TITLE: White Ink AUTHOR: Bonetree (Bonetree@aol.com) RATING: NC-17 for adult content and language. (It's probably closer to R, but just to be safe...) CATAGORY: Standalone S, Angst, X-File, MSR, Post-Series. There is also implied CD of several characters. TIMELINE: This story takes place after Season 9 and spans the entire series. It's inclusive of all events, as well (i.e. not an AU). ARCHIVE: Gossamer via Ephemeral only, without permission. Anyone else, please ask. SUMMARY: In December 2012, a battered Mulder, Scully and William know there's much more at stake than just the end of the world. DISCLAIMER: The following is a work of fiction. The characters of Mulder, Scully, William, Skinner, Doggett, Reyes, Kersh, and the various alien players (along with anyone else referenced from the show) are the property of Chris Carter, 1013 Productions and Fox. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made from their use. All original characters and the story in this form belong to the holder of the above AOL account. AUTHOR'S NOTE: This is NOT the happiest thing I've ever written, and considering that most of my stories can be fairly dark, that's saying something. Proceed at your own risk, please. Other notes at the end. Thanks for reading. ***** WHITE INK God, give us each our own death, the dying that proceeds from each of our lives: the way we loved, the meanings we made, our need. - Rilke, "O Herr, gib jedem seinen eignen Tod" **** "I am alive because I perceive that I live..." 17 LILY ROCK VISTA IDYLLWILD, CALIFORNIA DECEMBER 1, 2012 7:32 a.m. (20 DAYS UNTIL INVASION) Something about the coming of the first day of December had caused a change in all of them. This wasn't surprising considering that according to all they knew, the first day of winter would signal an Eternal Winter, that Christmas would never come this year or again, and that there would be no New Year to welcome in this, the Last Year on Earth. She tried not to think about this, but it was hard when everything – even the persistent snow that fell here in the mountains – seemed to remind her of endings. Even the smells of the old house they'd let for more than they could afford, even in the off-season, were of something decaying. The cedar shingles and their ripe aroma that seeped through the windows. The smell of vague mildew on the rugs that hadn't been cleaned since the summer tenants had returned to the city. The foggy aroma of the vaporizer she would always associate with sickness from when she was a child. Even the sheets beneath her – worn and soft – seemed used up, their faint blue pilled from too much time in the wash. The persistent smell of blood in her nose reminded her of it, as well, the taste of it in the back of her throat. Every time she woke from sleep – often these days, since the cancer had settled in, making itself warm and comfortable behind the mask of her face – Scully had the strange and certain feeling that, while sleeping, she had been consuming herself. This morning, when she opened her eyes and took in the light coming through the picture window – drapeless, as they had no neighbors, all the other houses vacant for the hard mountain winter – she tried to forget what day it was. As she reached for a dingy white washcloth on top of the pile of them on the night table -- a neat stack William had placed there the night before to catch the warm seep of blood from her nose -- she tried to see only the snow and how beautiful it was against the backdrop of evergreen. None of her attempts worked, of course, because there was no denying the date or the blood or any of it. They were running out of time, in more ways than she could describe. She rolled over, holding the washcloth against her face, almost welcoming the blood's warmth. The house was cold, and she burrowed deeper into the mound of blankets gathered on her side of the bed. Mulder moved them over her every night, his body dealing with the chill of the house much better than hers. The cloth against her face, she looked over and saw a small scrap of paper folded on his pillow, reached out and took it in her hand, fingering it thoughtfully before she opened it. Things had been so strained lately she was a bit afraid of what it might say. Since William had appeared at their door six weeks before, there was a wall made of something between them, the boy's 11-year-old body seeming to build it brick by invisible brick. Fingering the paper, she blinked past the dull headache, the pressure behind her eye, kept her eyes closed. No, that wasn't fair, she concluded, talking hard to herself. It wasn't William's fault. The fissures had been there for years. When had they begun? Regretfully, she conjured the source behind her closed eyes. The night in Pincher Creek in Alberta three years ago, and the following morning when Mulder had gone off with their daughter's body wrapped in a towel, tucking the four- month's premature baby inside his jacket as though care mattered. She'd cried harder than she could ever remember, something inside her shattered from watching him move away with the bundle against his chest, from the night when she'd delivered the tiny body with only Mulder there beside her, quiet and grim, his arm curled beneath her neck on the bed like a wing. Their mission to stop the invasion depended on *their* safety, not their daughter's, the baby a totally unexpected and unwelcome surprise. They could not risk themselves to save her, and though the decision to remain in the cabin in hiding had been Scully's, bit out through the contractions' pain, something in her blamed him – and herself – just the same. Mulder had left with the girl as soon as it grew light, come back several hours later with dirt beneath his nails, clots of mud on the knees of his jeans where he'd clearly been resting on the spring rain-drenched ground for some time. The cracks had started then, as surely as the lines that had crept in and creased both their faces with hard years. She was 48, but looked worn, and Mulder's hair and beard were so shot with gray he looked older than his 51 years. To blame William for the strain between them was pointless and unfair. He had done nothing but push the breaks wide enough that she and Mulder could no longer pretend they weren't there. They'd done well, she had long thought, with how much they'd had against them – years of running and dead-end leads. Phone calls she'd made and received from phone booths outside diners in pouring rain and heat and snow so deep they'd been trapped in motels for weeks. Doggett and Reyes and Skinner and Kersh answering phones, writing down addresses for P.O. boxes and General Deliveries across dozens of states. Too many cars to count stolen and ditched, too many hours in thrift stores picking up clothes and chintzy, chipped kitchen things to cook in