured nor based on ignorant conjecture." Mulder's voice was a deadly soft timbre that teetered gently on the cusp of insubordination.

"You have no suspect and no idea of where to start," he said, bluntly. "'Behavior reflects personality,' and if you at least had some idea of this perpetrator's personality, you might be that much closer to narrowing down who you're looking for. As you now stand, it could be anyone. Any one of the several hundred thousand people living in this city. It could be one of your own men, for all you know."

Moore severed Mulder's continuing speech, his tone a warning. "You know as well as I do that it isn't one of my men."

Mulder simply blinked mildly. He had said the words to get a reaction. He always did.

Moore's irritation grew. "You also know that the use of a profiler is usually a last resort, and that even when a profiler *is* used, their participation results in an instant arrest in only five percent of all cases."

Not Mulder's profiles, Scully thought. She didn't say this, and neither did Mulder, but when she glanced at him, she was not at all surprised to see a glint of challenge hiding in his eyes. We'll see, his eyes said. She was always uneasy when she saw that expression.

Moore's voice was imposing. Scully could easily see how he was able to command such a large group of agents. He was a leader, that much was undeniable, and also a man who was not accustomed to his authority being challenged. "I will not have my agents sidetracked by vague speculations and untenable theories." The words were slow and final. They brooked no argument.

"Agent Haydn is waiting out in the bullpen for you both. He's agreed to take the two of you to the crime scenes and to introduce Agent Scully to the pathologist who did both of the autopsies."

Mulder's expression hadn't changed. Scully knew it was far from over, even if he'd decided to keep his peace for the time being.

She assumed that they had been dismissed and began moving towards the door. Hand on the knob, she turned back to summon Mulder. He was standing motionless in front of Moore's desk. She didn't say anything. He would feel her eyes on him. She knew that.

Moore had to be given credit. He maintained the stare, unflinching. Mulder eventually turned and walked to where Scully was waiting. She breathed a sigh of relief. Before leaving the room, Mulder turned back to Moore. "I was assigned to this case for a reason, and I intend to do my job."

It wasn't a challenge or a threat. It was the truth. Not for the first time, Scully wondered how much that truth might cost them in the end.

~~~~

Agent Haydn was an agreeable enough, if exhausted, agent. He wasn't overly helpful, but he wasn't a hindrance, either, and that was more than she had expected after exiting Moore's office. They went to the second scene first, starting where the trail was fresh, but there was little to be seen except an old dumpster, tattered police tape, and six inches of fresh snow covering the ground. From the look on Mulder's face, he hadn't expected much to begin with. After that, they decided against going to the first scene until the next morning, worried about road conditions and knowing that they weren't likely to find much anyway.

In the car on their way to the motel, Scully asked the question that had been bothering her since the beginning of the argument in Moore's office.

"Who said anything about profiling, Mulder?" She was careful with her words, but she knew he would hear the concern in them.

Sighing, he didn't turn to look at her when he answered. "I knew I'd be profiling the minute Kersh gave us this case, Scully."

"How did you know?"

His reply was slow, considered. "Assistant Director Rigler was the Buffalo SAC during a case I worked here when I was with the ISU."

He didn't elaborate, and she had to prompt him for more. "Why does that necessarily mean you'll be profiling?"

"It was a nasty case," he said, sounding reluctant to continue. "When I arrived on it, I only pointed out what I thought was obvious." His words held a trace of self-deprecation. "I guess it hadn't been so obvious to everyone else."

Scully looked out over the darkened Buffalo streets that sailed past her window and hid her smile. The things Mulder saw so easily were often completely invisible to average men.

"They caught the killer?" She knew the answer before she asked the question.

His voice was small. "Yeah." And then, after a beat, "so, if Assistant Director Rigler asked specifically for me, he expects me to profile."

Remaining silent for a few breaths, Scully asked a simple question. "How long had you been on the case before you caught the suspect?"

"Two weeks."

"And how long had the rest of the investigative team been working on the case before you got there?"

Mulder turned away from the road, glanced over at Scully briefly, and smiled a tiny, knowing smile.

"Six months."

Only five percent of all cases, indeed.

~~~~

Dinner -- at ten minutes till midnight -- was turkey and Swiss on rye from the all night deli next to the motel (since no one would deliver during the snow) and case files spread out like a trailer park after a tornado over the covers of both beds and the floor of Mulder's motel room.

Scully took a sip of her soda, rubbed a weary hand over her aching eyes, and stood up. "I can't do it anymore. I'm about to fall asleep with my eyes open."

His only acknowledgment was the shuffling of papers from the other bed.

She gathered up her things and tried again. "Mulder, I'm going to sleep."

Still no reply.

Chagrined, she walked over to stand beside her partner and looked down at the file he was reading. It was the police report on the third child taken, Tristan Oliver.

"Mulder?"

Nothing.

She placed a hand on his shoulder and squeezed lightly. When he looked up, his expression was only half aware, and she pulled her hand away to rest limply at her side.

"I'm going to bed," she repeated.

"Okay."

He looked back down at the file as if he hadn't really heard her at all.

She stood there for another moment, watching him as he turned the page and began reading again. When she left the room, she had to forcefully squash down some unnamable sadness that she did not want to own. That night, in her bed, sleep was a very long time coming, and dread loomed large and commanding in the forefront of her thoughts.

~~~~
End Chapter 2 (Part 3/29)

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Chapter 3
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"... and we should expect the eighth big snow storm in a winter that is already breaking all the records to show up sometime late Saturday night."

In the car, on their way to the field office. The announcer's voice droned on, talking of wind chill factors and the day in 1949 that previously held the record they had broken last night with a record book worthy temperature of five degrees, wind chill not a factor. On and on, and Scully could imagine countless school children lined up in front of their radios, faces full of hope, praying for the blessed reprieve of a snow day.

"... so if you're forced to brave the great outdoors this morning, don't forget to bring your mittens."

Scully paused at the familiar words, grasping onto a memory so far in the past it seemed only a phantom. So insufferably smug, he had been. So delightfully, infuriatingly difficult. She glanced over at her partner, remembering the warm, then disconcerting and unfamiliar tingle of his breath just above her ear as he had spoken. Mulder turned, sought out her eyes, and shared the memory with a tiny smile.

~~~~

A trip to the scene where the first body had been found was as pointless as they had expected it to be, and as cold. Teeth chattering, they had made their way back to the field office.

"I'm beginning to think the whole point to the positioning of the bodies is merely to demonstrate how efficiently the weather can erase evidence," Scully reflected ironically, as they stood in the elevator.

Mulder didn't reply, and she watched as his jaw tightened, the doors opening with a sudden ping.

Down the hall and through the bullpen, they came to stand in the doorway to a small conference room, made all the smaller by stacks of files in boxes, on top of boxes, on tables, in precarious towers, and laid out in an abstract display across the floor.

"This is everything, all the evidence that's been uncovered over the course of the investigation. If you two need anything else, I'll be out at my desk."

Janice, Agent Moore's administrative assistant, looked at them both expectantly. She had the no nonsense demeanor of a woman who had worked with The Boys for a very long time, and Scully doubted she did such pedestrian things as fetch coffee anymore.

"Thank you. You've been more than helpful."

She gave a short nod, not quite a smile, and shut the door softly on her way out.

Scully folded her arms and turned to Mulder. She tilted her head forward, drew in a breath through pursed lips, and peered at him beneath raised brows. "This should be fun. Divide and conquer?"

"Left" he announced.

"Right," she concurred, and they turned simultaneously to their elected ends of the room.

The stacks appeared to have some sort of order, at least. The various crime scene reports were in two small boxes near the door. Scully found the autopsy files stacked together at the end of the table and set them aside for perusal before her meeting with the forensics staff downstairs. Detailed profiles of each of the four families sat in a large box in the center of the table. On the floor at the back of the room loomed several, crowded boxes of compiled research into the possible means of victim selection -- a point the investigation had primarily focused on.

Scully picked up the autopsy reports, sank into an uncomfortable chair, weary resignation escaping in a puff of expelled air, and began to read.

~~~~

"Three and a half hours, and I still can't make sense of the MO," Mulder said, the first to raise his head from the mess.

"He smashes the framed pictures in each home when he takes a child, paying special attention to the portraits of the entire family, or photos with more than one member present. Now, from a pop-psychology viewpoint, the analysis is damned obvious -- he hates those pictures, hates what they represent. Something about these families upsets him, makes him jealous or angry enough to need to destroy the evidence of their existence."

Scully had put down her pen, not sure where he was going with this.

"I've seen similar symbolic destruction many times over the course of my work with the ISU. It's a fairly common means of venting anger or frustration towards something or someone you cannot otherwise confront. But that's not it; that’s too neat, too simple. That's what doesn't make sense."

Scully nodded, following at last.

"If this were merely another example of that type of symbolic destruction, he should be picking more consistent targets. Shattering family portraits, coupled with the kidnapping of the children, would primarily indicate that he envies the lives of these children, their happy homes. But he's not always choosing children from typical, sit-com, 'Leave it to Beaver' families."

"What do you mean?" Scully broke in.

"Tristan Oliver's mother had just been through a messy child custody battle after walking out on her husband of twelve years. Timothy Crane's mother was practically decapitated by a drunk driver just three weeks before his ninth birthday. The Lees and the Gaines are both still happily married, or apparently so. Other than the ages of the children, there is no consistency to the families he's choosing."

"Can't it be as simple as that?" she asked. "He couldn't just be going after boys between the ages of eight and ten?"

"No." Mulder dismissed her question outright. "The pictures are of primary significance. He's sending a message, he's telling us exactly *why * he's doing this. He wouldn't destroy the photos if he didn't have something he was trying to say, or if the message wasn't directly connected to the families themselves."

She could see the logic behind Mulder's argument. "There aren't any other commonalties between the families that he could be targeting? Some other aspect they all share that he resents?"

Mulder looked down at the chaos of papers spread out before him, then over at Scully with her neatly arranged stacks of files, and then back to his own work. She noticed his scrutiny and rewarded him with a faint, rueful smile. He began reciting the known facts.

"Randall Lee, our first victim, lived in a modest middle class house with both parents -- Catherine, who worked with property management at Century 21, and Richard, a freelance graphic artist. He had two older sisters, Beth and Ashley, ages 12 and 17. Investigators interviewed the family and stated that they appeared loving and devastated by the loss of their son. In short, nothing abnormal."

Pausing, Mulder reached out to draw a particular folder closer to where he sat.

"For his second victim, he went to the total opposite end of the spectrum. Timothy Crane's family had just been torn apart by tragedy. Four months ago, three weeks before his ninth birthday, his mother, Grace, was involved in a head-on collision when another car swerved over the line and into her lane. The driver was drunk, three times the legal limit. She was killed instantly. Under New York State's no tolerance law, the perpetrator is now serving a hefty sentence for vehicular homicide in a state prison. Alan Crane, who works as a computer programmer with Luminary Technologies, was left to raise both Timothy and his twin sister Charity on his own. When friends of the family were interviewed, they said that the only reason Alan was still alive at all was for the children. His wife's death destroyed him."

Mulder pushed the folder away and grabbed another. Across the table, Scully had leaned back against her seat and was busy filing Mulder's words away into pockets of relevance in her mind.

"For a different kind of tragedy, he went after victim number three. Tristan Oliver's parents were recently divorced. It was very messy, and the child custody argument was particularly brutal. After months in the courts, custody was finally awarded to the mother, Madeline, an executive secretary with Exemplary Publishing House. His father still lives nearby and works as an on-again, off-again musician. He has one sibling, a sister, Eliza, ten months old.

"And for number four, Stephen Gaines. Mother and Father, Camille and Keith, are still together and expecting another child, their second, two months from now. The mother is a homemaker. The father is a successful lawyer, not a full partner but well on his way, at Wakefield and Chase uptown."

Mulder stopped, stood up, and walked over to the water cooler in the corner of the room. He leaned down and grabbed one of the little plastic cups, filled it with water, and downed it in one gulp. Looking up at Scully, he silently asked her if she wanted a drink.

Bringing the exchange into the audible realm. "No thanks," she responded, "But I would kill for a cup of coffee."

He raised his eyebrows. "Coffee?" Walking over to the door, he said, "Let's go see what we can dig up."

Eager for a break, and in desperate need of caffeine, Scully followed Mulder out of the conference room. In front of Janice's desk, they paused and he asked for directions. Out of the bullpen and down the hall to a lounge, they both noted the distant nature of the other agents. Thinking about it, Scully decided that no one they had met had been overtly rude or difficult. They all just seemed exhausted. This case had been going on for far too long, and its recent descent into a serial murder investigation as opposed to merely a series of kidnappings had to have been a debilitating blow to the team.

Scully leaned against the edge of a table while Mulder discovered the empty coffeepot, looked around for the filters, and brewed a fresh pot. Waiting while the machine hissed and sputtered, emitting a few preliminary drops, Mulder turned and regarded her.

"So, did you find out anything interesting while you were reading?" He knew she would share. He was just prompting.

"Well," she began, "as we already knew, the investigation up until this point had been primarily focused on discovering how the children were being chosen. They were hoping to find some distinct connection like a day care center or a doctor's office from where they could obtain a list of obvious suspects."

"They didn't find anything." A statement, not a question, from Mulder.

"No. And they tried everything, eventually. Schools, friends, playgroups, sports teams, even hospitals the boys were born in and the stores the parents frequented for their clothes. On the parent's side, they were equally thorough. Everything from jobs, high schools attended, military and political affiliation, doctors again, obgyns the mothers went to. There are stacks and stacks of abandoned inquiries trying to establish a link between these children, and *nothing* has been found."

Mulder's next statement surprised her. "They're not going to find what they need with that information."

She looked up at him. "Why not? He has to be choosing them somehow."

"I agree. But I don't think how he's choosing them has anything to do with something as pedestrian as a common pediatrician or little league coach. If it were as easy as that, the family wouldn't have so much to do with it and the smashed pictures wouldn't be an issue."

She could feel them slipping into their familiar opposing roles. "But, Mulder, even if the family *is * the reason he's taking these children, the fact remains that there has to be some method that he's using to select them. Whatever particular trait he's looking for in these families, you said it yourself, he's not just going after any random house he sees with a nine-year-old boy in the front yard. There has to be a specific connection to the families. There has to be a way he is being personally introduced to these little boys. Your whole theory about the photographs hinges on that personal knowledge."

Scully was leaning against the table with arms crossed high across her chest. Unconsciously, Mulder adopted a similar pose.

"I think that the reason for the photographs *is* the method."

Scully's expression was puzzled.

He paused, searching for an explanation. She knew that his theories were often difficult to articulate. "I don't know what it is. I don't understand what he's looking for yet, but I believe that whatever it is, somehow it's obvious to him. He can see what he's searching for when he looks at those children, and that's why they're chosen."

The coffee maker was dormant now, full, and Mulder turned to fill two mugs.

With his back to her, "In order to solve this case, we need to find out what it is he's looking for, why these children are special, what those pictures mean."

She watched as he poured a small amount of cream into her cup and then a pile of sugar into his own. She scrunched her face up slightly in distaste, all too familiar with his coffee drinking habits. He handed her the steaming mug.

"That's where this investigation needs to be focused. They won't catch this guy by questioning schoolteachers and bus drivers. They need to know how his mind is working."

She stared him down. "Mulder, you know how..."

He interrupted. "Vague, intangible, untenable those theories could be?"

She made a frustrated noise in her throat. "You're going to be looking for things you won't be able to prove, throwing out Moore's entire investigation in the process."

"Yeah." He seemed suddenly tired. "I know that already. But it's unavoidable. This is the only way we'll catch this guy. This is what I came here to do. This is why we were given this case."

Scully scowled into her coffee, annoyed for complicated reasons, because this couldn't just be simple, because it was *never* simple with Mulder, because he was probably right, and because she didn't want to see his theories ripped apart by Moore. She was so very sick of people who dismissed his ideas out of ignorance, treating him like the resident crack addict, almost as sick as she was of the accusing glares they then shot in her direction, wondering why she stayed, accusing her of defending him. Kersh did that, dismissed Mulder outright as a lunatic, irredeemable, and she became the target. She was the one responsible, because she should have known better.

They were silent for several minutes while she sipped the hot liquid, relishing warmth amidst the cold she felt surrounded by in this place.

"When are you going down to meet with the Pathology department?"

She sighed deeply, staring into her cup of coffee. "Two hours. I still have to take a more complete look at the autopsy reports, so I know what questions to ask."

She couldn't see it, but she felt his nod. His fingers grazed her elbow briefly. "Let's get back to work, then."

Side by side, they walked back down the hall.

~~~~

Five hours later, her feet throbbed with a dull ache, her hair was still in the loose ponytail created while down in the lab, and hunger like an unwelcome house guest was taking up all of her concentration. She trudged down the hall, through the bullpen where several of agents were still at work despite the later hour, and pushed wearily into the conference room.

"Mulder?"

At first she didn't see him and wondered if he had left for another break or to use the bathroom. She was about to leave, to check in the lounge, when the sound of shuffling papers caught her attention.

Stepping slowly around the table, feeling foolish in the small room, she rounded the edge and stopped in her tracks.

"Mulder, what are you doing?"

He didn't answer or even look up. On the floor behind the table, he was crouched in front of a long row of boxes, papers spread out before him like new, white carpet. In his hands he held an open folder. She watched with growing dread as he stared at the pages and reached up slowly to trace the paper with the tip of one long finger.

She took a step closer, was about to speak, and was suddenly captivated by the expression on his face.

He looked... absent. That was the first and only word she could think of. The disproportionate nose, the shape of the jaw, the long lashes shading his eyes, those were all the same. But Mulder was not there. Sometime during the three hours she had been down at the lab, Mulder had disappeared within himself and left only a shell behind.

She kneeled down, insinuating herself gently at his side. Looking at the folder he held, she found it full of photographs. He was staring at a wide shot of a child's bedroom. Glass covered the furniture and floor. Bloody footprints ringed the bed.

Unsure of exactly what to do, she reached out, trusted that he would respond to her, and laid a careful hand over his fingers that touched the picture. She squeezed lightly, called his name.

"Mulder, please."

A delayed reaction -- he seemed to not even notice for a few heartbeats -- and then he flinched slightly, turned his head to look at her with still distant eyes. "Scully." Almost a question.

"Mulder, it's time to go. We should go."

She thought she saw him nod, and then they rose. She took the folder from his hands.

~~~~

"Dinner?"

She scowled. "As long as it's not Chinese. I can't handle Chinese again."

His chuckle was slight from the other bed. "What's the matter, Scully? Had your fill of MSG already?"

She kept her tone flat. "For at least the next two decades."

His voice on the phone faded into a minor buzz in the background. She closed her eyes, toed her pumps off and let them fall over the edge of the bed, wiggling her stockinged feet indulgently. She was starving, and tired, and frustrated, and a plethora of other things she wasn't yet ready to name.

"Italian place down the street. Should be here in fifteen minutes."

She murmured her assent and heard him disconnect the call.

Silence became a welcome, comfortable presence between them, and she was content, for that one small moment in time. She listened to the creak of ancient springs on the other bed, as he settled against the pillows. She did not open her eyes. The TV turned on, sound low, and he flipped quickly through the channels.

...static, talk show, infomercial...

"Mulder?" She had a sudden question. "Why does Moore have such a problem with you?"

Expecting a flippant remark, or more likely a shrug indicating his own ignorance, Scully was startled by Mulder's seemingly off topic response. "You know where they keep the ISU, don't you, Scully?"

She rolled onto her side to face him and answered slowly, confused by the turn in conversation. "At Quantico. It's a part of the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime..."

Mulder cut her off. "Sixty feet below ground. Underneath the indoor firing range in an old nuclear fallout shelter."

He paused and got up from the bed. "To get down there, you have to press LL in the elevator. Lower than low." There was a pause there that might have been meant for a mirthless chuckle, might not have been, and he left it empty. "You step out of the elevator into this labyrinth of long, dark corridors. No windows, no light, these tiny, soundless rooms."

He walked away from Scully, towards the window, and flattened his palm against the glass.

His voice was suddenly flat, desolate. "There were some nights, I swear I could watch as the walls closed in. I kept waiting to suffocate." He didn't look at her as he spoke. "The ISU receives over eleven thousand cases every year, and they have only ten full time profilers." Repressed outrage in his tone.

"When I joined the ISU," he continued, "barely half of the bureau thought that we should be doing profiling at all. Witchcraft, they said. A bunch of hocus pocus that didn't even yield a name, just vague conjecture about insignificant things like whether or not the suspect's mother was dominating and if he liked to dress up in women's clothes on the weekends."

His fingers tensed against the unyielding, transparent barrier, whitening the tips. "They had us down there, crawling through the minds of monsters, creating and sustaining and willingly walking into the most vivid nightmares... *Ten agents,* and they still manage about 800 full profiles a year, despite the fact that to this day, there are large portions of the bureau that think profiling is a waste of both time and resources."

He stopped for a breath, and when he spoke again, she could hear an emotion in his previously empty words -- a vague, bitter distaste. "But it's not concrete. It's not exact. It's not a hair or a fiber or a smear of blood. You can't hold it, and you can't analyze it. I construct a profile," he sighed, faintly, "and I can point out some of the substance behind my findings, some of the evidence to support my theories, but for the most part, I can't explain it. I can't rationalize it, and I can't document it. All I can offer is what I *know* is right, not *how* I know.

"It's what makes me good at what I do, and it's also what makes men like Moore suspicious and often belligerent when forced to work with a profiler."

Scully moved finally, rising from the bed and stepping warily towards her partner; not moving to actually touch, just to be closer.

"But your work," she protested. "You've proved your abilities time and again. How can anyone possibly doubt what you do after seeing the results you get?"

His shoulders were slumped, body leaning in towards the window. If he moved any farther forward, she feared his forehead would come to rest against the flat, hard surface of the glass and he would slide gradually to the floor.

"The things you have to do, the person you have to become." His tone was hushed, disgust hanging over every word. "You can't approach a killer with hatred and anger. You have to be able to walk into an interrogation room, a prison cell, and truly be able understand this person, win his trust, empathize. You have to be able to laugh with butchers, baby killers, and rapists, to discuss details of the most hideous crimes with genuine indifference. You can't even pretend, because they can see right through it. Most of the time, they're smart, smarter even than we are, so in order to be successful, you have to *become* like them. You can't hate them."

She couldn't imagine, didn't even want to try. Her anger grounded her through cases like this; made it possible to face mutilated little bodies and the violation of innocence. The thought that her partner, her friend, a man she trusted with her life was able to laugh and empathize with child molesters and men who tortured for pleasure, the thought of him trying to relate to the motivations of those men frightened her. It was like ice water running down her spine.

His hand had relaxed. Her eyes were strangely drawn to the shapes of his long, slender fingers.

"During some cases, I used to look in the mirror and find a stranger staring back. I couldn't recognize myself. I disgusted myself, and I was terrified I'd never see a familiar reflection again."

Suddenly, his shoulders tensed, she stepped back, and he moved away from the window, turning to face her. "Part of the reason Moore doesn't like me is because I scare him." Eyes unfocused, he wasn't really looking at her while he spoke. His last words were very quiet, but still somehow steady and sure. "I scare myself sometimes."

The phone shattered the silence between them, startling Scully. Mulder moved away from the window and walked past her without looking up from the floor. She watched the top of his head from his abandoned post by the window, as he scooped the phone up to answer it. His first hello didn't alert her, his second broke her attention from the conversation they'd just had, and his third brought her around the bed to stand beside him at the phone.

Mulder caught her eyes, reached out to turn the volume on the phone up, and gestured for her to sit down. She settled next to him, leaning in, and could hear nothing. After a moment, she thought she could discern light breathing. Heads together, she was about to tell Mulder to hang up when the caller spoke.

"Agent Mulder?"

"Yes." Mulder's voice was hesitant, "Speaking."

Silence for another breath.

"I was just wondering," the speaker paused. "I was wondering if you had figured out the message behind the photographs yet, Agent Mulder?"

The voice was curious and calm. Scully held her breath. Something sinister coiled deep in her belly.

"I was wondering if you had been able to see yet what the others have not?"

