TITLE: Finding Tamoanchan and the Escape from Mictlan 
AUTHOR: Zoonr
EMAIL: zoonr@hotmail.com
DISTRIBUTION: Anywhere. Just let me know and attach my AO3 and/or my website: http://archiveofourown.org/users/Zoonr/works and http://zoonr.tripod.com/index.htm Feedback is also loved and feared at AO3 and my email.
RATING: R
POST DATE: 11/22/2015

CATEGORY: S
KEYWORDS: MSR, Post-Colonization, William, Mythology
SPOILERS: The entire series (not including IWTB or Season 10 and beyond), but this story plays particularly off of events in “Memento Mori”, “Redux I/II”, “Emily/A Christmas Carol”, “Per Manum”, “William” and “The Truth”. This is a sequel to my novel “Mesabi Ferrum”. If you have not read that, this story will likely not make sense. You can find it at my website or AO3 and the usual places.

SUMMARY: After the events in “Mesabi Ferrum”, Mulder, Scully and William trek across the post-alien invasion landscape of the former United States to learn the fate of Scully’s mother. Along the way they find more than they could have ever imagined.

DISCLAIMER: This work contains characters and situations of the television series "The X-Files," which are the creations and intellectual property of Chris Carter, Ten-Thirteen Productions, and FOX Broadcasting Co. The author makes no claim to ownership over these elements, and this work should be distributed only in a free manner without promoting monetary gain.

MY NOTES: This story has taken me much longer than I originally hoped or planned. I started writing almost immediately after I finished Mesabi Ferrum, but life and my muse got away from me. All along the way, it was important to me to finish. But I never could have kept my energy going if it hadn’t been for the pokes and offers of chocolate from all the fans out there who loved MF, reminding me that this was not just about me. This story is dedicated to all of you. Sadly, one very vocal supporter of MF passed away last year, so this story is also dedicated to her memory. Beckyc, you were genuinely the most positive X-Phile I’ve virtually met, and one of the biggest cheerleaders in the fandom. Thank you for your kindness and support. The fandom is better for having had you in it, but worse for your loss.

Lastly but not leastly, thank you to my beta readers: The Other Dynamic Duo - Lord N Thomas and M Thomas, and Sara! You all spent much of your precious free time helping me out with this project which was a two for one deal. I couldn’t have done this without you. You’re awesome people! Any mistakes still within the story are mine alone. 

^^^^^^^
PROLOGUE

When the last Neanderthal died more than 35,000 years ago, leaving Homo Sapiens as the dominant surviving Hominid species on earth, the world population of Humans numbered in the few millions. Several millennia later, after the rise of civilization, in the year 33 of the Common Era, when Jesus of Nazareth was crucified on a hill called Golgotha in Jerusalem, the population of the world had boomed to approximately 200 million. One thousand years later in the year 1066 when William the Conqueror led his Normans into Britain to defeat the Anglo-Saxons, Mankind had surged to 350 million, only to be reduced one third by the Black Death in the coming centuries.

Human Beings persisted.

They discovered new worlds, new technologies, new enlightened ways of thinking. They invented philosophy and science. The internet. They even traveled to the moon. By the dawn of the 21st century, medical advances, unprecedented wealth, prosperity and opportunity led more than seven billion people to rule the Earth, and there seemed to be no foreseeable end to Man's reign.

Until the Great Plague. Until aliens returned to take possession of the planet. Until the Invasion.

By January 1st in the year 2013, more than 6.9 billion humans had been exterminated in under a week. Those few remaining would be lucky, or unlucky depending upon one’s point of view, to survive the rest of the year.

They'd be luckier still, if someone they loved were alive to share it.

^^^^^^^

Day 1: January 5, 2013, 15 Days After Invasion

Catlet, Virginia

When Scully was a little girl, she loved camping. Between her father's time away at sea, and the family constantly moving to his next billet, there hadn't been many chances for vacation, but Bill and Margaret Scully always made a point to take at least one trip with the children per year. Whether by necessity to save money on a sailor's paycheck, or because her father was a rugged military man, camping trips accounted for more than half of the Scully Family vacations. That was back before nylon pop-up tents, Kevlar canoes and air mattresses, yet the wilderness seemed so much easier to handle then. Of course, Scully had been a child, and all of the planning had been done by her parents, but that time had felt so idyllic. As much as camping brought back wonderful memories of home and family, Scully would have given anything for a fully staffed Holiday Inn Express right about now. Even one of the rat-trap motels she and Mulder would stay in during cases would seem like the Hilton.

After leaving Canyon City on New Year's Day, Scully, Mulder and William had made it as far as Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains in just over four days. They'd limited driving time to those precious few winter daylight hours. Even without the old-world’s blinding headlights from oncoming traffic, there were too many obstacles on the road to risk driving in the dark at any speed. Abandoned cars, debris, even human bodies littered stretches of highway. Unfortunately, their sensible self-imposed travel rule and bad timing had landed Scully near Skyland Mountain, and only fifty miles from their intended destination – her mother’s home -- just as nightfall came on what was technically January 5, 2013.

So close and yet so far away.

They'd considered pushing ahead, but common sense won out over emotional impulsiveness. The DC area would be the biggest hazard field they'd encounter on the journey to Scully's mother's house. They were in a hurry. Scully had no idea if her mother was alive, injured or dead and nothing short of not arriving at all would be worse than making it there a few hours too late. But pushing ahead might mean not making it there at all, so they made camp instead.

"Are you sure you're okay?" Mulder asked for the seventh time since they'd zipped up their tent for the night.

"Yes, Mulder, I'm fine," more edge in her voice than she'd intended, and sounding less believable than usual even to herself. For most of the trip she’d been able to fall asleep before she could zip up the sleeping bag, exhaustion winning the competition with anxiety. Not tonight. She'd kept Mulder awake with her constant twisting and turning, hopelessly attempting to get comfortable on their godforsaken air mattress. He’d patiently endured it, and now *she* was being snippy with *him.*

"I'm sorry, Mulder. I just don't like being here," she admitted. “It’s creeping me out.”

Mulder raised a brow.

"What?" she asked defensively.

"I'm shocked you admitted that out loud," he said.

Not only was their campsite near the place where she'd been abducted by Duane Barry, but it was also near the crash site of one of the massive alien Mother Ships. Debris still hovered in the air like fog, coating everything thinly as it settled. Being so close to a hundred thousand dead Grays was unsettling enough, but add in her fear and anticipation about what they might find at her mother's house, along with William’s insistence on sleeping alone in his own tent, and Scully's nerves were frayed. Never mind that she'd technically been dead only a few days earlier.

"We really should compare notes," Mulder said.

Scully frowned and twisted to her side to face him. "About what?"

"About our individual ‘Night of the Living Dead’ experiences," he said, mirroring her posture, and bringing his hand up to brush his fingers lightly against her cheek.

"Mulder, what did I tell you about reading my mind?"

"To avoid it."

"And what happens if you don’t?" she asked, giving her best impression of a third grade teacher.

"Death by ‘Copacabana’," he said holding in a smirk.

"Correct, though I may also throw in a sprinkling of ‘Mandy,’" she said, also trying to keep her face straight, and finally losing. They both burst out laughing at the same time. Laughter felt good, and her body relaxed a bit.

"I'm sorry, Scully. I really don't have much control over this thing," he said.

"Try," she said softly.

"I will, but I make no promises. If anything it's getting stronger. Luckily, so far only your thoughts and Will's have been on the airwaves. Makes it easier to sort out, especially since Will’s sound more like background noise, leaving pretty much only you. Also, this thing still only comes and goes for me. I’m not like Will. I think it’s always on for him. I'm still amazed he's made sense of it all as young as he is."

"Do you think he's okay?" she whispered as if this would keep William from hearing if he really wanted to.

"He's asleep now," Mulder said, confirming William wasn't listening to their conversation. "He's safe," he added, whispering unnecessarily as well.

"That's not what I meant," she said, though she constantly wondered about that, too.

"I know. Honestly, Scully, I don't know how he is. He's an expert at hiding his thoughts from me. Aiden said that other telepaths," he said smirking at his choice of words, "are difficult to read, not that I try to pry. Will's equally good at not sharing much verbally. A lot like his mother."

"I don't think I contributed all of the DNA on that trait," Scully said, lying back, looking up at the shadows playing on the tent's dome.

“I’m an open book, Scully,” Mulder said, smiling. “Want to know what I’m thinking right now?” he asked, leaning over her, pressing soft kisses to her neck.

“I don’t need telepathy to figure that out. In fact, my medical training comes in handier in this case. Pulse threading… quick, short breaths… blood flow.

“Diagnosis?”

“Arousal… or stroke. I can’t be sure without the proper tests,” she said moving her hand slowly down his abdomen, stopping above the waistband of his sweat pants.

“It’s been a while since I had a complete physical,” he said.

Scully snorted.

“What?”

“Supplemental diagnosis: Adult Pay Per View Withdrawal,” she said smiling. Before he could protest with insincerity, she covered his mouth with her own and pulled him down for a very unprofessional examination.

^^^^^^^

Day 2: January 6, 2013, 16 Days After Invasion

Iwo Jima Monument

Arlington, VA

Smoke rose from multiple sites throughout Washington, DC. The entire city was laid out before them like a 3D map from the hilltop, but was barely visible through the haze. Long ago, this had been one of Scully’s favorite places to sit and think. The enormous statue recording one of the iconic moments in US history had inspired her during moments of lost faith in her mission and in herself. She’d often found comfort watching the tourists, especially families, look up in awe at the monument, no doubt imagining what it had been like that day after the great battle for those now immortalized men. On a clear day from this hill in Arlington, Virginia, the view of the Capitol city had been spectacular.

Not today. Not ever again. At least not in the same way.

Snow softly fluttered to the ground, partially obscuring any view the smog had allowed through. If she closed her eyes Scully could almost imagine this was a normal January day, the snow dampening the sounds of busy Arlington surrounding them. But shutting her eyes couldn’t block out the smell. Washington, DC had been a city of over five million people, most of them were now rotting away in their homes, their cars, their offices. The snow made the smell tolerable, but the knowledge of where the stench had drifted in from made it worse.

“I don’t hear anything,” William said, standing alongside his mother, looking towards the city below. He meant there were no thoughts of other humans down there. He looked at Scully, realizing what he said, then amending, “Nothing I recognize. And I’m not sure how far away I can hear when I don’t know where to focus.”

Scully smiled at her son’s thoughtfulness. “It’s ok, Will. We’ll find out for sure soon enough. I still think she’s out there.” She wondered if William would interpret her inner conflict as a lie or fear. She wasn’t sure what the truth was herself.

“We’d better go. I don’t want to be on the road if it starts snowing harder. The Beltway road crews were terrible Before, but I think they’ll be especially incompetent today,” Mulder said, standing near the truck, a bright yellow Nissan XTerra they’d found a few miles across the Texas border. Now near another state border, they’d stopped to stretch, and gas up at a station near the monument before the last few miles to her mother’s house. Really, Scully had just needed a little inspiration before facing what may lie ahead. She wasn’t sure she’d gotten what she’d hoped for, but it was time to find what she’d been looking for, one way or another. It was time to go home.

^^^^^^^

Margaret Scully Residence

Bethesda, MD

The walkway leading to the front stoop of Margaret Scully’s house was covered by a pristine layer of snow, more than an inch deep. Long, uncut blades of grass stubbornly poked through the snow covering the lawn, but they were being swallowed up fast as the flakes continued to fall, heavier than when they had left the Iwo Jima Memorial less than a half an hour earlier.

Mulder parked the truck on the street in front of the house and they all got out, standing in a horizontal line on the sidewalk looking towards the front door. He glanced at Scully as she sucked in a trembling breath. “Maybe she’s inside trying to keep warm. The power’s probably been out for a while,” he said feebly trying to explain the undisturbed snow. He knew it wasn’t true before he’d said it. The house was empty of life.

“You don’t *hear* anyone, do you?” She asked, though it was more of a statement.

Mulder tried to keep his face neutral, but lowered his head, shook it. “I’m still a beginner at this though. You better check with the expert.”

They both looked to William standing beside them. He shook his head slowly, but his brow crinkled as he craned his left ear toward the house. The kind of hearing he was trying to do had nothing to do with his ears. The movement seemed natural, yet unconscious.

“Do you want me to go in by myself?” Mulder asked.

Keeping her eyes forward, trained on the front door, Scully said, “No. She’s my mother. I need to know.” Mulder felt the warmth of her body heat as she slipped her hand inside of his and squeezed. Scully wasn’t prone to handholding, so the uncharacteristic gesture made Mulder’s breath hitch in sadness. He would be strong for her if it killed him. He squeezed her hand in return to make sure she knew it, before she released him.

They all walked toward the house together in a line, Scully leading the way.

^^^^^^^

The door opened with a soft click. Scully’s mother had hidden a key under a rock in a flower bed near the front walkway, but the door wasn’t locked. She led the way in. This hadn’t been her childhood home. The Scully’s had traveled from Navy port to Navy port, finally ending up in this house during the last couple of her high school years, yet it still felt like home to Scully. It had been the last real stable home she’d had. This house had been her refuge.

She remembered visiting her mother and father one weekend about halfway through New Agent Training at Quantico. She’d hit a wall and had been sure she’d fail her next round of firearms tests. She’d stayed in this house, in her old room. Her father re-told stories of his days in naval officer’s training, and her mother made her favorite dinner, neither of them asking her how she was managing. Neither of them had asked her if she’d been thinking about quitting… which she absolutely had been.

She knew her father never approved of her choice to become an FBI agent, but he never spoke of it that weekend. Strangely her parents’ silence about what she was going through that weekend had inspired her to continue. They had given her strength by reminding her they loved her… by allowing her refuge in a normal weekend away from the strain of class and tests and defensive tactics and her entire future. Their normalcy made it *possible* for her to continue. She’d give anything to hear her mother’s voice now, even if it was to tell Scully she’d made all the wrong choices in her life. Any sound of life would be the most beautiful music Scully had ever heard. But there was nothing. Even the howling of the wind was dampened by the falling snow.

^^^^^^^

The house was in good order. Nothing seemed to be out of place. There was no evidence of vandalism or looting. No sign of hasty packing. It seemed as if Margaret Scully was out shopping, due back home any moment. They’d spent a half an hour checking every room in the house, under beds, in closets. Aside from some apparently missing clothes from her mother’s dresser, and a suitcase sized empty space in the closet, they hadn’t found any indication of where Margaret Scully could be.

The most concerning detail was that her car was still in the garage, empty with nearly a full tank of gas.

Scully’s eyes burned, swelling with tears she desperately wanted to keep from falling. They’d come so far, been through so much, and now they had nothing. Where could her mother be? The house was less than a mile from the Bethesda Metro station, a distance her healthy mother was able to walk even at her age. Had she taken the train into the city before everything fell apart and been trapped there? If so, Scully would likely never learn the truth. Never know her mother’s fate.

From the kitchen a mild odor drifted into the great room. A few pieces of spoiled food inside the refrigerator indicated the power had been out for a while. Strangely, most of the fridge and the freezer were entirely empty, as was most of the pantry. The house was tidy considering the state of the world. The garbage had been recently emptied, which for some reason had drawn Mulder’s attention.

She wandered out of the kitchen, leaving Mulder to stare at the empty garbage can, and into the living room. A bookcase stood along the living room wall, mostly filled with books covering the span of the Scully family’s lives together. Her mother had been a voracious reader, a love Scully had also acquired. Her father may have read Moby Dick with her, but Margaret was the true literary aficionado between her parents. Her mother was also an obsessive scrap-booker, tracking the Scully family history in giant bound albums that always made their way onto someone’s lap during a family get together, ever since she’d married Scully’s father more than fifty years earlier. Whenever the albums would come out, Scully had always found something important to do in the kitchen, or elsewhere. She longed for her mother’s annoying hobby now more than ever, as something in the middle of the second shelf from the bottom caught her attention. A dust coated gap took the place of at least three of the large books. “Come here, Mulder,” she called.

“What is it?” he asked, walking over to her.

“Mom’s photo albums. They’re gone. Do you think she took them?”

He looked to the gap on the shelf where she was pointing, ran his index finger through the layer of dust. “I don’t know, Scully, but I think I found an empty vial of the serum in the garbage,” he said, holding a little glass cylinder up, the light from the window refracting through it. Almost as instantly as he said the words, he looked like he regretted it, no doubt aware of the instant hope he had inspired appear on her face.

“She’s alive, I know she is! She has to be,” Scully said, straightening herself like her spine was a spring. Her mind raced, searching for any possible place her mother could be. She came up empty. “Mom’s friend, Lilly, lives a few blocks away. We should check there.”

“Ok,” Mulder said.

“Stop looking at me like that, Mulder,” she said. His face reminded Scully of someone who had just hit a dog with his car. Only in this case she was the dog.

“Scully,” he started.

“She’s alive, Mulder. She has to be,” Scully said, cutting him off.

“I’m not arguing that, but do you think it’s possible she wasn’t here when it happened? The house looks fairly buttoned up,” he said. Scully slumped into the soft cushions of her mother’s sofa. Mulder sat beside her. “Hey, I’m not saying we stop looking.” He ran his hand over her thigh soothingly. “Can you think of where she may have gone?”