motels' dirty kitchenettes. Stops on roadsides in the darkness, Mulder's mouth on hers, his hands under coats and thin shirts, her fingers clenching in his long, then short, hair. Desperate lovemaking, their worn suitcases still perched at the foot of a hundred beds. Cars they thought were following them. A phone's warning ring in the darkness to Reyes' or Doggett's or Skinner's voice, or Kersh's tight-lipped, quick answer to her or Mulder's groggy answer of "yes?": "They know where you are. Get moving again." Then the #10 envelopes arriving with D.C. postmarks with newspaper clippings of "unidentified bodies" found in landfills, lakes, alleyways. One with a photo under a Richmond, Virginia bridge, page nine of the Times-Dispatch, and scrawled in black letters at the top in Skinner's hand: "Doggett." A woman wrapped in a rug in a landfill after months of no phone calls, Reyes' kind voice pushing through the static: "Reyes." One, three years ago, from Kersh, his small writing as neat as type along the article's title ("Authorities Baffled by F.B.I. Assistant Director's Disappearance"): "Stay put and lay low for awhile." Skinner had not been heard from again. A year ago, the box had come to the house they'd rented in Saskatchewan, the hard drives and CD drives and tiny CD-ROMs, the laptop and desktop computers in their plain brown boxes. It was the last thing they'd heard from Kersh, and they assumed he, too, was gone. She could still remember the pain of the headset as she'd sat frozen in the chair. She could remember Mulder squeezing her hand as she'd endured it, how she'd held his as he did the same. Lying there, she could hear the drives turning in the other room, just beyond the thin door opened to a crack. They whirred and clicked, a constant electric sighing punctuated with occasional beeps like a heart. The bleeding was slowing and her hand went limp to let the washcloth slip to the pillowcase, her other still holding the scrap of paper. She took in a breath and opened it, focused on the tiny lines of writing inside: I love you Rest Don't lose hope She heard William moving around in the kitchen, making her tea and an egg and a single piece of toast. The quiet sounds of him mixed with the computers' white noises and she dozed, waiting for him to come to her, listening until she couldn't tell her son from the machines or the silent, falling snow. ***** "I am aware of the possibility of death (the absence of life)..." DEVIL'S SLIDE TRAIL BENEATH TAHQUITZ PEAK IDYLLWILD, CALIFORNIA 11:24 a.m. The ten-man crew for the California Conservation Service was up Devil's Slide two months past the time that tourists were allowed to apply for permits to hike to the peak, and Mulder, stepping in aluminum snowshoes up the trail with his pack of equipment for the fifth day in a row, was getting a clear understanding of why they were alone in this wilderness. It had snowed nearly two feet in two weeks, and the trail was getting more and more difficult to find as they rose toward the peak. Mulder had joined the small group of rangers and Forestry Service personnel to take samples of the trees' cores, the area under study for some kind of blight. His fellow workers were all friendly, occasionally boisterous men who laughed a lot when they weren't working, like now, all of them having taken the break for lunch early and gathered around several large camp stoves holding iron skillets and steaming silver pots. Mulder kept his eyes on the circle of them as he lifted one foot after the other, the snow crunching beneath his wide, light shoes. His breath steamed out in front of him, and there was a faint trace of frost on his beard that was lost in the gray. His black coat tapped with the fall of the heavy flakes, but it and his thermal underwear and heavy jeans, his socks and his boots, kept him warm. The hours of climbing up and down the trail with the 40-pound pack did a good job toward that, as well. He'd even shed his black stocking cap, the one with the "NY" for the Yankees sewn into its front, his forehead dewed with sweat. "Hey John!" Paul Sterling called from the circle of warmth, his voice echoing amongst the pines. They were so green, Mulder thought. So green against the other trees whose leaves were gone, their trunks and branches black as pitch but wearing their robes of white. "Where the hell have you been?" Sean Burke added. "We were about to eat your sausage and potatoes and send out a search party!" "In that order," Jay Finney laughed, and the others joined in. Mulder smiled. "Corer got hung up," he said as he drew near. Though he loved hearing their laughter and loud voices, his own had grown quiet over the years, and besides, he didn't like to disturb the quiet of the mountain in its snow. It was only partly true. The coring tool had lodged in a pine's fat, fallen trunk, but when he couldn't remove it after a few tugs, he'd simply cleared off a space and sat, his feet on his open pack, his hands out of their gloves and cupping a silver thermos of coffee they'd made at the base camp at the trail's head. He'd sat for a long time simply holding the cup. He'd looked down into the coffee's surface and watched his oily reflection in the black, listening to the flurries and their taps. He barely recognized himself in the face looking back at him. He had promised himself years ago, when he'd turned 30, that he would never regret the choices he made to give his life to this. Staring at the face in all that black, he made the promise again. "Who the fuck are you kidding?" the face seemed to say in return. "Twenty days and you'll have officially pissed everything away." He closed his eyes. "There's still time..." "Yes," he heard a familiar voice beside him. "There is still time, Mulder." He opened his eyes, and John Byers – looking like he should be shivering himself to death in that suit of his, if he were alive – was sitting there. He gave Mulder that same kindly smile he always wore, and as always happened when he or one of the other Gunmen appeared to him from the ether, he felt a lump in his throat. "John," he said by way of greeting, and sipped his coffee, his eyes going straight ahead. "You don't believe me, do you?" Byers said, crossing his arms over his chest. He sighed. "You'll have to pardon me if I'm a little on the pessimistic side these days, Byers," Mulder said quietly. "I don't have a hell of a lot to look on that's going well." "You've got the computers going," Byers replied. "They're working." "I gotta tell you, John," Mulder said bitterly. "Besides the fact that I still have a headache from putting what's in my head onto that thing – and it was almost a *year ago* we did that, by the way – I don't have a fucking clue how all that works to this day." "We've explained it to you before." It was Langly now on his other side, looking ridiculous in his black T-shirt and his glasses specked with snow. "You know how it works." "Yeah, yeah," Mulder said, irritated now. "Mind uploading. My memories and Scully's memories ripped out of our heads and copied onto those CDs in their little tiny boxes whirring around and Kersh's files on another and all of them rolling around together in some glorified Ronco Virtual Blender of Information and trying to figure all this out." "Oversimplified as usual, but yeah," Frohike said from behind Byers. Mulder hadn't even seen him appear. "It's cold as hell out here, Mulder. You couldn't find work inside?" Mulder chuffed, took another sip of his coffee, made a face to find it had already gone mostly cold. "You don't know how much of an idiot I felt like tapping that question Kersh told me input into the laptop. 