~~~~
End Chapter 3 (Part 4/29)

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Chapter 4
~~~~

It was customary for high profile investigations to leave certain, key bits of information out of the press statements, as a cautionary practice. It gave the officials a means to sort through the inevitable weirdoes that sprang from the woodwork as soon as an investigation hit the papers. From the very first kidnapping, the Buffalo PD, and then the FBI field office, had omitted any mention of the broken picture frames. It was key; it was unique. When the front desk was flooded with "confessions," they would know right away who the crackpots were.

No one outside of the immediate investigation was supposed to know about the photographs.

"Photographs?" Mulder was playing dumb.

"Please, Agent Mulder, don't be coy. It isn't your style."

Scully, knowing this was the real thing, scrambled for her cell phone and called the field office.

"This is Agent Dana Scully, badge number JTT03316613. I need a trace on a phone line immediately. The Stay and Save Motel on route twelve, room 316."

Beside her, Mulder spoke again. "What am I supposed to be able to see?"

Scully disconnected her call when she got confirmation and leaned back towards Mulder. She caught the end of the kidnapper's next sentence.

"... would be cheating. That would defeat the whole purpose. It's not in my nature to be self defeating." There was a pause, and then out of nowhere, "You have a partner now. She's beautiful, and I assume that she's not only started a trace on this call by now, but has joined the conversation as well."

Scully's mouth opened on an unformed word. Mulder only stared off into the middle distance.

"Now? How do you know me?"

"You've been here before, Agent Mulder. I know you remember. 1987. They said you were brilliant back then -- caught the uncatchable. I'd already seen the obvious myself by the time you arrived, but I was impressed that someone as young and... unformed as you were then could also see it, could make that leap."

Mulder let out a huff of breath. "A compliment?"

"Yes. You can consider it that. Well deserved, I think."

Polite compliments from a man who hunts little boys as a hobby, Scully thought, feeling ill.

"I'm sure you're wondering how I found this number, so I'll spare you the question. I saw the two of you outside of the federal building yesterday, and I'm afraid I followed you back to your motel, just to see which rooms you were in. That was the only way to get the number."

His tone took on a note of surprise. "I have to say, it was a bit of a shock. I hadn't thought I'd become so high profile yet. I hadn't thought they'd give up so easily. It’s flattering, actually, and a pity that their minds are so narrow, but I know to expect better from you. I'm just wondering how long it will take."

Looking down, Scully noticed Mulder's hand clenching and unclenching into a repeated fist. She gritted her teeth and wondered how long the trace would take.

"You called for a reason. Was it just to inquire about the pictures?"

A soft laugh across the phone line. "Engaging me in conversation won't help you with the trace, Agent Mulder, but I did call for a reason. Your being here puts me in a unique position. I am more than aware of your skill with these matters, and while it does add a certain pressure to my circumstances, it presents an interesting opportunity at the same time."

"What opportunity?"

"To communicate with someone who may actually look in the right directions."

The line went quiet for a moment.

"I'm going to make you an offer, give you a 'clue,' if you want to call it that. The next time I make a move, I'll leave you a message. The clock is running, Agent Mulder. I would be careful how long you take."

The knuckles on Mulder's fist were white. "You're playing games with innocent lives!"

The answer was immediate, sharp and scornful. "Innocence? Innocence is a myth, a sacred word that has been raped of its meaning, and this is not a game. I am very serious about this, as are you."

Mulder was about to speak again when the kidnapper interrupted. "I'm sorry. Our time is up for now. I'll be looking forward to seeing your interpretations. You don't want to make me wait too long, Agent Mulder."

And then he was gone.

~~~~

"You wanted last resort. This is last resort time!"

Mulder was fuming, pacing the length of AD Moore's office in unrestrained agitation.

"Agent Mulder, sit down now!"

Mulder stopped in his tracks, turned around, and glanced over at Scully. She was standing near the door, watching without speaking.

"You, too, Agent Scully."

It was not a request. They both sat down, taking the two chairs in front of Moore's desk. Moore waited a moment, staring at Mulder, apparently waiting for him to calm down. When Mulder stopped fidgeting and was completely still, Moore spoke.

"I'm sure you know by now that we weren't able to get a trace on the call. Whatever technology he was using, it was fairly advanced. That call was re-routed all over the Hemisphere."

Mulder didn't say anything, and his expression was perfectly blank. Finally, his voice a warning, "We are no longer going to have the luxury of time with this case. Up until this point, our murderer had just been observing the investigation, and that's fairly common. Many serial murderers try to form some sort of connection to their case, hanging around the crime scenes, blending in with the crowd, going to places where the officers congregate to try and overhear conversations about the investigation. Our subject has moved beyond that. Now, he's chosen an adversary."

Moore stared into Mulder, not even blinking at his statement. He spoke with a hint of disbelief in his tone. "You?"

"It's become even more personal for him now," Mulder said, by way of affirmation. "It's become a matter of pride, to a certain extent. Not a game, really. He's proving himself to himself, not just to us. But now, with a definite opponent, a voice, a personality, and a face to challenge, he's going to begin moving a lot more quickly, with less and less time between acts. You won't have weeks anymore. You're going to have days."

"How do you know?" Moore had folded his arms across his chest and was sitting back slightly, appraising Mulder.

"It's what I do," Mulder answered, flatly. "This could be a double-edged sword. It may give us a certain advantage. If he begins moving more quickly, he could make a mistake. However, this will also make him more serious about what he's doing. It could refine him, make him more precise, more deadly."

Agent Moore still had an uncertain look on his face, as if unsure whether to be alarmed or to dismiss Mulder's words as mere foolishness.

"I've been here before, Sir," Mulder said, suddenly. "This isn't the first time I've been 'picked out' by a suspect."

Beside him, Scully sat up straighter, remembering Modell and Barnett, somehow knowing those cases were not what he was referring to. There was a reluctant taint to his voice, hesitance. This was something related to his time with the ISU, a time he rarely discussed. He never spoke of profiling unless forced to.

"It was right before I left the ISU, one of my last cases." Mulder was staring into his lap, voice much fainter now. "The subject called the field office just to taunt the investigators. He wanted to brag. Because I was the profiler, and the psychologist, I got phone duty." A tiny, ugly grin graced his face for barely a second. Scully doubted Moore had even seen it.

"I talked to him. This was back before tracing a call was as easy as it is now. It took time. So I stalled, really tried to engage him in conversation, and by the time he hung up, he had decided that I 'understood,' that I was the only one who truly understood him."

Scully could feel it coming, a little knot that formed in the pit of her stomach. Anticipation. Something bad was coming.

Mulder's fingers laced and unlaced nervously in his lap.

"We ended up cornering the guy in a house, finally got him to stay on the phone long enough to get a complete trace. But by the time we got there, he had taken a hostage. He barricaded himself inside with a seventeen year old girl."

Mulder drew in a shaky breath. "We heard gunfire. When the team finally entered the house, the subject had killed himself and the hostage. He shot her in the head."

Raising his head, Mulder looked straight at Agent Moore. "He left a note on the girl's body. It said, 'for Agent Mulder, who knew.' "

Scully closed her eyes briefly, swallowed the lump in her throat, feeling a familiar compassion for her partner and his "gift." There was something within Mulder that never allowed him to let go, something intrinsic to him now that stemmed from the disappearance of his sister so many years ago. Scully knew, with a bone deep certainty, that Mulder blamed himself for that girl's death. She knew that he could recall her face in exact detail to this day.

Scully looked over at him, but he did not look back.

"You want to know how I know what I do, Sir? It's because I've done all of this before. I've been *right here* more times than I can even count."

Mulder stood up. "And right now, I have no idea how to stop this."

Outside, it was completely dark, late. Light snow stuck and melted against the window behind Moore's desk. Scully watched Moore considering Mulder's words and then felt Mulder's eyes on her. By the time she looked up, he had already glanced away and was turning for the door. He left the room without looking back, and Moore didn't attempt to stop him.

"Agent Scully."

Shaking herself free of some odd paralysis, Scully turned to the SAC. "Yes, Sir."

"What is your opinion of Agent Mulder's theory?"

Scully stopped, actually thought about the question, and answered quickly and with certainty. "I have been partners with Agent Mulder for six years, sir, and I have seen his talent with this kind of investigation time and again. He's good at this. The best. I don't pretend to know how he does it; I just know that he does."

Moore nodded, accepting her words. "You're dismissed, Agent Scully."

She left the room in search of her partner.

~~~~

Mulder was not in the bullpen. He was not in the conference room or the lounge or the bathroom. When she asked a few people if they had seen him, no one could give her a definite answer. Flipping open her phone, she hit his speed-dial button and hoped he would answer the call. After ten rings, she gave up. She was standing alone in a deserted hall. They hadn't had the chance to eat. She was exhausted and starving. Ahead of her, the elevator doors opened with a chime to reveal an empty car. On impulse, she stepped through the doors and pressed the down button.

She didn't know how she knew, not even when she swung through the large metal doors. They moved on well oiled hinges, completely soundless. The morgue's lights had been dimmed for the night, and the room was dominated by shadow. She found him standing in front of the wall of freezer drawers. They gleamed, dark, polished silver in the half-light.

She stepped into the room and shivered. It was freezing.

"Mulder?"

He didn't answer.

Walking closer, she saw the open drawer, knowing instinctively which drawer it would be. She came up beside him and looked down at the tiny body. An autopsy had already been performed on Timothy Crane, that much was immediately evident. The Y-incision was the first and only thing you saw when you looked at the boy. A long, hideous row of large, black stitches ran from the groin to the ribcage before branching out. It was obscene, only emphasizing the child's diminutive size, his immature body. The abdominal cavity was sunken in, all of the organs having been removed for dissection.

Scully had a brief flash of the picture that had been included in the file about Timothy's kidnapping. Blond hair, that much you could still see. The blue eyes were gone, hidden forever behind a murky shield. He held little resemblance to the smiling little boy in that photograph anymore. That made it easier, in a terrible way.

Scully wondered if Mulder would make the first, most glaring observation.

His voice surprised her. "You never told me what you learned when you talked to the Pathologist earlier today."

She looked up at him as he continued to study the body. She spoke softly in the dark quiet of the room, "The cause of death was asphyxia, which wasn't a surprise."

The bruises around the child's neck stood out brightly against the skin, despite the discoloration he'd taken on after death.

"What *was* surprising was that we found no signs of abuse, physical or sexual."

Scully looked down at the child's wrist, the bones jutting out sharply beneath the skin. "Have you noticed how thin he is, Mulder?"

That finally got a response. Mulder looked over at her, interest showing in his eyes.

Scully explained, "He didn't touch either child. The only physical damage, other than the strangulation, was bruising due to the use of restraints. However, from the level of malnutrition, I would guess that during the two months Randall Lee was held, he was fed maybe once a week, if that. He was starving them to death, Mulder. Slowly."

Unable to continue to stare at the child while she described his suffering, Scully turned around, looked out across the empty room. "I'm not the psychologist in this partnership, but if I had to offer an opinion, I would say that he was watching them suffer, keeping them alive so that he could watch them waste slowly away. He only killed them when there was nothing left."

Mulder had turned as well and was looking down at her with a glimmer of sadness and compassion in his eyes. He had heard the undercurrent of grief in her voice. It was always slight. No one else ever noticed, but Mulder knew her well enough, understood without her having to explain it to him. Children were especially hard.

Needing a subject change, Scully moved around Mulder, pushed the drawer shut. "I've been going over the forensic evidence taken from the scenes, if you want to hear it."

She continued when he didn't respond. "As you know, there were no fingerprints recovered at any of the scenes. We've been able to collect two extraneous hair samples from the Crane house and the Oliver's. They match, so we're assuming it's our guy. Not much to go on from there, though. Medium brown hair, no apparent signs of disease. We ran a PCR against the known offenders’ list, but we didn't get any matches.

"More of the same with the fibers and boot prints. All four houses yielded innumerable fiber samples, but with a busy household, it's going to take months before we can sift through the thousands of samples collected to discover if any are common to the individual crimes; and again, if we ever have something to match up against what we've collected, maybe… but nothing useful in our present circumstances."

Mulder had walked away from her and was standing in the middle of the room. He looked smaller in the large space. A light shining above his head isolated him in his own pool of illumination, accentuating the sharp lines of his face.

"We've found boot prints at all four houses and at both sites where the bodies were discovered. However, at both Haynes Street where Randall Lee was dumped and in the Gaines' back yard, snowfall obliterated anything useful almost immediately. The prints we got from the Oliver house matched the type of shoe we found at the Lee’s and at the site where Timothy's body was discovered. The only problem is that it's a very basic brand, sold at almost every Wal-Mart across the country.

"If they aren't too new, and we get something to match them up against, we might be able to get an identifiable wear pattern, but..."

"More of the same," Mulder finished for her, disgusted.

She didn't reply, just as frustrated.

His sudden movement made her start slightly. He stepped forward abruptly, took a few quick steps, and stopped, staring down at the floor, scrubbing his hands over his face.

"This investigation has absolutely no solid evidence to go on. Nothing." His arms dropped down against his sides. "Yet they still continue to concentrate on country club memberships and boy scout troops."

Taking a tentative step towards him, Scully spoke softly. "Mulder, we haven't eaten. You need sleep. It's almost midnight."

She walked over to him, laid a hand over his arm, which was chilly beneath her palm. "Mulder, lets go. Please?"

Softly pleading her concern, both for him and for herself. He glanced down at her, eyes solid and dull, impenetrable. There was a fear she had always carried with her, ever since she had become aware of the uniqueness of Mulder's talents, a fear that with this gift lay the inherent risk of one day losing him to the madness. Beside him at that moment, she saw again the blank expression he'd worn earlier in the conference room. She suddenly feared that the stress of the past few years, together with the sorrow he carried constantly with him, the oppressive nature of their present circumstances, might become the final impetus needed to push him beyond the edge. Maybe once, years ago, he would have been able to fight his way back. Now, she wasn't so sure.

Even more frightening was her uncertainty in her own strength. Would she be able to pull him back from the abyss? After everything, did she remember how?

He stood motionless beneath her touch for an instant and then pulled away, moving towards the door. The doors swung open, admitting a rush of light from the hall, and she followed when he did not turn around.

~~~~

The green glow of the travel alarm was the only light in her room. Oppressive darkness, that was the only description that came to mind, like it had taken on form and could smother her as she slept. It was a childish fear. She watched as the digital readout increased by one and proclaimed a new hour. Four-o-clock in the morning, and she was not asleep.

She had managed to crawl into bed upon their return from the field office. She couldn't remember closing her eyes, that's how tired she had been. But after sleeping for slightly over three hours, somehow she was awake again and still so tired.

The clock's cheerful display mocked her in the darkness. Sighing, she rolled over, reached out and turned on the small bedside lamp. The glare sliced through the darkness and stung her eyes. She shuttered them tightly, waiting to adjust.

When the light wasn't so painful, she stood up and walked to the bathroom. She wasn't sure why. Standing in front of the bathroom mirror, she stared into her reflection. She didn't know what she needed; she just knew that she was restless.

On impulse, she grabbed her trench from the chair and slipped on her shoes.

Outside, the night's earlier clouds were yielding their promise as light, freezing rain, sealing the thick carpet of snow under a slick, clear shell. As a child, she had loved the snow, especially after they moved south and its appearance became a rarity. After the past couple of days, she was starting to hate it. In small quantities it was cheerful, seasonal, inciting a Christmas-like atmosphere. How people were able to live where it never stopped, where it never seemed warm, was beyond her comprehension.

Further beyond her comprehension was why a motel that was in Buffalo, New York, a city renowned for its copious amounts of lake effect snow, would include in their design an outdoor staircase to access the rooms. It was a torment, and ridiculous.

She was careful on the steps, cursing the hazardous rain. Rounding the last flight, she stood only two doors from his room. Even from this distance, she could see the light beneath the door, peeking from behind the curtains. He was awake or asleep with the lights on. And while the latter was not uncommon, she knew somehow that the former was the truth. Part of her restlessness was related to him. Strange as it was, they had always fed into one another's moods.

He was awake, and so was she, and she didn't want to be alone. But something held her back. Rain slanted in under the protective roof, dampening her hair and cheeks.

Barriers between them were erected and -- less commonly -- deconstructed more often than she could keep track of. They made steps forward, they made steps back, and she always felt like she was stumbling along, unable to master the finer points of the dance. They only made it worse for themselves. They were the ones responsible for complicating things so terribly. She realized this and yet remained unsure or unable to step back, make it make sense, destroy a few more walls.

In her bitter moments, she thought it a curse; that two people could need each other so desperately and yet be completely unable to reach out when comfort was needed, that two people could hurt each other so badly, and yet be tied inextricably together.

In her most bitter moments, she believed that someday they would destroy each other, and that she would watch it happen, unable to leave.

A gust of wind slapped against the building, causing her to sway on her feet. It was foolish, to be standing out in the rain at four in the morning, teeth chattering and lips turning blue. Sheer foolishness. He was probably asleep, anyway. She would only wake him needlessly. Her restlessness would fade.

Hating herself for it, she moved towards the stairs. She almost turned around multiple times, continuing down to her room, despite the nagging in her gut. Later, as the clock still glowed green against the black, and she closed her eyes to block it out, she wondered how many times he had done the same, stood outside her door and wanted to reach out, tugging helplessly against the chains that bound them.

~~~~
End Chapter 4 (Part 5/29)

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Chapter 5
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It was the phone that woke her, and her mind absently noted that it was far too dark for any sane person to be calling. It could only mean one thing. They had spent the past two days in relative inactivity, sifting through the boxes of evidence, waiting, dreading, expecting something to happen.

She picked up the phone. "Scully."

"Agent Scully, this is Detective Mathers with the Buffalo Police Department. We were told to call and inform you that there had been another kidnapping."

She closed her eyes in the darkness.

"Agent Scully?"

It couldn't be any later than five-o-clock. She glanced to the side and found her suspicions confirmed. Five-fifteen. She looked away in disgust.

"Where?"

There was a knock on the door as the Detective answered. She clicked on the light and replaced the receiver, knowing already who her visitor would be. He didn't say anything when she let him in. Mulder glanced down at her, unspeaking, sharing the grim knowledge. Resigned to her fate, she moved into the bathroom to change.

~~~~

The living room was tiny -- four beige walls, brown, faded sofa (with a few buttons missing), ancient TV, some toys scattered in one corner. But amidst the ratty carpet and thrift store furniture, there was comfort in the small space. It was the toys, the crayons on the table, a folded pile of clean clothes on the couch. There was a small forest of bright houseplants in one window. In the kitchen, an open textbook with multiplication tables inside sat next to a cookie jar on the table, crumbs scattered across the surface.

Scully stood in front of the couch, watching the way the shattered glass sparkled under the lights.

"Not much for him to destroy."

Mulder, behind her, and he was right. There were only a few framed pictures in the small house, but he had managed to get them all.

"No," she answered, turning to face him.