Scully shook her head, and William entered the living room. His brow was crinkled, like he was working out a difficult math problem. “Are you ok, Will?” she asked.

He looked up, nodded, but his face remained the same. He turned his head towards the bookshelf Scully had been looking at earlier. He bent down. There was something lodged behind the wall and the bookcase, and William reached for it. As he stood up straight, the object became clear. It was a wooden picture frame. William looked at it curiously.

“Is this her?” he asked, holding the frame towards Scully. The photograph in the frame was a picture of her mother and father with their arms around each other, both laughing at something, looking at each other in the summer sun.

“Yes, that’s my mother and father,” she said. She breathed in deeply, wondering if she should add “these are your grandparents” or if that would be pushing him too much. This had been one of her favorite photographs of her parents.

“I think she used to take care of me,” William said. Since they’d met again, Scully had noticed William’s remarkable memory for things that had happened when he was a baby, from the time before she’d given him up for adoption. She’d spent the past decade wavering between wanting to purge every last memory of that time from her mind, and desperately clinging to each fading detail. Now that she had her son back, she was glad she could allow herself to think of that time again, and that the boy he’d been when she’d been his mother wasn’t completely erased from who he was now.

“That’s true. She did,” Scully said, waiting for William to indicate if he wanted more.

“Did he take care of me too?” William asked, pointing to Scully’s father in the picture.

“No, he died many years before you were born,” Scully said. She looked at Mulder, and he smiled warmly, letting her take the conversation as far as she was willing.

“Do you miss him?” William asked, still looking at the photograph, holding the frame in both hands.

“Every day,” she said, a soft smile appearing before disappearing as quickly.

William was quiet. He rubbed his thumb over the picture. Usually, Scully imagined telepathy would be a curse… never having quiet, always having other people’s thoughts invade your own, but she wished she was able to read William’s mind now. He knew what it was like to lose a parent. Both of his adoptive parents had died less than a month ago. There were times even almost twenty years later that the pain of losing her own father was as fresh as the day she received the call from her mother. Even with that shared experience, it was difficult for her to know how to comfort her son. Some pain just needed to fade with time to become bearable. The silence was too much, but as she was about to say anything to break it, William spoke again. “I think I know where she is.”

“My mother?” If William had been any other boy, she would have asked how he thought he knew, but with her son, there was not much that shocked her.

“She’s in the forest… in the mountains,” William added. He spoke like a person does when they’re trying to remember a fading dream, barely within intelligible reach. “There are log walls. A fireplace in the living room made of stone that goes to the ceiling. A little shed out in the back. Its red.”

Mulder asked, “Do you know where? Is it nearby?”

William shook his head. “It’s fuzzy. I’m sorry.”

“It’s ok,” Mulder said, putting his hand on William’s shoulder. “Scully, do you… Are you ok?”

Scully heard him ask the question, but didn’t register he was speaking to her. Her mind raced. As soon as William had said the words, she knew where her mother was, at least generally speaking. “What? Yes, I’m perfect, Mulder,” she said, leaping up from the couch with a sudden rush of adrenaline pumping through her racing heart. “It’s probably still a long shot…”

“What is?” Mulder said, still sitting.

“I know where she is, too.”

“Where?”

“It just came to me,” she said. “Let’s go! It’s not far from here. Couple hours.”

“Go where?” Mulder asked as he stood up, and grabbing her arm gently bringing her attention back to him.

“Catoctin.”

^^^^^^^

Her body and her mind raced with excitement. Even setting off from Canyon City hadn’t filled her with this feeling. That had been more trepidation. She wanted more than anything to find her mother alive, but truthfully, she knew a happy outcome was a longshot. That she would dare ask God to give her William *and* her mother stretched the credulity of her own faith and hubris. When so many in the world had lost so much, how could she dream of getting more than what she already had? The dread that flooded her just before she’d opened the front door was exactly as she’d expected. But she had always placed her faith in the facts, and now that she had evidence her mother fled Bethesda and had used her serum, Scully was revitalized with hope. Perhaps there was a chance to have everything she wanted after all.

“When I was still in high school,” Scully said as she searched for an Atlas her mother kept on one of her bookshelves. It was a leather bound book that had come with a set of Encyclopedias. Both had become obsolete relics until a few weeks ago. “Bill was about to graduate and head off to the Naval Academy, my parents rented a cabin in the Catoctin Mountains. Near Thurmont, Maryland. On the way to Gettysburg, I think.”

“You think?”

“We stayed there over Christmas because Bill wouldn’t be home for the summer. It was a big log cabin deep in the woods.”

“And you think your mother went there?”

“She always talked about going back there again. It was the last time the whole family was together. It was kind of an idyllic trip, at least in her mind. Almost every Christmas she brought it up. She might have gone back there,” she said. Mulder’s face told her all she needed to know about what he thought of leaving the security of a home in a quiet neighborhood to wander through the snowy mountains for a cabin Scully couldn’t really remember. “I know it’s a longshot Mulder, but I have no idea where else she could be. It’s only an hour or so away. William saw it, too,” she added, like a child excusing bad behavior on the grounds that a friend also did it.

“Scully,” he started. Scully braced herself for the pragmatism she imagined was about to come from her normally impulsive partner. For whatever reason, whenever one of their personalities would reverse poles, the other would follow suit to make sure the universe was in alignment. It *was* a crazy idea. There was no way to know if her mother had gone there. He must have seen the desperation she felt, so plainly and frustratingly painted on her face.

He said, “We should go.”

She exhaled a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding in. Anticipating her next wish to leave immediately, he added “But its late afternoon now, it’s still snowing, and it’s already getting dark. I would rather not wander around in the Maryland mountains on a snowy winter night when we’re not even sure where we’re going. We’ll leave right away tomorrow morning, ok? That way we can check your mom’s friend’s house. Make sure she’s not there, load up on supplies. Be safe.”

She knew Mulder was right. Usually she was the advocate of caution, so when the usually leap-while-questioning Mulder was the voice of restraint, she needed to pay attention. She sighed, and crossed her arms. “Fine. You win. But as payment, you’re fixing mom’s generator. Let’s see if we can get some hot water running,” she said. Before she could control her next thought, it escaped her. She was amped up, wired and finally had some positive energy coursing through her body.

*And I’m in the mood to conserve some water by sharing a shower…* her mind supplied.

“It’s a deal,” he said, smirking. She could almost see the pulse racing in his neck in anticipation.

“Out of my head, Mulder,” she said, walking past him to get started on their preparation tasks for the night.

“You love it,” he said.

Sometimes, she admitted to herself, she did.

^^^^^^^

Despite her earlier temptations, the shower was more basic and functional than she’d suggested. With the sputtering generator, they’d only managed to get the water up to luke-warm. The air was chilly, so the three of them took turns racing through a solo scrub down. Despite the temperature, the water still felt amazing to Scully. Showers – cold or otherwise -- were a luxury in this world, especially during this road trip east, after leaving the “civilization” of Canyon City.

They set William up in the spare bedroom at the end of the upstairs hall which Scully’s mother had decorated mostly for Bill’s kids on their occasional visits. There were twin beds and decorations that an older woman would assume appealed to a teenager and five year old. Scully and Mulder took Scully’s mother’s room despite Mulder begging her to live out some weird hybrid teenage dream he had of doing it in Scully’s own former bedroom.

“We only lived in this house starting with my junior year of high school anyway, Mulder,” she said, wondering how on earth he could ever have fantasies about her as an awkward teen. She was about as unsexy as they came back then.

“That’s perfect,” he said, wrapping his arms around her from behind as she folded down the bedspread on her mother’s king-sized bed. He kissed her liberally-bared neck. She wore a well-broken in white terrycloth bathrobe she’d found in her old closet. She couldn’t remember owning it, but it was coming with them for sure. “It doesn’t bother you that we’re in your mom’s room?” he asked.

“To sleep?” She closed her eyes, smiling as she leaned into the kiss. “Why should that bother me?” She teased. His hand moved across the exposed part of her chest over her heart, and underneath the robe to touch her breast, softly at first, then firmly. She gasped, belying her efforts to play hard to get.

“Nice try,” he said, almost growling as he turned her chin towards him to kiss her lips. There was nothing soft or tender about this kiss. Scully turned around to press her body into him as she deepened their contact. Her hands covered his face, roamed through his hair, as her mouth opened to devour him.

She needed this. After growing apart before the world had ended, they’d become even closer since the invasion, and she rarely held back physically like she used to once upon a time. She’d always believed life was short, but she’d never been able to truly open herself up to him until they’d reconnected on their trip to save William. She’d probably always have a hint of a reserved Catholic girl within herself, but as more of a ghost memory in her mind, than a trait completely absorbing her. A time would inevitably come when they’d be separated forever. They’d cheated death more times than any human or cat deserved. But until Fate came to collect her past due bill, Scully wanted to spend as much time as she could in this man’s arms.

Without breaking their kiss, she scraped her fingernails down his torso to find the edges of his t-shirt. She pulled it up, and he broke away from her lips long enough to finish taking it off, throwing the shirt in the corner of the room, as he leaned in once more.

She closed her eyes as she felt him guide her onto the bed, untying the robe as he crawled over her. More clothes were discarded until they were both bare, the only cloth surrounding them the lush pillow top mattress, sheets, and down comforter of her mother’s bed. Her heart raced, even as time slowed as she felt him push inside her, pushing away her lingering anxiety about the day. Between languid thrusts of his hips, he smoothed his lips up and down her neck and chest at a pace that was neither frenetic nor slow. He adopted a rhythmic pattern that complimented her pulse, elevated, but not racing. There was no hurry in this safe space. After several ethereal minutes of drifting, Scully felt her body fall into blissful semi-consciousness, peacefully lulled by the sensation of his movements. She felt neither present nor absent, the concept of time was lost on her, but the thought that this is what floating to Heaven must feel like tickled her face like a soft breeze. Sex with Mulder was as close to Heaven as she ever needed.

“I’m giving you some of my best stuff, and you’re sleeping,” said a sandpaper voice coming from somewhere in the wind as she floated upwards.

She opened her eyes for a millisecond, and closed them again gently, smiling as she spoke. “Mmmmm… absolutely not,” her sleep-drunk tongue willfully lied.

“Scully,” he said, pausing slightly, but not stopping completely, “You think I can’t tell when you’re sleeping?”

She’d tried explaining this to him before. Falling asleep during sex can actually be a sign of extreme enjoyment for a woman. That he should take it as a sign of her complete abandonment of fear, openness to vulnerability, and evidence of her trust being placed entirely within his hands, body and being. That it’s not a matter of boredom or lack of interest (at least it never had been for her with Mulder). A wide awake woman might be thinking of anything but how a man is trying to rock her world (what’s for dinner, cleaning, work, late night TV, the stresses of daily life), whereas a drowsy one is nearing Nirvana, completely content and safe. Mulder had never bought into this, as she suspected no man ever had.

“Not sleeping. Feels amazing,” she said honestly, slurring the words slightly, not helping to convince him. This man was one of the most intuitive thinkers she had ever known of any gender, and was now even a bona fide telepath, yet when it came to sex, he still had no idea what was actually going on inside her mind. She’d have to remember this for later. If she wanted to completely keep an idea secret from Mulder, just get him into bed. Win-win.

“Scully,” he said, this time stopping entirely, breaking the spell, and forcing her eyes open wide.

“What?” she asked, alarm jolting into her thoughts, seeing the seriousness in his face. She pushed herself up slightly on her elbows, wondering if maybe he had gotten some telepathic cry for help from William down the hall. “What’s wrong?”

He grinned wider than the Cheshire Cat, leaned into her face. She felt his warm breath against her cheek as he growled, “I’ll show you *amazing*.” He gave her a deep, hard kiss, ending with a swipe of his tongue, and then pushed himself up, pulling her up with him into a prone position on the bed. He twisted them around so that their heads faced the opposite direction from their original spot near the headboard, and pushed her hard into the pliable, soft downy mattress, throwing the covers off all in one motion. Her knees were bent on either side of his hips as he pushed himself back inside of her, simultaneously returning to a kiss that left her snorting for air, unwilling to let him pull away from her lips. She was most certainly awake now.

He picked up the pace of his thrusts, their bodies smoothing over each other, lubricated with sweat, her eyes rolled to the back of her head. As the fluttering pressure built in her abdomen, her only coherent thought was *So much for that secrecy during sex plan.* And, then, as she gasped his name and involuntarily grasped fistfuls of bedspread, she found a whole different level of Nirvana. She was too far gone to notice the self-congratulating smirk on Mulder’s own face after he joined her in Heaven, too.

^^^^^^^

Day 3: January 7, 2013, 17 Days After Invasion

Interstate 270, South of Germantown, MD

They made quick work of getting out the door shortly after 2 pm. They had planned on leaving much earlier, but having an actual bed the previous night meant falling into an almost comatose state of blissful deep sleep. Mulder couldn’t remember the last time he’d been that dead to the world. Perhaps the last time had been when he’d actually been dead to the world. It had been a while. But it meant they would have only a couple of hours of daylight to make the trip, which in perfect conditions should take a little over an hour. The previous day’s snowfall and no plows to clear the roads would make each mile of their sixty mile trek much more treacherous.

They’d gathered as many remaining supplies as they could from Mrs. Scully’s home to take with them on their travel, double checked each of the nearby houses, including Mrs. Scully’s friend’s house, and scavenged at a nearby corner gas station en route to the highway. They considered risking a stop at a Walmart or sporting goods store, but they’d had a close call with a group of men on a similar attempt a day into their trip that had made Mulder cautious. It had been a cold reminder to them that there were other survivors out there – human and hybrid survivors -- and not all of them were as benevolent as those they’d found in Canyon City. Steering clear of major looting destinations like big shopping centers was now part of their regular routine. There was plenty of leftover stuff in the world, but who controlled that stuff might become the next chapter of humanity. It had always been that way, but the difference now was there was no government to enforce law and order. As much as Mulder had despised the government, especially after his show-trial conviction of a non-existent murder had forced him and Scully into hiding, a tiny part of him longed for the leviathan of government now. There was a thin line between rule of law and anarchy.

Fortunately, (or foolishly depending on one’s perspective), Mrs. Scully seemed to have left the house without concern for what life in the apocalypse might be like, and she’d left many useful items at home, such as spare batteries and flashlights, a couple of large collapsible water containers, some canned and dried food, and fresh water. Either she had gone to the cabin before everything had happened, or she was extremely underprepared for the world today. Or she had a lot of extras she’d left behind. Captain Scully’s gun safe remained closed and locked. Unfortunately, Scully couldn’t remember the combination, and they hadn’t found any C4 explosives lying around on their travels.

“Let me check something,” Scully said leading Mulder to her old bedroom. She rummaged through the closet, finally pulling out a small lockbox hidden in the back.

“What’s this?” he asked.

She opened the box, revealing two Glocks and boxes filled with 200 rounds of ammo.

“Hid these back here a long time ago. Mom never knew,” Scully said. Mulder smiled at her uncontrollably.

“What?” She asked, somewhat defensively.

“I just always thought I was the paranoid one,” he answered.

“Well, spending absurd numbers of hours with you down in the X-Files basement rubbed off a little bit,” she said, more calmly.

“When did you hide these?” he asked.

“After Melissa,” was all she needed to say. His paranoia had rubbed off on her earlier than he’d assumed.

They finally set off with a bit of food and water, camping supplies, and three handguns between them. Mulder hoped that between the six inches of freshly fallen snow, with no working plows or humans to drive them, and the numerous stranded vehicles stopped in time on their futile attempts to flee DC, they’d get to the Catoctin Mountains before dark, and in one piece. He planned to take it very slowly.

The ideal course of action would be to stay off the main roads, but he knew Scully was barely holding it together as it was with their time delay. She hid it well if you only had access to her exterior demeanor, but like it or not, Mulder had access to more than that. On the inside she’d been wracked with guilt since not being able -- or willing -- to save her mother when the shit hit the fan and the virus had poured down on the planet. She’d chosen to save William instead. Although it was the right choice at the time, Scully was Scully and she’d hate herself forever for not having done more. If they had found her mother dead at her home, the guilt would never leave her, but she’d be able to eventually move on. If they found her mother alive, maybe, she’d be able to begin to heal from everything. But if they never found her at all, Mulder feared the uncertainty would eat away at Scully until it did untold damage to her psyche. And that turmoil in turn would consume him as well. Probably sooner.

Outside, the snow was falling again, lightly at first and then growing heavier as they moved north. Not quite like the previous night, but it would make their already treacherous drive that much worse. The scene was beautiful as they climbed the Appalachian mountain ridges. Once amongst the tallest peaks on earth, they were now merely gently rolling hills, withered and dying.

The word “Catoctin” floated around in Mulder’s mind. How had William known where to go? Had he seen the cabin through Margaret’s eyes? It was a little over fifty miles from Bethesda to Thurmont, a much greater range than Mulder’s telepathy allowed, but William’s gift seemed to have no limit. The dreams Mulder had over the past decade that had led him to finally find his son in Wyoming had come from William, even if he hadn’t been aware he’d been projecting them. Mulder was a more effective receiver than the average Joe, but William was the rock star.