'How can we prevent the invasion on 12/21/12?' I felt like I was nine years old with my Magic 8 Ball, for Christ's sake." He tossed the coffee into the snow. "You had a Magic 8 Ball?" Langly asked, and Mulder scowled at him. "You'll pardon me if I'm not quite so amused," he said, started gathering his things, standing to go after the coring tool again. Langly scooted over to give him room. "I know it's hard," Byers said. "The waiting, I mean. But you've got to give it more time. Everything you and Scully know about the aliens, the X-Files...everything you've ever experienced is copied onto those disks. And everything Kersh could find in the X-Files and in the F.B.I. is on the other. The answer's there. It's somewhere there. You know it is, Mulder. You would have given up years ago if you didn't believe the answer was there." "I don't believe in anything anymore," he said softly, pulling on the tool. He turned the handle to unscrew it, wood squeaking against the metal. "You're talking to us, aren't you?" Frohike said. "If you didn't believe in something you sure as shit wouldn't see us standing here." "Oh, let me correct myself then," Mulder said, his voice strained from turning the tool's heavy handled screw. "I *believe* I've lost my mind. That much is true." "Bullshit," Langly said. "You know why you see us." Mulder kept turning, the wood creaking. "The abduction," he said after a moment. "Yes," Byers said, just as quietly. "They did something to my mind." He didn't look up as he said it. The probes going into his nose...the saw across his chest...opening... He closed his eyes, stood still. His breath puffed out in front of his face, the memory quickening his breath. "I'm sorry, Mulder," Frohike said. "I know it was hard." Mulder shook his head, shaking off his friend's sympathy, the memories. "Some things are harder," he said noncommittally, returning to the stubborn tool and its wood. "She's handling it really well, though," Byers said gently. "Considering." "Yeah," Mulder chuffed. "*Considering.* No doctors." He pulled. "No chemo." Pull. "No painkillers." Pull. "No nothing." He wrenched, his anger behind the words. "Nothing!" On the last word, the tool came free, and he was nearly toppled over as it did. "I need to take her to a hospital," he said, wiping at his nose with his bare hand. "This is ridiculous. She should be comfortable for the few days we have left. I don't want her in this kind of pain anymore." "They'll find you," Byers said. "And they'll find the disks. You'll destroy any chance of stopping them if you do." "And they'll find William," Frohike said. "And that can't happen," he added. "Not ever." Mulder looked at him. "Why?" he asked. "We don't know," Langly said, and Mulder turned to him, the quiet pressing in as all four went silent for a beat. "The answer is on those disks, Mulder," Frohike said, finally breaking the silence. "Somewhere in the things you don't remember about your time with the aliens, in Scully's time with them that she can't recall. It's got something to do with William and with her chip and her illness and with you and with the X-Files. The disks will figure it out." "Yeah," Mulder said, putting the tool down in the slot designed for it in his back. He closed up the thermos, stored it away. "I'd love to stay and chat..." He looked up. Nothing but snow and trees and quiet. No one there at all. He shook his head, shouldered the pack, and started back toward the rendezvous point for lunch, following the faint sound of Finney, who was singing. "'I love to go swimming with bow-legged women and swim between their legs! Swim between their legs! Swim between their legs...'" Now that he was with them, he took the pack off again, the smell of sausage and coffee somehow a comfort. "Love your singing, Finney," he said. "I could hear you a mile away." "Good damn thing, John, or we'd lose you in the snow," Finney said, patting the log they sat on with a smile. "Take a load off and we'll fix you a plate." ***** "One is either alive or dead at any point in time, not both." 17 LILY ROCK VISTA 4:46 p.m. William Andrew Mulder was not an ordinary little boy. His adoptive parents had not, apparently, cared for "Fox" as a middle name, and Scully couldn't exactly blame them. She had always loved Mulder's strange and seldom used first name, but she loved it because of *him,* because it was part of who he was. The family that had adopted William (she had never known their name) had changed it to "Andrew," called him "Andy" as a family nickname. William had told her this when he'd arrived that night six weeks ago, appearing as if by magic from the dark, but had asked that they call him "William" just the same. She wondered if he'd done it to please them, or, more accurately her, she who had stumbled over "Andy" as her shaking hands had tried to pour him something hot to drink. She couldn't remember now if it was cocoa or coffee or tea. She only remembered the sound the mug made when she'd try to lift it and had dropped it on the floor instead. She watched him from across the chessboard at the kitchen table, the way his small hand cupped his small chin to consider the pieces in the game. It was a medical fact that the eyes did not, actually, age. She knew this, that they looked (barring disease) perpetually the same. Still, there was something strange about looking into his 11-year-old face, one that looked so strikingly of Mulder (dark hair, strong nose, full lips), and see the same wide blue eyes set into it, blue as sky or turquoise, and shot with flecks of gray. He reached out, not meeting her stare, and moved a piece, tapping her Bishop's base as he lifted it away. "Knight takes Bishop," he said, still studying the board. She smiled. "You're very good at this," she said softly. He looked up now, a small and very adult smile on his face. "Yes, but I'd be less so if you'd concentrate less on me and more on the game." It still surprised her to hear him speak. His voice was wry and articulate and devoid of accent. He