His expression mirrored her feelings, sad and unsure. They would find nothing more here than they had at the other scenes. This house, with its shroud of glass, would yield no fingerprints. Not that fingerprints would help even if discovered. This criminal would not be found by something as simple as a search of the NCIC. He was a ghost; no name, no face, just a voice over the telephone line.

"You two ready to see where we think it happened?"

Mulder nodded at the detective, and together they walked out into the cold.

"Drew Hausner was supposed to be staying at a friend's house for the night. His mother was working third shift at a bar where she waitresses, and her husband works night security at one of the malls uptown."

The Detective was speaking as they walked down the street. Around them, the houses remained tranquil, the sun just peering over the horizon’s edge, slightly hazy behind clouds and lingering rain.

"According to the mother of the boy he was staying with, Marcia Demers, the children got into a fight sometime during the night and Drew decided to walk home. She had no idea he'd left the house. Her son says he thinks Drew left at around one this morning."

Up ahead, Scully could see familiar yellow tape swaying in the breeze. A few people lingered nearby.

"No one noticed anything until Mrs. Demers discovered that Drew had left and called the boy's mother. Mrs. Hausner rushed home to check and found the mess. That was at four-thirty this morning. We assume he got in using the keys Drew had on him."

They arrived at the sight of the attention -- nothing more than an empty expanse of sidewalk with footprints scattering the surface.

"You can tell there was a struggle."

On the ground, in the snow, there was a clear path of small footprints leading in the direction of the Hausner residence. In the road along side these were tire tracks, and on the sidewalk another larger set of prints were visible. The footprints melted together in the snow, slips and scuffles evidencing a minor struggle as the boy had undoubtedly tried to escape.

"Not much to see, I'm afraid."

Neither partner answered.

Scully had a feeling that these boot prints would be as useless as the last sets had been, and from taking only a cursory glance at the road, she already knew that the weather had most likely destroyed anything helpful the tire tracks might have indicated.

There wasn't much to be seen.

Mulder was walking back to the car, as aware of the realities as she was. He waited at his door until she opened the door on her own side. When he started up the engine, she cranked the heat up as high as it would go. The streets were ice rinks, perfect for skating. Scully gripped the edge of the door as they made their way to the office, praying for coffee, some answers, and a safe arrival.

~~~~

It was something about the way she clung to his hand, the way she leaned into his body like a shield, the way no matter what the question was, she looked to him before answering. Perhaps it was a natural reaction to the stress of their situation, but it seemed like more than that, and looking over at Mulder, Scully knew he saw it, too.

"And you didn't notice anything unusual about the house when you returned home, aside from the pictures?"

Roberta Hausner shook her head but didn't speak.

Mulder directed his next question at the father. "Is Drew your only child, Mr. Hausner?"

Inexplicable hesitance crossed Kenneth Hausner's face, and he looked over at Roberta briefly before turning back to Mulder. "Drew isn't my son, Agent Mulder."

Mulder's look was a question. Roberta was staring down at the table. Kenneth was regarding her with a cautious expression, clearly concerned for some reason.

"He was from a... prior marriage."

The pause there was telling.

"A prior marriage?" Scully directed the question at Roberta, and when she didn't get an answer, Kenneth spoke up.

"Can I speak to the two of you outside for a moment, please?"

"Of course," Mulder answered, glancing quickly at Scully for confirmation.

Kenneth leaned over to his wife, murmured something to her that Scully could not hear. Roberta nodded, looked up at her husband and then back down again. He squeezed her shoulders lightly before following Mulder and Scully out of the room.

When the door closed, he spoke. "Roberta's first husband was a sick man," he stated, simply, with emotion. "He beat her, constantly. She spent every other weekend in the hospital. The police couldn't do a damn thing because she was too scared to press charges and he never touched Drew."

Kenneth turned, looked at the door. "I lost count of the number of times she ran to a shelter. She always went back, and it always got worse, but she's a weak woman now. He made sure of that. She can't survive on her own anymore."

Scully digested this, asking a question. "Why did she finally leave?"

"One night," Kenneth began, "she just showed up on my doorstep with Drew. I didn't turn her away."

"So you knew her before she left her husband?"

Kenneth straightened his shoulders, looked directly at Scully. "Yes." There was a gleam of defensiveness in his eyes.

"That night, when she knocked on my door... God, she just... I could barely recognize her; he'd messed her up that bad. One eye was completely swollen shut, the other was purple but still open. Her cheek was all torn and bloody, like she'd taken a spill on a motorcycle and met the pavement hard."

His voice broke slightly, and he looked down at the floor. "She had two broken ribs, Agent Scully, and a broken wrist from when he'd stepped on it as she tried to crawl under a table to hide, helpless and bleeding on the floor. She had to have surgery to repair a detached retina, and she still has only partial vision out of that eye."

He paused, the gleam completely gone from his eyes and looked up from the floor. Scully could hear tears in his voice, undercut by a ribbon of pride. "So, yes, I was seeing her while she was still married. We weren’t sexually involved, but we were spending time together for almost a year before she left. I won't apologize for it. I'm sorry it took her as long to leave as it did. He'd have killed her eventually if she hadn't run to me. I know it."

Scully was unsure of what to say.

"Roberta needs someone to protect her, to take care of her, and I do that, but Drew is her life. He’s the reason she smiles every day."

"If Drew's not all right..." Kenneth closed his eyes and sucked in a shaky breath. "It may kill her," he said, sorrow filling every syllable.

Scully wanted to offer reassurances, to proclaim that they would find Drew and bring him home safely. She wanted to tell Kenneth Hausner not to give up hope. But did she have the right to encourage hope when, in the end, that hope could be so easily destroyed?

She didn't know, and standing before the hunched figure of Kenneth Hausner, she had only one assurance she *could* give. "We'll do our best, Mr. Hausner. I promise."

He opened his eyes slowly, regarding her, and nodded, looking grateful but unsure. "Thank you."

Mulder opened the door to the interrogation room, watched from outside while Kenneth went over to his wife, whispered again into her ear, and helped her up with a gentle hand under her elbow. Watching the couple walk down the hall, the tiny woman tucked under the arm of her husband and protector, Scully realized how small her assurances truly were and suspected that they would be a bitter comfort, at best.

~~~~

Her coffee had grown cold and sour. She was staring absently at the autopsy reports, reading and re-reading the pathologist's findings, not sure what -- if anything -- she was looking for. The bullpen was quiet. Night had fallen delicately over the city and most of the agents had returned to their homes, home to wives and families, comfort and safety.

Scully shivered, chilly in the large room.

Mulder had barricaded himself in the conference room four hours ago, supposedly looking for that indefinable something. The key. The meaning. He had said he would know it when he found it. Unable to assist him in any way, she had left him to his hunting, secured a desk out amongst the other agents, and hunkered down for the evening. The dinner he had refused to touch earlier that evening sat in its paper wrapping on her desk. Her own sandwich sat half eaten and abandoned next to a tepid cup of coffee.

What on Earth were they looking for, anyway?

Two desks away, the phone rang, startling her in her seat. One of the few agents still present walked over to pick it up. She tuned the conversation out, trying to concentrate, partially succeeding until someone called her name.

"Agent Scully?"

She looked up.

"There's someone on the line asking for your partner."

That got her attention. Anyone who would normally call them would use the cell numbers. No one, except for the distant possibility of AD Kersh, would think to call them here. Following instinct, she stood and faced the Agent -- Agent Williams, if she remembered correctly.

"Agent Williams, would you please get SAC Moore and tell him that I think we're about to get another message."

Williams gave her a slightly puzzled look, but she wasn't about to explain.

"And tell him we need a trace on that line, ASAP."

He nodded, expression suddenly grim, and she turned away and headed for the conference room. Her knock was loud and impatient. By this time, the scattering of agents around the room had noticed the action and were looking up from their work.

"Mulder, it's me."

She pushed into the room... only to find exactly what she had expected.

Mulder was seated in the center of the table, shoulders hunched, head bent. He took no notice of her entrance into the room. Papers and files were scattered everywhere. The room smelled stale, stuffy. It was overheated, just like the rest of the building. Mulder had removed his jacket, and sometime during the night it had fallen forgotten to the floor. His sleeves were rolled up, the first button of his shirt was undone, tie a limp noose around his neck.

He was absorbed by the search, and he wouldn't hear her. She knew this. She walked cautiously to his side and laid a gentle hand on his shoulder. His skin was warm through the smooth cotton.

"Mulder." Softly. It wasn't the word that would break his trance. It was her touch.

It was like watching a curtain being raised, like changing the channels on a television. One minute he was someplace else, far from light and sound and bothersome words, and then the shift occurred. He was far away, and then with a sudden, vague transformation, he rose to the surface, blinked a few times, and looked up at her, expression still a bit distant.

The question was in his eyes.

"You have a phone call."

Mulder's initial puzzlement at her words faded, as he slowly regained his sense of time. The cast of his eyes grew gradually cold. His shoulders stiffened. The muscles in his neck drew taut. She stepped back when he stood up, following him out of the conference room and back into the bullpen.

SAC Moore was standing next to the desk Scully had abandoned, the same mixture of dread and eagerness written across his face that was shared by the collection of agents that had gathered nearby. When Mulder took the offered telephone, Scully knew she was the only one who could see the odd combination of predatory rage and fear that lay hidden in his eyes.

"Mulder."

Someone had hooked up the speakers, and for the first time, the other agents in the room heard the voice of their enemy, ringing loud and clear in the stillness.

"Agent Mulder, I was beginning to grow afraid that you had decided not to answer the phone."

"I was in the other room."

The caller's tone was light, conversational. "There's no need to apologize."

Mulder's voice was flat. "I wasn't apologizing."

A brief laugh across the line, "No. You wouldn't be, would you?" A pause. "I'm sure you're wondering why I've called."

It was a question. After it became apparent that Mulder was unwilling to answer, the blithe voice continued. "I had thought that you'd want to discuss my clue, dazzle me with your amazing insights." He seemed to stop and consider something for a moment. "You have found the clue, haven't you, Agent Mulder?"

Scully glanced over at Moore, whose eyes were boring into the top of Mulder's skull.

He hadn't; she knew this. It was something Mulder had been tormenting himself about the entire day. He said it had to be there, that he was missing it somehow. She had suggested that maybe they were being toyed with, that there was nothing to be found. His dismissal of that idea had been quick and firm.

Their opponent had taken silence for a negative answer. "Oh, Agent Mulder, I had thought it would be so obvious to someone like you."

Mulder’s reply was dull. "Perhaps you overestimate my vast intellect."

"I doubt that." Another pause. "And while I would love to give you some further evidence to look into, I think I've given you quite enough already, far more than I had ever intended to reveal."

Scully was standing woodenly -- only a few paces from Mulder – her state of mind betrayed only by the slight twisting and tensing of fingers at her sides.

"What is the point of this, then? Why reveal anything? What do you hope to achieve?" Mulder's questions almost directly mirrored ones she had asked him earlier, concerned that they were being led about blindfolded and dumb.

The previously breezy timbre of the suspect's voice shifted, took on a more serious note when he answered. "Because I can accomplish nothing if there is no one who is willing and able to see, to learn, to understand. I never thought I would need to go to these lengths; I was saddened when all of this...” He paused again, as if searching for a word, “melodrama became necessary."

Mulder's face twisted into a sneer. "And I'm supposed to be what, your interpreter?"

Silence descended upon the phone line for several long, tense minutes. The collection of agents shuffled, trading glances in the calm. Moore looked as if he was about to approach Mulder. The killer hadn't hung up, that much was confirmed by the tiny nod of the agent across the room in charge of monitoring the trace.

Mulder seemed willing to wait.

When the quiet was shattered, it was not with the expected answer to Mulder's question.

"You still feel guilty about it, don't you, Agent Mulder?"

Shaking herself slightly, Scully was completely thrown by the question. She watched Mulder as a more controlled version of her own reaction played across his features. Mulder was tentative, careful of whatever territory he was entering unexpectedly. "Guilty?"

"Heather Jacobson. Even now, after all this time, you feel it. I know you do."

Inching closer to Mulder, Scully knew the confusion was written on her face. Studying Mulder's reaction only compounded that confusion. His expression seemed to fall. His eyes lost their predatory gleam.

"I had nothing to do with what happened to Heather Jacobson."

The tone of Mulder's voice was defensive, and Scully cringed. He wore guilt like a second skin. It crept into every aspect of his life. The sharp, defensive nature of his reply would be like a red flag to their enemy.

When the killer responded, his patient tone barely acknowledged what he knew had been merely token protests. "I can hear it in your voice, Agent Mulder. It's undeniable."

Without looking at her or any of the other agents, Mulder turned abruptly around and faced the wall behind the desk.

A new and sudden question was issued by their opponent. "How many ghosts live in your head, Agent Mulder?"

Silence from the broad, slumped shoulder's of her partner.

"Do they keep you awake at night?"

Scully cringed, closing her eyes briefly and tightly.

"Do you see their faces when you close your eyes?"

Mulder's voice again, low, dangerous. "You have no idea what I see."

The murderer ignored the interruption. "How many of them are young women, Agent Mulder? Mothers? Children?"

Mulder didn't answer, and something inside Scully burned, ached to step forward and touch him.

"How many of them have you actually managed to save?"

Moving even closer, stepping boldly forward, Scully tried to gauge the intensity of Mulder's reaction, to offer him the knowledge and support of her presence. His hands were shaking almost imperceptibly where they gripped the telephone.

"Agent Mulder?" Demanding an answer.

"Agent Mulder?"

Silence.

"Agent Mulder?"

Across the room, announced by the speakers, the line went dead. Mulder’s large hand was splayed over the telephone cradle; he had disconnected the call. Everyone in the bullpen seemed frozen where they stood. Scully stepped forward again, extending her hand, and began to gently call Mulder’s name.

SAC Moore finally erupted. "You killed the trace!"

Mulder didn't speak or turn around.

"Goddamit, Mulder, how the hell are we supposed to catch this bastard if you cut him off before we can finish the fucking trace?!"

Slowly, Mulder turned around and spoke. His voice was arid, eyes avoiding contact with anyone. "You would never have gotten that trace."

Moore almost sputtered. "Why the hell not?"

Mulder was moving carefully away from the other agents, walking towards the door when he answered, eyes still pointed at the floor, voice soft and detached. "Because this guy isn't an amateur; he wouldn't stay on the line if there were any possibility of the call being traced."

Moore hadn't finished his tirade, but Mulder simply walked away, out of the bullpen, oblivious to the reprimand. Moore's accusing glare was immediately turned on Scully. She was convicted by default.

Unable to offer any explanation and unwilling to face her superior's ire, Scully turned away in defeat. Sensing that only seconds remained before she would bear the brunt of a brutal verbal pummeling, she began walking toward the doors, an equally incensed and astonished Moore rendered speechless in her wake.

~~~~

Water gushed from the faucet, sending little droplets out in a spray to dust the mirror and the sleeves of his shirt. She reached out, twisted off the tap, and looked up to study his face, crystalline beads of water glistening amidst the stubble and too pale skin.

The men's restroom was empty, and she was grateful for the privacy.

Mulder drew in a long, shuddering breath before raising his eyes. He seemed to look at the mirror's reflection, but his focus was turned inward. Scully doubted he was seeing anything as concrete as his own face reflected back by the glass.

"Mulder?" Her voice sounded unnaturally loud and hollow echoing off the tiled walls and floor.

He closed his eyes, and she touched the back of his hand, his skin damp beneath her fingers.

"I'll be okay, Scully."

She drew her hand back but remained close, looking up at the dark circles around his eyes, the long lashes grazing his cheeks.

"Mulder, who's Heather Jacobson?" She needed to know, and, she suspected, he needed to tell her.

He opened his eyes and looked down at her -- familiar depths of dark gray and evergreen -- Mulder's eyes when he was exhausted or depressed.

"Mulder..." she prompted softly.

With a sigh, he turned away from the mirror and leaned back against the sink, shoulders hanging down. "When I came onto the case here in Buffalo twelve years ago, they already had a tentative profile written. There weren't many details. They hadn't fleshed anything out, but there were some very basic, concrete foundations that the investigation was working from."

Scully had stepped back and was giving him the space he needed.

"Young, pretty women were turning up dead and mutilated all around the Buffalo area. No one could even figure out how they were being taken. One night, they just never came home from work, and then, a few weeks later, they were dead."

From the tone of his voice, Scully could hear Mulder retreating within, launching into familiar lecture mode.

"By the time I came onto the case, the entire city was terrified. These weren't prostitutes. They weren't lower class or minorities. Someone was kidnapping and torturing pretty, middle-class, white women, and nothing the police tried brought them any closer to a solution."

The fatigue was shadowing each of Mulder's words. "I noticed the flaw in their logic almost immediately.

"The women being taken were all very small, tiny. All of them were around five feet or shorter. None of them were ever sexually violated, as might be expected in a case where the suspect was specifically targeting the most vulnerable victims. In a city that had been plagued by these murders for weeks on end, somehow the suspect was still managing to gain the trust of more and more women, leading them to their deaths. It didn't make any sense.

"The investigation was assuming, based on traditional logic, that they were looking for a man. I told them that they should be looking for a woman."

Scully took in an abrupt breath, shocked. That was a leap, even for Mulder. Serial killers were almost never women, and when they were, they were usually working in conjunction with a man.

"You can guess how well that theory went over with the rest of the team."

She could. She knew what her own reaction would be to such a suggestion. Adding it up, however, she could see that the pieces fit. She understood Mulder's reasoning, if somewhat vaguely. A woman would best be capable of overpowering only small victims, and in a city plagued by a serial killer, what woman would suspect another?

"But they listened to you?" He had closed the investigation. He'd told her that already.

"Eventually."

He was silent for an instant. "I had the profile written on the plane trip up, but it took them almost two weeks to even consider my theories, and by that time, two more women were dead. Once they were finally willing to hear what I had to say," disgust was plain in his voice, "It was fairly simple. We ran a search on recent deaths of middle aged women who had left behind property in their estate. Someplace private, secluded. Someone who'd had a younger sister."

At Scully's puzzled expression, he explained further.

"She was killing her abusive older sister, over and over again, torturing her. The chain of events had been triggered by the sister's death, by the killer's sudden inability to ever exact the revenge she needed from the actual person. Locating the house was easy, and my profile was dead on.

"Louise Taget had been raised by her older sister who had beaten her severely for most of her childhood. When the sister died suddenly of a heart attack at a young age, Louise inherited the house, and pretty women who bore an unlucky resemblance to Margaret Taget starting disappearing from the Buffalo streets."

He was stalling, drawing the words out. Heather Jacobson remained a mystery. Mulder reached up and scrubbed his hands over his face, leaving his eyes closed when his arms rested again at his sides.

"We found the house within a day of starting the search, and most of the team thought it had been just in time. Louise had been gearing up to another kill, and we found Heather Jacobson, badly beaten on a filthy cot hidden in the basement. But she was alive. We'd gotten there in time. We saved her."

Mulder said the last phrase like a plea, like he wanted to believe his own words but couldn't. Scully knew the worst was coming.

"Heather Jacobson had been held for five days, and the horror she must have endured during that time was unimaginable. There were injuries she would never recover from. Her face had been ravaged. No amount of plastic surgery would ever fix what Louise had done."

He took a deep breath.

"Eight days after she was admitted to the hospital, when the nurse came to check her vitals in the morning, Heather was found dangling from a sheet strung through the heat vent in the ceiling. She'd hanged herself. No one even thought she could walk, and yet she'd managed to move the bed ten feet across the room, loop a sheet around her neck, and end the horror she was living."

Mulder turned back around and stared unblinking into the mirror. His voice was dead. "When we rescued her from that house, she asked me why this had happened to her. I couldn't give her a reason. A week after I had arrived in Buffalo, with my profile already written, she was still safe at home with her family. She didn't have to die."

"Yet you blame yourself," Scully interrupted, her tone gentle. "You must know that if anyone other than Louise Taget is to blame, it's the investigators who refused to listen to your theory. You did all you could, Mulder. You have to know that."

These were just words, a conversation she'd had with Mulder numerous times. She knew, logically, that he knew these things. Yet she also knew that some deep, dark part of him could not yield to this logic, and that her words were only shallow reassurances. She also knew that they weren't really speaking about Louise Taget or Heather Jacobson. It wasn't that simple. This was about all of the victims of all of the crimes he had witnessed, all of the lives he hadn't saved. Heather Jacobson was just a scratch on the surface of a vast whole.

"I know," was all he said.

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End Chapter 5 (6/29)

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Chapter 6
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Light snow was falling; the perfect crystals strangely beautiful highlighted by the cascade of sodium-yellow lamplight beyond her window. She watched as the occasional flake blew towards the window, stuck, and remained, for only a moment, before fading away against the warmth of the glass. Her hair was damp with that same snow. It saturated the rug around her door with muddy boot prints. On the chair by the door, Mulder's jacket rested atop hers, dripping. The heat rising from the radiator lulled her into a sleepy stupor, as she listened to the sounds of Mulder moving quietly about her bathroom.

Hopefully, their food would arrive quickly.

She was lonely, an emotion not unknown to her, but strange when she was spending nearly every waking hour by his side. There was a palpable cocoon of silence that surrounded Mulder now, growing thicker, denser with every passing day.

They were waiting. Or rather, she was waiting. He was filling long, fat legal pads with hastily scribbled notes, staring at his computer screen for hour long stretches before exploding in a fury of typing, throwing those same legal pads away when they were full, a look of disgust souring his face.

It had been almost two weeks since the last phone call. She was alternately relieved or terrified by the lack of activity. No more bodies had turned up, no more children had gone missing, but somewhere there were three little boys who grew thinner and further from life with every inactive hour. Scully prayed they were still alive.

Water was running in the bathroom. The phone rang. Sighing, she moved over to the bed, picked up the receiver, and kicked off her shoes as she sank down to the mattress.

"Scully."

"Agent Scully, so sorry to disturb you, but your partner wasn't in his room, and I thought you'd be the most obvious place to look."

Every muscle in her body tensed simultaneously.

"Agent Scully?"

She sat up, now completely alert. The water in the bathroom was still running.

"Yes, I'm here." The words were nearly toneless.

The voice on the other end of the line was conversational. "I'm actually rather glad to have gotten the chance to talk to you, to give a voice and a presence to the face and the stories."

The water in the bathroom stopped running.

"The stories?" She asked, warily.

"Ah yes, amazing what a little focused digging can turn up. Do you know that there are almost fifty newspaper articles with your name in them? Not all of them are very informative, some are barely mentions of your name in the context of a larger story, but a few were intriguing, indeed."

What was taking Mulder so long?

"Intriguing?"

"You seem to have endured more than your fair share of suffering in the past several years -- missing for three months, taken hostage more than once, targeted and abducted by a serial killer, the death of your sister, surviving those bizarre burnings at the Ruskin Dam -- it's almost too much to be believed."

Scully felt like she'd been punched in the gut.

"And then, of course, there are various articles about cases you and Mulder have investigated. Some of them have had pictures. You two must be very close."

The door to the bathroom opened, and Mulder walked out. Scully looked up at him, and the message must have been immediate in her eyes.

"What makes you think that?"

Mulder was dialing his cell phone.

"You went to jail for him, didn't you?"

*That* was something he should not have been able to find by sifting through newspaper articles.

"How did you know that?"

"The Freedom of Information Act is a glorious thing; government records about anything and everything freely available over the Internet."

Mulder had disconnected the call and was watching her, his eyes demanding to know the content of her conversation.

"There was a particular photograph, from a few years back, taken at a hospital in Maryland after some psycho shot a couple of guards and took a hostage in the ICU."

Scully shuddered, watched, as Mulder's expression grew concerned. She didn't need the name or the details to remember Fairfax Mercy Hospital.

"Mainly, it's a picture of the body being wheeled away, the requisite meat wagon shot, but you and Mulder can be clearly seen in the background. There's just something about the expression on your face in that picture, about the way he has his arm around your shoulders..." The killer paused, as if in reflection. His voice at his next words bore a strangely wistful quality. "There is so little of true beauty or purity in this world."

Scully found herself holding her breath for a moment, letting it out in a frustrated puff of air, shaken. "Is this why you called? To discuss my varied appearances in the newspapers though the years?"

Mulder looked downright bewildered.

The voice on the other side of the line grew serious. "No, not at all. In fact, as I said before, I called to talk to your partner. He is there, isn't he?"

"Yes, he is."

Mulder's posture stiffened.

"Well then, Agent Scully, I'm afraid our conversation must come to an end, for now."

Scully handed the phone to Mulder. The handle of the receiver was slick with sweat when she pulled her fingers away.