Mulder glanced in the rear view mirror. William’s head was cocked to the side, partially resting against the side door’s window. He’d fallen asleep almost before they’d made it out of Margaret Scully’s neighborhood. It seemed his son hadn’t slept as well as both Mulder and Scully had. Although Mulder was improving as a telepath, he found it nearly impossible to read William’s mind. Occasionally, he’d get a stray thought, but for the most part his son’s mind was quiet to him. He’d been told that telepaths have a difficult time reading other telepaths, but Mulder knew his mind was an open book to William. But sometimes when William slept, Mulder could see random images from his son’s mind. They rarely made much sense, as is often the case with any dream, except for now. Mulder could see a little cluttered corridor lined with junk on either side as someone walked towards something Mulder couldn’t see. Then the image was gone.

Mulder’s eyes flickered to the mirror again. William’s face twitched. The image from William’s mind returned. Dream William approached something. A mirror? As an image of William appeared in front of Dream William, the real version in the truck gasped as his eyes flew open. The force of the dream’s images and William’s emotions pushed Mulder’s mind. Suddenly the volume inside his brain had been cranked up to ’11.’ It created a physical sensation of nausea and pain that he’d felt before when his telepathy had been showing itself after he’d first touched images of an alien spacecraft, fifteen years earlier.

“Whoa!” Mulder shouted out loud, unable to control the force.

“Mulder, watch the road!” Scully yelled with the same emphasis he’d used. She grabbed the steering wheel, and forced it to the left, then steadied it. The truck fishtailed briefly before re-gaining a grip on the road. He realized he’d squeezed his eyes tightly closed and was holding his head in his hands. He opened his eyes, and took back control of the wheel, shaking his head as if he was trying to get water out of his ears after swimming.

“Sorry,” he said, trying to weakly cover for the fact he’d almost slid off the road at 30 mph, and plunged them into a snow drift in the middle of a snowstorm with no hope of rescue anytime soon. He righted the car, but didn’t stop it.

“Jesus, Mulder! Are you ok?” Scully asked, her face flush with panic.

“I’m fine. Just thinking,” he said, trying to will his heart to stop racing, still feeling a little dizzy.

“Just thinking? You looked like you had a stroke,” she said, touching his forehead, checking him for fever as was her habit when he flipped out. She did this often.

“I’ve had worse,” he said, trying to break her out of ‘Doctor Scully’ mode. “Seriously, Scully, I’m fine.” She pulled her hand away, clearly unconvinced, but she didn’t press the issue further.

William’s eyes reflected to Mulder in the rear view mirror were tightly shut, and his fingers were pressed against his temples. As Mulder opened his mouth to ask William what was wrong, the response entered his mind. “I’m ok. Don’t make her worry. Bad dream,” William said. Mulder looked over at Scully. The worry lines on her forehead more pronounced than usual. He looked back to the mirror. William shook his head as he lowered his hands to his lap. Until that moment, William’s dream hadn’t seemed to Mulder like anything particularly terrifying, but it had clearly upset him. What was it about the reflection of himself in the mirror that had awakened him?

“Can you turn the heat up a little bit, please,” William asked.

“Are you cold back there, sweetie?” Scully asked twisting around to look at William, distracting her away from Mulder’s immediate health. Mulder had shed his coat several miles ago after Scully had cranked the heat in the truck during mile one.

William nodded. “Just a little.” Apparently his internal thermostat took after Scully, but Mulder got the impression his son had another cause behind his need for more heat.

“Ok,” Scully said as she turned the dial up a notch, which was about as far as the temperature could go before turning the truck into an actual sauna.

William hugged his arms tightly while the heater took its time warming up the truck’s interior even more. He turned to look outside, glancing back once to Mulder in the rear view mirror. William’s mind was once again dark to Mulder.

^^^^^^^

“Oh, my God! There it is!” Scully chirped, pointing for nobody’s benefit as the two passengers were sleeping. She sounded more like a teenager than the seasoned, weary, highly educated professional she once was. In the quiet of the truck, her voice boomed to her own ears. Scully always felt like a child in her family’s company, and despite not having seen her mother in a decade, this felt no different.

Except this was different. She was not certain she would see her mother. She was not certain that her mother was even alive. The intuition she felt after hearing William’s description of the images of the cabin in his mind could have been nothing more than wishful thinking. Perhaps her mother had gone somewhere else when everything had started to fall apart, and that’s why they hadn’t found her at the Bethesda house. If they found nothing here, her next goal would be to go to her brother Bill’s house. Bill, his wife Tara and their two children lived in San Diego, the last Scully had known, so she really hoped it wouldn’t come to that. They’d been closer to California when they’d started this journey in the red rocks of the Southwest.

“Are you sure?” Mulder asked, sounding groggy. He’d finally fallen asleep during the past half an hour of driving. She’d normally feel guilty for waking him from the limited rest he was able to find, but her heart pounded harder inside her chest than she’d ever felt it before. He sat up straighter and cleared his throat, stirring a napping William in the back.

“Yes, that’s the driveway to the cabin,” she said, softer now, pointing with her right index finger. “I’d never forget it, even with all this snow,” she added.

“Are you ready,” he asked, grabbing her hand, and squeezing it gently. She’d have to remember to thank him for that later. He smiled when he heard her thought. She’d have to kill him for that later, and he smiled more broadly.

She took a deep breath. “Ready as ever,” she said as she slowed down slightly to make the turn into a long driveway buried in the tall pines.

Though it was probably only a few hundred feet, this felt like the longest stretch of road they’d driven since leaving Canyon City. As they neared the end, she could make out the shadow of the cabin, and the flicker of some interior lights, probably coming from candles. At the end of the drive was a vehicle Scully didn’t recognize, a blue Jeep Liberty parked near the front door, facing outward towards the road. Someone was here, or had been recently. The Jeep had only a light dusting of snow covering it.

“That’s not her car. At least not the one I remember her having,” Scully said, a tear forming in the corner of her eye. “She probably got a new one in the last couple of years and didn’t think to tell me about it in her letters. Doesn’t mean anything,” she said, more to herself. She took a deep breath, and drove the final few feet she’d need in order to learn the truth.

^^^^^^^

Mulder wanted to have as much hope as he heard in Scully’s voice, but couldn’t muster it. The driveway had no tracks from recent travel, and the Jeep parked in the drive was buried in the thick heavy snow. He didn’t want to remind Scully that they had seen her mother’s car parked in her garage back at the house. There appeared to be lights on inside the cabin, but that didn’t necessarily mean someone was home, or if they were, that they were alive. He glanced back at William to try to get some indication. William glanced back, but his brow was furrowed as he did whatever it was to focus more deeply. How his own spotty telepathy worked was entirely a mystery to him, much less how William’s worked.

Mulder wasn’t sure what that meant. It probably didn’t help that William hadn’t seen his grandmother since he was a baby. It would be harder for him to discern who was inside, or so Mulder assumed. Mulder wasn’t picking anything up from the house or from William.

Scully stopped the XTerra a few feet away from the Jeep. As soon as the truck was in park, the main light inside the cabin went out. Somebody was inside.

Scully reached for the handle to the truck. Mulder grabbed her other arm quickly.

“Scully, we need to be careful,” he said. “Maybe you should let me take a look first.”

Scully sighed heavily. He knew what she was thinking, but he wasn’t trying to be paternalistic. He knew she could take care of herself in a fight. It was her emotional well-being he was worried about. If her mother was inside and dead, it could be a grim scene, and he didn’t want that image burned into Scully’s memory and heart for the rest of her life.

He cocked his head, looked into her eyes, hoping she’d understand. “Scully, please…” he said softly. She inhaled deeply, closed her eyes, and nodded. Mulder’s lips twitched in a modest smile. He squeezed her hand, and leaned in for a brief, gentle kiss, which she returned warmly.

“If you’re not back in three minutes, I’m coming in,” she said.

“Fair enough,” he said and hopped out of the truck, carefully closing the door to not make a sound, and leaving his jacket on the front console. The cabin’s front door was only twenty feet or so from the parked truck. The jacket would only hinder him if he needed to move quickly. But the air was crisp, especially now in the early winter twilight, and few steps into his walk he shivered. He tapped his hand on his side, verifying his sidearm was firmly holstered there. He didn’t think he’d need his weapon, but did not want to be caught without it.

Mulder was fairly certain someone was inside the cabin. It was too coincidental that the tiny light had gone out just as they’d pulled up. But that didn’t mean it was Scully’s mother. Although he’d never say it to Scully, he thought the chances of Margaret Scully being alive to be very slim. The Plague itself had killed most of humanity, and the chances of one woman in her seventies being immune were small. Without the experiences resulting from the X-Files and the conspiracy that Mulder and Scully had been consequently wrapped up in, neither of them would have had immunity either. And Mulder thought the chances Maggie had been injecting herself with the doses of Mesabi Ferrum, and doing it correctly, were also low. It was just too far beyond reality despite all she’d seen her daughter go through.

He hoped he was wrong.

Mulder half-crept up to the front porch. The door recessed about ten feet from the edge, and was comprised of a screen door and sturdier storm door inside of that. The cabin appeared to be winterized, its owners probably catering to vacationers frequenting the nearby ski hills. It was also a larger cabin than Mulder had expected, and seemed to be in decent shape. Almost luxurious for what he imagined a Navy Captain’s family vacation budget to have included. No rotting pieces of wood, or chipped paint. It had been taken care of.

Mulder inhaled. He could smell smoke in the air. He’d noticed smoke coming from both chimneys, so whoever was here was likely making fires, and cutting wood. At the very least, he could be facing someone armed with an axe.

Mulder reached the door itself, standing off to its side. He put his back against the wall, opened the screen door, holding it with his foot, and knocked with his free hand. He couldn’t hear any movement coming from inside. He waited for a few seconds before he turned the knob. To his surprise, the door was unlocked. He pushed it half open, and as he was about to step inside, a blinding flash of fire, accompanied by a thundering BOOM filled the space around him. Before he could register what had happened, he noticed pieces of splintered wood raining down all over him as the door frame shattered with the force of the shot gun blast.

Mulder leapt off the porch, his only thought was getting to the truck to drive his family out of danger. One more, loud BOOM ripped through the air milliseconds before something stung him from behind.

This end of the world thing was growing tiresome, he thought as he tripped over a snow covered stone lining the walkway, launching himself face first into the snow bank.

He had just become a sitting duck.

^^^^^^^

Electric pain radiated up his legs and back, spreading out like fire, making it hard for Mulder to pinpoint exactly where he’d been hit. For all he knew his entire thigh was blown apart. He pushed himself slightly up and out of the snow, reached back with his left hand to feel his leg. It felt wet, but that could be from blood, sweat or snow. He brought his hand back in front of his face to look, and his entire palm was watery red.

Time seemed to stand still. All he could hear was his own heartbeat until he faintly made out Scully’s voice, tinny and far away. He wanted to shout to her. To stay back, get in the truck and go, but his tongue felt dry and too big for his mouth. He fumbled to the bulge of leather and metal lodged on his belt, grasping for his gun as another voice shouted at him to “not move!”

“No! Stop!” Scully’s voice came again, followed by the quick dampened sounds of her boots moving through the deep, wet snow. When she finally made it into his field of vision, he realized her own gun was not in either of her frantically waving hands.

*What are you doing, Scully?* he thought in desperation. He tried again to produce any sound from his throat, or stand up to block her, but it was no use.

As she passed him, he heard her yell again, “No! No! Put down the gun, Bill!”

Bill? She was already on a first name basis with his attacker?

“Oh, my god!” said an oddly familiar man’s voice. The voice brought him backwards in time, but he couldn’t quite place it. “Dana! Is that really you?” the voice added. And then Mulder understood.

Scully’s older brother had gotten the chance to shoot Mulder, and had taken it.

The apocalypse just kept getting better.

^^^^^^^

Scully wasn’t sure who to run to first. As crazy as the world had gotten, she had never expected this was possible. It was bizarre as hell. She stood in foot-high snow drifts, forming the point of a triangle between her soul mate, and her big brother Bill. Until this moment, she had assumed he was dead. She’d come looking for family and had found it, albeit in a different form.

Bill looked older. His hair thinner, starting to look more like their father in her ghost infested memory. She hadn’t spoken to Bill in more than a decade, but had kept some tabs on him via her mother’s coded letters. She felt moisture in the corners of her eyes. Glancing away, she picked up Mulder in her blurry field of view.

“Mulder!” she gasped, shaking herself back to reality and what had just happened. Bill had shot Mulder. With a shot gun.

She rushed over to him, knelt down in the red-tinted snow. The part of his pant leg covering the side of his thigh up through his backside was shredded, and wet with a combination of melted snow and blood. It was difficult to tell how severe it was, or even exactly where the wound was, in the gloomy waning afternoon light.

“Mulder, how bad is the pain?” she asked, leaning over to face him.

“Slightly less intense than when you shot me,” he said.

That he was joking was a good sign, but with Mulder you never really knew. You could be breaking his fingers and he’d be telling you knock-knock jokes in defiance.

She stared at him, trying to hold back her irritation considering he was the victim, but succeeded only slightly. “Seriously, Mulder. Do you feeling light-headed, or nauseous? Can you stand? It’s hard for me to see how bad it is out here.”

“I think I’m ok,” he said, pushing himself up out of the snow, leaning to his good side, wobbling minimally. “I think it just nicked me.”

“Bill, help me get Mulder inside.” She instructed, her medical training taking over even as her brother’s name felt foreign after all these years. As Bill moved to comply, she turned towards the truck and added “Hey, Will!” Before she could wave her hand to get his attention, he stood beside her holding her medical bag, holding out a large towel, with a smirk. “Thank you,” she said matching his expression. She should be used to this by now, but his anticipation of her wishes still caught her off guard. Taking the towel, she pushed it gently into Mulder’s leg.

“Ow!” he yelped. Perhaps she hadn’t pushed quite so gently.

“Sorry” she said, as Bill appeared at her side.

“Dana… I can’t believe you’re here,” he said putting his hand on her shoulder and squeezing gently.

“Me either,” she said softly, smiling at him.

“This is really touching, but BLEEDING MAN HERE!” Mulder said.

“Hey, Mulder,” Bill said, smirking sheepishly, still holding the gun he’d used to put buckshot through Mulder’s ass.

“Hey, Bill” Mulder said through gritted teeth as Bill took one of Mulder’s arms. “Sorry about the bloody snow,” Mulder added, unable to let the guilt trip up on Bill as the siblings helped him into the cabin, with William bringing up the rear.

^^^^^^^

“Will, can you… “ she began, stopping when she turned to watch William dropping her bag and bounding back out the cabin’s door, presumably to get some snow just as she was about to ask. Scully took a deep breath. She was overjoyed to see her brother Bill alive, but she was quite certain explaining how William was with them, and the past ten years was going to drain every ounce of her energy, and right now she needed to make sure Mulder was ok. “Stop fidgeting Mulder,” she said, trying to determine the extent of the damage through his clothes.

“Sorry, but my ass simultaneously hurts, burns, and itches. A little sympathy maybe? This is the second time I’ve been shot by a Scully.” The first had been the second year of their partnership, and a drugged and paranoid Mulder had been about to kill Alex Krycek with the same gun the man had used to kill Mulder’s father, another Bill. Another time and place. Scully’s choice to shoot Mulder had saved his life. Her brother’s shot wouldn’t be so easily forgiven, she suspected. Especially since the two men generally had to feign civility in each other’s presence. Usually doing it poorly.

“I’m so sorry, Mulder,” Bill said, sounding uncharacteristically meek. “I thought you were one of them.”

“Them?” Mulder asked.

“Aliens,” Bill said. “I was about to kill you until I saw the blood. I know those bastards bleed green. Didn’t want you in the house. Toxic gases and all.”

“So, Bill Scully talking about aliens and bleeding green and toxic gas,” Mulder said, curiosity peeked almost as high as the pain he was feeling. “That’s interesting.”

“Later Mulder. Bill is there somewhere Mulder can lay down?” I need to get him out of these pants to see what I’m dealing with,” Scully said.

“Always trying to get me out of my pants,” Mulder said, grimacing despite his bravado.

“Shut up, Mulder,” she said.

“Couch right there,” Bill said, pointing to a circa 1970’s style brown, orange and white flowered three seat sofa. Bill moved out of view down a hallway, and quickly returned carrying some large bath towels. He put them down on the long sofa before Scully could maneuver Mulder to it.

Bill smirked. “No need to get it completely covered in blood.”

“That’s sweet,” Mulder said as he limped with Scully under his arm.

“Lay down on your stomach, Mulder,” she said. “Bill, bring me my bag.”

Bill walked over to the bag sitting in the spot where William had dropped it, picked it up.

As he brought the bag over, William returned with a cooler full of snow, sat it down next to Scully who knelt on the floor perched over Mulder on the couch.

“Dana, I still can’t believe you’re here,” Bill said. “I honestly can’t even believe you’re alive.”

“I had the same thought,” she said, digging through her bag.

“I mean, mom told us you died. Ten years ago. Both of you. That’s why I thought Mulder might be, you know, one of them.”

“Might be?” Mulder asked.

Bill shrugged. “It’s why you’re not dead, Mulder.”

“I just assumed you’re a terrible shot,” Mulder said.

“I’m sorry,” Scully said, redirecting the men from escalating their one-upmanship, reminded by Bill who she’d actually been hoping to find here, but not wanting to say more about how much their mother knew about the past ten years.