said he'd grown up in the Dakotas, but he sounded like he'd come from Nowhere, his dialect flat as a newscaster's. "Probably so," she said softly, and reached for her tea. "We can play your game while we're doing this, if you'd like," he said, his fist on his cheek. He looked up her, his lip quirking again as she looked into his eyes again. "Am I that transparent?" she asked, reaching for her Queen. "Only to Mulder and to me," he replied. "Watch my Rook, by the way." Her hand hovered over the board, touched the Queen and left it. She took a sip of the tea, set it down again, and selected another piece. "Knight to King Seven," she said, and he nodded, seeming pleased. "Check." "Ask me anything you wish." Since he'd come to them, she'd asked mostly innocent questions – his likes and dislikes. How was he at math and did he like horses or sports? What were his favorite color and food and thing to drink? What had his parents gotten him for his birthdays? Did he like winter or summer or fall or spring, and had he ever read "The Giver" or flown in an airplane or broken anything? She had asked him the first night how he'd found them, and he'd come all this way from the Plains. Mulder had stood with his hands in his pockets, silent, against the counter in the kitchen, staring, a pulse of muscle along his jaw every few beats. William had looked at his father with those wide, bright eyes, then told her he was tired, taken his duffel bag to the back bedroom where Mulder'd led him and gone to sleep. Once, she'd asked him if his parents would be worried about him disappearing like this. They'd washed half the dinner's dishes in the house's silver sink, him washing and her drying them as best she could, sitting in a chair when her legs had tired and gone weak. "No," he said, dipping his hand into the water for an errant, sharp knife. He was tall for his age, the bottom of the deep sink easily within his reach. "They don't worry about anything anymore." She'd swallowed and hadn't asked anything like that again. As though he could read her mind, his eyes still on the board, he said again: "Ask me what you wish," reaching for a piece and then withdrawing his hand to further consider his choice. It was getting dark outside. Mulder would be home before it turned from blue to black. "I don't know what to ask," she said. She was tired and felt weak, unable all day to keep anything but the toast and egg down. She looked outside at the outline of Lily Rock and wished Mulder were home already. He and William were not comfortable with one another and William was less...William when he was around. "Sure you do." His hand hovered again. She swallowed. Her mouth was dry. "How did your parents die?" she asked, her eyes still on the mountain's top. William picked up a piece. "Queen takes Rook. Check." He set the castle-shaped piece down with the others he'd won. "They were killed, of course. Though, to argue semantics and fact, my real parents are still alive. In their own way." Though she was already the color of paper, she blanched at the bluntness of his words. "How did you get here, William?" He looked up. "That, I can't say." "How did you know where we were?" she pressed. Now that the first question was out, caught like a stopper on the rest, they started spilling from her mouth. "Nor can I tell you that." He tapped the board. "Your move." "Damn it, William, I don't care about the game!" she said, though raising her voice beyond the low tone she'd been using made her cheek and eye ache. "Tell me. In a few weeks none of this will matter anyway. Please." He looked up at her, his face solemn. "They always knew I was different," he said. "Always. From the start. They deduced very early on I would eventually be in danger for who and what I am, and they always knew who you were and how to find you, though I don't know how or why they'd want to know that part. We had a lot of visitors to the house starting about three years ago. When I stopped going to school. When we stopped going out." He tapped the board again. "Check." She looked down at the board, taking it in, though there were tears lodging behind her eyes. She grabbed a piece and moved it, a pawn off to the side. "You're right, you don't care about the game," he said softly, and she heard the Jeep coming in the drive, a rake of headlights going through the front window off to their side. William reached out and tipped her King over, nodded to the computers to their right, their whirring, the CDs throwing small rainbows onto the wall, reflecting the small desk lamp light as they spun, beeping and humming into the room's dark. "You lost this one because of frustration and by abdicating," he said, touching the board, then pointed to the computers. She stared. He smiled faintly. "Try not to do it again." ***** "A perfect copy of a thing that is alive will result in a new thing which is alive..." 17 LILY ROCK VISTA IDYLLWILD, CALIFORNIA 10:02 p.m. DECEMBER 12, 2012 (10 DAYS TO INVASION) William had taken himself early to bed after the three of them had had a parody of a family dinner at the heavy kitchen table, Mulder somehow ending up at the head of the table with his elbow on the wood and unable to meet either Scully or William's eyes as he ate. Part of Mulder's distraction at dinner had been exhaustion, and he tried to hang onto that as his excuse when Scully mentioned some time later, the two of them sitting at the computer and watching the scroll of files go by faster than the human brain – the organic one – could consciously retain. He and the crew had gone all the way to the base of Suicide Rock, so named because of the legend of an Indian Princess who chose to leap from its height with her lover rather than marry a man her father had chosen for her whom she did not love. His back and legs ached from the steady incline and then the steady descent in snowshoes as the snow turned into sleet and then rain. "You didn't have to say what you did to him," Scully said quietly when she asked him what was wrong and he'd begged off with his profession of fatigue. It had pricked anger in him, and he'd found himself stalking into the kitchen for a drink out of the carton of orange juice, foregoing the glass in his haste to be doing something with his hands. What he'd said was to tell William to stop talking in riddles. What he'd said he'd said with a bite worthy of a bulldog at a pup. "The computers are moving through the files nicely," the boy had said, cutting into his chicken with the manners of the King. "You mean our minds?" Mulder grumbled, pointing his fork at he and Scully without looking up. "Yes," William replied patiently. Mulder had been aware of Scully halting with a bite of her own unspiced piece halfway to her mouth. "That's what I said – the files. Yours and the ones from the F.B.I." The boy kept