~~~~

"It's very simple, actually. You have twenty-four hours. If you make it on time, you save a little boy's life; you get your gift. If you don't... you don't."

"If I make it on time?"

"Before the darkness comes."

"I don't understand."

The recording cut off abruptly, as Mulder punched the stop button with his finger and hit rewind again. He was muttering. "It has to be here."

As if by magic, a cup of coffee appeared on the table in front of Scully, billows of fragrant steam issuing forth from its murky depths. Startled, she looked up to find the tiny, concerned smile of Agent Williams.

Whispered, "I thought you could use the caffeine."

Her returning smile probably more closely resembled a grimace. She took a long sip, gagged slightly at the surprising presence of sugar, and then took a longer swallow, despite the cloying sweetness.

The tape started up again from the beginning.

"Your partner seems like a lovely woman, Agent Mulder, tense but lovely."

Silence for a moment as Mulder refused to answer.

Across the room, SAC Moore emerged from his office, as the voice of their adversary spoke on the tape again.

"I wanted to have the benefit of your full attention without the audience this time, though I'm sure this is being recorded for posterity as we speak."

Moore walked over to the group of agents, stood silently beside Scully, and settled his eyes on Mulder's hunched figure at the other side of the table.

Mulder's voice on the tape was terse, "Of course."

"Understandable," was their opponent's reply. "I called to offer you a gift, Agent Mulder."

"A gift?"

Beside Scully, Moore leaned down and whispered. "How many times is he going to listen to this?"

Mulder seemed not to notice.

"You can call it that, though I suppose it's more of an opportunity"

"An opportunity to do what, exactly?"

Scully ignored Moore's question.

"To achieve something I know you long for, Agent Mulder, to save at least one life from all this darkness, one out of all of the lives you've seen taken."

Silence on the tape again, filled only with the sound of Mulder's breathing. His previously caustic tone was gone with his next question.

"How?" Small, almost.

"I'm giving you a chance to out-run the darkness, to return to the beginning and set things right again, for yourself, for this child. It's a chance I found myself wary of offering, considering your still glaring lack of understanding, but I thought that perhaps the time had come for a more” he paused again, consider, “hands on lesson."

Frustrated and furious. "I've told you before; I'm not interested in playing games."

Short and hard. "And I've told you before, this isn't a game."

A pause while Mulder considered. "So how am I supposed to achieve this?"

A high-pitched squeal filled the room, as Mulder hit the fast-forward button.

"Agent Mulder, I don't know what you expect to find, listening to this tape over and over again." Moore's voice was annoyed, exhausted, and frustrated.

Mulder didn't look up. Instead, he repeated his earlier insistence. "It has to be here. I know it." Desperation was evident in his words.

The voice of the killer sprang to life again on the abused tape-recording, his tone patient and explanatory. "Before the darkness comes."

"I don't understand."

There was a pause here, very slight.

"You will."

And then there was only silence.

~~~~

Eight hours later, she pushed into the conference room, food clutched in a large, brown paper bag at her side. Mulder didn't look up when she entered. A halo of soft radiance spread out from a lamp in the center of the table, leaving the corners of the room distant in their shadows. She hadn't noticed the lamp in here before. He had shut off all of the overhead lights. Unsure of what to say, she moved over to the table and started pulling little aluminum trays out of the takeout bag.

Mulder looked up, saw what she was doing. "I'm not hungry, Scully."

She bit the inside of her lip, not wanting to yell, knowing anger wouldn't reach him. "Mulder, you have to eat."

He didn't respond.

Frustrated, she continued to pull out their dinner. Little pre-wrapped bags of plastic utensils were ripped open, napkins withdrawn. The plastic lids came off of the food and steam issued forth. She pulled out two Styrofoam cups of soda and placed one at the seat across from her.

"Scully." Voice a warning. "I said I wasn't hungry." He was watching her now with a look on his face that told her that he wanted her to leave.

"Mulder, when's the last time you ingested something more substantial than a cup of coffee?" She challenged, noting, ironically, the collection of drained coffee cups littering the surface of the table.

He narrowed his eyes, and his voice was condescending. "We have twelve hours, Scully." As if she didn't know this already.

Across the table, Scully noted the perpetual trembling in his hands and arms, the way his normally golden skin had turned pallid and gray. How many days had it been since he'd slept for longer than a two-hour stretch? Weeks?

"And you won't even make it that long if you don't at least eat something, Mulder. How can you expect to be any good to this investigation if you destroy yourself in the process?"

Mulder's fingers tightened around the pencil he was holding. Scully worried it might snap in half under the pressure.

"I don't want to eat anything, Scully." His voice was threatening. "And I told you I wasn't hungry. I just want to be left alone." He punctuated each word sharply in the last sentence.

He bent his head back down to the file he was studying.

The smell of steamed dumplings and thick, potato soup filled the air. Mulder grimaced, as if in pain, and gripped his forehead momentarily before resuming his work.

"So you expect me to just stand back and watch as you starve yourself of sleep and sustenance?" The anger and worry were clear in her tone, despite her former attempt at calm.

His voice was unexpectedly quiet, uninterested, not even looking at her when he spoke. "I don't expect you to stand back and watch anything."

He was pushing her as far away as possible.

She swallowed, took a deep breath and a step around the table towards him. "Why won't you let me help you?" She asked, fear shading her words.

Mulder had refocused on the evidence before him. There were small piles and large piles of mismatched file folders in varying hues, spread out in some bizarre pattern that only he could see. She took another couple of steps towards him -- almost close enough to touch -- and then stilled, waiting for his answer.

He was rifling through the contents of a thick, over-stuffed folder. "You can't help me, Scully"

It was the soft, sad acceptance in his reply that moved her. She breached the last few inches between them and laid a gentle hand on his shoulder. He felt thinner under the smooth material, bony.

"Why, Mulder?" She asked, as he pulled himself away from her touch. "Why can't I help you?"

His voice had gone completely devoid of threat. He was no longer reading the files spread out around him. "You just can't."

"Mulder, I can't watch helplessly as you destroy yourself. You can't expect me to do that."

There was a pause, where perhaps he had been considering her words, but when he spoke again, there had been a drastic shift in his mood. He rose from his seat abruptly, shocking her, sending a folder and all of its contents over the side of the table and across the carpet. He moved a few steps away from her and then turned swiftly back to face her.

"Why not, Scully? You ask the same of me all the time." He wasn't shouting, but there was vehemence in his tone, and incredulity.

She didn't know how to respond. She knew her own guilt, knew that he knew it, too.

"But that's different, I suppose." He was continuing without her response, despite the fact that she had lowered her head and was staring at the floor. "It's not the same, because I'm not dying of an inoperable disease. I haven't just lost a loved one, or a daughter I never even knew I had. Those are perfectly good reasons to shut yourself off from everyone who cares and expect them to step back and watch, helpless, while you quietly self-destruct. How foolish of me, Scully. I didn't realize there was a difference."

When she lifted her eyes to meet his accusations, they were all cold, blue flame. "How dare you?" Almost a whisper, but so embittered, pained.

He flinched, closed his eyes, and turned his head away. "I don't... I can't do this right now, Scully."

She watched him, trembling slightly.

When he continued, his words were barely audible. "You want to reach out and make it all better, Scully, but I'm telling you that you don't know how. I don't know how. There is no remedy for this."

She didn't reply. There was quiet between them for a moment.

Finally, not knowing why she felt the need to push, "Do what, Mulder?"

He caught her gaze and held it, sighed deeply. "I just can't handle the mother hen routine when every time I reach out to you, you act like I've committed some grand transgression for even trying to care."

He stopped and slowed his speech. "You can't fix this. You can't, Scully. No one can." His voice took on a pleading tone, apologetic. "I'm sorry... I just don't need any help... I'm sorry."

But he wasn't, not really, and it was obvious. The phrase was a poor attempt to end what would only become a devastating conversation.

"Fine, Mulder," she said. "Just... fine." Acidity in her words. She was turning for the door when his voice stopped her.

"Scully."

She turned, stared into him.

"I don't know what you want me to say."

Standing there, her thoughts were a whirlwind. Scully wondered, often, how many more of these conversations they would have before they stopped speaking all together.

"I don't either," she replied, her irritation still distinctly present.

"Godammit!" His fist connected solidly with the table, a sudden explosion, sending a cup of soda over the edge to soak the carpet below. Frustration, building since this case had begun, radiated off of him in waves.

Scully was poised like a statue near the door.

"Aren't you tired of all of this yet, Scully?"

She was confused momentarily, until he continued, and then surprised by the sudden direction their argument had taken.

"It's all such bullshit. We fight for six years. Six fucking years!" He was almost ranting. "We think we know where we're headed, what we're looking for, but we don't have a clue. We have nothing. Time and again, just as you think you've got your head above water, something else comes along to push you back under and leave you in the dark." His voice dropped. "I'm sick of it. I'm sick of fighting so God damned hard."

He was looking straight at her with his last sentence, and she knew he wasn't just referring to their abandoned quest. Lately, they fought each other more often than they fought their nameless enemies.

"And now here we are," he gestured weakly to the large window, where ice crusted the dark glass. "We don't even belong here."

She didn't know where they belonged. On the X-Files? Maybe. But even Mulder's precious files yielded more questions than answers lately, caused more pain than reassurance. To Mulder, they were stability, though, a purpose, something concrete upon which to anchor an unstable life.

She had nothing to say to him.

When he looked at her again, another radical shift had taken place. His mood was volatile, shifting without warning. "But maybe you don't mind it so much. Maybe it doesn't make as much of a difference to you."

It was an accusation. Scully felt as if the room was spinning around her. "What the hell is that supposed to mean?" She demanded, bewildered and hurt by the seeming randomness of his ire.

"You tell me, Scully. You don't even believe. Why should it matter to you that they've taken everything away?"

He was directing the full force of his wrath and exhaustion at her, and while she knew that Mulder wasn't fully in control of his words, she was powerless to avoid being swept into the storm.

"How can you even say that to me?" she said, taking a step towards him, the words clipped in disbelief, in hurt.

His shoulders were set in a stance that was a clear challenge, daring her for it to be otherwise. "Not two months ago, after persuading *me* not to give up, insisting that you couldn't leave my side, you got up in front of a bureau panel and dismissed any credibility our work might have gained. You doomed our work with those words, Scully. I felt like a fool. You publicly *declared* me to be a fool."

What could she say? They'd been over this all already, her need for proof. It wasn't enough for him. He took it as a personal betrayal. Her breath shuddered in and out of her chest.

Was he honestly blaming her for the loss of the X-Files?

"Those files were as much my life as they were yours, Mulder, maybe more." Her voice was shaky. She wanted to scream that she had been violated, betrayed, wrested of her hope, her free will, her control over her own decisions, her body; but the words got lost in the sting of her fury and grief, and she couldn't force them out.

Finally, she found her voice again. "And don't you dare tell me that I was only *assigned* to the X-Files, Mulder. You know damn well that my assignment ended six years ago on the day I stopped reporting to the powers that be. I stayed by choice, and that choice has cost me everything."

She was helpless now to the kinetic energy of their fighting. She loosed her next, wounding words knowing their potential for damage. "You lost a sister. I lost most of my life as I knew it."

His expression flared. In a few, brief steps he was standing in front of her, hands around her upper arms, trapping her within his height and superior strength.

He was balancing, just barely, on the thin edge of control. "And for a long as I can remember," he spat "I've been trapped in a life that was beyond my choosing, set on a path with a predestined beginning, middle, and end; a prisoner of the person I've become as a result of someone else's decisions, someone else's plans. I don't even know who I'm supposed to be. I was created to fit a role." By the end of his tirade, his words had become muted, withering. "I've lost a lot more than just a sister, and I never asked you to stay."

Irate. Hateful. He didn't, couldn't mean it. His hands tightened around her arms.

Her eyes communicated what she didn't say. <You're hurting me, Mulder.>

He dropped his hands quickly, as if burned. She rubbed the red spots on her arms exposed by the shell she wore, knowing he'd feel the sting of guilt even through the haze of his enmity.

His eyes fell away from her as he backed up, but not before she saw the shimmer of unshed tears. They were both so unfathomably exhausted. When he looked back up at her, the tears were gone.

She had nothing to say.

Her jacket was in a heap on the table. She walked over to retrieve it, moving past him in the process. The food sat untouched and still steaming, and while her stomach gave an involuntary roil of hunger, the thought of eating made her feel ill. She brushed past him after grabbing the jacket, feeling, faintly, the brush of his fingers against her arm. She didn't acknowledge his touch.

At the door, she was moving with only the thought of escape when he called behind her softly. "When did we become these people, Scully?"

He sounded so unbearably sad. She paused, her head dropped, eyes closing. When? When had they begun wounding each other purposefully? When did the blame and guilt become this tangible presence breathing between them?

"I don't know, Mulder."

She shut the door, unsure if he'd even heard her.

~~~~

"Agent Scully?"

The voice filtered down through the layers of her consciousness. Had she fallen asleep?

"Agent Scully, are you all right?"

The voice sounded concerned. She lifted her head up from the pillow of her folded arms (when had she put her head down?), scrubbed a hand over her eyes, feeling the faint stickiness of tear tracks on her cheeks (she couldn't remember crying), and regarded the owner of that concern.

"I'm okay. Thank you." Her voice didn't sound okay, not even to her own ears. From the look on Agent Williams' face, it didn't convince him, either.

"Really," she said, rising from her chair. She arched her back, wincing as several vertebrae slid painfully into place. "I didn't mean to fall asleep."

Williams still didn't look convinced, but he stepped back. "We've all been running a little low on sleep lately. It's understandable," he said. "I'm sorry I woke you, but SAC Moore wants to talk to you in his office."

Scully suppressed a groan. "Thanks."

Knocking first, she pushed into the office.

"Agent Scully, have a seat."

Scully collapsed into one of the chairs, still exhausted. Moore regarded her with an odd expression. Self-consciously, she smoothed a hand over her hair and straightened in her seat.

Moore was blunt. "We have three hours, Agent Scully."

She knew, too well.

"Is Agent Mulder any closer to figuring out what the hell we're supposed to do?"

Scully looked down at her hands folded neatly in her lap. "No, Sir," she said. Truthfully, she didn't know exactly *what* Mulder was doing. She hadn't spoken to him since their argument.

With the squeak of old leather, Moore pushed back in his seat and stood up. The spark of the lighter was a shocking, gaudy orange in the almost colorless office.

"You don't mind, do you?"

Scully shook her head.

"I'm not even supposed to do this in the building, but I think these could be considered extenuating circumstances."

She only watched as a thin wisp of smoke curled up towards the ceiling. Moore took a long drag on the cigarette and, with an outstretched hand, offered her one. She was tempted, for a moment, until Moore bent slightly at the waist, coughing.

"No thank you," she replied.

He shrugged and turned to the huge window behind his desk. Outside, downtown Buffalo twinkled like the lights on a giant Christmas tree.

"Another child is going to die tonight, and there's not a damn thing I can do about it."

Scully could hear the conspicuous assignment of personal guilt in that statement. Moore and Mulder had something in common, but then Moore had been working this case for months. This was his city, and he'd been unable to do anything to stop this. She could understand why he felt responsible.

Scully was about to excuse herself when the door to Moore's office flew open behind her.

"I found it!"

Mulder burst into the office, gave a momentarily surprised glance in Scully's direction, and then directed his discovery to Moore. "I know where he wants us to go! I know how to save that little boy!" His words were tumbling over one another in their desperation to escape.

"Slow down, Agent Mulder."

Mulder took a deep, hasty breath, and then, with utter conviction in his voice, "Saks Mill."

~~~~
End Chapter 6 (Part 7/29)

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Chapter 7
~~~~

A rivulet of sweat traced a leisurely path down from the nape of Scully's neck. She was impossibly hot under the bulletproof Kevlar vest, tense and hot and uncomfortable. She wriggled and sighed and glanced across the car. In the passenger seat, Mulder shifted his weapon slowly from hand to hand, mesmerized by the unwinding specter of the snow flanked road ahead. He wouldn't meet her gaze.

As soon as the car stopped moving, Mulder launched himself from his seat, to the door and out, frigid air blasting in to occupy the space as he left it. Mulder took a dozen long strides toward the mill and then stopped abruptly. Scully, a few seconds behind, felt the sweat on her neck chill and dry as she approached him. He stared up at the building, motionless, body coiled and barely restrained. She glanced up at him as she unholstered her weapon. His eyes were glassy, reflecting the headlights' glare, impenetrable. Lifeless, she thought, and shuddered.

Around them, agents poured out of several large, black vans. They gathered quietly around Mulder, awaiting his signal. Mulder was silent, staring up. Finally, he turned to the assembled group. "It's going to be a straight two by two down the hall, with Agent Scully and myself in the lead, followed by Sandborne and Williams, and then Tucek and Bukowski."

Mulder addressed the small team with sharp, quick words, reiterating a plan they already knew by rote. In through the side entrance, down a long hall off of which several offices were placed, through the mammoth packing room, and then up the stairs to the door leading into the main cargo bay. Mulder had insisted that he knew, that he knew where the child would be, knew they had to approach from the side entrance and not go blasting through the front.

"Dammit, No!" Mulder had practically roared. "If he's in there with the kid, and we go busting through those doors like the four horsemen of the fucking apocalypse, do you think we're going to have a chance in hell of finding that child alive!?"

Moore had opposed him, demanding that the teams follow standard procedure, clearing each room as they went, guarding against ambush and traps. Mulder's "But that'll take all Goddamn night!" and similar protests went alternately unheeded and overruled, Moore determined to wrest back a portion of his vanquished control.

The Saks Mill Warehouse rose from the frozen ground like an ancient fortress, colossal and ominous, black, boarded up and forgotten. Tall smokestacks were shards of obsidian against the night sky. Ladders and rusted fire escapes clung like spider webs to the crumbling facade. The building was beyond the Buffalo City limits, in an under-populated area. That was where all of the bodies had been dumped twelve years ago, Mulder said, remote, desolate places. Twelve years ago, this vacant warehouse had borne silent witness to a gruesome murder. Mulder hadn't been on the case by then, of course, but he had insisted that it didn't matter.

"'Return to the beginning,' " he'd told them, in Moore's office, electrified by his discovery. "It's the only phrase I couldn't make sense of. Saks Mill is the place it all began, twelve years ago."

With her back to the cold, clammy concrete of the outer wall of the warehouse, Scully thought she could feel the death in this place, malevolence.

The speaker in her headset came suddenly to life. "Team four, perimeter secure."

Now they were waiting only for Mulder's command.

"Team two and team three, you have a go." Mulder's voice was cold, detached. He held his hand up and counted down silently on his fingers. On three, the door swung outward, and Scully swiveled around the corner, weapon a precise extension of her outstretched arm.