Saving her from having to explain, a loud bang came from the back of the cabin as a screen door on a tightly coiled spring slammed back. Scully jumped up instantly with her weapon ready, forgetting Mulder and Bill and the past ten years. She reflexively pushed William behind her.

“Bill?” a cheerful, familiar voice called from the direction the sound had come from. “You here? We’re back. Found a whole pile of dry sticks. Perfect for getting the fire started.”

“In here,” he said looking at Scully calmly, a slow smile spreading on his face.

Scully partially lowered her weapon as the voice’s owner appeared from the back of the open kitchen. “What’s going on… oh my god, Dana! Is that you?”

“Hi Tara,” Scully said smiling at her sister-in-law, holstering her gun finally. Appearing behind Tara were two children, a little girl and a teenage boy, slightly older and taller than William. The little girl was partially behind her mother, poking her head around curiously but cautiously.

Bill’s wife ran to Scully, and embraced her in a tight bear hug. The woman was always a hugger, little had seemed to change about her appearance in ten years aside from a few extra pounds and faint evidence of crow’s feet around her eyes.

“I can’t believe it’s you!” Tara said.

Scully managed to gasp out, “Me either.”

But what little breath she had remaining expelled out of her in the next few seconds.

“Hey kids, what are you looking at?” another voice asked, slightly concerned. Scully knew that tone, burned into her mind from before the time when her conscious memories began. Tara released Scully, but the air in her lungs had not returned, sucked out of her like a vacuum.

“Oh! Oh, my god!” Margaret Scully managed to squeak out before covering her gaping mouth with her hands.

“Mom?” Scully said just before she burst into tears. She walked to her mother, boneless, and collapsed in her arms as if she were still a child.

“Oh Dana,” Margaret said before her own tears consumed her as well.

^^^^^^^^

The room was spinning. The only thing Scully heard was a faint ringing sound coming from somewhere deep in her brain. She was delirious, like she’d been struck on the head with a hammer, but without the pain. She was in her mother’s arms. Her mother was alive. Bill and his family were alive. Mulder and William were alive. She was overwhelmed with nearly every emotion she’d ever had. They clumped together like a giant ball of multi-colored yarn, chaotic, beautiful and incoherent. An emotional yarn ball. That was what she felt like. Normally, Scully was a reserved woman. She hated being overly emotional in public, but her awareness of the others in the room gawking at her was zero, and all she could do was sob with joy.

Her mother held her for several minutes, equally engulfed in her own joyful sobbing. As Scully’s surroundings slowly came back into the range of her senses, she was able to gain some composure. Her mother pulled away first, but remained close, keeping her hands on Scully’s face like she had done when Scully was a little girl, brushing her hair out of her face, wiping her tears, the way mothers do.

“I can’t believe you’re here. I had assumed the worst,” Margaret said.

“So did I, but I hoped…” Scully squeaked out.

“How did you know to come here?”

“It’s a long story,” Scully answered, straightening herself as she wiped the errant tears from her cheeks, replacing them with the biggest smile she’d probably ever had.

Margaret glanced at the couch and gave Mulder a warm smile. She walked towards him, “Hello Fox! You brought her here safely!”

“Hi Mrs. Scully. For the most part, yes,” Mulder said. “Though I think it was the other way around, mostly.”

“It’s Maggie, Fox. Oh, my goodness,” Margaret exclaimed when she saw Mulder’s bloody backside. “What happened?”

“Just call me Scully-family target practice,” Mulder said.

Margaret crinkled both eyebrows, not getting the joke. “Never mind, Mom,” Scully said.

“I shot him. Thought he was one of them,” Bill added for emphasis.

“We’ll explain everything,” Scully said. “I need to see how bad his wound is, and then we can sit down and talk.”

“Catch up,” Margaret said, nodding. “I’ll make some hot cocoa. Tara can help me get some dinner going. Oh, who’s this now?” Margaret said, looking around and finally noticing the stranger in the house with the bright blue eyes, and dark brown hair.

Scully breathed in deeply. She took her mother’s hand, and led her a few steps towards the cabin’s front door. “Mom, this is William.” When she exhaled, her breath shuddered uncontrollably. Scully hadn’t imagined introducing her grandson to her mother quite in this manner, but so be it.

“William? As in… As in my?” she said, clasping her hands over her mouth again.

Scully nodded, knowing what word her mother had been trying to utter. “Will, this is your grandmother.”

As the tears fell again, Maggie smiled and leaned in slightly so that she was at eye level with the nearly twelve year old, whom like her daughter, she wasn’t much taller than. “I’m very happy to see you again, William.”

Margaret was a more demonstrative woman than her daughter, but she restrained herself, unsure how he might respond. William had been curious about his grandmother based on the questions he’d had about her, but a giant bear hug might be too much for him upon the first meeting in his conscious memory.

“He likes ‘Will’,” Scully interjected warmly.

“Will, the last time I saw you was when you were a baby. I’m sure you don’t remember any of that, but I remember that like it was yesterday.”

William nodded and smiled, looking back and forth between Margaret and Scully. Scully wasn’t sure what exactly was going on in his mind – she rarely did – but he seemed happy.

“Do you like hot chocolate, Will?” Margaret asked as a gust of wind blew in, banging closed the front door to punctuate the moment, and keeping the cold outside where it belonged.

^^^^^^^

Scully’s throat was raw from telling the story of the past month, of finding William at his adoptive parents’ house in Wyoming. She kept it short, leaving out his role in ending the alien invasion. She left out tales of Super Soldiers or Alien Replicants, and that a madman who worshipped William had shot and killed her before she had been brought back to life by a genetically pure alien Gray named Jeremiah Smith. She left out the small detail that William’s telepathy and the other special gifts he’d had as a baby like moving objects with his mind had returned to him. Bill hadn’t been in on that one anyway, and her mother no longer needed to worry about such things. Scully told them that William’s parents had died in the Plague, and she told them about her life with Mulder on the run for the past ten years. Perhaps eventually she’d tell them more, but for now it was enough to all be together and alive. They’d experienced a miracle yet again, and there was no need to complicate it.

Scully wasn’t sure how long she’d been speaking, but it was fully dark outside when she finally looked out the window. Absent all the real details, she’d been able to tell a surprisingly rich story of the last ten years of Mulder and her life together. Dressed in a warm and roomy pair of Bill’s sweat pants, Mulder had begun to doze off in a mild pain killer induced trance. From what she’d been able to ascertain, the buck shot Bill had hit him with had only grazed the back side of his upper thigh, tantamount to a deep scratch. No shrapnel had lodged in his leg. Still painful, but as long as they kept it infection free, he should be fine and able to walk once the swelling went down. Since her own death experience, she’d been obsessed with keeping stores of medicine. Half her belongings consisted of medical supplies. Every stop they made, she did a sweep for anything she could add, meaning they had enough antibiotics to keep Mulder covered.

The entire group had gathered around her in the cabin’s small living room, eating a meager dinner quickly prepared by Tara and Margaret while listening to Scully’s tale. The only interruption had been when Bill had carried his daughter to her bed after she’d fallen asleep on the cold floor. Bill’s son Matthew, now a teenager a few years older than William, sat near his cousin and listened intently. Scully never thought she’d get to see the two boys meet each other. Leaving the other children in Canyon City had been difficult for William. And while his cousin would not understand some of the special challenges inherent in being William Van de Kamp, perhaps he could still become a friend. Scully hoped so. William needed friends now more than ever.

They all sat silently now, mostly staring into the fire, processing everything. After what seemed like ages, Margaret spoke, breaking the dead quiet room. “Well, I think you all must be exhausted. I think it’s time we turn in. We have plenty of beds for everyone. Dana, you and Fox can have that room down the hall to the left, on the other side of the kitchen. It’s the only room on that side of the cabin and has its own bathroom. Will sweetie, I made up the other set of bunk beds up in the loft for you. You can take your pick of the top or bottom bed. Matty and Katy are up there as well.”

“I’ll show you,” Matthew said.

“Ok,” William said, standing up to follow his cousin, increasing Scully’s confidence that they would get along well.

“Goodnight Will,” Scully said, yawning uncontrollably as she added, “Thanks mom.”

Margaret smiled, and continued. “We will all have plenty of time to talk more tomorrow. We have all the time in the world, now.”

Everyone scattered in their respectively assigned directions, except Margaret, and her daughter. Scully sat on the floor near Mulder who was crashed out on the couch, stroking his hair lightly.

“I think Mulder might be here tonight. I’m going to stay up for a while to make sure he’s really out,” Scully said softly.

“Do you think William will be ok up there?” her mother asked.

“Yes… he’s pretty independent. He’ll let us know if he needs anything, and I’ve learned not to push him too much.”

Margaret smiled wistfully at her daughter.

“What?” Scully asked.

“What?” Margaret laughed. “I just can’t believe you’re here, Dana. And you found William. I’m just… I’m just feeling truly blessed at the moment, that’s what.”

Scully laughed softly as well. “I know,” was all she could come up with. No other words really could do justice to the moment. “I know. I love you mom,” she finally added, the corner of her eye feeling the telltale sign of a newly forming tear.

“I love you, Dana.”

^^^^^^^

Day 4: January 8, 2013, 18 Days After Invasion

Scully Family Cabin, Catoctin, MD

CLANK!

Scully’s mind jolted awake, and she instantly grimaced from the sharp pain radiating from her neck. She wiped at the bead of drool rolling down her chin, and collected her bearings.

“Sorry!” A deep, whisper came from the kitchen. “Did I wake you?”

Scully pulled herself up from the cabin’s living room floor, and walked over to one of the breakfast barstools near where Bill was noisily trying to make a pot of coffee on the gas stove. The cabin’s main level was really just one large room, with only décor separating the living room, dining room and kitchen, designed for maximum togetherness on family vacations.

“It’s ok. If I slept any longer I don’t know if I’d be able to turn my head,” she said, craning her head from side to side to stretch out the kinks in her neck.

“You slept there all night” Bill asked.

“Didn’t mean to. Wanted to make sure Mulder was ok. Then you woke the dead with your dexterity.”

“Is he ok?” Bill asked, his face growing red. Scully couldn’t remember Bill ever so easily embarrassed, or remorse-filled.

“He’ll be fine. Not like you to be so concerned about Mulder, big brother,” she said, a little harshly, and if she admitted, a bit unfairly.

Bill creased his brow. “Well, ten years and the end of the world changes a person, you know? Especially with kids to worry about.”

“I definitely know that,” she said, pulling a stool out from beneath the breakfast bar, yawning as she sat. As uncomfortable as it was sleeping on the floor, she still felt great. Her mother was alive. Mulder was alive. William was alive, and even her older brother and his family were all alive. She craned her neck to look up at Bill. Her brother was taller than Mulder, so standing this close was a challenge for her five foot three seated frame so early in the morning after sleeping on the floor. She smiled, wanting to let him off the hook, glad to be able to see him in person, but his lips turned downward as he lowered his gaze away from her eyes.

“Dana… I’m really glad you’re here,” he began, “I’m thrilled you’re alive.” He glanced her way every few words, but his head remained lowered.

“I sense a ‘but’ coming.”

Bill smiled mirthlessly. “Mom told us you and Mulder had been killed by the military when you broke him out of prison. More than ten years ago. That was the official story they told us. I had no idea you were alive until I saw you telling me not to shoot Mulder again. At first I thought you were a ghost. Thought Mulder was an alien,” he said, smirking. “Obviously it’s been quite a shock.”

“I’m sorry, Bill. I’m sorry. I asked mom to lie to you all of these years,” Scully said.

“Mom knew you were alive this whole time?” Bill’s jaw dropped as he lost words.

Scully nodded. “We’ve kept in occasional contact through coded letters. She told me all about you though. About Katy. She’s beautiful, Bill.”

He closed his mouth and took a deep breath, brow furrowing. Bill had a particular way of being quiet when he was upset, seething and tense, tight jaw, followed by terse bursts of condescension. “I just don’t know why you felt you couldn’t tell me.” He’d spoken to her like this in the past when he disagreed with her choices. When he’d felt disrespected in his role as oldest in the family. When he felt the need to take up the mantle for their father. “I can keep secrets, Dana. I had a goddamn security clearance for Christ’s sake.”

Scully sighed. So much for peace. “Bill… do you honestly think you would have believed any of it? *Did* you believe any of it? I sent mom extra doses of the medicine to give you. Did you take it?”

“Yes, we did,” he said, adding self-righteousness to his voice.

“From the beginning? I sent it to her a more than a month ago, before this all started.”

“No,” he admitted. “But maybe if I’d known it came from you… she said it was from that guy Skinner at the FBI. Your old boss.”

“Big brother, that’s bullshit and you know it,” she said cutting him off. “I don’t want to fight about this Bill. Can’t we go 24 hours of just being happy we’re both alive?”

Bill looked down, exhaled and nodded. “You’re right. I’m sorry. Truthfully, Dana, there’s something else I need to tell you.” He lowered his voice, a somber tone replacing his haughty one.

“Okay,” she said cautiously, assuming he was changing the subject to redirect her. If Bill had known she and Mulder had been alive for all this time, he either wouldn’t have believed it, would have thought their mother was crazy, or might have even tried to find them… to turn them in. She knew his loyalty to the country was beyond even that of their father’s, and considering he did not understand all that had happened during Scully and Mulder’s time working the X-Files, he would have thought the right thing to do would be to help the government bring them to justice. He might have even believed that was best *for* her and Mulder in some misguided attempt to let the system prove itself worthy. He wouldn’t have believed the system was rigged. His professional identity was wrapped up in the belief his country was benevolent. Scully kept all of this to herself, not wanting her big brother to know she understood his pyramid of priorities probably better than he did.

“I think it will hurt mom too much for her to bring it up,” he added.

“Now you’re scaring me. Is mom ok?” she asked, sitting up straight on the breakfast bar stool. Her mother had aged over the past decade, and although she’d stayed in contact it would have been very much like her mother to keep her own health issues a secret from her. Like mother, like daughter.

Bill sucked in a breath. “Charlie is dead,” he said softly, the words like a whisper as he exhaled.

Scully took in her own deep breath. She felt instantly terrible that she felt no shock at hearing the news. She had assumed Bill, his family and their younger brother Charlie were all dead, because she’d assumed none of them would believe their mother and take her Mesabi Ferrum serum to keep them safe from the alien virus. She had only the emotional strength to believe the impossible idea her mother was alive, so she had privately mourned the rest of the family over the past weeks. She licked her lips. “The Plague?”

Bill nodded. “That’s how we knew we needed to take your medicine. Mom had been taking it since the beginning,” he said pointedly. “And when everything happened… when none of us except her were taking it...” his voice broke. Although Scully and Charlie were only eleven months apart, Scully being born in February 1964 and Charlie being born in January 1965, Bill and Charlie had been closer friends. Charlie had followed Bill everywhere, including to Annapolis and into the Navy with a commission. The only thing he hadn’t copied from Bill was having a family. His frequent travel and adventurous lifestyle had made it hard for Scully and the rest of the family to keep in contact with him. He was always volunteering for rapid response missions around the world, or pursuing some personal life dream, like climbing Mount Everest. But Bill and Charlie had always been able to pick up where they left off, even if they’d gone a year or two without talking.

“Mom insisted we spend Christmas here this year,” Bill continued. “I thought she was just being sentimental. You know how she always wanted to come back here, but now I know she planned for this. She pleaded with him, but Charlie couldn’t get the leave. Mom sent the serum to him, but he must not have taken it. I talked to him just before. He died almost right away after he got sick. His commander called to tell us before everything else went to hell. A day later, the rest of us got sick, except mom. If he hadn’t died... Mom forced us to take the serum, injected it herself while we were out of it, and saved our lives. Been taking it ever since to be safe,” he coughed and stood straighter, looked directly at Scully. “*You* saved our lives, Dana.” He choked back another tearful cough, and looked down again. “But Charlie… he’s gone.”

Scully felt the tears come now. She thought she had been prepared. She wasn’t completely sure she was more choked up by Charlie’s death, or Bill’s words of thanks. Probably a little of both. She wiped her eyes, and stood up. She walked over to Bill, put her arms around his towering broad shoulders, and hugged him like she had back when they’d been kids, and he’d been her protective big brother. After a long embrace, they parted.

“When did you come here?” she asked.

“About a week before Christmas. We were going to be here through the New Year. When everything happened, we decided staying here was the best option for now. Obviously, that was mom’s plan anyway. She’s been stockpiling food and other supplies for years. Keeping them in her basement. When we loaded up the truck, I thought she’d bought some really heavy Christmas presents for the kids. I had no idea. She had this all worked out to come here when things started. Made some trips up here alone before we came up just to drop stuff off. She’s smarter than I gave her credit for.”

“Is that my son paying me a compliment?” Margaret Scully’s sleep-filled voice half-yawned as she walked into the kitchen. “I wish I’d recorded it.”

“Mom, I compliment you daily,” Bill said, walking over to her to give her a hug. Truth be told, he did give their mother daily compliments. He was always a little bit of a suck up with mommy.

“Is that coffee?” a familiar gravelly voice asked from behind Scully. She turned around to see Mulder standing, a bit gingerly to one side, groggy and grimacing as he wiped at his eyes.

“Mulder, are you ok?” Scully asked walking over to him in protective mother bear mode. She reached up to check his temperature with the back of her hand. He felt relatively cool. “No fever. How do you feel?”