eating, chewing before he spoke again. "The progress bar says they're 85% through the interface. I'd give them three or four more days before they give us our solution." "*IF* they give us one," Mulder said under his breath, stabbing at his food. Looking back, he realized he probably appeared fairly petulant as he'd done it. "They're giving one right now," William asserted quietly. "But it's like they're writing it out on a sheet of white paper, using white ink." That's when he'd bitten, and William had put down his fork and knife, excused himself politely to Scully and vanished into the guest room off the long hall and closed the door. He stood at the doorway to the kitchen, looking at her with her glasses on, the screen making her eyes appear to glow in her face. Her mouth was the angry, thin line he'd known for what seemed his whole life. He saw it every time he fucked something up. "You're defending him again," he snapped. "I'm defending the one who deserves defending," she shot back, looking up from the empty email inbox, the fourth one they had that she'd checked. Her eyes could have burned a hole through him into the doorframe. "If he – or anyone – attacked you like that, I'd do the same for you. A fact you seem to be forgetting lately." He looked away, wiped orange juice from his mostly-salt moustache. He was glad for the beard in the cold, but very few other places, the kitchen not one of them. "Scully, for Christ's sake..." He trailed off. "Why don't you just say what you really want to say?" "What is it I want to say?" she asked, arching an eyebrow above the rim of her reading glasses, her red hair – dimmer now, and long -- pulled away from her face into a pony- tail that trailed down her back. It accentuated the gauntness and ghostly pallor of her face. "That you think the way I treat him is appalling," he said, angry. "I can see it in your face every time I'm with him—" "I have *never* said that, Mulder," she shot back. "But I'm glad you're self-aware enough to know it's true." "I--!" "You treat him like he's a leper, Mulder! You ignore him and you won't look at him. You snap at him and silence him and avoid him!" She stood from the desk chair, holding onto the desk for support as she rose. Her face had taken on an unusual flush. "What do you want from me, Scully?" He couldn't help but shout. "What do you want me to treat him like? He's CREEPY. I don't even think he's HUMAN, for God's sake! He's—" "He is my SON!" she screamed, the sound tearing around the room and shocking him with its pitch, its desperation. Tears burst from her eyes. The hand she held on the table was shaking. "And he's YOUR SON, too!" By the time she got the last of it out, all of her was shaking, and her free hand had gone to her face, to wipe the tears he thought at first, to cover her mouth to catch the sob. Then he saw the blood, and his anger vanished into air. "Scully," he said softly. "Scully, don't—" And then she was sliding down, and the carton was in the middle of a puddle of orange on the floor, and he caught her as she fell. He was pressing the sleeve of his fleece shirt against her face, staunching the flow of blood (both nostrils now, he noted grimly) and trying to lift her when a small hand offered him a washcloth, his eyes focusing on it as he stilled. He followed the arm up to William's sad, pale face. "Not for me," the boy whispered. "Never for me." Mulder didn't know what to say to that. The words – and the sadness they implied – left him thunderstruck. All he could do was take the cloth, put it to Scully's face, lift her small form into his arms and walk to the bedroom, her head against his chest. As he turned to push the door closed with his foot, facing the computers and the kitchen again, he saw William move silently to the spill on the floor with a dishrag on the table and begin cleaning up the mess. ***** "An imperfect copy of a thing that is alive will most likely be alive too, but it may behave differently than the original." NORTH MOUNTAIN ROAD OUTSIDE IDYLLWILD, CALIFORNIA 9:14 p.m. DECEMBER 15, 2012 (SIX DAYS TO INVASION) The rain had again turned to snow, and though Mulder had welcomed it on the worksite, finally not spending a day miserable and cold and wet up at Tahquitz, the drive home was proving treacherous. His Jeep Wrangler – bought in Hemmet for $2000 of their last $4000 of cash – growled along the road, its four-wheel drive digging in but black ice beneath the white causing it to lose its grip. He kept his face forward, his hands gripping the wheel as tightly as could, the seatbelt grabbing him as the vehicle slid suddenly from left to right, and he yanked it back straight again. He was finally away from the upper mountain's curves, descending through the woods toward town, though his headlights and the fog lamps, lighting up the snow to the point that the refraction on the huge flakes nearly blinded him, were the only guides he had down the pass. The computers were at 92%. They had six days to not only get the solution to the invasion but to put it into place. Too late, he said to himself. It was too late. "Perhaps not," a familiar voice said from beside him, and he heard an intake of air like a hiss. The cab of the Jeep suddenly filled with pungent gray smoke from a Morley. He didn't have to look to the side to know who he'd find grinning there. "If it isn't the gargoyle," he said, gritting his teeth as the Jeep started to lose its feet again. "In the flesh," Spender said, and Mulder could hear the smile in his oily voice. "Well, so to speak." "What do you want?" Mulder asked. This was one visitation he could do without. And he didn't want to look over and see the wild white hair and the smoke coming from the old man's throat. "Too hot in Hell so you'd thought you'd hit the slopes?" "Mulder," Spender tisked, and Mulder chanced a look. "Is that any way to talk to your father? Your own son gives you so much more. And you're not nearly as kind to him as I've been to you." "Yeah, you're a peach," Mulder replied, relieved to see Spender as he'd known him first, the gray Reagan-era hair and the cheap suit, his wide lips smiling that odd smile, slid back to show his teeth. "Scully's dying," Spender said softly, and Mulder could swear he heard regret. "No shit." "No, I mean imminently. She'll be lucky to make it to the Date." "Won't we all," Mulder bit out. "Now fuck off." They were rounding a wide, arcing corner, the Jeep sliding but hanging on around the curve. The snow was falling too heavily, the lights too bright. Mulder was dazzled by the snowflakes, large as eyes, and he had to train his own to look between them to keep his eyes on the road. "I want you to tell your son his real name," Spender said, breaking into Mulder's concentration. "He knows his name." Another slip. "He doesn't know his middle name. His *real* middle