"Clear," she announced, and the word had barely left her mouth before Mulder was sprinting past her and down the hall.

In the submarine glow of her night vision goggles, the hall was long and dark. Scully ran down the hall after Mulder, pausing outside the first office door, Mulder's breathing, along with faint sounds of the other team members, echoing ghost-like from her headset.

Again, Mulder counted down on his fingers. This time he was first around the door's edge. Scully followed his lead, swiveling to confront a small, empty office.

"Team one, section alpha, clear," Mulder spoke crisply into the speaker on his headset, the message disseminating to every member on all four teams.

Immediately in Mulder's wake. "Team one, section bravo, clear," Sandborne's voice crackled over the speakers.

Two other teams were moving into the warehouse at the same time as Mulder's, one from the back and another from the remote east side. There was a fourth team surrounding the building, who had by now wired the gargantuan cargo bay doors with explosive charges, just in case.

They had less than an hour.

"Team one, Charlie, clear," Tucek reported.

Mulder started back down the hall at the same time as Scully, and the windowless enclosure was like a coffin. When Scully licked her lips briefly, they were salty with sweat. Small, damp clumps of hair stuck against her forehead. Poised outside another office door, there was the same countdown, holding her breath. There was a slam as the door hit the wall behind it, and the blood rushed in Scully's ears when she rounded the corner.

"Team one, Section Delta, clear," she said.

There were eight offices in the hall, anticipated ahead of time with the blueprints they had obtained. Scully and Mulder were supposed to clear the first office while Sandborne and Williams cleared the second, then Tucek and Bukowski had the third, and so on. That was how it was supposed to work.

Scully felt the air shift, sucking inward, at the precise moment it all fell apart. Faintly, she could hear Mulder as he muttered, "this is ridiculous," and then he had broken into a run, passing the next office in his haste. "Williams and Sandborne, take golf. Tucek and Bukowski, take hotel."

The bewildered response was affirmative, but Mulder didn't even pause. Scully ran after him, not knowing what else to do.

SAC Moore interrupted from his position waiting outside with team four. "Agent Mulder, what the hell do you think you're doing?"

Mulder didn't respond, and Scully struggled to match his pace, as he finished off the length of the long hall. In her ear, over the sound of her running footfalls, the first report from one of the other teams came through.

"Team two, section kilo, clear."

There was an enormous pair of swinging metal door at the end of the hall, and Scully was shocked when, heedless of procedure or safety, she watched Mulder slam through the obstacle without a glance back in her direction. The doors resounded with a deafening boom as they smacked into the walls behind.

Scully felt panic well up inside her chest like water, drowning.

Moore's voice rattled across the speakers. "Holy fucking shit! What the hell is going on in there?"

Their presence was as good as announced now. Any element of surprise their careful silence had secured was obliterated.

"I want a report! Now!" Moore again, and, in his wake, the voices of other team members reporting in, assuring Moore of their safety.

"Agent Mulder!" Moore roared.

Scully mirrored Moore's cry. "Mulder!" But he was gone from her sight.

Scully pushed forward, imagining she could already hear the crack of gunfire as Mulder was taken by surprise in his mad dash forward. She hit the door hard and almost stepped back at the enormity of the space she had entered.

The room was vast, spreading out around her. Two staggering, vision obscuring rows of six vats each -- tall, circular monstrosities of corroded metal with ladders ascending their sides -- dominated the room, marching impossibly backwards. Too easy for someone to hide in this place, she thought. Silence was a menace filling every darkened empty space.

From elsewhere in the building, another report came through. "Team three, section romeo, clear."

"Team one, foxtrot, clear." Williams and Sandborne were clearing the offices she and Mulder had abandoned.

Heart pounding, Scully made her way around the first vat, weapon steady. She had just cleared the titanic structure when she heard the flutter of movement, looked up and saw Mulder moving forward at the far end of the room. He was almost to the stairs.

"Mulder, wait!"

He didn't stop, and she raced after him, feeling each and every shadow in the massive room watching her. Mulder was already reaching the top of a high, narrow staircase at the end of the room. Scully placed her foot on the first step. Dust sailed up from her feet. Her thigh muscles twinged in protest. Suddenly, the world dropped out from under her, the shattering sound of a small explosion reached her after the fact, and an involuntary scream tore from her throat.

"Scully!"

Pain, as all of the air was sucked roughly from her lungs, and her body impacted with the ground. Scully had landed partially on her back and left shoulder, hard. The remains of the staircase she had been climbing littered the cold, stone floor around her. She winced when she lifted up onto her elbow; a large splinter of wood had ripped through her shirt sleeve, gouging a jagged tear in the flesh of her arm. She sucked in a deep breath, closed her eyes, and plucked it out. Blood streamed down her arm from the wound.

She was dizzy. Above her, Mulder was standing in an open doorway near the edge of the drop-off, looking down at her with panic in his stance.

"Scully, are you all right?!" Panic in his voice, too.

Behind her, Williams and Sandborne had followed them into the packing room and were rounding the last vat, rushing to her side.

"I'm fine," she panted. "I just got the wind knocked out of me." Scully tore the remains of her shirt sleeve off, using the dirty scrap of material as a pathetic tourniquet. Her blood seeped warm and wet from beneath its meager protection. She could feel angry bruises blossoming across her back and shoulder, but there was nothing anyone could do for her at that moment.

"Agent Scully." Williams had dropped down beside her, placing a hand under her arm to guide her up.

"It's all right, Mulder. Just go." She forced the words out. "We'll find another way up."

He looked down at her one last time, as she stood up fully and brushed debris from the front of her jacket. In the eerie glow of her goggles, Mulder gave a small nod, his eyes unknowable behind their obstruction, and without another word, disappeared through the door behind him.

"We have to find another way on to that catwalk," Scully said, turning to Williams -- the catwalk that surrounded the cargo bay, the cargo bay that Mulder insisted held their missing child and possibly their suspect.

"There should be another two doors on this side," Williams responded, gesturing to a featureless portal at ground level to their left.

"Let's do it," she said.

The radio in their ears reported the other teams' progress, making their way in from more distant entrances to the building. Scully couldn't remember if she'd heard anything from them during her rush after Mulder. From their current positions, she'd missed something.

"Team three, tango, clear."

"Team two, section November, clear."

The other teams were making slow progress through the dank, labyrinthine corridors and storage units.

"On three," Scully ordered, automatically taking command.

Sandborne forced the door open, and Scully was the first one in, staring down a hallway much longer and wider than the one through which they had already run. This time there were no office doors to break up the monotony of rotting walls.

"Clear," she announced, and then, "Go!"

The group of agents leapt forward, Scully in the lead. A thin stream of blood reached her wrist and slicked out over her palm. Her breath sounded ragged and unnaturally loud, filling her ears, drowning out the clatter of boots on concrete.

Another staircase came into view.

"Agent Scully," Williams called behind her, a warning in his tone. She knew what he was trying to say, and worried as she was about taking another fall, there was no other way.

"I don't have a choice," she told him, the words clipped, starting up the stairs. She almost expected to hear the same explosion, the same splintering wood and pain. Scully could hear Williams' boots on the stairs behind her. Reaching the top without incident, she cursed loudly in the darkness.

"Shit! It's bricked up!"

Ahead of her, the door that was supposed to lead out to the catwalk had become nothing more than an extension of the wall, a thick, fresh barrier of bricks sealing it up.

"What?" Williams asked, incredulous.

Scully clicked on the radio. "Mulder, the next entrance is bricked up. We can't get in. What's going on?" She paused, waited, and her query was met only by silence.

"Mulder, what's going on?" She was scared and trying not to let it show in her voice.

Nothing.

"Agent Mulder, report!" An order over the air waves from Moore.

Dread clawed its way up her spine. "Mulder!"

There was no answer.

"How far is the next entrance?" Scully demanded, as she pushed past her teammates to continue down the hall.

"About another a hundred yards." It took a second to recognize Sandborne's voice behind the answer.

Scully reached the next set of stairs with Williams at her side. She bounded up the ancient steps without a thought to her previous concern for stability. The sight that greeted her at the top solidified the dread into a tight, frigid knot, melding seamlessly with her fury.

She radioed her findings in a tight voice. "Team one, C entrance is bricked up, too. Over." Then, in a more pleading tone, "Mulder, please, we can't get in. What's happening in there?"

Silence was the only reply.

"Next entrance should be around this corner." Sandborne spoke without Scully even needing to ask the question.

Over the pounding of her feet against the concrete, team three had more bad news. "Team three, G entrance is bricked up. Over."

Followed shortly by Moore and another attempt to get a response from Mulder. "Agent Mulder, I want a report right now!"

Scully's team reached the fourth set of stairs. This time, she was not surprised when she reached the top and found the doorway obstructed. Turning to move down the stairs again, a sound stopped her in her tracks; clear from within the sealed off cargo bay, the crack of gunfire, one shot, and then a quick succession of three more.

"Team three. Shots fired. Over," came the unnecessary statement over the radio.

"Mulder, who's firing? Mulder?" She sounded desperate and didn't care.

Without thinking, without even knowing how she was going to accomplish it, Scully slammed the butt of her assault rifle into the brick wall with strength she shouldn't have possessed.

"Agent Scully?" Williams made to grab her arm, but she pulled herself roughly away, continuing without speaking or even looking up. She was shocked when another weapon began to collide with the bricks along side hers. She wanted to thank him but didn't have the energy or the time to waste. The empty corridor resounded with the sound of their efforts.

"Team four. We're taking these cargo doors out. Over."

Unavoidably, the team outside was preparing to blast through, despite Mulder's orders.

The brick construction was new, obviously unprofessional, and therefore weak. Muscles in her arms and shoulders burned, as the first cracks in the wall began to appear. Pulverized brick dusted the toes of her black boots. Finally, a few bricks tumbled inward. Scully ignored the pain, pouring furor and fear into her labor.

"Detonating!"

Outside, loud through the small opening they'd made, the pre-set explosives discharged. Another pile of bricks fell away.

"Go! Go! Go!"

The breach was barely large enough. Grabbing Williams' arm to stop his movement, Scully scrambled up and over the shattered bricks. Head first, her hands collided with the metal floor, slipping in the rust colored rubble. When she righted herself, she stood on a catwalk that ran the periphery of the cargo bay. The gigantic doors were violently cleft, cacophonous, bright light of headlights beyond flooding in. Scully pushed the night vision goggles down. A swarm of agents poured through the demolished doors, peppering the interior of the warehouse with red pinpricks from assault rifle scopes. The cavernous space was filled with stacked crates and other refuse. Dark, indistinguishable Agents fanned out, searching the mess. From above, Scully scanned the melee and found no sign of Mulder.

Williams was crawling through the hole behind her, with soft grunts for effort, landing eventually in a graceless heap. Scully ran towards the stairs that descended to the bay below. Above her head, the ceiling of the cargo bay was high and curved, thick, black, steel arches supporting the weight. Satan's Cathedral, Scully thought, oddly, and with horror.

She reached ground level and stopped. Agent Moore was standing several feet away, staring at her in shock.

"Where's Mulder?" She asked, urgently.

"How did you get in here," Moore answered, his eyes on the demolished shape of the weapon at her side.

"Where is he?" She repeated, not willing to explain.

"We've found no sign of him yet," Moore replied, grim, as red flashing lights and the wail of sirens heralded the arrival of several ambulances. Someone had called the paramedics, preparing for injuries or casualties.

Something tugged in the recesses of Scully's mind. She turned away from Moore, feeling his gaze on her as she walked away.

"Agent Scully?"

Walking, not sure why, Scully moved past the agents searching the warehouse, and then running, past everyone, to a high wall of stacked crates against the back wall of the room. An insidious sense of foreboding began to crawl over her, viscous and dangerous, making it hard to breathe. She wanted to slow her steps. She wanted to turn around and leave this place. She couldn't. She was being drawn inexorably forward.

A small aperture was present along the side of the stack. Knowing somehow, and strangely heedless of precaution, Scully reached up and toppled one of the crates. It was heavy, shattering with a hollow crack into countless pieces. Then a second crate, and a third. The crates were huge, and dust from shattered bricks and decay smeared in the sweat on Scully's forehead.

Finally, light poured through the fissure she'd created, illuminating a small alcove carved beneath the catwalk, stretching back into darkness. Stepping under the low ceiling, shadows surrounded her, and Scully could see very little in the dim light. A few more steps, and then she gasped, breaking into a run.

Ahead of her, barely visible on the dirt blackened floor, Mulder sat sprawled and bloody, the limp body of a small child cradled in his arms.

"Mulder, oh my God, Mulder..."

She crashed to her knees beside him, shocked by the quantity of blood. It was everywhere, visible even in the near darkness. It spread out in a gory pool around the little boy, coated Mulder's hands, smeared his face and jaw. Mulder was holding the child as if a strong enough embrace might revive him. Scully had to force his hands away in order to check for a pulse, already knowing.

Glancing down the tiny body, her voice held a tremble. She had to force it out. "Mulder, are you hurt? We heard gunfire."

He didn't look up, didn't respond.

"Mulder?" A gentle hand over his, which was tightly fisted around a bundle of blood drenched t-shirt. She squeezed, faintly, and could feel him shudder beneath her touch. He was in shock.

Briskly, Scully ran her hands up and over his arms, along the part of his legs that she could reach. She tilted his head to the side, his muscles moving without resistance, searching for signs of injury. Finding nothing, she swept her eyes around the room, certain she would discover their murderer lurking in one of the dark corners. All that revealed itself to her scrutiny were tyrannical shadows and the mingled stench of blood and dirt.

Mulder was staring into the sightless eyes of Tristan Oliver, a face Scully recognized from photographs, a face now pale and tragic, stained by blood. Scully reached out, and with reverent fingers, closed the vacant eyes. His skin was still warm. She watched as Mulder's eyes, too, closed, his shoulders slumping, shaking. He was moments away from falling completely apart.

"Mulder..." She pried his fingers away from the child's clothes.

She lifted the boy from Mulder's lap and laid him tenderly on the ground. Mulder rose when she guided him up, stumbling, almost collapsing. She wove an arm around his back and he leaned against her, walking sluggishly, posture slack. He didn't seem to blink, to breathe. His eyes stared unseeing ahead, more frightening than Scully had ever seen them. There was desolation in his eyes that made Scully terribly, sickeningly afraid.

Unnoticed by Scully, several agents had entered the alcove. Scully pushed past them, ignoring their looks, their questions. A virtual sea of agents, and she pushed past them all. Something inside of her was clenching, drawing tighter, folding in upon itself. Her perceptions narrowed. The car. Safety. Quiet. They couldn't be here. He couldn't. She would lose him.

The shouted questions were faint disturbances at the edge of Scully's purpose. She emerged from the warehouse into a blinding chaos of lights, sirens, and shouting. Back to the car, opened the door on Mulder's side, closed it after him.

If she had bothered to glance at her watch, Scully would have noticed that the small hand had only recently passed the hour mark, she would have surmised that the hour had changed at around the same time Tristan Oliver had drawn his last breath. Their twenty-four hours were up, and they had been too late.

Uncaring and unknowing, Dana Scully led her partner back to the motel they shared, and again the road unfurled before them with the horrifying speed of terrible events set in unstoppable motion.

~~~~
End Chapter 7 (8/29)
End Part I

~~~~
~~~~
~~~~
Part II -- Ashes

Most of what they shared, after all, after all was done, was silence.

"It was all a question of silence," she said aloud to him, in his workroom, where she could no longer expect any answer, neither anger nor understanding.

~~~~
Chapter 8
~~~~

The chalkboard was green, like the kind used in a classroom. Blood smeared its smooth surface; red fingerprints marred the pieces of white chalk that sat in a tray beneath. Scully shivered. The white tile and polished metal of the autopsy suite reminded her of the glacier in Antarctica, frozen and vast. Overhead lights cast pools of cold, harsh light. Scully stared at the chalkboard, transfixed by the macabre spectacle of scarlet stains amidst carefully recorded weights and measures.

She'd pulled off her gown and face shield. The high rubber gloves had been disposed of. The practiced hand of an assistant had long since cleaned the table and meat scales. Yet the chalkboard still sat, across the room, keeping record of the precise weight of a heart, a lung -- the viscera of a life and innocence stolen.

"The deceased is a Caucasian male, Tristan Robert Oliver, eight years of age. Preliminary diagnosis indicates cause of death to be blood loss stemming from three visible stab wounds to the chest, lower abdomen, and lower back. No other discernible signs of trauma are present."

Her voice on the tape recorder, though she barely recognized it.

"Height recorded at four feet, nine inches; weight, forty-one pounds in extremis. Low body weight is consistent with signs of advanced malnutrition. External physical examination reveals the stab wounds to be inflicted with, most likely, a small knife, not unlike a kitchen knife, though the exact type of weapon will be difficult to establish due to retraction of the skin once the weapon was removed. Detailed observations and sketches of the wounds can be found on page eleven of the attendant report."

Such small wounds, and purposefully so. He'd been intended to die slowly. Tristan Oliver had been stabbed with the express purpose that he gradually bleed his young life out onto the dirty floor of the Saks Mill Warehouse. After all, their murderer needed time to escape, time to leave before the FBI showed up. It was much more dramatic that way, to find the boy as he was moments from death, still hanging on for one last gasping, blood-flecked breath.

"Further external examination reveals the appearance of obvious edema in the face, legs, and arms. The stomach, also, is distended and swollen. Muscle mass deterioration is apparent in the shoulders, upper arms, and scapulae, as well as less severe deterioration in the upper and lower legs."

His body had turned in upon itself in an attempt to survive, cannibalizing muscle and soft tissue. Tristan had been held for three months and a week. It had been more than long enough. His tiny body was reminiscent of victims of famine, of disturbing images of countless small children, in Ethiopia and elsewhere, bellies swollen, eyes sunken and haunted. The perfect skeletal outline of a collarbone, an elbow, thin skin stretched tight. Those images on television and in newspapers, the distance making the horror seem less real. A horror the likes of which Scully had never imagined she would be forced to confront personally.

"There are symptoms of dermatitis -- peeling and flaking of the epidermis along the face, arms, chest, and back. Hair has a faint reddish tinge and can be pulled out easily, due to the deterioration of the roots. Again, all observations are consistent with advanced malnutrition."

On the tape, the pre-recorded Scully launched into the internal exam.

"The heart and liver appear markedly enlarged. Examination and gross dissection of the liver reveals signs of impaired synthesis and liver disease. Effusion of serous fluids into the interstices of cells in tissue spaces is resultant in more apparent swelling within the body cavity. Gross dissection of the kidneys reveals degeneration consistent with nephritis and is further supported by the laboratory finding of keytone bodies present in the subject's urine. Full laboratory findings are also attendant."

Tristan Oliver was in the early stages of renal failure. His liver and heart were giving out. Even had he survived the stabbing, if they'd arrived in time, it was doubtful that Tristan would have lived. Mental and physical retardation would have been likely. As with the other victims, Tristan had been starved to the point of torture. He was only disposed of when there was nothing left to destroy.

Not that these facts made it any easier, their failure the night before. They didn't make it easier at all. Before, she would have returned to the hotel, grim and assured, and tried to console Mulder with these observations. She would have tried to console him, in some small way, with the knowledge that they hadn't been meant to win, that there was no possible way for them to have won under these circumstances. It had been a "lesson." A malicious, abhorrent lesson. Before, but not now.

"Examination and gross dissection of the large intestine reveals signs of long-term infection and impaired absorption. The subject most likely suffered from chronic diarrhea for several weeks prior and up until the point of death.

"Basic and pertinent lab findings include an expectedly low concentration of albumin water-soluble proteins, a low plasma glucose, low plasma amino acids, signs of secondary immunodeficiency with a white blood cell count at less than 1500 mm3, an excessively low cholesterol count, decreased levels of Potassium and Magnesium in the blood, and the aforementioned presence of keytone bodies in the urine."

Symptoms of a body at war with itself, a body ravaged and fading away.

"Cause of death is officially noted as blood loss, but with the observed serious levels of deterioration due to malnutrition it should be noted that, in my professional opinion, the subject was a victim of prolonged starvation as a method of torture, though this is only an opinion and cannot be adequately proven."

Unbidden and unwelcome, the image of Tristan after the autopsy had been finished flashed across her mind's eye.

The body had been open and hollow, empty. Just the fragile remnants of his ribs remained, the sternum gone, no longer necessary to protect a heart that had ceased to beat. His face had been obscured by the scalp that had been pulled forward and over, the top of the head missing to enable the removal of the brain. She had stood in the cold sterility of the autopsy suite, mesmerized by the spattering of blood that had found its way to the floor, and had been trapped by her own suffocating sense of loss.

<"I'm going to close the body up now, ma'am.">

She almost hadn't heard her assistant when he'd spoken. She'd only nodded, unable to offer any more by way of assent.

Also unbidden was the memory of Mulder's eyes, staring down into Tristan's, as the child lay across her partner's lap, the tiny shapes of fingers etched in blood upon the canvas of Mulder's cheek and neck. How cold his skin had been, how warm the washcloth, as she had wiped those marks away. How he had murmured her name, faintly, so faintly, as she pushed the gory jacket from his shoulders. How even his lips had tasted of grief.

Behind Scully, the door leading in from the morgue opened.

"Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't know anyone was still in here."

Briskly, she gathered her notes and reports together, stuffed them into her briefcase. "That's okay. I was just leaving."