“Other than a sore ass, I feel fine. Slept pretty well, actually,” he said. “Coffee will make it even better. Maybe you could just inject it intravenously.”

In spite of herself, and the serious tone of the morning’s news, Scully laughed.

^^^^^^^

Slowly throughout the morning, the rest of the cabin woke up and made their way to the great room area. The entire area was basically an open floor plan with one room seamlessly transforming into the next, where everyone could easily see and talk with anyone in one of the three main rooms. The kitchen was separated from the dining and living rooms by a breakfast bar, with the latter two rooms flanking on either side of the rest of the space looking out to the front porch. Tara and Margaret made them all a simple breakfast of instant oatmeal. There seemed to be enough food stockpiled to get them all through the winter at least. One less thing to worry about, adding to Scully’s sense of euphoria. Part of her worried that she *wasn’t* worried about what the future had in store for them. But she was trying not to allow her habits of practicality ruin what she had been given.

Scully checked Mulder’s wound, and was surprised to see that it was not as bad as she’d assumed earlier. The buckshot had only grazed him, so nothing was lodged inside, amounting to large, deep abrasions, but completely healable. She would make sure to keep him on an antibiotic regimen and watch for infection carefully, but she had every reason to believe he would be just fine. She would thank her brother later for being such a terrible shot. So much for those marksman medals he used to be so proud of. Nearly every time she saw him since she’d become an FBI agent, Bill was always trying to convince her to go to the range and have a shooting contest. She should have taken him up on that, and involved money as part of the deal.

Everyone quietly milled around the cabin, occupying themselves with various activities, unpacking, cleaning dishes, inventorying supplies, and just trying to keep their minds away from the subject of the end of the world. In this place it was easy to believe they were just on a normal family vacation for the holidays.

Outside it was snowing again, delaying Mulder’s plan of taking Bill to look for more supplies, which Scully was thankful for. She didn’t want him pushing himself so soon. She also hoped to delay Bill and Mulder joint road trips together until they all had time to process the recent events a little longer. The two of them had never spent much time together, and the time they had spent together had been contentious at best, usually putting her in the middle.

Baby Katy, though she wasn’t a baby anymore, but a rambunctious five year old, played with Barbie dolls off in a corner of the cabin, while her older brother Matthew sat quietly in a chair in the living room reading a book. Scully was having a hard time reconciling her nephew’s age of sixteen with the last time she saw him. He had been about Katy’s age then, and now he was even older than William. He seemed to have grown into a contemplative young man, much different from his father and extraverted mother. He’d barely spoken a word since they’d arrived last night, but so far he and William seemed to be getting along well. Yesterday had been a whirl-wind of activity and emotion. She felt like she was coming down from the biggest high of her life.

“Is that more of a clinical interpretation, or are you diving back into college dorm room memory banks?” Mulder asked softly, sitting gingerly down next to her on the soft loveseat nestled in an alcove looking out through one of the big bay living room windows. The view from the window was of the front lawn, which was really more forest than grass, filled with towering pines, poplar and hickory trees. She opened her mouth to speak, but he interrupted her. “I know, I know. Copacabana torture and all that. I couldn’t resist the image of you smoking a joint at a frat party.”

She snapped her jaw shut, pursed her lips together. “No Mulder, aside from prescription meds, and a few X-Files related pharmacological events beyond my control, I’ve never been high. I think we’ve had this conversation before. Never smoked a joint, or anything else. I know you just want me to keep saying it out loud.”

“Well, we will have to…” he began.

“Remedy that,” she finished for him, putting her finger against his lips.

They’d had this conversation many times. He’d often threatened to feed her marijuana brownies, but never actually followed through with it. They’d lost a bit of their respective good humor over the past ten years, and with it the motivation for trying fun things. Now and then they’d have a lapse, and talk about better days ahead.

“That’s probably exactly why we should have,” he said a bit somberly. He smiled, and looked lovingly into her eyes, leaned in for a quick peck on the lips. “But now, there’s no reason not to follow through. We have all the time in the world, no jobs to worry about, and no law to run from, no FBI drug tests to avoid.”

“Just the constant worry about survival in a world absent of modern day conveniences,” she said.

He continued without a beat, “Consider this added to the bucket list. Get Dana Scully completely stoned at least once, and preferably soon.”

“Good luck with that,” she scoffed, returning her gaze outside. “So, Mulder, I’ve been thinking, as I’m sure you know,” she teased, “what’s next?” Now that she’d found her family alive, the next thing to do would be to figure out what life in this new world means.

“Isn’t that normally my question? I’m the one who can’t sit still,” he said, keeping his eyes on her.

“I’m assuming your gunshot is making you rusty, so I thought I’d pick up the slack.”

“You just found your mother, Scully. We don’t need to do anything next. Not just yet anyway,” he said.

She looked at him incredulously. She knew that was not what he actually believed. And she knew he knew it as well. And she knew he knew she knew it.

“Hey, I’m trying to relax,” he laughed. “I suggest you do the same thing. But if you want to know the truth, I think we should just stay here until spring, then try to find a safer place.”

“Where is a safer place?”

Mulder exhaled. “Honestly, I have no idea. But the world is still filled with enough shitheads that I’d rather we play some offense.”

They sat there quietly for a few minutes, each quietly gazing into the large flakes of falling snow. Without the stress of having to drive through it, it was beautiful. “Hey,” he said in a whisper, turning his face, leaning his shoulder into her. She turned to meet his eyes. “I’m sorry about Charlie. I’m really, really sorry,” he added, cupping his hand around her face to caress her cheek with his thumb.

“Yeah,” she said, looking down to her hands. “Thanks. I’m not really sure how to feel though. I miss him, but in my mind he was already dead, you know? I was surprised to see Bill and his family, too. I know that’s terrible, but I really only thought there was a chance to save mom.”

“It makes sense,” he said, waiting for her to continue, taking her hand and entwining their fingers.

“I’m beyond overjoyed to have been wrong though. I mean, can you believe this Mulder? Nearly the whole family is alive and back together, after everything that happened. We’re all here. Almost all,” she said softly.

Mulder leaned in for a quick kiss, put his arm around her as they leaned back into the soft chair. “I’m happy for you Scully.”

“I’m happy for all of us,” she said. He nodded, but there was a glint of insecurity in his eyes. Scully hoped that now they were all together, Mulder might start to think of her family as his family as well.

^^^^^^^

The entire day flew by in a surreal flurry of nothing as the family reacquainted themselves with each other. Tara told Scully about the past ten years of her life with Bill and their kids just like Scully had done the night before. It was wonderful to finally hear the news first hand instead of via her mother’s coded letters. Despite all that had happened in the world, this felt normal. For the first time in more than a decade, life felt pedantic. It was what Scully had dreamed of, but had never had as an adult. They’d all lost so much, but today was the beginning of a new era, the start of a new life together as a family. That realization seemed to exhaust the entire group, so the cabin quieted relatively early in the dark winter evening.

Mulder closed the door to their room behind him as Scully brushed her teeth in the small private bathroom. She had a private bathroom again. After weeks at Canyon City, she wasn’t sure if she could get used to this little luxury. She ran the water. It was warm, heated by the propane tank and generator used to electrify the cabin. Yes, she could get used to this indeed.

“Scully?” Mulder called.

“In here,” she said just before spitting out the last gob of toothpaste. He entered the bathroom behind her, wrapped his arms around her waist, nuzzling her neck. Her pulse shot up from nearly unconscious and ready for bed to a sprint in an instant.

“Everyone is asleep, and I’m bored,” he growled.

“Mmm,” she said, leaning into his warmth, her eyes closing. “We could play a board game. I saw several downstairs in the family room. Yahtzee?” she teased.

“I had something else in mind,” he whispered.

“Are you sure you’re up for this? A man your age still recovering from a gunshot,” she said, her eyes involuntarily fluttered as he kissed her exposed skin. Her question had a hint of genuine concern, but she knew more than anything it would spur him on further if only to prove how ok he was. His response was an animal groan before he spun her around, grabbed her around each thigh and lifted her off the ground. She wrapped her legs around his waist as he moved her quickly backwards to the bed, nearly throwing her before laying on top of her. She was not able to hold back a giggle. The sound was so foreign to her own ears these days, she almost didn’t recognize it as herself. Mulder stopped the sound seconds later, kissing her open mouthed, with unabashed force, his body pushing her into the bed with the same pressure. Pressure was all she felt, and it was the perfect counterbalance to feeling completely outside of her skin all day.

“I’ll show you what a man of my age is capable of, Scully,” Mulder’s gravel-infused voice growled as he briefly released her lips.

She put her lips against his ear. “Prove it,” she whispered, breathing heavily.

Mulder was always a man who followed through on whatever he was intensely focused on. She was happy in this moment his thoughts had room only for her.

^^^^^

Scully’s arm draped across Mulder’s chest as she finally slept nestled along his side. They rarely cuddled as they slept, each preferring separate space. Scully had fallen asleep almost immediately after they’d made love. He could hear the occasional unintelligible pieces of her dreams. He had a difficult enough time comprehending what people were thinking while they were awake, much less when they were sleeping, but it was still fascinating. From the relaxed way her body felt against him, he was sure her dreams were benign at worst, and perhaps even taking her to happy places. He hoped so. They would always have things to worry about in this new world, but he felt like happiness was a place they could find more often now that they’d found her family. This day felt like a lifetime in the making.

She’d been right earlier. His only thought had been of her. Well that, and the occasional twinge of pain in his backside caused by buckshot wounds being chaffed from vigorous movements. Pain and pleasure were such similar sensory responses, that it almost enhanced the experience of sex with Scully. He hoped he wasn’t developing a fetish. Getting shot was generally a giant drag. His thoughts drifted and he felt his body rise above his bed, effortlessly passing through the cabin’s ceiling until he could see the expanse of black, filled with the unending light of all the stars in the universe.

It was possible he was now asleep, too.

He didn’t fight it. The knowledge his corporeal body was wrapped up in Scully’s arms while his soul traveled the nighttime sky, now free of massive alien mother ships, while his son slept safely nearby, was his happy place. It was a place he never intended to leave again. Nothing would interfere with what he hoped was the new normal. It was finally time to stop running, and start actually living. This was all he’d ever need.

^^^^^^^

Day 5: January 9, 2013, 19 Days After Invasion

5:37 a.m.

William had never felt this cold before in his life. He shivered with each step he took through the deep snow, wrapping his arms around himself tightly as he ran, looking down barely ahead of his feet. His body was covered in a loose fitting gray jumpsuit, and his frozen feet wore canvas Con high tops. He couldn’t remember wearing this outfit before. Or even owning an outfit like this before. These were not his clothes. He turned around, an impulse suddenly hitting him to do so like an intense itch. In the distance, smoke lifted in the air above the huge alien mothership. William shivered, but not because of the cold. He’d hoped to never see the image of an alien mothership, or anything else alien, again. Thankfully, the ship that had nearly become his tomb had yet to make an appearance in his dreams, before now.

That’s what this was. A dream.

As he realized this, the landscape around him seemed to speed up. William continued to run in the direction he’d been running in before, but even as his speed remained the same, he was covering a tremendous distance at a blistering pace. The trees, hills, and towns raced past him. Or more, he raced past them. The sensation was simultaneously exhilarating and nauseating. He couldn’t stop running though. To do so would mean capture. To do so would mean death, his instincts told him. His home was destroyed. He couldn’t go back, so they’d kill him this time instead. He needed to keep going. There was something up ahead that he needed to find. He’d be safe there.

Finally, he stopped. He breathed hard, his hands on his knees. When he was finally able to stand straight without feeling like he would throw up, he noticed that in front of him was a little house. Not even a house. A shed. A little red shed. His heart raced with excitement. This was the end of the line. He’d made it. This was where he belonged.

^^^^^^^

11:45 a.m.

Mulder swung the axe down hard, splitting the small log in half with one clean strike. “Not bad,” Bill said, repeating the move with his own log. “I never saw you as the lumberjack type of guy. No offense.”

Bill was trying to make small talk. Their relationship had been rocky over the years, and Bill Scully was the last person Mulder had expected to spend the post-alien apocalypse with, but for Scully’s sake, Mulder wanted to give the man some credit for trying. Bill had hated him for dragging his family through hell because of the X-Files. Mulder had let him. If they were going to be stuck at the end of the world together, they might as well try to make amends.

Mulder shrugged. “Life on the road teaches a man new skills.”

“I suppose it does,” Bill said. He set up another log, and poised to strike it, but lowered the axe instead. He looked at Mulder, fighting for words that were perhaps difficult for him to say. “Mulder, I just want to thank you. For keeping her safe.”

“Nah, she kept me safe,” Mulder said casually, shrugging.

“Look, I’m just trying to…”

“I know,” Mulder said. “You don’t have to thank me though. I’d do anything for Scully. And William. I’m just being honest. Your sister saved me more times than I can count. Since the day I met her.”

Bill smiled. “It’s amazing you found him.”

“That it is,” Mulder said, swinging the axe down again. He caught the edge, and instead of splitting, the log flew off the larger stump Mulder was using as a base. Mulder was happy Bill was trying to be cordial with him, but he wasn’t quite ready to have a heart to heart with the man. He turned the subject to something that had been on his mind since they’d arrived at the cabin. “So, you thought I was an alien then? When I opened the door?” Mulder asked. On Bill’s shrug, Mulder added, “You’ve come a long way.”

“When the world is collapsing around you, it’s hard to deny at some point,” Bill said, jovially, but with an edge in his voice. “I really hate those things. What they did to all of us.”

Bill got very quiet, and Mulder could feel the anger in his mind. It was more than a hatred towards the aliens. Bill was harboring all kinds of different levels of anger and resentment about the state of the world. Weren’t they all?

“One thing I wanted to ask you as well,” Bill said finally.

“Shoot,” Mulder said, lifting the axe once more, bringing it down on a small log. “Metaphorically speaking of course.”

Bill rolled his eyes. Mulder wasn’t quite ready to let the man off the hook for nearly killing him. Bill continued, “How did you know how to find us here?”

Mulder rested the axe on the base log, holding the end up near his midsection to consider Bill’s question. There were a thousand ways he could answer it. He could tell Bill that his telepathic son gave them a clue. Or he could take the simple route and just say Scully had a hunch. Fortunately, she saved him the trouble of deciding, as if it was a difficult choice.

“You guys can come in for lunch,” Scully called. She stood just outside the sliding door of the downstairs basement entrance, and took a few steps towards them. She hugged her arms as she approached, forsaking a jacket. She wore a pair of snow boots that looked about four sizes too big, laces untied.

“Scully, have you ever seen such a manly display of burletude?”

“Burletude?” Scully asked. To a less skilled interpreter of Scully expressions, her face remained neutral, but Mulder caught the corner of her mouth curl up ever so slightly, along with movement of one lone eyebrow, giving away her amusement. “I’m fairly certain burley men do not include ‘burletude’ in their lexicon, if that can even be called a word.”

“Check this out,” Mulder said. He placed another log on the base, lifted his axe high above his head.

“I’m freezing, Mulder. I’d be happy to check out your burletude when it’s warmer out,” she said.

“When it’s warm out, burletude switches to *Herculean*, and flannel is swapped for chest hair,” Mulder said. He brought the axe down, splitting his log with one swipe.

“Nicely done. Have you seen Will?” Scully asked. “Haven’t seen him in a while.”

“He was playing pool with Matthew in the rec room last I saw him,” Mulder said. He set the axe head down on the ground, still holding the handle, and wiped his brow. The snow had finally stopped falling for what felt like the first time since they’d crossed into the Appalachian mountains, or at least since they’d hit the edge of the Beltway. In the snow’s place, the sky had turned to brilliant blue, and the temperature had dropped at least ten degrees. Despite not wearing his ski jacket, Mulder was sweating. His ass also hurt, but that was completely unrelated.

“He’s not now,” Scully said. Her brow was creased as she scanned the woods behind the house where Mulder and Bill were chopping wood.

“He’s probably just exploring somewhere,” Bill said. “Dana, he’s fine. He’s a boy.”

Mulder had actually almost said the same thing, but that Bill said it first annoyed him. Scully’s brother hadn’t yet earned the right to say such things after all he and Scully had done to bring that boy safely back to them over the past weeks. Scully stayed quiet, but Mulder noticed her bristle. She felt the same way.

As Mulder was about to distract her with another quip about his burliness, a loud CRACK echoed through the trees. The snow was thick in the brush, dampening most sounds, but the noise carried sharply through the air. Seconds later, they heard clanging of metal, like pots and pans crashing to the ground. Mulder turned his head in the direction it came from. About fifty feet away near the tree line there was a little red storage shed, probably no more than ten feet by ten feet. A path wound down from the front of the house, and presumably the driveway, currently buried in six inches or so of snow. The snow had been cleared around the door to the shed, little mounds piled around its edges.

“Been throwing any extra supplies I’ve scavenged in there. Filled pretty much to the brim,” Bill said proudly.

Mulder craned his head towards the little building. A ‘little red storage shed’, his mind replayed in William’s voice. Then another, though similar, voice replaced his son’s as his mind heard a faint, fast-paced whispering, and although he couldn’t understand the words – if they were words -- he thought they sounded like a prayer. Mulder absently craned his ear towards the shed.