name. I want you to tell it to him." "Why?" Mulder asked. That one word had seemed to become his *own* middle name in the past ten years. The deaths, the running, all of it. Why? Spender ignored him. "What was your daughter's name?" Mulder felt his mouth go dry, his tongue feeling like a wad of cotton in his mouth. "She never had a name," he lied, and Spender chuffed, drawing in another puff of smoke. "Of course she had a name," he said. "Scully must have named her. If not before she was...born...then certainly after." He swallowed at the memory. The flat stone he'd found in Pincher Creek to place over the fresh, wet dirt. The scratching of stone on stone, his breath catching in his throat... "What did you write?" Spender said softly. Mulder chanced a hand off the wheel long enough to give his eyes a rough swipe. "What was it, Mulder?" His voice was soft, almost soothing, almost... "Grace." He could see Spender nod from the corner of his eye, the smile finally off his strangely creased face. "Tell your son his name, Fox," Spender said softly. "Tell him his name is 'Fox.' And then tell him hers. Tell him about Grace, and all that she's done." Then he was gone. Mulder swiped his eyes again, turned onto Lily Rock Vista, the snow socking in, a wall of falling white. That's why when the deer darted out in front of him he didn't see it until its side had smashed into the Jeep's high grill, the impact startling him into the roadside's shallow ditch. In the sudden quiet as he cut the engine, Mulder climbed down from his seat, found his feet in the snow there, pulling his hat down a bit more on his forehead against the frigid air. The fog lights were still on, pointed at where the deer had been thrown, its still brown shape. A few meters to it, and he was standing against its side, against the widening pool of red. He knelt, put a hand on the doe's side, his bare hand smoothing down the longer, winter coat. "I'm sorry," he whispered, and the tears were still in his eyes. He closed them, felt something moving up from his chest with enough pressure to choke. His hand gripped the doe's soft side, his other hand covering his face. The snow fell silent around him, covering everything with its white. "I'm sorry," he said again, the sob catching his breath. "I'm so sorry, Grace..." ***** "In merger, two (or more) living things are brought together in one substance..." 17 LILY ROCK VISTA IDYLLWILD, CALIFORNIA 11:55 p.m. DECEMBER 17, 2012 (FOUR DAYS TO INVASION) "I want..." She was dreaming again. About the field of flowers all opening, and the boy and the girl there, and the mountain in the distance, the white snowcap of it, the white outcropping of rock. The white cap that gave off that beautiful, golden light... (Shhhh...shhh...it's okay...) "Mulder, I want..." (Scully, it's okay.) She opened her eyes to the pressure behind her eyes, to Mulder's face over hers from where he'd leaned over from where he was perched on the edge of the bed. He tried to smile. He tried to let it at least touch his eyes, but there was nothing but grief there. He hadn't been to work in two days. The vaporizer hissed from the floor, the bedside table's yellow lamp the only light. "You were dreaming," Mulder said softly, brushing back her hair from her face. She nodded. She wore one of his T-shirts, underwear and nothing else. It seemed stiflingly hot, though she remembered being cold when she'd fallen asleep. "What were you dreaming?" Mulder asked. His voice was smooth as old sheets. She drew in a breath, wiped at her face, clearing away sleep like it were a web she'd wandered through. "Something about the baby," she said softly. "Something about...William and the baby..." Mulder shook his head. "Don't think about that now," he said. Now... At the end of everything. "Will you do something for me?" she asked. She reached up to touch his face, caressing what would be laugh lines at the corners of his eyes in some other time or place. "Anything," he said softly. "Make love with me," she breathed. The light seemed terribly bright. His brow creased down. "Scully, we can't..." he began, shaking his head. "You're—" "I know," she whispered, nodding, her hand trailing down from the corner of his eye to his cheek, down to his throat. "I'll hurt you," he said softly, as though he were afraid William would hear. "I don't want to hurt you, Scully." She shook her head, gathered herself to lean up, her arms going around his neck, holding herself there. "Mulder..." she whispered. "Please..." ** Outside the door, his face glowing in the computer light, William sat at the desk and watched the load bar's blue move the last few millimeters from left to right. "100% INTERFACE COMPLETE," the screen stated in its black letters on white. He smiled, his fingers dancing on the keyboard. Username. Password create... Enter. "HELLO WILLIAM FOX MULDER. UPLOAD READY." He reached for the headset, the metal nodes resting against his small temples, his eyes covered with its visor fitted with two tiny plasma screens. They lit up as he touched the control on the side. "YOU MAY COMMENCE." ** She pressed her head into the pillow, arched her back. He was kneeling between her legs, his hands smoothing her shoulders to her breasts to her waist. Her hands gripped his wrists and drew his hands down over her flat belly. So thin. She knew she was so thin, and that he seemed afraid to touch her with the certainty he'd once had, though his eyes were black with desire, his chest rising and falling with the quickening of his breath. He curved his hands around her hips, moved toward her slowly, leaning down. Her legs went around his thighs, his hips, his waist. "Yes," she said to him, to herself. "Please..." "Tell me—" "Yes—" "Scully—" Then he was inside her again, his body draping over her. She drew in a breath at how warm she felt, his chest on her chest, his face against her throat. She'd been freezing for months. "I love you," she whispered into his hair. Her back arched again, her hips pressed against him, straining to push him deeper inside her until what wasn't him and wasn't her disappeared. His mouth was on hers, his arms bracketing her face, and she opened beneath him, feeling no pain, no grief, only herself opening like a fist. Opening like an eye, or a flower. Like a door or a gift. ** William whimpered against the pain. He hissed out the words, his teeth clenched: "Abduction...chip...baby...cancer...experiments... Changed. All changed. They changed..." Tears poured from his eyes, though he squeezed them shut. Yes. It made sense now. It all made sense. "It's me...Mother...Mulder...blood to blood to blood." He smiled, the images dancing before him, coughing out the pain behind his eyes, shut tight. "Blood...then the mountaintop," he whispered. "Blood to blood. And then blood into light." ****** "Two brains are adjoined and connections allowing activity to pass freely from one brain to another are allowed." 