Brushing past the janitor, moving out into the night, she did.

~~~~

Back at the motel, in the relative sanctuary of her own room; her image was reflected in the mirror above the low dresser.

She'd started pulling her clothes off almost immediately after entering the room, intent upon escaping the imagined smell of death and retreating to the shower. An uncharacteristic trail of clothes littered the floor, dropped randomly as she'd discarded them. She'd turned on the lamp atop the dresser, throwing faint, yellowed light around the drab room. Then she'd turned around, faced the mirror in only a bra and panties.

The bruises from her fall in the warehouse were livid. Facing the mirror, they wrapped around her shoulder, extending to the front. Horrid. She looked like she'd been beaten. Her fingers grazed the tear in the flesh of her bicep, and her breath hissed out, face twisting in pain. She should have gotten stitches. It would scar now.

But those injuries weren't what held her transfixed before the mirror. There was a bruise, a mottled circle of red, broken capillaries at the juncture of her neck and shoulder, along the tendon, another on her collarbone.

The modest shape of bikini panties did nothing to hide the fainter bruises on her hips, the shapes of long fingers, larger and thicker than her own. Familiar fingers.

The last was the worst, she knew. Folding her arms behind her back, the clasp of her bra gave with a subtle snap and fell away. She shrugged it off, and took a deep, steadying breath before lifting her eyes to the mirror once more. On the underside of her right breast, just below the nipple. Faith teeth marks red against the pale skin. She could remember the scrape of his teeth vividly. She carried that memory with her like a phantom.

She hadn't slept last night. The day had stretched long and endless from the moment she had regained her fragile composure in her room after it had happened, through a dressing down from Moore, a visit to yet another crime scene, interviews with bereaved parents, and a long and terrible autopsy.

She couldn't recall how she had ended up on the bed, when she had curled herself into a tight fetal ball. Exhaustion, perhaps, had propelled her there without conscious thought, weeks of fatigue and then... this. In the end, it didn't matter. All that mattered was that she was curled on her bed, suffering and half-asleep, when he knocked.

He knocked, weakly, like he didn't want to be heard. How did she know it was him?

"Scully?" Feeble and watery, like he'd been crying.

"Scully, are you awake?"

She curled herself tighter, imagining that she was diminishing on the bed. The door was locked. He couldn't get in.

"Scully, I know you're in there. I saw the car in the lot." He sounded frightened and desperate, needy. "I need to know that you're all right." His voice was barely loud enough to be heard through the door, and it wasn't all he needed. He was as lost as she was, and he needed reassurance, that it would all be okay, somehow.

She just needed time -- time to sublimate it all, to push the heartache down into submission, time to recover so they would be able to move forward. They had to be able to move forward.

"Scully, please..." And if her heart hadn't already been broken, it would have shattered with those words, at their hopelessness.

Then there was silence. Her hands were trembling where they clutched around her waist. She concentrated on her breathing, on trying to slow it down, to stop the shaking. She assumed he had left.

Then there was the grinding twist of someone unlocking her door. She didn't even bother to wonder how he had picked the lock. She knew that she should move from the bed and didn't want to, didn't care.

The hinges on the door were rusty; they whined as the portal was opened. A blast of frigid air swept through the room, drenching her in goose flesh. The rusty wail again as the door was closed, and then nothing but silence filled with the sensation of his eyes on her.

He didn't go. Instead, after an interminable pause, she could hear soft footsteps approaching the bed. The footsteps stopped at the edge of the bed closest to her. She could hear the ragged sound of his breathing, a choked gasp. Was he crying?

He did. Fingertips grazed her shoulder, the one covered with angry bruises, a gossamer touch, like a sigh. She jerked back sharply, eyes snapping open. She moved fast, faster than he had probably thought her capable of. Reeling, scrambling, arms falling away to push against the bed as she moved, over to the opposite side and onto her feet. She was unconcerned with her nakedness. It hardly mattered anymore. And perhaps she wanted him to see. The damage.

They both froze when she had stopped moving, the bed a vast uncharted sea between them. One tear traced a jagged path down his cheek. He hadn't shaved. There were dark circles shrouding his eyes. His eyes raked over her body, nothing sexual in the gaze. There was a precise moment, when she knew his eyes had reached the most obscene of the bruises, his eyes growing impossibly wide, a flash of the most intense pain, and then shame, horror, revulsion. He closed his eyes.

Neither spoke for a long time.

With his eyes still closed. "I never..." He took a small step around the bed. His lips moved without sound. Another two steps, "never..."

She couldn't move.

He stopped a few feet away from her, and then stretched out a hand, slender fingers, ashen skin in the half-light. The touch was faint. He reached out and traced the discoloration along her collarbone.

"Don't." She almost hissed the word, fumbling back, away from his touch. "Don't touch me."

His eyes closed again, two more tears escaping.

Edging away from him, she moved closer to the dresser, snatched her discarded blouse off of the ground, and clutched it to her chest. It was cold in the room. She was shivering violently.

"Why didn't you tell me?" He was looking at her again, at the jagged gash in her arm.

When would she have told him? As she was carrying him from the warehouse, bloody and shaking? When he had refused to speak in the car, mute with shock? While his hands had gripped her knees and pushed her legs apart? As she'd held him, crying in the aftermath?

"There was nothing to tell." So cold, her voice.

"Scully..." Pleading.

She felt frozen, glacial and solitary standing across the room from him. She was unable to explain the full spectrum of grief she was experiencing, unable to rationalize why even his slight touch seemed an embodiment of something, of a vague, unuttered promise that they had destroyed the night before.

The words escaped of their own volition. A whisper. "I feel dirty, Mulder." They were the worst words she could have possibly spoken. They were the truth.

The blood drained suddenly from his face, and he doubled over, as if punched in the gut.

<I'm so sorry, Mulder, for both of us. I don't know how to fix this.>

When he stood up again, his eyes were vacant, perfect nothingness where pain had washed the rest away. "I'm sorry, Scully." Mirroring her thoughts.

She hadn't wanted his apology, had dreaded it, in fact. She didn't blame him, and his regret was the most painful gift he could have offered.

Their eyes locked one last time. Her -- hair the only color in the room, white knuckles gripping a silk blouse like a shield above cotton panties, feeling frail and defenseless, hating that feeling. Him -- tears dry and eyes red-rimmed, a sort of barren acceptance, resignation, hardening his features into a mask of stone.

It wasn't supposed to be this way.

She looked away, eyes cast to the floor, and she heard his footsteps on the carpet, heard the snick of the door opening and shutting again. When she looked up, she was alone.

~~~~

Scully was standing, hiding, between Agent Williams and Agent Marcus in a group of agents that had gathered around the conference table in the bullpen. A chair was pulled out, files spread in front of it, as if someone were sitting there. But the Agent who had formerly occupied that spot was no longer seated. Mulder swept the length of the bullpen behind the table in furious strides, pacing, taking his impotent rage out on the polished tiles of the floor.

"How did you know I'd be the first one up the stairs?" Mulder jumped into the conversation, seemingly unwilling to let their opponent make the opening move.

"It was an educated guess, actually, and an easy one at that. I knew that once you thought about it, you'd know where to go. I also knew that you'd need to be the first one there."

The phone had rung several hours after they'd arrived at the field office this morning. Mulder had spent most of the morning in interviews, going over what had happened. The biggest question had been over the firing of his weapon. He would only explain by saying that he thought that he had "seen something… someone." From the look on Moore's face, it had been a weak explanation, at best. Scully had left after that, her presence not necessary. She couldn't sit there, watch his lifeless expression, and pretend to be okay.

"Masonry, explosives; are there any other talents of yours we should be forewarned about?" Mulder again.

"Hardly talents, Agent Mulder, they’re necessary skills."

After leaving Moore's office, Scully had retreated to the flurry of activity in the bullpen, comforted by the rush and press of people around her. She'd willingly thrown herself into a pile of paperwork someone had cast her way, knowing there was nothing else to be done at that moment, feeling entirely incapable of deciding what to do next.

Williams had sat down opposite her at a desk, regarding her over the stacks of paper. He'd asked her if she was all right, laughing after realizing he asked her that same question with some frequency. Scully had been startled to realize just how badly she needed some sort of human connection and had found herself grateful for the concern in his dark eyes.

There was silence for a moment on the telephone.

When their adversary spoke again, there was genuine sorrow in his tone. His words were soft. "I'm sorry you couldn't save him, Agent Mulder. I know how badly you wanted to."

Abruptly, Mulder stopped in his tracks, and from her position between the two taller men, Scully could see the rage that flared in Mulder's eyes, a blaze that made them dark and frightening.

"I couldn't save him," Mulder spat, "Because you put a knife in his chest."

The killer was quiet for a moment. "Blame,” he finally said, "is a strange thing, Agent Mulder. It's complicated. Who do you blame for the miseries of your life? Other people? Fate? God? Yourself? Blame is not easy to quantify."

"It’s not that difficult," Mulder said, lowly, accusing. His voice rose with each of his next words. "Tristan Oliver was a living, breathing little boy until you took a knife and put it through his left lung, and then again into his stomach, and again in his back, leaving him to die, alone and afraid on the dirty floor of an abandoned warehouse." His pitch dropped, derisively. "That's not complicated at all."

Standing several feet away, SAC Moore was watching Mulder intently, almost suspiciously. He must have felt Scully's eyes on him, because he turned at her glance, made brief eye contact with her, and then turned back to face Mulder.

Everyone in the room was keeping a wide berth from Mulder, wider than was normal, wider than Scully had noticed during the whole of their investigation prior to the tragedy at Saks Mill. It had been like that all day long, and all day the day before. She felt sorry for him. She physically ached for the isolated sorrow he was living, but she could no more approach him than could any of the agents standing beside her.

On the other end of the telephone line, there was a frustrated sigh. "Still you fail to see." The kidnapper sounded sad, disappointed, and then, suddenly, imploring. "Look into yourself, Agent Mulder. Look at those children. It's all right there, staring you in the face, the lies."

"The lies?" Mulder was condescending.

"We have more in common that you would probably like to think, Agent Mulder."

A thought Scully shuddered to consider.

"We don't have *anything* in common."

"Oh, that's where you're wrong," the murderer corrected. He paused, and then his words became cryptic, strange. "They can make the choices for you, and you can even try to make it better, but you won't ever be clean. Don't think that just because you do good deeds, you search for justice, you lead a righteous life, that the stain is erased. It isn't ever absolved."

The look on Mulder's face must have mirrored the one Scully wore. She felt completely lost by the turn in conversation, knowing understanding was essential.

He continued, "I've seen you, Agent Mulder. You're as tainted as the others, as I am. But, like me, you were the victim. You didn't choose to become dirty. Someone else made that choice for you."

Mulder was speechless and still in his spot across the room. Scully hugged her arms around her chest, feeling cold and vulnerable, noticing the perplexed looks on the faces of the agents around her.

This lesson their murder had designed was beginning to feel more and more like an orchestrated punishment. Punishment for what, however, she had no idea. It was a punishment that involved agendas and plans, ways of thinking that pertained to some twisted sense of order they were completely unable to see. There was a feeling of dread, an utter lack of understanding, as if Scully were blindfolded and supine on the executioner's block, waiting for the ax to fall.

When the line disconnected, it was with a quiet, decisive click, and the room was washed with silence.

~~~~
End Chapter 8 (part 9/29)

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Chapter 9
~~~~

The cuffs of her black pants were wet and cold, soaked with dirty slush. She stepped from the car, into another puddle of melting ice, and felt the tug of wind on cold-prickled cheeks. On the other side of the car, Mulder emerged and shut the door behind him, moving up to the front gate of the house without a glance in her direction. Clouds hovered ominously in the sky, and she supposed that their joint choice of all back ensembles was a subconscious acknowledgment of mourning. Mulder stood at the front door, seeming tall and strange to her. She stopped beside him and rang the bell.

The house was quiet, dark, and she wondered if anyone was home. Then there was the faintest shuffling of feet on the other side of the door, the sound of multiple locks disengaging, and a crack appeared as the door was opened only as far as the chain would allow. From within the shadowed confines of the house, a face peered out at them.

"Mrs. Oliver?" Mulder asked.

She nodded, clutching her bathrobe tighter, but she made no move to unlatch the door.

"My name is Fox Mulder. We spoke earlier today."

She hesitated, and after a moment, moved to unlock the door. It opened to reveal a dark hall and the retreating figure of Madeline Oliver, who was walking slowly towards the living room without waiting for them to come inside.

Scully stomped the ice from her boots and stepped into the foyer.

After the last phone call, Mulder had sat dejected at the table for almost an hour. Scully and the other agents had retreated to their previous activities, and when Mulder finally rose from the table and approached her desk, he made only the most tenuous eye contact.

"We need to re-interview the families."

That's all he'd said, and no one had questioned him. So, with Mulder trailing behind, Scully followed the bereaved specter of Madeline Oliver into her living room. Madeline had been the only real witness to any of these events; she had been the only person to have any sort of contact with their killer, even if she remembered nothing of it.

Sitting gingerly on the edge of a plain, blue sofa, Scully looked into the eyes of the woman across from her. The shades on the windows were drawn back, allowing gray winter light to sweep across the room, which was otherwise dark. Madeline's skin was almost translucent, colorless, eyes red and swollen, showing an unmistakable lack of sleep. Her hair was pulled back into a messy ponytail that hung limp between her shoulder blades. She sat stiff-backed and defensive, waiting for them to continue.

"We're very sorry for your loss, Mrs. Oliver." Scully said, knowing how meager that sounded.

Madeline only nodded. "I already told the police everything I know," her voice rasped.

Mulder answered her, and the raw guilt in his voice was a fourth presence in the room. "We know that, and we're very sorry to intrude on you in this way again. We wouldn't do it if we didn't think it would help."

Tristan's mother seemed to consider this for a moment. "It won't help bring my son back." Bitter and resentful.

"No," Mulder responded, the word choking in his throat, "but it may help bring him some justice."

She only stared back, unconvinced.

Mulder cleared his throat, looked nervously about the room, searching for a place to begin. He sat in an armchair next to Madeline's and across from Scully. The room was cold, the air thick with stale grief. A quantity of unwashed dishes sat abandoned on the coffee table. Scully remained quiet, allowing Mulder to figure out where he needed to go. She had no idea what he was looking for.

"I hate to make you do this again." Mulder's voice was compassionate, soft, forcing the guilt down by sheer force of will. "But could you tell us what happened on the night Tristan was taken? What you saw?"

Madeline sighed and looked down at her hands. She took a deep breath and closed her eyes, reluctance palpable in her demeanor. How many times had she told this story, Scully wondered. How many more times would she have to tell it?

"I don't really remember anything."

Scully wanted to flinch at the abused sound of Madeline's voice, at the obvious hours spent crying.

"I woke up," her voice was faint, eyes still closed, "and it was freezing, so I climbed out of bed to turn up the thermostat."

Mulder nodded, but Tristan's mother wasn't looking at him.

"I went out into the hall." Her face came up and she opened her eyes, looking at Scully, eyes pleading. "I didn't notice anything wrong. The house felt perfectly normal."

Scully swallowed the lump at the back of her throat.

Madeline's concentration returned to her wringing hands. "I walked down the hall to turn up the heat, and..." She stopped the unconscious motion of her hands, and her voice grew flat, impossibly quiet. "That’s it. The next thing I remember is waking up on the floor the next morning."

"No other memories have surfaced since that night? You can't remember anything after you raised the thermostat?" Mulder prompted gently.

The mother shook her head.

"Not even things that don't really seem like memories? Dreams? Flashes of strange images?"

Scully was unsure of where he was going with this.

Madeline looked up, a strange expression on her face. "Dreams?"

"Dreams, daydreams, hallucinations, anything," Mulder responded.

"I..." She was hesitant.

Scully moved forward in her seat. The muscles in her shoulders tensed.

"I've had this dream, the past four nights in a row." Madeline sounded unsure.

The look on Mulder's face was eager, the compassion and guilt dimmed by its presence. He said nothing, his silent method of encouragement.

"In my dream, it's dark. I can't really see anything, where I am, but I don't feel lost or worried."
Madeline started slowly and then became immersed in her recollection of the dream. She was staring past Scully, looking through the window and beyond. "Then, out of nowhere, I hear a voice. It's a whisper. It tells me, 'no more lies.'"

Her focus returned, and she caught Scully's eye again, clearly disturbed by the dream.

"That's it?" Scully asked.

Madeline nodded.

Scully glanced over at Mulder, who had the look on his face she always associated with his inner forays into the world of his own personal darkness. He was searching.

Seemingly out of nowhere, he asked, "Why did you and your husband split up, Mrs. Oliver?"

Madeline's breath stuttered out on a small, surprised gasp. "I don't see what that has to do with my son's death." She sounded flustered and disturbed. Her ravaged voice made the question seem cruel.

Scully looked over to Mulder, confused.

Mulder recovered his tact, and his voice lost its edge. "Family history is always very important." His voice was calm, with the intonation that suggested this was just ordinary procedure.

Discomfort was evident in both Madeline's body language and voice. "We had been having problems for a long time." She fidgeted, the motion not born of grief this time, but of hesitance. "He... he couldn't find work. He's a musician, and gigs were coming fewer and farther between. We were having trouble paying the bills. I think he had more of a problem with it than I did, that I was making all of the money for the family. I think he felt like a failure."

Her speech tapered off. There was more. "And then, I met someone." There was guilt in that phrase.

"Met someone?" Mulder asked.

"Someone at work, a colleague. Henry and I had been so distant for such a long time, and I was lonely." Her voice dropped even lower. "When I became pregnant, Henry knew. It had been quite a while since he'd shown any interest in that part of our marriage."

The sister, Eliza, Scully thought. Scully broke into the conversation. "He asked for a divorce?"

Madeline looked up. "Yes, and I didn't object." The question of what this had to do with her son's murder was still apparent in Madeline's demeanor, and Scully noticed the trembling in the woman's hands.

Abruptly, Mulder stood. "Thank you for answering our questions, Mrs. Oliver."

Tristan's mother also stood. After an unsettled pause, she turned to walk the partners to the door.

"We'll contact you as soon as we find anything," Scully assured, as they were about to walk out onto the front porch.

Madeline's eyes had the haunted quality of countless other mothers, of Cynthia Deary, Grace Crane, and Roberta Hausner, mothers who were living their worst nightmares. Madeline blinked, the glimmer of unshed tears shading her pale eyes, and closed the door without reply.

~~~~

The temperature was dropping, and the air smelled crisp, heavy with snow. Ahead of her on the iced over walk leading back to their car, Mulder’s expression was indecipherable, his odd line of questioning a mystery.

She caught up to him, matching his strides. "Mulder?"

His phone rang. He snatched it up without answering her question, and, after a moment, grimaced. "Where?"

He hung up.

"We have another one," he said, as they reached the car. But she'd already known, had been able to tell as soon as he'd answered the call. The first flakes began to fall as their car pulled away from the curb.

~~~~

It was the same, always, always the same, same snow, same ice, same missing little boy.

Except this time, there was an added element of chaos. Police barricades kept the media and other on-lookers penned like cattle on one side of the street. Half a dozen news vans clogged the roadway along with several squad cars, three bureau sedans, and two tech vans. A perimeter had been established and was being patrolled by a Buffalo PD officer. Agents scurried about involved in various activities. Reporters hollered questions to anyone within earshot.

The weather was growing worse. It was only late afternoon, and already the sky had grown dark. Thick flakes of snow were gaining momentum and mass as they descended from the heavens. Scully had the beginning of an intense headache building behind her left eye, and she wondered if it was the weather or the circumstances.

The atmosphere was almost melodramatic in its tragedy. Flashing blue and red lights against the storm filled sky, the grim faced, somberly clad police officers and agents that moved back and forth across the street, the aura of panic that hung in the air.

Mulder brought their vehicle to a stop behind another bureau car.

Stepping into the maelstrom, Scully tugged the collar of her jacket tighter against the cold, fingers instantly numb, even protected by her gloves. The earlier thaw had melted the snow enough that the sudden drop in temperature again had solidified it into a seamless sheet of ice. Mulder had exited the car and was coming around the front when she started to walk up to the house. Her DC climate accustomed boots, which rarely saw this degree of cold weather, were not equipped to deal with the ice rink she was walking on. She slipped, her feet going momentarily out from under her, and he was there to catch her.

"Sorry," she mumbled, with one of his arms hooked around her waist, his other hand a vise around her upper arm, attempting to steady her.

He didn't say anything. He helped her right herself, and then released her, quickly, stepping back as if burned. They continued walking.

The officer at the periphery logged them in with barely a glance in their direction. They were halfway up the walk when another uniformed cop exited the house and came down to meet them.

"First at the scene?" Mulder asked, more of a statement than a question.

The uniformed officer nodded.

"The parents were away for the weekend," the officer started explaining, responding to Mulder's expectant look, "They were staying at a bed and breakfast in the country, and the kids were with a baby-sitter." The officer inclined his head in the direction of the street and Scully followed his gaze.

In the back seat of a squad car with the door open, a semi-hysterical teenage girl was clutching a steaming cup in her shaking hands, a blanket tossed over her shoulders, while two police officers stood nearby, one of them leaning down in conversation.

"The baby-sitter left the house to bring the sister to a friend's house, and Seth stayed here to keep an eye on one of his little brothers. When she got back, Seth was gone." There was a note of disgust evident in the officer's words, and Scully wondered if it was towards the parents who would leave their children for a weekend during this chaos, or towards the girl that had left an eight-year-old unattended long enough to be taken.

"We've gotten in touch with the parents, and they're driving back, but they won't be here for another hour or so."

Officer Phillips, a young man, maybe a year out of the academy, looked sickened and overwhelmed by the spectacle around him. He turned away from the baby-sitter and nodded in the direction of the house. "You two ready for the tour?"