“Something probably just fell over, brought junk down with it,” Bill continued. The whispering stopped, and as Mulder was about to shake his head, his amateur telepathy leaving him unconvinced what he was hearing actually came from the shed, another sound set his heart racing.

William’s voice entered Mulder’s mind again, but this time it had come through his ears.

Mulder immediately burst into a jog towards the sound, with Scully following behind without hesitation. They hadn’t been FBI agents in more than a decade, but their instincts still drove them towards anyone in pain, despite the possible danger. Although Bill got a late start, with his longer legs he quickly passed his sister, her ill-fitting boots bogging her down in the deep snow. “I locked it with a padlock I found at a hardware store in Thurmont. There’s no way anyone is in there. Probably just a mouse.”

“Pretty big mouse,” Mulder said just before he arrived at the shed first. He jiggled lock looped through a simple eyehole latch. “It’s open,” he said.

“That’s strange. I’m positive I locked it,” Bill said.

Mulder opened the door. His heart was pounding.

Standing calmly a couple of feet inside was William, his back to the door. He was looking towards one dark corner of the shed, but Mulder couldn’t see what interested him. The space was blocked with metal storage shelves that stood as tall as the shed itself, each one covered with various tools and plastic storage totes. Only a narrow path lead from front to back. It felt familiar to him. Like Deja vu.

William twisted his upper body around in a quick motion. “Sorry! It’s ok. He just startled me,” he said. It was rare for William to be startled. Jeremiah Smith had once called him one of the most gifted telepaths in the world, alien, human or hybrid.

“What’s wrong?” Scully rasped, reaching the small doorway to the shed, pushing past Bill to stand beside Mulder. William stayed focused on whatever he was looking at, but pointed to the corner of the room in response. He was breathing heavily, but the tension in his body relaxed as he lowered his hand. A slight smile formed as his breathing slowed closer to normal.

“It’s ok,” William said. “He scared me at first because I didn’t *hear* him. Not really. Didn't understand what I was hearing.”

“Hear who?” Scully asked, confused.

“Scully…” Mulder said, pointing towards the spot William had just been standing in. Scully turned to Mulder, followed his finger towards the corner.

“Oh, my god!” she said with the same tone Mulder had once heard her use in a hypnotic regression of seeing an alien spaceship for the first time on a bridge with Cassandra Spender.

Crouching in the corner of the little red shed, the very place William had seen in his mind giving Scully the clue she needed to find her mother, behind several large boxes full of who knew what, was a boy.

Not just a boy. He looked like William’s mirror image. Or more specifically, he looked like William’s clone.

^^^^^^^

The boy, if that was what he was, shivered uncontrollably in the corner of the shed as three adults and his mirror image stared at him. He had yet to speak, or make any sound except the clicking of his chattering teeth. He wore a gray jumpsuit made of thin canvass-like material and simple black canvass shoes with white rubber toes. He held his left forearm with his other hand, applying pressure. After moments of dumbfounded silence, Scully finally stepped forward. As she moved, the boy stepped backwards, pushing himself further into the cramped corner of the shed. He looked terrified.

“It’s ok. Don’t be afraid,” she said, putting her hands up. “Are you hurt? Can I see?” She reached out slowly. The boy reminded her of a wild dog wondering if the human holding food out was either tricking him or was harmless. Finally, her hands made contact with his arm, and she gently prodded his hand away. Reddened, slightly bruised skin covered a small vertical line on his forearm. She smoothed her fingers over his skin gently to check once more, and the boy jerked his arm out of her grasp.

“Sorry, it’s ok. You’re ok,” she said, perhaps more to herself. His shivering increased and the boy hugged himself tightly to fend off the chill. His eyes darted between the adults, but settled on William. It was subtle, but Scully thought the boy relaxed upon reestablishing eye contact with his doppelganger. “Can you understand me, sweetie?”

Bill chuffed softly at her choice of words, but she ignored him.

“He’s freezing, possibly going into shock,” Scully said, turning to Mulder. “We need to get him inside.”

“Dana, I’m sorry to point out the obvious,” Bill started, “but, he looks like…”

“Don’t,” Scully said, holding up her hand without looking at her brother.

“Come on. It’s ok,” she coaxed softly to the boy, holding her other hand out towards the shed’s door. The boy was unpersuaded by her gesture. Finally, William held out his hand, nodding. Astonishingly, the boy took William’s hand and allowed him to lead them both out into snow. Scully looked at Mulder. His mouth was slightly open, with a hint of a smile on his face. It was his curiosity smile. He lifted his shoulders up, letting her know he was just as confused as she was by the entire situation. He cocked his head slightly, raised his brows, silently asking her if she thought it was wise to bring this stranger inside. Honestly, it was probably not wise. Her younger self would not have hesitated to bring a scared, freezing boy in from the cold. But who she was today was far from that naïve, trusting version. She’d seen too much, and experienced too much to be that same idealistic young woman. But she was also a mother now. And although she couldn’t explain it, she did not fear this boy that looked like her son. Perhaps it was because of how easily William trusted him. William’s telepathy and intuition were beyond comparison. If anyone should be afraid of this boy, it should be William. Instead, he held the shivering boy’s hand and led him inside. All Scully could see was a frightened child who needed their help. They’d be cautious, but right now all that mattered was she needed to save him before he froze to death.

She pursed her lips together, raised her brows and shoulders back in response. Mulder nodded, agreeing with her plan to bring the boy inside the cabin. As she turned to follow her son and his look-a-like, something caught her eye. It was a small blot of thick, glimmering, red wetness coating the edge of one of the shelves the boy had been hiding behind. It was blood. Fresh blood. The boy’s blood.

“You coming, Scully?” Mulder called to her, holding his hand out to her like William had for the stranger.

“Yeah,” she said, fitting her small hand into his, warmth meeting her cold skin causing her to shiver. “Right behind you.”

^^^^^^^

Scully hunched over, leaning her elbows against one end of the kitchen’s breakfast island countertop with her hands cradling her face. She watched William and the boy who looked exactly like him wander around the living room. They would stop occasionally, look at each other, and then move on to another spot in the room. William would pick up an object, the boy – now wrapped in a warm quilt Scully had found thrown over the sofa -- would nod, and William would set the item down and find another. They’d repeat the game. Neither of them said a word out loud.

Mulder sat on a stool next to Scully keeping both her and the boys in the corners of his eyes. For the moment, it was just the four of them. Bill had insisted Tara take the kids to the basement, away from the stranger. To distract his five year old daughter, he made a concession to power up the television and DVD player that made up a sizable portion of the lavish downstairs rec room. The cabin was powered by its own generator, and they really couldn’t spare the gasoline, but this was an unusual circumstance to say the least. Scully had no idea where her mother was, but she assumed it involved preparing some new bedding, or finding some dry clothes for their new guest. Keeping herself busy and out of the way. Or, bless her soul, perhaps she was holding her oldest son in check while Scully and Mulder had a moment to consider the latest twist the apocalypse had handed them.

“What are they doing?” Scully asked, her words slurred by both hands on her chin, and confusion.

“That’s your first question?” Mulder answered. His voice was filled with the exact mix of astonishment and muddled thinking she felt. So much for relying on him to come up with some crazy theory she could work from, or refute. Had he forgotten their modus operandi already?

“No, but it’s the only one I can articulate at the moment,” she said, straightening to a standing position, leaving her hands resting on the countertop. “Can you pick anything up?”

Mulder shook his head. “Before we found him, I thought I heard whispering, but couldn’t understand any words. I keep picking some of that up, but it’s infrequent.”

“Whispering?”

Mulder shrugged.

“So, he must be a clone right?” she asked.

“Must be.”

“Like Kurt Crawford, or,” she hesitated, “or, like Emily maybe?”

“Could be something like that,” he said.

“I mean, what else could he be?”

Mulder shrugged again.

“Mulder!” she said in a loud whisper.

“I’m sorry Scully, but I really have no idea. He must be a clone. Created for what purpose, I’m not sure I want to know,” he said.

Scully was genuinely surprised to hear him say that out loud, but she also instantly understood what he meant. The past few weeks had culminated in the near total destruction of humanity at the hands of alien invaders, with only their son being the one to keep them all from extermination. Stopping the aliens’ plans by destroying their mother ships on a global scale seemed like the proper conclusion to the story. What more could there possibly be other than living out the rest of their lives in peace with their newly reunited family? That’s how the story was supposed to end. The conspiracy was over. The X-Files were over. It was time for real life to begin, and Scully had hoped for copious amounts of mundane boredom.

“So much for that,” Mulder said.

“*That* you can hear, but the thoughts of two pre-teen boys have you stumped,” she said.

Mulder shrugged once more.

Then another possibility burst into her conscious mind. “What if he’s not a clone?” she asked.

“Shape-shifter? Could be,” Mulder said.

“If he’s a shape-shifter, that means he’s a Gray,” she said.

“Like Jeremiah Smith.”

“Or like the alien bounty hunter,” she said, stiffening.

Mulder looked over to William and the boy, and Scully followed his gaze, her mind going over all of the possibilities in their known catalogue of alien factoids.

“I don’t know why,” she said, “but I don’t think he’s a Gray. Why would he hide? Why choose to copy William? And without hurting William first, to replace him. Isn’t that their usual m.o.? Mulder, that boy was scared.”

Mulder pursed his lips and they were both quiet for a moment. Mulder slapped his hands lightly on the countertop and stood up. “I suppose we could just ask,” Mulder said.

As she walked around the kitchen island towards the living room to follow Mulder Scully said, “Taking the direct route *is* the more mundane, non-speculative approach I guess. Good practice for us.” They’d thought now that they’d found her mother, that life could finally calm down for them. That they’d be able to lead normal lives. Fate had thrown them another curve ball in that endeavor, but maybe they could keep trying anyway.

“Fake it ‘til you make it?” he said, stopping to allow her to pass him, his hand held out.

“Something like that,” she said, stepping in front of him.

The boys had stopped their game after she’d taken a step in their direction. They stood in the middle of the living room watching them approach, anticipating their purpose no doubt. She’d gotten used to William anticipating her moves, but this time with a double dose it was a little creepy.

William smirked, and said, “He learns really fast.”

The clone stepped back behind William, lowering his head but keeping his eyes on Scully.

“You’re teaching him English,” Mulder said smiling with the combination of curiosity and boyishness Scully had seen on countless X-Files cases. Mulder stepped beside Scully, and took a seat on the arm of the sofa to be at eye level with them. William nodded.

“He doesn’t speak English?” Scully asked. William shook his head. “Spanish then?”

William shook his head again. “I couldn’t understand him at all at first, but it’s getting better.”

“Can you speak, sweetie?” Scully asked, looking at the clone. The boy cowered even more behind William.

“It’s ok. She’s my mother,” William said. The clone’s eyes grew big as saucers, and Scully realized her own eyes were doing the same. Hearing William call her his mother took her breath away. But that was only part of it. Something about the clone’s reaction had affected her, but she couldn’t name what it was. The closest sensation was déjà vu, but that wasn’t quite it either. “I think he knows some English. He just didn’t know what this stuff was,” William said. He was holding up a soft pillow from the sofa. Something about that made her incredibly sad. To not know what a pillow was. That was not something a little boy should be ignorant of.

“What’s your name?” Mulder asked, filling in for her inability to squeak out another word for the moment. The clone shook his head, but stepped forward slightly to square himself more with William. “You don’t have a name?” The clone’s eyes darted back and forth between William and Mulder.

“He has a name, but I can’t pronounce it. It sounds like… It’s kinda like… Forget it!” William said, throwing his hands up in the air, and looking directly at the boy. “I’m just calling you Jake.” Upon hearing that declaration, the clone smiled as broadly as Scully had ever seen William smile. Apparently he approved of “Jake.”

“Will,” Scully said with a mildly hoarse voice. She cleared her throat and continued. “Does he know how he got here? Where did he come from?”

“He ran away,” William said lowering his voice. The clone’s eyes looked downward to match the tone.

“From where?” Mulder asked.

“The bad men,” William said.

Although Scully stood near a fire roaring in the fireplace, and wore a thick sweater over her thermal shirt, she shivered.

That mundane, boring life would remain an illusion at least a while longer.

^^^^^^^

Whether due to a language barrier, or an unwillingness to say more, they were unable to learn more about what brought the clone or shape-shifter, or whatever the boy was, to their little backwoods red shed, or how he had come to be at all. The boy was sleeping now, curled into a ball on the tiny love seat sofa near the bay window that looked out towards the cabin’s front lawn. He’d allowed Scully to perform a basic physical on him, which consisted mostly of checking his pulse, heartrate and pupils. Drawing blood could be a risky option, considering clones, and Grays often emitted a gas that was toxic to humans, and whatever Jake was, he was not impacted by being in close proximity to William, meaning he wasn’t a Super Soldier hybrid, or a Gray with an iron allergy.

William sat in the chair across the room, ostensibly reading a comic book, but no doubt wondering about the boy that looked just like him. Just like his father was. Scully had gone downstairs to check on the rest of the family. Mulder picked up bits and pieces of Bill’s interrogation of his sister, but she was holding her own, and Mulder thought it best to stay out of that discussion for now. He’d probably only make things worse for Scully and for the boy.

Mulder knew logically he should be more distrustful of this stranger than he was. As far as he could fathom there were two possibilities to who or what this boy was. He was a clone of William created for some evil purpose by men or aliens in their tiresome pissing match for World Domination, or he was not a boy at all, and was instead an alien shape-shifter here for some reason that was very likely to end up badly for them all. Somehow neither of those options sat well with him. Partly, because what Scully had said was right. If the boy was a shape shifter, why would he choose to appear in the most conspicuous possible disguise that would raise a million red flags to this particular group of people? And the chance that a gray alien on a mission here to kill them would fall asleep in the middle of the battle zone was basically zero in Mulder’s estimation. That left ‘clone’. He was probably created for the hybrid project, just like the clones of his sister Samantha created at various ages, like the Kurt Crawford clones, or maybe even like Emily, some altogether other hybrid type. The project leaders had proven their evil minds had no limits time and time again. This could just be another dangling strand of silk in that spider web of deceit. With the aliens dead, they might never know this clone’s true purpose for existing.

That purpose didn’t matter as far as Mulder was concerned. Even if this boy was a clone of William, that meant he was his son. That was all the purpose he needed for his existence now. He hoped Scully would feel the same way. He *needed* her to feel the same way.

Mulder looked at the boy. He could hear the slow, languid breaths of a child in deep slumber, at peace. Out of the corner of Mulder’s eye, he saw William turn his head. When Mulder reciprocated the gesture, William quickly looked back to his book. It was a game between one profoundly gifted telepath and his intuitive, and sometimes clumsily telepathic father. The telepathic game of chicken. William knew more than what he had said so far about Jake’s appearance, and although Mulder could not read his son’s thoughts, or even identify the clone’s thoughts as thoughts, somehow Mulder had the feeling that this clone was no clone at all. There had to be a third option he was yet to understand. There were two things he was certain of: One, the boy sleeping on the tiny sofa was not a danger to his lookalike or anyone else, and two, there was much more to come beyond the mundane and boring in the story of their lives.

^^^^^^^

“Dana, I’m not a complete idiot. I know what happened to the world,” Bill said. “That thing up there is an alien, or it’s a clone.”

Scully raised an eyebrow. Although Bill had admitted to mistaking Mulder for a clone when they’d arrived, it was still odd to hear her brother talk so openly about them.

Off her reaction, Bill added, “A lot has changed in ten years. If you’d have trusted me, you would have known that.”

“Don’t do that,” Scully said. “This isn’t about the past, Bill. This is about a little boy that needs help.”

“Dana, there is no way I’m allowing an alien or clone or whatever it is stay in the same house with my children,” Bill said. “Not with the way the world is now. Not after what they did.”

“William trusts him,” Scully said. “That’s all I need for now.”

“Your eleven year old son trusts him and that’s all you need?” Bill said, his voice rising on the last words. He was exasperated. Scully couldn’t completely blame him. What she said would sound crazy to anyone who didn’t know about William’s abilities, and certainly to a man like her brother who believed he was the head of the household. That she would listen to her young son about something so serious probably made her look like she was weak in his eyes.

“I’m not sure I really feel comfortable with it either,” Tara said in a loud whisper, trying to keep from waking Katy. The little girl had fallen asleep against her mother’s side as she sat on the other edge of the large sectional sofa that took up a significant portion of the downstairs rec room area. Scully had almost forgotten her sister-in-law was there. Somehow, when she and Bill were arguing, all there seemed to be were the two of them and their disagreement. It had always been that way. But Tara’s voice broke her out of that illusion and she registered the others in the room as well. Matthew was nearby playing a solo game of pool occasionally looking over to his father and the aunt he had just re-met. Scully’s mother folding clothes, trying to appear disinterested, but certainly listening to her two children argue. Tara added, “He doesn’t *seem* to be dangerous though.”

“Tara, your parents, my brother, our friends, even my other sister, almost everyone we’ve ever known and loved are all dead because of what that thing is,” Bill said, his voice getting louder with each word. Tara held her finger up to her lips, and he recoiled slightly. It was good to see Tara hadn’t allowed Bill to control everything in their lives. Her sister-in-law had always been a genuinely happy person, but she’d also struck Scully as a little too Donna Reed and exactly the type of woman her brother would choose. Family was everything to Bill, and Tara had fit the role of the perfect wife and mother. “Sorry,” Bill said still facing Tara, then turning back to Scully he finished, “But, no way.”