6:31 a.m. DECEMBER 18, 2012 (THREE DAYS TO INVASION) It had been so long since he'd slept naked with her, warm skin against skin, that Mulder almost didn't awake when he heard the sounds of things breaking from the other room. He hadn't slept so soundly in so long, his body used to the mountain snow, he and Scully's distance like frost... But then he remembered William and the date. He remembered the newspaper clippings and the bodies of Doggett and Reyes. He remembered faces of men without faces and flame, and Rohrer and— He was standing as the images all rushed in. He was pulling on his long-john bottoms as the sounds of things smashing kept going, again and again. "William!" he called, rushing to the door. He heard Scully stirring in the bed and calling his name. He threw open the door to the living room and pulled up short. William was there by the computers. He had the metal sledgehammer Mulder used for coring from the pack by the door. The computers were in pieces. The drives, the disks...bits of broken plastic and glass— "WILLIAM NO!" He ran so fast he stepped through the glass, the pieces slicing into the bottoms of his bare feet. He grabbed William so hard the boy cried out, the hammer tumbling to the floor. "What are you DOING??" he cried, spinning William around. He had the boy's thin upper arms clenched so hard in his hands that William's face twisted to a wince. "You're hurting me—" "What are you doing? Tell me!" His eyes were wide enough to ache, his breath hissing between his clenched teeth. "TELL ME!" "It's finished," William said, and he smiled. "The computers found the answer, Mulder." "What...?" Mulder felt his mind swimming in a brine of confusion in his head. "But why did you destroy it, William? Why?" William bent his arm at the elbow and Mulder looked down at his hand, the one that hadn't held the hammer. The headset was there. And Mulder could see the faint indentations on William's temples, the faint burns of current going in. He stopped, held his breath. "You..." And William smiled as Mulder looked into his eyes, and Mulder saw it. Everything he was, everything Scully was. Right there behind the boy's eyes. "Why did you do it?" he asked, his voice faint. "I've always known the final piece was inside me," William said softly. "I know that the final piece *was* me. But I couldn't know the answers because the things I needed to look at, you and Mother...you couldn't remember. You couldn't see." "Tell me," Mulder asked, his grip loosening, and he went down onto his knees in the rubble of the computers, the room deathly quiet now that there were no more running, clicking machines. Behind him, Scully had come in unsteadily, touching furniture as she drew nearer, tears in her eyes. She'd heard everything they'd said, the whole thing. "You've always known it was within you both to stop them," William began, looking at them in turn. "That's why you kept running. That's why they kept after you. That's why they killed the people who adopted me, and your friends...everyone you've cared for...and destroyed everything you had." Mulder's eyes welled. "Yes," he nodded. "Three years ago," William continued, "they tried to use the chip in Mother's neck to find you. A burst to track you, to test to see if they could use it to find you. But it did something they didn't expect." He looked at Scully. "The baby," she said softly. "I could conceive." "Yes." William swallowed. "And when you became pregnant, the baby girl changed you, Mother. It changed what they'd done to you all those years ago. It changed what they'd done to you to produce me. You became yourself again." He smiled. "But in doing that, your baby girl...Grace...she had to go. And the cancer...the cancer was able to start forming and come back again." "But what--?" Mulder stopped, shook his head "no." "They didn't know that could happen," William said into the silence. "And what they'd done to you," He looked at Mulder, "changed you, as well. The artifact. The dying and the virus and the time underground. You were never the same." Scully's hand touched his shoulder, and Mulder looked up into William's face. "No," he said. "No, I wasn't. Not ever again." He put his hand on the side of William's shoulder, his thumb brushing his neck. "You know how to stop them," he said softly. Scully's hand squeezed down. William nodded. "Yes." "How?" Scully asked, her voice gone. William looked toward the door just a faint rap sounded against it, and he called for whomever it was to come in. Mulder and Scully looked to the doorway as the figure came in. "Skinner...?" Mulder said, and he and Scully froze and Walter Skinner – dotted with snow on his black jacket, dotted as though he'd been spattered with white ink – came over to the desk and the circle of light from the lamp. "Skinner," Scully said, releasing Mulder and going to the other man, who was old now, his face deeply lined. When Scully took him in her arms and cried against his shoulder, he seemed to have forgotten how to return an embrace, and stood like a statue for a moment, looking down, until he slowly closed her in his arms, his lids falling as he did so. "Hello, Scully," he said softly. He opened his eyes and met Mulder's gaze. "Mulder." There was a trace of smile on his face. Mulder swallowed. "You," he said. "It's you who brought William here." Skinner nodded. "I've been here since you came here yourself," he said as Scully released him. "But I didn't want to come out in the open until the disks had done their work. I was...waiting for the call." He smiled down at William, his hand touching the boy's dark head. "Did you bring what I asked for?" William said, and Skinner nodded, reaching into his pocket and drawing out two wrapped syringes. "What are they for?" Scully asked. "A vaccine? A—" William shook his head. "One is for the two of you," he said. "We'll draw out a sample of each of your blood. Then we'll inject both of your blood into me. And what you have in your bodies, your cells – even the cancer's trace cells, Mother -- will be passed onto me. What happened to you to change you will happen to me." "What's the other syringe for?" Mulder asked, and William looked at Skinner, who smiled, his eyes shining in the light. "Once everything we are has altered me," William said, "we'll take a sample of my blood and give it back to mother." Mulder felt the lump rising again. "What will...what will that do?" William smiled. "Her cancer. It will go away." Mulder felt something in him loosen and slip. His back actually bowed as his eyes closed, the tears slipping free. The voices floated around him as he felt, for the first time in three years, that he could breathe. "Why didn't you tell us any of this?" Scully asked. "William, why didn't you tell us before?" He raised the headset to her. "I didn't know until last night when the interface finished. But I know everything to do now. I know about Lily Rock—" "It's almost pure magnetite," Skinner added. Mulder nodded. It's why he'd chosen the town. It's why he'd stayed, for a scrap of hope. "And I know about the light," William finished. Mulder felt William's hand on his chin, turning his face up toward his own again. "They can't hurt us anymore," he said softly, and gave Mulder that strange, contented smile. Mulder looked into his eyes. "Who are you, William?" he whispered, and the boy's eyes shone. "Your son," he said. "I'm your son." **** "This may be done gradually...until a single new mind is formed." 