They moved carefully up the ice-crusted walk.

Moving through the front door was walking from one form of chaos and into another. There were toys everywhere, brightly colored plastic in myriad shapes and sizes on the floor, the furniture, even littering the stairs at the back of the room. There were Barbie dolls, matchbox cars, Lego’s, a giant dollhouse, and a small fleet of toy trucks, amongst others.

"How many children are there?" Scully asked.

"Four," Phillips replied, "Seth, his sister Jill, who's six, and two younger brothers, Paul, one-year-old, and Christopher, three. The baby-sitter had the littlest, Paul, with her when she left the house. When she returned, she found Christopher screaming and alone in the living room."

Accenting the hurricane of toys was the glass, the omnipresent shattered glass. Crime scene experts moved through the wreckage with soundless, almost graceful efficiency. Photographs were taken by the score. Endless plastic evidence bags were filled and collected. The position of each piece of glass would be noted. Fibers that had been trekked onto the carpet by countless tiny feet would be catalogued. A million smudged fingerprints would be lifted, and none of it would yield anything.

It was enough to make Scully want to cry, to slink back to her motel room, climb under the covers, and cry. And then sleep. Sleep until this nightmare was over and she could wake once again to the prospect of another boring day of background checks and Mulder's forced witticisms that were nothing more than poorly veiled attempts to coax a smile from her during the mind numbing monotony of their day. She would embrace monotony now, but none of this was a dream, and she wasn't going to wake up anytime soon.

"We have something you're going to want to see." Phillips walked over the chest high counter that separated the living room from the kitchen.

When she walked up to the counter, Scully momentarily forgot the stony silence between her and Mulder. "Mulder, look at this."

He came up behind her and looked over her shoulder, his presence wrapped in the cold that still clung to them from the frigid outside air. On the kitchen counter, surrounded by the discarded remains of lunch, (milk glasses and bread crusts) an age yellowed photograph sat pristinely atop a sheaf of typed papers.

"This wasn't here before?" Mulder asked.

Phillips regarded the objects, hands stuffed into his pockets. "Not according to the baby-sitter."

It was obvious that it wasn't an innocuous photograph. The careful placement of the photo, the way it was creased and torn with age, the stack of printed papers it was perched upon; it was all too structured, too blatant.

Their opponent had left them a message.

~~~~

The baby-sitter, Margaret Collins, was only sixteen years old. She answered questions between fits of sobbing, was understandably convinced that Seth's disappearance was her fault, and was terrified of having to face his parents. She hadn't seen anything. She hadn't heard anything. She didn't know anything.

The interview with the parents had been equally unhelpful. They'd blamed themselves. Peggy and Eric Leeds had left the interview devastated, walking past SAC Moore who stood at the edge of the bullpen with mouth a cold, flat line and shadows around his eyes etched by sleeplessness.

Moore hadn't mentioned it, but Scully knew. Pressure from above had to be intense. Another child had been taken and they were still no closer to a solution. The vast FBI bureaucracy, media-savvy political giants for whom headlines and solve rates were the largest concern, would undoubtedly be breathing down Moore's neck by this point. This was a high profile case. It was splashed across every major newspaper. It had gotten coverage by evening news programs across the nation. This was the kind of case that made careers, or broke them.

Scully and Mulder couldn't possibly sink any lower than they already had. Career advancement wasn't really an issue for them anymore. The only advancement they wanted was the one they weren't allowed to have -- back down to the basement. The only punishment for failure they would receive was the one they inflicted upon themselves. Mulder, especially, was good at self-flagellation.

Moore, on the other hand, had everything to lose. He was seated at the desk in his office, visible through the opened blinds. His chair was turned to face the window. From where she stood, Scully couldn't see his face.

She pitied Moore. As much as his attitude rankled, as furious as he made her, she had to understand his frustration, in some small part, frustration at a case that seemed unsolvable, at the tremendous pressure being exerted by the bureau brass, at being saddled with a maverick profiler who broke all of the rules and pulled rabbits out of invisible hats, making the rest of the world seem stupid in the process. His leadership was threatened, as well as his career. More importantly, beneath it all, Scully had the unmistakable sense that he really was a good agent and a good leader.

Scully sighed. The wind howled against the glass. The room reeked of desperation. She walked into the conference room.

Mulder was hunched over the table, a copy of the papers they'd discovered spread out around him. The war zone atmosphere within the room seemed to intensify by the hour. Mulder had added to the original chaos, bringing in stacks of books, piles of folders, tape recorders, speakers. There was the detritus of a million plus coffee breaks, his bizarre patterns of evidence arrangement. She'd grown accustomed to it, and to the pervasive lack of light he seemed intent upon.

Scully stepped into the room cautiously, watching as Mulder turned the page and continued reading. Finally, she broke the silence. "What is it?"

He looked up at her, his eyes unknowable behind the reflection of light against the surface of his glasses. She shivered, whether at the cold winter air or the strangeness of his gaze, she wasn't sure.

When he spoke, he started slowly, concentration returning to the neatly typed pages in his hands. After the first unexpected sentence, Scully slumped into the chair across from her partner and began to listen.

"To begin at the beginning," Mulder read, "we shall start at the point from which all proper legends must set forth, with the traditionally vague, the beautifully mystical... once upon a time."

~~~~
End chapter 9 (part 10/29)

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Chapter 10
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"Innocence and Iniquity"
-- a parable

To begin at the beginning, we shall start at the point from which all proper legends must set forth, with the traditionally vague, “once upon a time.” Because once (whether it be in ages past or merely in imagination) upon a time there lived a faithful and honest widow. She was industrious and kind-hearted, toiling on a daily basis at whatever work she could procure in an effort to provide for her family. But despite this, she was a content and peaceful woman. She praised God every day for the blessing of his mercy and lived happily with her children.

The two sons of the widow were twins. Both had a shock of thick, dark hair and pure azure eyes. Each was tall and strong. Outwardly, they were alike in every way. Without fail, every time the family would venture into town, neighbors would exclaim at their striking resemblance. They were, in fact, so identical that their mother alone was capable of telling the two apart.

The only difference between the boys lay in their spirit, which was the method by which the mother was capable of discerning between them. The first born of the two she had named Merciful, for he was a meek and gentle child. The second she called Avarice, as a warning towards the greedy and immoral tendencies that were part of his nature.

One ordinary afternoon, the mother sent both boys out to fetch water from a near-by river. They arrived quickly at the river and proceeded to fill the wooden buckets to their brims. Just as the brothers were about to turn around and return home, they heard a small, delicate voice calling out to them.

"Help, please help me! The current is quick, and I am trapped in its pull!"

Both boys stopped and looked out across the river, searching the swirling waters for the source of the plea. In the middle, caught up in a strong rush of water, the delicate, golden figure of a nymph could be seen struggling in the angry waters. She was no larger than the hand of one of the brothers, her reed thin arms churning against the waves.

"We have to help her," Merciful told his brother. "She will certainly drown if we don't."

Avarice, being mindful of only his own safety, scoffed at his brother's observation. "If we go swimming in those waters, we will surely be swept away."

From the center of the river, the nymph called out again. "Please, the current grows stronger, and I grow weaker with every minute passed."

Merciful regarded his brother for a moment and then gazed out to the floundering figure of the tiny nymph. He made his decision quickly. Shedding all but his slacks, Merciful dove into the tumultuous river. He swam with sure, slicing strokes, chest heaving from his exertion. Finally, he reached the nymph, helped her to crawl upon his neck, and swam back to shore.

When Merciful and the nymph reached the bank of the river, she climbed down from his shoulders, wrung the water from her gleaming hair, and regarded the brothers with eyes the color of starlight.

Now, as you know, in fairy tales no good deed goes unrewarded. Our little allegory is no exception. Once the nymph was finished wringing the water from her hair, she spoke to her brave rescuer. "Because you have risked your own life in the effort to save mine, I owe you much gratitude. In an effort to display that gratitude, I offer you a gift."

The diminutive creature raised her arms above her head, and with the graceful flick of her alabaster hands, a large gold box appeared suddenly before the brothers.

"This box," the nymph explained, "is truly magical. It is filled with an inexhaustible supply of gold. You need only lift the lid and the supply will always be replenished."

Stunned, Merciful bent down to the box and opened the lid. Indeed, as the nymph had promised, the inside of the shining chest was ripe with gold coins. In awe, Avarice reached past his brother, dumped the valuable contents onto the forest floor, closed the lid, and opened it a second time, only to find the coffer once again brimming with riches. When the boys looked up again to find the nymph, she was gone.

Merciful was bursting with pleasure. "We can bring this home, give it to mother, and she will never have to work another day in her life. Our troubles will be over!" He exclaimed.

Avarice, as I'm sure my astute readers must already suspect, was not as excited by this idea. He had never been in the presence of such wealth before. Running his fingers through the cool, sparkling pieces, he was overcome by an insidious hunger, by anger at the thought of having to share this wondrous gift. Of course, it did not occur to him that it was his brother's toil that had won the precious receptacle. Instead, he imagined the lavish lifestyle he could lead if he were to take the box and leave the forest life behind forever.

Spurred forward by those greedy thoughts, Avarice turned towards his brother. Merciful was kneeling by the bank of the river, collecting gold pieces into the makeshift pouch of his discarded shirt. With a fierce push, Avarice threw his brother into the frenzied waters. Unprepared, Merciful smashed his head into a rock at the bottom of the riverbed and was carried swiftly and easily downstream. With his brother thus removed from the picture, Avarice picked up the golden box and headed for the road that led into town.

-:-:-:-
Of course, it can be assured that this was not the end for our kindly brother. The river carried Merciful many miles downstream. The twisting waterway crossed the whole of the kingdom, rushing down mountainsides and meandering through peaceful villages. Finally, the river opened into a tranquil bay, and Merciful was washed ashore. When he awoke, he discovered himself to be in a distant land with no idea of how to return home. However, not a boy to be overcome by adversity, and a resourceful child at that, the gentle brother picked himself from the ground and began walking in search of a town.

What Merciful did not know, what he could not have known, was that the path of the river had cast him into an uninhabited and desolate land, where the only citizens were the birds in the trees and the deer on the hills, where one could walk for years without the sight of another human soul. And so, as a result of his brother's deception, Merciful began a journey that would take him away from civilization for many years to come.

-:-:-:-
Meanwhile, Avarice was very busy with his newly found prosperity. He did not return to the home of his mother. He did not stop when he reached the town at the center of their kingdom. Instead, the covetous brother procured a horse and set out to find his destiny.

After traveling for several months and leaving the boundaries of his native country behind, Avarice came at last to a bizarre city, its turrets and pinnacles draped with thick, black crepe. Not a window could be seen. Not a building remained uncovered. Perplexed, the brother rode into the city to inquire about its unusual appearance. Arriving at an inn, Avarice tethered his horse and ventured inside to question the innkeeper. The tale he was told was unlike anything he had heard before.

Six years earlier, the giant city had been a beautiful and thriving township, its subjects joyous, its king kind and merciful, his daughters radiant, exquisite embodiments of their kingdom's good fortune. They had been a people bathed in opulence, untroubled by common fears.

As it turned out, they had reason to worry. Without warning, a hideous and spiteful witch descended upon their city. She destroyed its bounty and raped its beauty. As a war prize, she took the king's youngest daughter. She cast a spell that sent the town and its people into the depths of poverty and despair. The only way the curse could be lifted, Avarice was told, was to journey to the witch's enchanted forest, climb to the top of the tallest tree in the wood, and slay the wretched crone, returning the princess to her people and breaking the spell.

Around him, Avarice could see the decaying remnants of the kingdom's plundered wealth. Uncaring of the tragic story, and sensing an opportunity not to be missed, he thanked the innkeeper and departed for his destination -- the crumbling towers of the once lavish castle. Moving up the stairs with arrogant ease, Avarice approached the king and made an offer. He had, after all, something that could vanquish the city's stark poverty. In his possession was the stolen gilt chest.

A deal was easily struck. The once proud king had been reduced to a vacant shadow of his former glory. The price demanded was the hand of the second princess in marriage and the assumption of the crown. And so, my students, the selfish twin came to rule over the devastated city as its new king, and his impressive greed finally found fulfillment in the subjugation of its people.

-:-:-:-
What, you must be asking, had become of Merciful during this time? Well, unlike how we might respond if thrust into such despondent circumstances, Merciful maintained his hope. With every mile walked, he grew more confident that his wandering was nearing its end. He lived in harmony under the sheltering trees. When he was hungry, the birds would lead him to a bountiful crop of blackberries, or the squirrels would share with him their sequestered supply of walnuts. In short, my children, he remained confident that his tribulations were nearing their completion and journeyed forward for years on end.

-:-:-:-
Meanwhile, in the city of mourning, black vestments still cloaked the buildings, the curse had not been lifted, and within a year of the new king's ascension to the throne, his unwilling queen gave birth to a son.

As we already know, Avarice was a wicked and self-centered man. He found no joy in the presence of others. His wife, who he married to secured his kingdom, he treated with such cruelty that she shrank within herself, farther from reality and deeper into depression.
Four months after the birth of her child, she died, quietly while sleeping, some say from a broken heart.

Contrary to this, and a most miraculous occurrence indeed, was the king's bountiful and virtuous love for his infant son. It was an emotion he had not known himself capable of possessing. It stunned him with its intensity. With this miracle in mind, he named the child. The heir to his throne came to be called Purity.

Gifts of every form were showered on the boy. Miniature cities sheltered within a magical sphere that fit into the palm of a child's hand, a toy sailboat that moved about on the water without the faintest wind to power its sails, suits of clothes that sparkled with thread as bright as the sun, coats of thick, luxuriate fur that were softer than the clouds in the sky.

Under the doting eye of his father, Purity spent his early childhood. Avarice ignored his kingdom, taxed his people beyond reason, and was hated by both young and old alike, but within the walls of his castle, his only child worshiped him.

-:-:-:-
It was on the eve of Purity's ninth birthday that fate aligned its pieces into precise rows and destiny came to pass. It was at this time, on a cold, fall night that Merciful emerged from the forest for the first time in more than ten years and came to stand at the edge of the city clothed in black.

In an action identical to the one his brother had performed years earlier, Merciful walked to the inn to inquire about the town. It did not take more than a few moments at the inn to discern the story of his brother's rise to power. The occupants of the inn immediately mistook him for their despised monarch, and after assuring the people of his true identity, they told him the legend of the curse. Unlike his brother, Merciful was deeply moved by this tale of woe.

With a quest to fulfill, Merciful set out in the direction of the witch's enchanted forest, intent on rescuing the captured princess, resurrecting the town, and rescuing its people from the rule of his brother.

-:-:-:-
Unknowing of his brother's return, Avarice sat up late at night, counting his riches in the massive room he'd had constructed for solely that purpose. Stack upon towering stack of gold surrounded the sinful leader.

It was while he was in the midst of rearranging (for the hundredth time) the mounds of coins that a figure appeared whom he had never thought to see again. Perched atop one of the precariously balanced piles was the unchanged and dainty nymph from his childhood.

"You've been very prosperous in the years since I last met you," the nymph said, no sign of judgment in her tone.

The king remained speechless, waiting for the beautiful creature to make mention of his brother.

"I've come to offer you another gift," she continued, with still no mention of Avarice's heinous crime.

"What gift?" he questioned, curiosity piqued.

"Wealth beyond even your wildest dreams, beyond even your comprehension, wealth of such magnitude that it will make this room seem puny in comparison."

The king's was awed. "How?" he asked.

"There is a bear, a great lumbering beast," the nymph explained, "who sleeps at the edge of the pond beyond the city walls. All you have to do is slay the animal while it slumbers, make a pelt from its hide, and sleep one night wrapped in the fur."

"That's it?" The king's voice was unbelieving.

"When you wake," the nymph assured, "you'll have your reward." And with those words, in a flash of warm light, she winked out of sight.

-:-:-:-
Just a few miles from his brother's stolen kingdom, Merciful took his first tenuous steps into a deep and forbidding forest. Even in the glorious light of day, the floor of the wood remained steeped in black. A stench of rotted things, of dying, desperate things wafted up from the decaying ground. After walking for over an hour, Merciful came upon a giant spider's web. Trapped within its silvery strands was another spider, a small, black, iridescent thing with long, jeweled legs and a shiny, ebony body.

"Please," the spider beseeched Merciful; "save me from this certain death, and I'll come to your assistance someday, should you need me."

Merciful took one look at the beautiful creature and, using a small knife from his pocket, freed the spider. "You owe me nothing," he told the spider.

"Thank you," said the creature, and with a bob of his glistening head, he moved into the darkness of the trees.

After another hour of walking, Merciful came upon a tree snake whose tail was trapped under the weight of a boulder.

"Pleassssse," hissed the snake, "I will most likely be eaten by a bigger creature if I can not escape to the ssssssafety of the treesssss. Rescue me from that horrible fate, and I will reward you sssssomeday, ssssshould you need me."

"I don't want a reward," Merciful told the snake, as he lifted the rock off of its tail.

It was soon after rescuing the snake that Merciful came upon the tree, which he immediately knew to be the tallest in the forest. It was gargantuan, its circumference encompassing more space than the house he had grown up in. It grew from the earth covered in thick, black bark. At a distance from the ground equal to twice Merciful's height, the tree divided into nine giant branches arranged in a perfect circle. They extended upwards indefinitely, forming a cup where they met and penetrating the clouds in the sky with their unimaginable height.

-:-:-:-
Back at the palace, Purity was setting off on an adventure. Sneaking from his bed, he wrapped himself in the warmth of a sumptuous fur pelt, tiptoeing past the guards that had fallen asleep beside his door. The young boy left the safety of the castle for the excitement of sailing his toy boat on the moon kissed waters of his city's distant pond.

-:-:-:-
Merciful was able to boost himself up into the cup formed by the branches, but after this point was faced with two different dilemmas. The first was which branch to choose. Each was identical and ascended in a slightly different direction. The next was how to scale the branches. There were no footholds. No smaller branches formed a handy ladder.

As I'm sure you might have already guessed, and as is the pattern in tales of this nature, the previous good deeds of our kindly brother came back to help him in his time of need. As he stood staring up into the heavens, the tree snake appeared.

"Thisssss isss the branch that leads to the witch's cottage," the snake told him, starting to wind his way up one of the tall branches.

As soon as the snake had explained this, the spider appeared. Without even relating his troubles, the spider spun an elegant and shimmering web of the most intricate and beautiful craftsmanship.

"This web is strong," the spider said. "You can climb it all the way to the top."

So, with the help of his new friends, Merciful began the long journey toward the top of the tree.

-:-:-:-
When Avarice reached the pond, he extinguished his lamp, wary of alerting the bear to his presence. Crouched near the water's edge, he spotted his prey.

I am certain that, by now, my diligent readers have already sensed the coming tragedy. How painful it is to sense a thing, to know it is wrong, and be unable to stop its progress, because we know that we cannot stop destiny.

The fur of the bear shimmered in the moonlight, dark and luxurious. It was a smaller creature that Avarice had imagined. He moved forward on hunter's feet, bathed in practiced silence, and plunged his knife into the back of the beast.

-:-:-:-
After almost two hours of climbing, Merciful finally reached the top of the lofty tree. A fine mist of clouds spread out around him, and he stepped warily into the haze. In the distance, the brother could see a small cottage outlined dimly in the mist. Beyond the mist, Merciful could see the figure of his adversary for the first time. She was a wretched crone, with black, sunken eyes and a glow of immense power that sheathed her in a dark, silver glow. Merciful was struck, suddenly and unexpectedly, with a bone deep sensation of fear. He could not move, could not speak, could not even breathe, and knew, as his lungs screamed for air, that the evil sorceress had enchanted him.

From his frozen position, out of the corner of his eye, Merciful watched as one of the tendrils of smoke seemed to change shape. It gyrated towards the old witch, gaining form and substance as it moved, until the familiar figure of the snake he had saved could be discerned through the fog. The slender creature wrapped its body around the witch's leg and sunk its venom tipped teeth into the tender skin of her ankle, paralyzing the hag and freeing Merciful from his enchantment.

The witch slumped to the ground, and immediately, the spider appeared, weaving around the horrid woman a net of indestructible webbing. Merciful stepped easily over the prostrate figure, walking with assurance towards the tiny cottage.

Inside, he found the princess, a young woman of perfect, innocent beauty, chained to the leg of a table, busily peeling potatoes for the witch's supper.

"Come," he told her, as he freed her from her bindings, "I've come to take you home."

-:-:-:-
The slain beast was an awkward weight, balanced precariously atop Avarice's shoulders, as the king ascended the steps of his castle. The potentate was exhausted, weary from his efforts, and uncaring of the trail of blood he left in his wake. Finally, he reached the sanctuary of his bedroom and slumped into his bed, leaving the carcass of the slain bear in a gory heap on the floor.

Overcome by weariness, Avarice heard the soft promise of "sleep now, you will have your reward when you wake," as he was sucked under by the sweetness of slumber.

-:-:-:-
Returning to the kingdom, Merciful told the young princess of the fate of her homeland, and was overcome (as is the tendency in stories of this nature) by his sudden and perfect love for the girl. Side by side, they reached the steps of the castle.

Merciful had begun his ascent of the long staircase when he heard a mournful, faded plea.

"Father, why?" the voice begged. "Why have you killed me?"

The voice, Merciful noted, seemed to be coming from the drops of blood that coated the steps ahead.

"Why?" came the anguished, child-like question from each gruesome drop, as Merciful followed the trail they marked, reaching, at its end, the bedroom of his slumbering brother.