“It is about the past,” Margaret said, folding one last piece of clothing then looking up to Bill.

“What mom?” Bill asked.

“Dana, you said this isn’t about the past? It is about the past. It’s about the past, it’s about the present, and it’s about the future,” Margaret said, standing up and walking over to her kids. She cupped Scully’s face and drew her in, kissing her gently on the cheek. She pulled back and looked over to Bill. “Billy, I know you mean well, and you’ve come a long way, but you don’t know the things your sister knows.”

“Mom,” he started. Their mother held up one hand like she used to do when they were kids. Their father had been the disciplinarian, the one they feared, taking on the traditional role in the family. But he was often away at sea, leaving their mother in charge of the household. She rarely yelled, usually using gentle words to correct her children’s behavior. Growing up with a military father, the Scully children were well behaved when they were near their parents, but in those times when they had gone too far, stretching their mother’s patience to the breaking point, she would hold up her hand, and her face would get very tense. This was the equivalent of Red Alert in the Scully home, and the children knew it was in their best interest to shut up or face a wrath they’d rather avoid. Scully and Bill heeded that alert now, despite their ages and having families of their own. Always a child to the parent.

“I love all of you more than anything. But I will support whatever decision Dana and Fox make about this little boy. They’ve earned the right to be trusted in these matters. Now, I found some of Matthew’s old clothes that I think will fit him. I’ll take them up,” she said. She grabbed the basket of laundry she’d been folding, and headed up the stairs, ending further debate.

Bill and Scully looked at each other expressionless. Scully knew Bill would defer to their mother’s judgment, at least openly, but she didn’t need William’s or even Mulder’s telepathy to know he did not agree with her decision. In fairness, Bill was right to be skeptical. It was her instinct as well, despite his assumptions, but something about this boy coming from deep within her told her he was not a threat, and that she needed to save him from more than just the bitter cold of a January day at the end of the world.

^^^^^^^

“Do you think they’ve killed each other yet?” Scully asked as she diced the last of the tomatoes for the dinner salad she was preparing. Mulder and Bill had taken Bill’s Jeep out for a supply run and scouting mission. Mulder wanted Bill to show him the area, and though Mulder hadn’t said so, he wanted see if he could figure out where Jake had come from. Mulder had a new X-File to solve, but today Scully’s brother would be riding shotgun in her normal seat.

Her mother poured a box of instant mashed potatoes into a bowl, and smiled. “It’s good for them. They just don’t know each other,” Margaret said. She added some water, and began whipping the mix with a whisk.

“I can’t say I’m not enjoying the quiet,” Scully said. Her mother laughed.

Scully looked towards the doorway off the side of the kitchen that led downstairs to the recreation room where the children had been for an hour.

“They’re fine, honey,” Margaret said. Jake had yet to say a word, but he and William had been continuing their game of picking up objects, and nodding quietly to each other. It had only been a few hours since they’d discovered the boy in the shed, but he and William already behaved like lifelong friends. She wasn’t so much worried for William’s safety as she was curious about these two together.

“I know, mom. Involuntary reaction,” Scully said.

Margaret touched her daughter’s chin briefly, wiped an imaginary blot of something with her thumb. “I still can’t believe you found him, Dana.”

Scully smiled. “Me either.”

“How?”

“I told you last night,” Scully said casually, focusing on perfecting her dicing techniques, avoiding her mother’s eyes.

“Dana, I know you well enough to know you gave us the short version,” she said.

Scully looked up. Her instinct was to deny it, but the look in Margaret’s eye made her realize how little credit she’d given her mother over the years. Aside from Mulder, no one knew more about what Scully had been through than her mother. Now that she finally had her son back, she needed her mother more than she thought possible. While she wasn’t ready to tell her brother the entire twisted story, her mother deserved to know the truth. All of it. Scully put the knife down.

“Mom, William’s *abilities*… the abilities he had when he was a baby, he still has them,” Scully said.

“You don’t mean,” Margaret started.

Scully only nodded. “He led Mulder to find him, just as it was all starting. William can read people’s minds. He can move objects with his mind,” she said. Her mother stayed very quiet. Scully wasn’t sure if she believed what she was saying, but it felt good to tell someone she trusted. She hoped her mother wanted to hear it all. She needed her mother to *want* to hear it all. Scully had been a mother to William as a baby, then suddenly she became a mother to a pre-teen. She needed guidance.

Margaret’s smile told her everything she needed to know. It was the unconditional smile only a mother could express. “There’s more,” she said. “Tell me, Dana.”

Scully took a deep breath. “Mom, William saved the world,” she said on exhale. Her mother waited for her to continue, and Scully told her everything.

When she finished, her mother hugged her tightly, holding the embrace for a long time before letting her daughter go. “I love you, honey. I’m sorry you had to go through all of that.”

“Thank you, mom. I’m sorry, too.”

“What for? It wasn’t just William. You saved the world, too.”

“I’m sorry I put you through it all,” Scully said. She’d wanted to tell her mother that for years, but it wasn’t until she became one herself that she truly understood what she’d put her own mother through. Sorry really was a grossly inadequate word, but it was the only one she had. Margaret wiped a stray tear from Scully’s cheek.

“The past *is* a part of us, Dana, but we can only live in the present. So, lets finish making dinner, and at least put that sadness behind us, ok?”

Scully smiled. “Ok,” she said. Scully picked the knife up and resumed her dicing. “Mom, do you really want to use all of these tomatoes?”

“We’ll grow more in the summer, and these won’t last much longer. Bought them a day or two before we came up here. Before the stores closed. The lettuce is on its last leg, and we have a lot to celebrate. Let’s make this the best meal we’ve ever had.”

^^^^^^^

Mulder wished he was driving. Bill was moving intolerably slow through the snow covered mountain roads. Today was warm compared to the past few days, and the warm sun had made a dent in the snowpack. The Jeep was more than capable of handling the foot or so of slushiness. Why he had allowed the guy from San Diego to take the wheel when Mulder had spent the better part of the past few years in northern Minnesota was a mystery. His knee bounced uncontrollably, occasionally bumping against the passenger side dash.

Bill had taken him to all the nearby convenience stores, box stores, hardware stores, and gas stations in a ten mile, half-radius to the east. Not very far, but the road conditions had made going further challenging. They’d loaded up on anything they could carry that looked usable, focusing on non-perishable foods with long shelf-lives and winter survival supplies like shovels. Now they were headed back to the cabin, and Mulder wanted nothing more than for this trip to be over. They’d endured enough awkward chit chat to hold Mulder over for the rest of his life, neither men broaching the subject most on their minds. Who was the boy that had found his way to the little red shed, and why had he picked that particular shed to hide in?

Mulder looked out the window considering the possibilities. As they came around a bend in the road, a wreck of about five cars partially blocked their way, forcing them to slow down even more. Bill inched closer, sitting up straight, making himself as tall in his seat as he could to see as far ahead as possible.

“Not sure I can get through,” Bill said, finally stopping the car.

“I don’t think stopping is a good idea,” Mulder said.

“Mulder, I have to stop. I can’t get through,” Bill said, throwing the Jeep into park just to punctuate his point.

“Fine,” Mulder said, half listening. In the back of his mind, Mulder heard something in the distance. His ears heard a whir of engines, but his mind heard a cacophony of voices saying words he couldn’t hear clearly. Mulder looked in his side mirror. Something moved over the horizon behind them. Mulder twisted around in his seat to look through the rear window. Coming over the hill about a hundred yards behind them was a large armored military truck.

“Drive!” Mulder said. “Go, go!”

“I told you I can’t get through,” Bill said. “What is it?” he asked, twisting around to see what Mulder was looking at.

“Shit,” Mulder said. “Duck. Get down and don’t let them see you.” Mulder threw his seat into full recline, and flattened himself against it.

“Mulder, this is ridiculous,” Bill said. “Those aren’t aliens; it’s the Army. We should flag them down.” Bill reached for the latch on the door. Mulder grabbed his other wrist and squeezed.

“If you open that door, and don’t get down right now I promise you’ll never see your wife and kids again,” Mulder said, not caring exactly how Bill might interpret him.

Bill hesitated, and finally relented, rolling his eyes as he reclined his seat as well. “What, like they can’t see us now? We’re not invisible,” Bill said. The Jeep’s windows were tinted fairly heavily, and the front of the vehicle was pointed slightly opposite to the side the Army truck approached from. With any luck, they’d look like part of the wreck.

“Shut up!” Mulder said in a harsh whisper. “Turn off the engine!”

“They certainly can’t hear us,” Bill said, turning it off anyway. Mulder knew that, but he was trying to hear the men in the truck. The sound of Bill’s voice irritated him in the best of circumstances. As the military truck barreled closer, this was far from the best of circumstances. “They’re not going to be able to get through either.”

Mulder could hear the truck slow down slightly. The driver of the truck debated turning around, then decided he could make it past, and stepped on the gas, pushing the speed of the truck up higher than it had been on the approach. All Mulder could think was “don’t get stuck, don’t get stuck.” Finally, the whir of the truck drifted into the ether, and the sounds of its occupants’ minds quieted as the truck drove out of range of all of Mulder’s senses.

Mulder brought his seat back up to its regular position, and Bill followed suit. “Let’s get out of here,” he said. “Turn around. Let’s go back the way we came.”

Bill turned the key, threw the truck into reverse, shaking his head in disapproval over how stupid Mulder was. “What the hell was that about?”

“Let’s just get home in one piece first, then you can hand my ass to me,” Mulder said, Jake’s appearance no longer at the forefront of his mind.

Bill stepped on the gas. The tires spun, digging into the slush fruitlessly. Bill shifted into drive, trying to get traction the other way, and depressed the pedal. More spinning.

“Are you in four-wheel drive?” Mulder asked.

“No Mulder, I’ve been driving through the mountains in a foot of snow in two wheel drive,” Bill said.

“I’ll get out and push,” Mulder said. “Make sure you have it in reverse. As much as I know you’d like to run me over, your sister might miss me.”

“Very funny,” Bill said as Mulder got out. They spent the next ten minutes trying everything they could think of to get the Jeep unstuck, but nothing worked.

“Goddamn it!” Bill said.

Mulder looked into the car wreck, and noticed something he hadn’t seen earlier, sitting on the edge of the ditch to the side of the pileup. “I think I know how we can get back,” Mulder said.

“How? We’re ten miles out. Pretty far walk in this temperature,” Bill said.

“Ever driven a snow mobile?” Mulder waggled his eyebrows, and Bill shook his head. “You take the rear then. I’m driving.”

^^^^^^^

Scully leaned against the wall frame at the bottom of the stairs that opened up into the large entertainment room where the rest of the family was gathered. Tara and Katy were playing some memory game with a box of cards with pictures on them quietly in one corner, while the boys played pool. She was thankful for the pool table. It had become a useful tool to allow William and his cousin Matthew to become acquainted with each other. And with Jake now in the picture, yet unable to communicate easily, it gave the boys something practical to do with their energy together, but without the pressure of much verbal communication.

She’d come down to let everyone know dinner was ready. The afternoon light was dimming, and while Bill and Mulder weren’t back yet, there was no reason to let it grow cold. But she’d been watching them all for a few minutes, unable to muster up the will to break this picture. No doubt, the boys felt her watching them, but they pretended they didn’t. She wondered about the clone. He had been attached at the hip to William since they’d found him and she wanted more than anything to talk to him, ask him how he had been able to find the boy he’d been modeled after. Scully crinkled her eyebrow at her own choice of words. When she looked up, she noticed William suddenly looking away, as if he’d thought her choice of words was odd as well.

The peaceful moment broken, she opened her mouth to ring the dinner bell, when she heard a mechanical sound roar in front of the sliding door. It sounded like a motor cycle, which made no sense. She looked through the glass to the snow covered back yard. As the sound stopped, she saw two figures on the back of a snowmobile parked a few feet from the cabin. The figure in the back hopped off almost before the machine had come to a complete stop and headed for the door. Bill was shaking his head, and she could make out the words “no, no” on his lips, as Mulder shut the snowmobile off and jumped up after her brother.

“Forget about it, Mulder,” Bill said, as he opened the door and stomped his boots inside the little mud room off to the side of the doors.

“Just let me tell them,” Mulder said, closing the door behind him.

“Tell them what?” Scully asked.

Both men looked up, both mildly stunned to see anyone in the room. Apparently, the trip to find supplies had been an adventure.

When neither answered, Scully asked, “Where’s the truck?”

“Got stuck,” Bill said. “About ten miles out.”

Tara leapt up from her spot across the room, and walked towards her husband. “You both must be frozen if you rode that thing all the way back here.”

“Didn’t have much of a choice after Mulder decided it made more sense to hide from the first humans we’ve seen alive since this thing started,” Bill said.

Mulder closed his eyes tightly, and pursed his lips. Scully recognized this as Mulder’s don’t-punch-the-guy-in-the-face look, suggesting what Bill had just said was what Mulder had wanted to bring up first, and had probably been the topic of their entire discussion home.

“An Army convoy passed us on the road, and instead of asking them for help, Mulder forced us to hide from them,” Bill said.

“Army convoy?” Tara asked, her eyebrows raised, her lips turned upwards. Her voice was a notch above her already typically cheerful tone. “Shouldn’t we ask for their help?”

“Exactly,” Bill said. “They’re probably stationed up the road at Camp David. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it sooner. I’ve been there a few times.”

“The only help those soldiers will be giving us is our last rights,” Mulder said, looking at Scully. They hadn’t told the family about Super Soldiers and their role in the end of the world. Scully’s mother knew a little about them from before Scully and Mulder had gone into hiding, and what she’d told her earlier today, but it was a complicated detail to add into the mix so soon after finding everyone here alive.

“Are you guys coming up or what?” Scully’s mother called from the top of the stairs. “Food’s getting cold.”

“Mom wants us to have a family dinner together. Let’s talk about this later, ok?” Scully said. She knew the only way to keep Bill from bringing it up at dinner was to use their mother against him, and she wanted to talk to Mulder before they said anything to the family about what it could mean to have Super Soldiers living down the road.

“Dana, this is huge. It means we’re not the last people alive, and the Army will have resources to help us. They’re probably working to get everything back to normal,” Bill said.

Scully took a deep breath. She was generally a terrible liar, but she put her best effort forth now. “Bill, you’re right. It’s huge. This is incredible news,” she said. She glanced at Mulder. This was a rare moment she hoped he was reading her mind, or at least tuning into his typically strong intuition and reading her intention correctly. His face remained neutral which suggested to her he was at least letting her take the lead. “I just don’t want to get mom’s hopes up until we know more. She’s already been through so much, with Charlie, almost losing you all. Let’s just take this slowly. Just for tonight, ok?”

“Billy, I think Dana’s right,” Tara said. “Your mom went to the trouble to cook a big dinner. We shouldn’t worry her.”

Thank god for her sister in law, Scully thought. Bill looked at his wife and his face softened. He nodded. “Yeah, ok,” he said.

“Are you guys down there?” Margaret called again.

“We’ll be right up, mom,” Scully called back. She looked at her brother one more time, then to Mulder. He smiled. She held her hand out to him, and he took it as she led them all up the stairs.

^^^^^^^

Scully wiped down the countertop, alone for the first time in what felt like forever. After their delicious, but awkward family dinner, she’d insisted her mother relax, and leave the chore to her. They’d successfully avoided any discussion of soldiers, super or otherwise during dinner, but she knew that peace would be necessarily short-lived. While Scully had never claimed to be the most domestically minded of women, sometimes she found enjoyment in the monotony of a solo task like cleaning. Her career in the FBI had left little time for much else than grabbing a quick bite to eat, collapsing into bed, and heading back into the office again, or a rental car, or a flea-ridden motel, or more airplanes than she could count.

When she’d been younger, she thought she wanted to be just like her mother, but also with her own career. As the X-Files and Mulder drew her more into their worlds, she realized, that had not truly been her dream at all. She craved the excitement of solving puzzles, and trying to make a difference in the world on a level any average life would not be able to accommodate.

But a funny thing happened along the way. Even as she’d given up on the dream of having a traditional life like the family she’d been raised in, she began to develop a new kind of dream. One that combined the excitement with something more. As she found herself falling in love with Mulder, she’d found herself thinking more and more about finding a balance between a domesticated life, and an amazing career few could imagine. When William had been born, she believed that new dream had begun to take shape. Then it had all fallen apart. She wondered if now she finally had the chance to put that dream back together again. And she wondered how their latest addition to the group might complicate that hope.

“Dana?” a small voice asked.

Scully turned to see William standing at the top of the stairs to the basement, looking unsure. He had been in the basement with Jake and Matthew playing pool. Bill hadn’t forbidden his son from being around Jake yet, but he and Tara had taken Katy for an early bedtime in their room rather than the loft. The boys seemed to be getting along very well. Scully laughed at herself. Jake had come into their lives less than twelve hours ago, and his history was a complete mystery to everyone, yet somehow she had begun to think of him as having always been there.

It had been the same for her when she’d first seen Emily. She’d seen her sister Melissa in the little girl’s face, and had formed an almost impossibly instantaneous bond with her. Perhaps it was simply because the clone looked exactly like her own son, but she felt the same connection to him. Perhaps after two decades and an alien apocalypse, she had lost her skeptical edge. The truth was, she wanted to believe not everything left in the world was dangerous. She wanted to believe in this boy.