17 LILY ROCK VISTA IDYLLWILD, CALIFORNIA 8:35 p.m. DECEMBER 24, 2012 CHRISTMAS EVE Some of the townsfolk said it was the Christmas Star come back a few days early, and some said a meteor had streaked down – unexpected and unseen – from space. Some said it was the ghost of an Indian Princess, or a fire that had started up there somehow and gone out. But most said they hadn't seen the light that came off Lily Rock at midnight on the 21st of December, the town of Idyllwild asleep in the winter snow and the vacationers in the cities far away asleep after days of buying their things to put under their trees. Only three people had seen the young boy on the top of Lily Rock, Mulder and Skinner standing several hundred feet behind just in front of the Jeep that had managed up the Forestry Department's back roads. They'd watched as William and his Changed Body – looking small inside Mulder's heavy parka – had stood on the edge of the white rock and lifted his arms, his fingers outstretched and his head throw back. He'd seemed to draw in an enormous breath. Then, the ground beneath them, the surface of the stone, began to glow. It glowed until it was too bright to look at it, until Mulder and Skinner had walked back and back, finally shielding their eyes from the brightness and a hum that had begun deep in William's throat that grew until it was everywhere, burring around them with its sound. Scully had not turned away as she watched his fingers – reaching to the stars -- sprout tendrils of light. She hadn't turned away when her son's hum had grown into a shout, not of pain, but of laughter, a delighted and otherworldly sound. Then she'd watched the entirety of the mountainside's light flow up through his small body, out his fingers and eyes and mouth in a pillar of white, the staggering force of the rock's magnetite streaming through her son, the whole mountain suddenly bursting with something like a nova, carried up into the stars and the dark on the sounds of a child's – and, seemingly, her own – laugh. It had been picked up on the satellites, of course, as had the approach of something the government couldn't explain and the people never did see, and when the burst of light shot up from the San Jacinto Mountains in California and the approaching object had turned and disappeared off the readings – repelled, it would seem, by the burst of light -- they had no explanation, but dispatched men to the mountains to search for the source. They didn't find it, of course. The source of it -- wrapped in flannel pajamas like any other boy his age on Christmas Eve -- sat now beneath a tree Mulder had cut from the woods behind the house, a tree that William had hung with bits of plastic and glass, that they'd strung with a sad set of lights they'd found at the General Store in Mountain Center (clear whites bulbs like starlight). Its only other decoration was a string of popcorn that Scully had sat in bed and worked through with a needle she'd found in her suitcase, one she'd picked up during a stay in a motel in some town in Kansas a lifetime ago, when every one of them was someone else. Walter Skinner stayed with them, and he and Mulder were playing a game of cards in the quiet, the fireplace crackling and sending up sparks. Scully slept on the couch swallowed by one of Mulder's fisherman sweaters, her color returning, her hand closed against her face. They'd have to move on soon and find another place to stay, this last move to somewhere they all could stay, but nothing could hurt them any more. Everyone knew this. On earth and above it. With this safety, the small family didn't feel the need to go right away. It was Christmas Eve, and in the middle of all of it, William sat beneath the tree. He had his knees curled up against his body for warmth, his arms crossed over them, his eyes wide on the tree, the lights dotting his face. He looked at his mother and father, his friend Walter who had worked for so long to keep him safe. The men laughed at something, and Scully turned in her finally restful sleep, as though she didn't recognize the sound. She seemed to listen for a beat, her brows squinting down, the two men chiding each other for something in the card game's hand, and when she recognized their voices, her mouth quirked a tiny smile and she rolled over to return to sleep. William resisted the urge to go cover her more fully with the old, woven throw on the couch. She would be all right. Instead he closed returned his attention to the tree, felt the warmth of the fire and the warmth of the lights, the warmth of the people and the warmth of the place. There was only one person not here, and in fact, only one person to thank for the peace of this night, the baby who had changed her mother down to her very bones and blood, the baby whose life had given her mother the disease that sent her just days from dying, a change in his mother that William found in the syringe. He'd mixed it with his father's blood. He'd merged it with his own again. From her living and dying, from his mother and father's lifetime of pain, William had been transformed. With his own changed blood given back to his mother to change her again, the baby – through him -- had ultimately enabled him to stop his mother's dying, and his father's, and, in the end, the dying of this whole beautiful world. William thought of her, there beneath the tree, and smiled. He whispered the name to himself, to celebrate, to mourn and to praise. "Grace," he whispered. "Little Grace." **** END AUTHOR'S NOTES: Thanks to Dani, Shari, Sue, Nancy and Revely for betaing this story and for their enthusiasm for reading it as I went along. Thanks to R. Paul McCarty for the section headings, which follow the train of philosophical thought for self- awareness that constitutes the underpinnings of Mind Uploading, as detailed by the Mind Uploading Research Group. Here's a nice picture of Lily Rock, too: http://www.desertsunschool.com/reunion2002/lily_rock.jpg Thank you for reading. Have a wonderful holiday season, and a joyous New Year. Bone 7 December 2004 10 December 2004 (revised)