The sight that greeted our gentle brother was one he had not imagined, not even in his most horrendous nightmares. At the foot of the bed, with the mink pelt folded back to reveal the child's face, lay the murdered body of Purity, his brother's only child, while atop the bedding, Avarice was sleeping, his hands and arms covered in his son's blood.

Shocked and sickened, Merciful stepped up to the bed. In his ears, Purity's tear choked cry echoed over and over again, demanding justice. When he looked upon the resting body of his brother, he could see only the lifeless eyes of the dead child, the trail of blood that had slicked from the side of the child's mouth, the carnage on the stairs. Reaching for the knife at his belt, Merciful knew what he had to do.

His brother's eyes snapped open in shock, in pain, and finally, understanding, as Merciful sunk the blade into Avarice's chest and the wicked brother gained his reward.

-:-:-:-
So, my diligent readers, our story reaches its end. Assuredly, "happily ever after" waits in the fate of Merciful and the young princess. But, as with all proper fairy tales, there is a moral to be decoded, a lesson to be learned from the trials and tribulations of its characters. That lesson, I will leave to your discovery.
~~~~
End Chapter 10 (Part 11/29)
(Author’s note: minor elements of this story have been “borrowed” from the Brothers Grimm. Fairy tales are f’d up!)

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Chapter 11
~~~~

She was still so tired. The hoped for revitalization from a shower and a change of clothes had done little to alleviate the fatigue that pulsated quietly behind her eyes. She had looked longingly on the folded back blankets of her bed at the motel, admiring the crisp neatness left by the housekeeper, imagining the softness of her pillow if she were to rest her head on its inviting surface.

Of course, Scully did not give in to temptation. Instead, she stood, ramrod straight under the hot tempo of the water in her shower and emerged with muscles only slightly relaxed. Picking out a change of clothes was a mindless affair. All of the members of her wardrobe were essentially interchangeable and equally lifeless. She had only succeeded in a partial drying of her hair before her arm had tired and she put the dryer down, leaving the rest damp. She applied her make-up with military precision and stark minimalism.

The bullpen, when she reentered the Federal building, was welcome warmth after the growing blizzard on the Buffalo streets. She had fishtailed twice on the iced over roads, thankfully without incident due to the lack of other drivers. By the time she slid the rental into a parking space in the government lot, her hands had been shaking slightly on the steering wheel.

Scully peeled her coat from her shoulders, discarded it over the back of a chair, and shivered as a melting bit of snow trickled down her ankle, inside of her boot.

"This is it!" Mulder exclaimed, from the other side of the room, drawing her attention. "This is the one!"

When she had left Federal Plaza to return to the motel, Mulder and the rest of the team had been pouring over countless yearbooks from countless towns containing countless faces of countless young boys in an attempt to match a face and a name to the image on their discovered photograph. Judging by the style of clothing, the picture had been taken sometime during the seventies, and was of a boy in his early teens, matching the suspected age of their murderer. Following a hunch, Mulder had requested copies of every junior high and high school yearbook from towns within a two hundred mile radius, and the resulting towers of books had swamped the large bullpen, growing still taller as more and more yearbooks were brought in for analysis.

Scully had been encamped at a long table with Agents Williams and Sandborne, discarding book after book, a photocopied image of the clue in hand, as the faces she was examining began to blur, melding into one strange, identical image. She knew, at that point, that she was no longer of any use to the search and had returned to the motel to change. She had not even bothered to ask Mulder if he wanted to accompany her.

Now, as other agents began to raise blood-shot eyes from those yearbooks, Mulder stood in front of an isolated desk in the corner of the room where he had been sequestered for the past twelve hours.

Moore had almost reached Mulder's side when Scully began to walk towards her partner.

"That's it," Mulder declared, slamming the book onto the cluttered surface of the desk. "This is our suspect."

Under the glow of a desk lamp, as Scully peered past the shoulder of her superior, the face that had graced the stack of papers discovered on the Leeds' countertop stared back at her, smiling, stymied in the awkwardness of early adolescence. In a column of names that ran parallel to the tiny squares of photographs, the face matched up with a name.

Jacob Childress.

~~~~

"What do you think it means?"

The road ahead was reduced to a span of visible concrete that extended no more than ten feet in front of their car, the rest having been obscured by a wall of white, as they drove through the blizzard. Scully had asked the question to take her mind off of the periodic slipping of their tires against the pavement.

"You mean besides the fact that our murderer has an obviously overactive imagination and has read way too much Brothers Grimm?" Mulder answered.

They were discussing their opponent's "fairy tale."

"There were some obvious symbols," Scully continued. "Notably, this theme of innocence and evil he seems obsessed by, and he followed typical fairy tale structures. I think I remember those bits about the black draped buildings and the speaking blood from a story I read back in college."

"What kind of reading were you doing in college, Scully?" Mulder asked, almost smiling, not taking his eyes from the road.

"That bit with the nine tree branches arranged in a circle is an oblique reference, I think, to Dante's nine circles of hell." She was looking out the window now, her speech slowed, thinking.

Mulder was quiet beside her. The windows were fogged. Scully wiped a hand over the glass, clearing the view, and discovered only darkness beyond. She couldn't see the side of the road through the storm, and feeling their forward motion while being unable to see evidence of that movement was like rushing through a long, black tunnel towards an unknown destination. Snow melted against the glass where her hand had been and the window quickly fogged over again.

"I think," Mulder began, "that he pictures himself as Merciful, the brother who, in the end, is rewarded for his good deeds but who also must commit a bloody act in order to set things right."

The windshield wipers pushed back the snow, only to be defeated as more fell in its place.

"And then there is the obvious corollary between the young son in the story and the kidnapped boys, the idea of innocence being slain. He's already explained to us that he believes innocence to be something sacred, something that we, as a society, have destroyed." Mulder paused, thinking. "But there's more in that story than those basic ideas, because we knew all of these things already, and this guy wouldn't be repeating himself for the hell of it. It has to have something to do with that picture, or he wouldn't have included the two together."

"You don't think it's a separate 'clue' entirely," she asked, using their suspect's word, hating that they were being led like this.

"I don't know," Mulder said, considering. "I don't think so."

There were two cars ahead of them, one driven by Moore and containing two agents Scully hadn't learned the names of, the other containing Sandborne and Williams. Looking to the road ahead, Scully could see no evidence of their companions. Only the light drumming of Mulder's fingers against the steering wheel and the futile efforts of the windshield wipers broke the silence. Scully leaned back in her seat, closed her eyes, and was instantly devoured by sleep.

~~~~

Barcelona, New York was roughly sixty miles south west of Buffalo, near the Pennsylvania border and on the shores of Lake Erie. It was a small, quiet town with tree-lined streets and large open fields. On the outskirts of town, they passed the high school in question and pulled up to a deserted motel. Dawn was still several hours away. The snow had stopped, leaving a fresh eight-inch blanket atop the foundation already in place. When Scully stepped from the car, she sank into the frozen precipitation all the way to mid calf.

Arguing that nothing, including the high school, would be open for at least another few hours, Moore had squashed Mulder's protests and sent the team to their respective rooms for a brief rest. Scully had listened to the sounds of Mulder's pacing for a few brief, anxious moments in the room that shared a wall with hers until oblivion mercifully claimed her. She had not even removed her shoes.

The next sensation she became aware of was a light touch on her arm and someone softly calling her name.

"Go away, Mulder," she slurred, still held captive by sleep. "I'm too tired."

"Come on, Scully." The tone was gentle and the touch was, too. Her slowly returning consciousness registered the caress and stiffened, snapping her focus into place, sitting her upright in the bed. When she looked at Mulder, he was standing several steps away.

"Moore wants us all outside in fifteen minutes," he said, looking at her only briefly.

She didn't have time to answer. By the time she'd risen from the bed, he was already gone.

~~~~

"Are you certain?"

The secretary tapped one long acrylic nail against her desk blotter and regarded the agents with a level gaze beneath silver eyebrows.

"Agent... Mulder, was it?" The secretary asked.

Mulder nodded.

"Agent Mulder, I've been a secretary at this high school since I got married in 1965. I've seen thousands of children walk down that hallway." She gestured with a small wave to the pea green hall beyond. "And while I'll admit, it would be ridiculous for me to claim I remembered every single one of those faces, I certainly remember Jacob Childress. You could ask any person who worked here during the time that Jacob attended and they would all be able to remember that name."

"Why?" Agent Williams interrupted from his position near the door.

"Because of what happened to him," she answered, regarding Williams.

"What happened to him?" Mulder asked.

"He disappeared, Agent Mulder. From right out of his bedroom in the middle of the night, and they never found any proof of what happened to him."

Scully spoke for the first time during the interview. "They never found him?"

"No, they didn't."

"They didn't just assume he'd run away?" Scully responded.

"Eventually, that's what the investigation concluded," the secretary replied, looking directly at Scully. "They didn't have evidence to support any other theory, but anyone who knew that boy could tell you the police were wrong to close the investigation. Jacob Childress was a wonderful child. He was smart, hard working, used to deliver papers to my house every morning. He was devoted to his younger brother, and there was never any trouble at home with his parents. It just wasn't right, saying he had run away. It didn't make any sense. He was only fifteen years old.

"If you'll give me a minute," the secretary added, the tapping nail ceasing its motion, "I think I could probably dig up Jacob's file." She arched an eyebrow in question.

"That would be very helpful," Mulder answered, politely, and the older woman rose from her chair and left the room.

"Mulder, Jacob Childress can't be our suspect if he disappeared twenty-three years ago," Scully said, arms folding across her chest.

"He could if he was a runaway," Williams offered.

Mulder shook his head. "No," he said. "Scully's right. It's not our guy."

Williams looked like he was about to make a further protest until Mulder continued. "It doesn't add up, especially if what the secretary said about Jacob's home life is true. Our killer is definitely not the product of a happy home."

"But there is a connection?" Williams asked, doubtful.

"There has to be," Mulder responded. "I'm just not sure what it is yet."

Scully could hear the self-defeat in those words, and she looked up at her partner, caught his eye briefly before he looked away.

"Here you go," the secretary said, walking back into the room, holding a manila folder. "We have records that go back all the way to the school's first year in 1955. None of those have been put into the computer, and we keep the old paper records in a room in the back."

She handed the file to Mulder.

"If you don't mind my asking," the secretary continued, "why are you looking into Jacob's disappearance? It happened a long time ago."

Scully looked at Mulder, who didn't seem prepared to answer.

"We think Jacob might have a connection to a case we're working in Buffalo," Williams offered, somewhat clumsily, an obvious non-answer.

Scully cut off the conversation, "Thank you. You've been very helpful." She tucked her coat around her body, preparing to leave.

Mulder had already walked out into the hall, and Williams was holding the door open, waiting for Scully, when the secretary spoke again. "Jacob's parents still live in town," she said, to the backs of the retreating agents. "His mother goes to my church."

All three agents turned around in unison.

"If you want, I could give you their address."

~~~~

Henry and Martha Childress had lived in the same house for over thirty years. It was a post World War II cookie cutter affair, a raised ranch with red clapboard and white trim. Flower boxes, empty in the winter cold, graced the front of every window. Carefully pruned shrubs were outlined in snow. Their mailbox, a colorful, novelty item shaped like a covered wagon, proudly proclaimed "2814, the Childress'" in bright, bold letters. Their welcome mat actually said, "welcome."

Scully stomped the slush from her boots, mindful of the clean, cream carpeting extending from the foyer. Martha Childress ushered them into the living room, her hands dusted with baking flour and a lace-edged apron around her abundant middle. Scully was struck by how utterly out of place four black-clad federal agents looked in such a place.

"I'm sorry," Mrs. Childress apologized, as she stepped over two toy trucks and a Teletubby. "One of my sons and a few of my grand kids are in town for the weekend." She spoke to them through the open passageway to the kitchen, sliding a large pan into the oven. "It's a bit chaotic around here right now." She spoke with a warm smile, as if chaos was a blessing. "You all can have a seat."

Moore looked hesitant, eyeing the over-stuffed couches, crowned each by a colorful afghan. Scully walked over to an armchair, and after shooing away a fat, orange tabby, sank gratefully into the plush cushions.

"Would you like some coffee?" Mrs. Childress asked, still in the kitchen.

"That would be wonderful, thank you," Mulder responded.

In a corner, Wheel of Fortune droned pleasantly from the television, its volume low. On the wall behind the set, framed photographs of every shape and size were displayed. Scully rose from her chair, moving to study the pictures.

They were of varying ages. The largest looked recent, the family all gathered around a dining room table, several adults, both of the grand parents, at least ten grand children, and in front of them a cake that said "Happy 40th Wedding Anniversary." Many of the pictures were of babies, or toddlers, or were school photos complete with missing front teeth. Scanning the various generations, Scully came at last to a familiar face. In the middle row was the unmistakable smiling face of Jacob Childress at fifteen years old.

"Mulder," Scully beckoned.

He moved to stand beside her, carefully outside of her personal space, and bit his lip slightly in consideration when she gestured to the picture.

"I already had a pot going," Mrs. Childress said, as she moved back into the living room laden with a tray and a collection of steaming mugs. "There's cream and sugar if you want it," she offered, and Scully detected a hint of nervousness in the woman's demeanor, as she settled onto the end of the largest couch.

Absently, Scully picked up a mug, wrapping her hands around its comforting warmth.

"Mrs. Childress, you said your husband would be home soon?" Moore asked.

"Yes," she answered. "Henry should be home any minute now." And after a beat, "Was there anything you needed to ask me. You said there were some questions you wanted us to answer. What kind of questions?"

Glances were traded around the group of agents.

Mulder was the first to speak. "We need to ask you about your son, Mrs. Childress. We need to ask you about Jacob."

~~~~

The atmosphere in the car was defeated. They'd stopped at the police station before heading over to the Childress', searching for information about Jacob's disappearance. What little they'd found had been very basic. The investigation had been abandoned early on. The other agents had been left behind to sift through the files while Mulder, Scully, Moore, and Williams had talked to Henry and Martha Childress. Unfortunately, that endeavor also proved to be fruitless.

Henry and Martha knew little beyond what the agents had already learned. Jacob had been a bright boy. Everyone had loved him. His family had adored him, and then one night, he was gone. There were no solid leads, he was never found, and with four other children to raise, eventually, his family had grieved and moved on.

In short, they'd learned nothing more than they'd known after identifying Jacob's face in his 1976 Barcelona High School yearbook.

They were returning to the police station, to see if the other half of their team had discovered anything in the police reports, and if nothing of interest had been found, they were to return to Buffalo later that night. Moore feared they had been led away from the city on purpose, away from the activities of their suspect.

Unresponsive, Mulder stared out the window of the car as Moore drove. He would not look at Scully, who sat beside him in the back seat.

Scully closed her eyes. How many hours of sleep had she managed to catch in the past two nights? Four? Five? She didn't know. Fatigue had become a constant ache in her muscles, a tightness across her face, a permanent chill. Clouds were building in the heavens again, foretelling the possibility of another storm. Scully had begun to hate the snow.

"Stop! Stop the car!" Mulder, suddenly, screaming.

Williams looked back from the passenger's seat, startled.

"I said stop the car!" Growing in volume, in mania.

"Mulder, what..." Scully began, as Moore slowed the car, looking in his mirror to stare at Mulder.

"Agent Mulder, why should I..." Moore started to ask.

"I said stop the fucking car! Right now!" Mulder screamed, pounding his fist into the back of Moore's seat, tearing at his seat belt, as Moore slammed on the brakes.

The car stopped, Moore turned in his seat, a vein in his temple throbbing in fury. "Mulder, you better have a fucking good explanation for ordering me to stop this fucking car in the middle of the forest in the middle of the fucking night."

But Mulder was already gone, out of his seat belt and out of the car, his long legs carrying him into the darkness, back in the direction from which they had come.

"Mulder!"

He didn't hear her, or didn't care, and Scully was scrambling at her own restraints, at the handle of her own door, before following him into the night.

"Mulder wait," she screamed, but he didn't stop, and in the darkness, she couldn't even see him. Frantically, she pulled her pocket flashlight from her coat, almost dropping it as she ran, its feeble beam doing little against the perfect night.

"Mulder!"

Running blindly, the weak fissure of light sliced a white arch along the pavement, and the dark presence of shadowed trees hovered along both sides of the highway.

"Mulder, where are you!"

The forest was quiet, with only the sound of wind in the trees, Scully's harsh footfalls on asphalt, and her rapid breathing, echoing loudly in her ears.

"Mulder, please!"

Until, suddenly, he was there. She ran right into him, and he was frozen, silent, staring into the trees ahead.

"Mulder, what the hell?"

"It's here, Scully. Look," he said, foreboding and grim.

Still breathing heavily, she quelled her impatience and looked into the trees.

"Mulder, I don't..."

At first, she saw nothing. The forest along the side of the road was a vast, black canvas broken only by the faint shadows of trees. Then the clouds drifted away from their position covering the moon, pale, silver light filtered down from the heavens, and ahead in the trees, Scully saw something that made her breath catch in her throat.

Standing back from the road, surrounded by smaller trees, stood a gigantic oak. Its massive trunk was at least twenty feet around. It grew, straight and colossal until being split at about twice Mulder's height into a circle of nine tall, twisting branches.

~~~~
End Chapter 11 (Part 12/29)

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Chapter 12
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"Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intarte." Mulder whispered the words that were engraved crudely in the thick, moss covered bark of the tree.

"Abandon all hope, ye who enter here," Scully translated.

"You were right, Scully," Mulder said, somberly.

The various other inscriptions adorning the tree ruined the proclamation somehow. Hewn into the rough wood were phrases like "KL wuz here" and "for a good time call Sandra," followed by, presumably, Sandra's phone number. Round and round the carvings went. Stepping closer to the tree, Scully found a Pink Floyd lyric inscribed near the base.

The other members of their small team had joined them in the forest.

"At least it's not the Grateful Dead," Williams commented, reading over Scully's shoulder.

"Hey, don't knock the Dead," she could hear Sandborne reply, indignantly, from a few steps away.

"Jerry's gone, Pete, get over it," Williams quipped, grinning only slightly, his tone subdued in the dark quiet.

The wind plastered Scully's trench against her back and legs, infusing her bones with ice. Whatever this place was, it was far too cold to be hell. Several decades’ worth of broken beer bottles in varying hues littered the ground, crunching intermittently beneath their feet, visible where the ground was protected from the blanket of snow by the sheltering branches of the tree. It was a veritable monument to under-age alcohol consumption.

"We had a place like this where I grew up," Williams commented, following Scully as she made her way around the tree, "except it was under an old train trestle." He stopped and nudged at some of the newer debris with the toe of his shoe. "Shlitz." He made a disgusted sound in his throat. "God, kids still drink that shit?"

Scully almost smiled.

Only faint traces of moonlight penetrated the dense canopy of trees, and the darkness was a weight, pressing down upon the frozen ground. The night wind, wet with snow, howled through the black, and even with several flashlights in attendance, Scully felt blinded. She jumped when she felt a hand on her shoulder.

"Agent Scully," Moore said, emerging from the darkness behind her.

She caught her breath with a shiver, more unnerved in this place than she usually allowed herself to become.

"I'm sorry," Moore apologized. "I didn't mean to startle you."

She didn't say anything, and Moore joined her in contemplation of the deeply etched letters on the trunk of the tree.

"Dante, right?" Moore asked.

Scully nodded and then shivered violently, clasping her arms around her waist in an effort to conserve warmth. She did not see the look of concern that flashed across Moore's face as he regarded her.

"The engravings aren't new," Scully observed, her voice determined against the cold. "In fact, they look considerably older than many of these other engravings."

"So it isn't our guy?" asked Moore. From Scully's small look of surprise, he added, "I caught the reference in the story, too."

Scully blinked, considering. "I don't know," she hedged. Her mind felt sluggish, smothered by ice. The inscriptions appeared too old to be of any significance, but if coincidences were just coincidences... She looked off into the dark morass of trees and saw a faint light moving away from the team.

"Agent Scully?" Moore asked, surprised, as Scully walked away from the tree and towards the light.

She didn’t answer him.

The large tree had been in the center of a small clearing, but as Scully moved deeper into the forest, the trees closed around her like menacing hands, their branches reaching down to graze her hair and brush her arms. Her gun had found its way into her gloved hand, but she followed the light based on recognition, not suspicion. She knew who had wandered off into the woods alone.

"Mulder?" she called, not yelling for some reason, as if there was a need to preserve the quiet of this place.

There was no answer, and she moved forward warily, reminded of Hansel and Gretel in the witch's wood, but with no breadcrumbs to mark her way. Twigs snapped beneath her boots, and her toes were numb.

"Mulder?" she called again, agitated, as the light ahead of her played hide and seek, winking out of sight occasionally amidst the trees.

After a few more steps, the trees cleared again, and twenty feet ahead of her, Scully's partner stood, still and silent in the night. Ahead of him, it was obvious what had caught his attention. Scully walked to stand beside him.

Seeming an extension of the ground it sat upon, the rotting specter of an old church crouched in the darkness. Decaying boards peeled away from its skeleton like skin, and one side appeared ravaged by fire. Planks over the windows had been torn down in some places. As Scully followed her partner closer to the building, she stepped over a faded sign that warned "Condemned. Do Not Enter." Disregarding the warning, Scully positioned herself outside of the main doorway opposite Mulder. She could barely see him in the darkness, and when she looked up at him before they opened the doors, she could not find his eyes.

The tall oak doors were soft with rot, their hinges nearly immovable with rust. It took both partners leaning their full weight upon the doors before they opened. Dust showered down from the braces,