“Is something wrong, Will?” Scully asked.

William stepped closer to her, putting his hands tentatively on the kitchen island. He was nearly as tall as she was, but his hands seemed boyish to her in that moment. He must have picked up on her thought – of course he did – because he self-consciously stuffed his hands in his pockets. Scully smirked, feigning lack of awareness to what they both knew.

“Can I bring Jake a peanut butter sandwich?”

That was not what Scully expected him to ask, though she hadn’t known what she expected. “Uh, sure, but I thought I saw him eating during dinner,” she said, opening up the pantry, pulling out one of the several jars of peanut butter. In the apocalypse, peanut butter had become god’s gift to what was left of humanity. It was delicious, calorie and protein rich, and had a long shelf life.

“He did, but he’s really hungry. He’s never had peanut butter before, so I thought he should try it.”

“He’s never had peanut butter before? Did he tell you that?” Scully asked. She set a loaf of sliced bread on the counter, and searched for a butter knife. She wondered what else they had *talked* about, although talking was probably not the right word.

William nodded, “They didn’t have it where he came from.”

“Wanna help?” She asked, holding the knife out to William. He grabbed the knife cheerfully, and dipped it into the jar of Jiffy. “Did he tell you more about where he came from? How he got here?” Scully asked. She was putting all her energy into trying to sound nonchalant. A likely futile goal when talking with a telepath, but old habits were hard to break.

“A little,” William said with equal nonchalance. Scully imagined growing up a telepath in a non-telepathic world had taught William how to blend in. He smoothed a glob of peanut butter over one slice slowly. He was quiet for a long time, creating a figure eight pattern of peanut butter absently. Scully was about to ask him if Jake might like some jelly as well just to break the silence when William spoke again. “He lived on one of the ships,” he said softly.

Scully looked at William, but he kept his eyes on the sandwich. “You mean, one of the…” she got out before William looked at her and nodded.

“Not the same one as me. The one we passed on the way here, the other night.”

Scully hadn’t realized he’d known they’d been so close to another of the alien mother ships that had crashed when they’d stayed the night in Catlett, Virginia. She shouldn’t have been surprised of course.

“He grew up there. When it crashed, he escaped, like me,” William said. He took another slice of bread and put it on top of the other, then he cut the sandwich in half down the center. “I don’t really know much more. He doesn’t like to talk about it. Sorry, Dana. I know you and Mulder are wondering about him. I am too.”

“And what do you think?” she asked forcing herself to sound cheerful.

“I think…” he said slowly. “I’m glad he found us. I think he is too. And…”

“Yes?” she asked.

 “You don’t have to worry. He’s a good guy. But he’s scared,” William said. He picked up a half of sandwich in each hand. “Thanks!” he said, holding them up, smiling, heading back downstairs before Scully could say another word, before she could ask him what Jake could be afraid of. She suspected William had known what her next question would have been before she knew. Her son had a way about him that both projected wisdom and confidence beyond his age, and boyish insecurity, sometimes simultaneously. She loved that about him, but it also worried her. He’d be turning twelve in May. She wished he’d had more time to just be a little boy.

^^^^^^^

Hey, Scully,” Mulder said, looking over his reading glasses, folding the map he was holding in half. He wore flannel pajamas and a Henley thermal shirt, sitting prone on the queen sized bed in their room, with his back against the headboard. He favored one side, leaning slightly to the side Bill hadn’t grazed with the buckshot. It was mostly a superficial wound, but the snowmobile ride earlier in the day had tenderized the spot of impact, making him sore. “Did you know Camp David is only a few miles west of here? It’s closer than I thought.”

Scully was pacing back and forth between the private bathroom they had, and the door to their room. She was dressed in her own flannel pajama bottoms and thermal pajama top, a staple necessity during their trip spent sleeping in tents while driving across the country. The house was well insulated, but their room ran on the cool side without a fire place like the two main great spaces. Mulder and Bill had arrived back from their supply run, supply-less, just before dinner, and he’d barely had a chance to talk to her in depth about what had happened out on the road. He’d waited until they were alone, after the rest of the house had settled into bed, to tell her the details on the close call with the caravan full of soldiers. Now she was displaying her wired persona.

She paced while she brushed her teeth, pausing every few strokes to speak. “Do you know for sure they were Super Soldiers?”

“At least some of them were, yeah,” he said. He wasn’t surprised there were other Super Soldiers out there. Scully’s serum had only killed the aliens in the ships and any in facilities linked to and controlled by their computer network. There were likely hundreds of them on earth, despite the fact they’d inherited the same iron allergy defect as the Grays. The project had created them to fight the aliens, but as a group they’d largely become enamored of the alien colonists, helping them instead. Mulder hoped they were rudderless, and feckless without a purpose, but truthfully, he’d had other things on his mind, and they hadn’t been forced to deal with the problem as they hadn’t run into any of them on the road from Canyon City. And they’d been traveling with the greatest Super Soldier repellent in the universe… William.

“I think we should leave,” she said. “All of us. The whole family.”

“I completely agree, but we have to figure out where to go first,” he said. He’d been studying the map all evening, weighing the options. At this point, they were in a vacuum of good information. They had no idea where a safe place might be. For all Mulder knew, this was the safest place for now. He added, “Besides, I am positive they didn’t see us, so I think we have some time. The cabin is hidden from the road. Hard to even tell there’s anything back here unless you know to look.”

Usually he was the impulsive one, but shoving nine people, including four children into the XTerra was not an option. Bill and Mulder had left the Jeep on the road after they’d found an abandoned, and functioning snowmobile. Mulder wanted to go back tomorrow to try to unstick the truck. They’d gathered a significant amount of supplies that were still inside, and they needed the second vehicle if they wanted to go anywhere together. Separating was not an option. “Also, I think it will take an act of God to convince your brother to leave. He thinks the soldiers will help us.”

“He doesn’t know what they really are,” she said.

“We need to tell him before he does something stupid,” Mulder said. “He’s thinking about driving out to Camp David tomorrow.”

“He said that?” she asked.

“No, but I heard it in his mind,” Mulder said. “He’s worried the aliens will come back, and he thinks there’s nothing better than the military to save us.”

“He doesn’t know what they are,” Scully repeated, sighing. “The military was Bill’s life. Of course he believes they’re going to help.”

“He’s also worried about Jake,” Mulder added. “He thinks he’s dangerous.”

She spit out her toothpaste and swigged a Dixie cup of water. She stood in the bathroom doorway, leaned against the frame, with a pensive look on her face.

 “Are you ok, Scully?” he asked. “Did you hear what I said?”

She inhaled deeply, and smiled softly. “I told mom,” she said on exhale.

At first, he didn’t understand, but then asked, “Everything?”

Scully nodded. “Except a few private moments,” she added. “Didn’t go into much detail about your abilities, either, but yeah. Pretty much everything else.”

Mulder smiled, put the map down on the nightstand, and took off his reading glasses. “How’d it go?” he asked.

“I feel relief. I should have given her more credit over the years,” she said. “I used her to keep Bill quiet, but the irony is she knows more than Bill ever has.”

“Do you think she could convince your brother to leave?”

“Honestly, I doubt it. Maybe,” she said. She rubbed her eyes.

“Is there something else, Scully?” he asked. He stood up and crossed the room towards her.

She put her hands on her hips. “Jake told Will where he came from. Will told me.” Mulder listened as Scully relayed what William had said to her earlier about Jake having been aboard the alien mother ship that had crashed in the Blue Ridge Mountains. What was a clone doing aboard an alien mothership? Mulder’s own experiences during his abduction allowed his mind to only come up with one possibility, and it wasn’t anything he wanted to think about a child having to face.

“Will said something else, too,” she said, hesitating.

“What?” he asked.

“He said we shouldn’t be afraid of Jake,” she said.

“What do you think he meant by that?” Mulder had an opinion on what William had meant, but he wanted to know if she felt it too. He’d decided that Jake was their son, like Emily had been Scully’s daughter. After all Scully had gone through with William from before he’d been born, he wasn’t sure she would accept that about this clone. But Mulder had felt a connection from the moment he’d heard strange whispers coming from the little red shed. He realized now the whispers had been Jake’s mind as he thought to himself in the language he grew up speaking. The language of the Grays. Scully’s mind suddenly was dark to him, as his own spun in chaos with all of the possibilities.

“He meant that whoever he ran away from is still out there, and he’s just a little boy who’s terrified of them,” she said breaking his concentration.

Mulder sat down on the corner of the bed, his body slumping, feeling boneless. A lifetime ago, he couldn’t imagine a life spent like all the other average Americans, who went to work, paid a mortgage, ate dinner with the family before throwing on the Tonight Show and heading off to bed. It had sounded incredibly droll and meaningless to him. But after William had stopped colonization, and he had the two most important creatures on the planet healthily by his side, Mulder had begun to understand what he’d been missing all those years. Yesterday, he thought perhaps there was a chance to carve out some semblance of that life, at least whatever that meant in this changed world. Today, he was back in the game, but with the date of colonization in the past and failed, he no longer had any idea what the game was. He just knew he was incredibly tired of playing.

“At least Emily had parents who cared for her,” Scully said softly, breaking the silence. “This boy, Mulder, I think he was alone with them. The Grays. His entire life.”

“However long it’s been,” he said absently.

“What do you mean?”

“Clones aren’t always born. They’re not always raised from infancy,” he reminded her. His mind flashed involuntarily back to a time when he’d been alone on an alien mother ship. The images of his torture during his abduction rarely assaulted him when he was awake, usually reserving their demonic machinations for his dreams. Whether or not this boy was a clone or a shapeshifting Gray or something else entirely, he hoped he had not endured even a fraction of Mulder’s experience.

Scully stepped closer to him, touched his chin, lifting his face gently. “Hey,” she said, mimicking his words to her moments earlier. “Are *you* ok?” she asked.

He smiled wanly, then he wrapped his arms around her waist, pulling her closer. He rested his head against her abdomen, and he felt her fingers glide through his hair soothingly as she allowed him to answer with silence. Sometimes he wondered if she was the telepath instead.

^^^^^^^

Day 6: January 10, 2013, 20 Days After Invasion

When William was younger, his favorite part of the day was sleeping. His dreams were vivid, and despite the nightmares he’d experienced in the months leading up to the day the world ended, they had usually been quite pleasant. The best part about dreaming was that his thoughts were entirely his own. That’s what he used to think. After meeting his real father – the man frequently in his dreams -- and then the others at Canyon City, he’d learned that sometimes other telepaths intruded on his dreams. The dream version of himself could not hear the ramblings of the other people his mind had conjured, but the dream itself could be impacted by the minds of the telepaths sleeping nearby. For William, ‘nearby’ was relative.

He’d fully appreciated this when he’d met Joy and the other children. Before leaving Canyon City, William had shared with them the dream he’d had of them all playing baseball. They all had told him they’d had the same dream, but none of them had realized at the time they’d experienced that kind of connection. They all thought their dreams had been accessible only to their own sub-consciousness.

The same thing was happening to him now, except this time he was aware of it. He was positive he was dreaming. He sat on top of a high outcropping of rocks, his feet dangling over the edge, looking down into a deep crevice hundreds of feet to the bottom. The rocks were covered in emerald green, mosses, trees, grasses. Green was only broken by the color of bark and the running river far below, the water sparkling like crystal in the high, unbroken sun. A long, but narrow suspension bridge spanned the swift moving rapids across the crevice. A dot moved from the one side towards the bridge, hesitating for a moment, then quickly moving onto, and across the bridge which swayed with the dot’s movements. Suddenly, although he remained seated on the same spot on the cliff, the focus of his dreaming mind zoomed in sharply, and William saw himself crossing the bridge in the dot’s place. He breathed heavily, occasionally looking backwards from the direction he’d come from, his face contorted in terror.

But he wasn’t watching himself.

The boy below him was wearing a gray jumpsuit. This wasn’t really William’s dream. It was Jake’s. Upon that realization, Jake looked upwards to the rocky outcropping that was William’s perch. William could see several other dots approaching the bridge from each side. Jake moved to the middle of the bridge, switching his head back and forth as he watch the others stop just before each anchor point in the cliff. One dot, no they were men, on each side unsheathed a long piece of metal, reflecting beams of sunlight back up to William’s eyes. As each man raised his sword above him, Jake’s mouth did not move, but inside William’s head a word boomed in his own voice.

“NO!”

The swords came down hard upon the rope holding the bridge firmly to the cliffs. And then William was back inside the cabin’s loft, his eyes seeing only the wooden slats of the ceiling. He hung his head upside down over the top bunk he had claimed to see if Jake was awake. His doppelganger appeared asleep in the bunk bed below, though his chest rose and fell at a quick pace, and his brow was covered in sweat.

THUD! THUD! THUD!

Jake’s eyes opened at the sound coming from the Cabin’s front door below them. William hopped down off of the bunk bed as Jake sat up straight. Now he could hear Jake’s thoughts clearly, and they echoed the word he’d said in the dream. William sat on Jake’s bed, his arm slung over his shoulder, knowing the boy was fighting the urge to run downstairs, and out into the snow. William held one finger against his own lips. “Shhhh” he said out loud. Jake shivered, but he obeyed.

^^^^^^^

“U.S. Army! If there’s anyone alive in there, open up!”

Scully sat straight up in bed, looking to her right to find an empty spot where she expected Mulder to be.

“Shit!” she heard a gravelly voice say from her left. Mulder was barefoot, but dressed in Jeans and a t-shirt, standing at the window. He was peering through the closed blinds covering the window that faced towards the front of the cabin. He tucked his Glock into the back of his pants, and turned towards her.

“What’s wrong?” Scully asked, jumping out of bed and pulling her own holstered gun out of the nightstand drawer, removing the sheath. She had no idea what was happening, but her instincts kicked in, and she followed his lead.

“They’re here,” Mulder said, taking two large steps towards their bedroom door, throwing it open. Scully followed a few steps behind. Though she wore heavy flannel pajama bottoms, thick wool socks, and a long sleeve thermal shirt, she felt naked.

As they turned the corner on the little alcove that divided their bedroom door from the larger upstairs great room, Scully saw her brother standing in front of the cabin’s main door, his hand poised over the knob.

“Do not open that door!” Mulder said in a forceful whisper.

Bill rolled his eyes, and replied casually, “Settle down, Mulder. I either open the door or they break it down. Take your pick.”

Three more loud bangs on the door punctuated Bill’s point.

Scully looked up to the loft space that sat above the kitchen. There was a short wall which from any angle downstairs hid the loft, and anyone standing away from the wall, from below. The stairs to enter were accessed only from the hallway on the other side of the great room and were not visible from where they all stood. Scully’s mother and Tara had paused their preparations of breakfast to watch the commotion unfold. Scully vaguely registered the time on the large analogue clock nailed to the loft wall above her mother’s head. It was 8:03 am. She looked around the room. The five of them were the only people there. Hopefully, William would read her mind as she tried to project to him, “stay where you are, don’t come out.”

Before Bill opened the door, he muttered, “And you can put that away,” referring to her ready weapon. Scully sighed, lowered her gun, placing it on top of a dining room chair behind the table and hopefully out of view, but easily accessible. Mulder took a step forward, but Scully placed her hand on his forearm, stopping him. The train had already left the station, and their best option was to be ready to react to whatever was coming next. Mulder pursed his lips, but nodded, reaching around behind his waist to make sure once more his own gun was still there.

Bill opened the door. Standing on the front porch was a fully battle dressed soldier, armored from head to toe, weapon pointed downward in front of him, his finger ready near the trigger, but pointed straight forward in standby mode. On his face he wore an enormous grin stretching to both ears.

“Hello sir,” the soldier said cordially.

Scully craned her neck, trying to peer around the man. She saw at least two other soldiers standing behind him on the front porch. She looked at Mulder. He mouthed “five” to her.

“Hello…” Bill noticed the soldier’s insignia on the front of his uniform. “Hello, Captain. What can I do for you this early in the morning.” Bill sounded relaxed. Scully wasn’t sure if he truly was, or if he was simply calling on his years as a Navy man. When the world had ended, Bill was a Captain, a much higher rank than the Army’s version of Captain. He was speaking to a subordinate, and displayed an aura of dominance over the man.

The soldier seemed unfazed, his smile never leaving him. “A military man yourself?”

“Captain William Scully, US Navy,” Bill said.

Scully almost heard the creaking in Mulder’s bones as he cringed when Bill told the soldier his last name. If the soldier recognized the name, he gave no indication through his facial expression, or what little Mulder could hear in his mind.

“Retired?” Gulliver asked.

“No. What can I do for you, *Captain*,” Bill bristled, emphasizing the man’s lower rank.

“Yes, sir, Captain Gulliver,” the soldier said. “May I come in?”

Bill moved aside and allowed the man to step in a few feet, but only a few. To her brother’s credit, he blocked any further entry, his body standing tall. The other two soldiers remained in their spots on the porch, and with Gulliver out of the doorway, she could make out at least one other soldier in what looked like a fully armored Humvee parked in the driveway.

“I must say, I was surprised to see any people here alive,” Gulliver said. “We’ve been doing sweeps of the area, and nearly all houses are either empty or full of corpses.” He looked behind Bill, seeing their older mother in the kitchen, he added, “Sorry ma’am.” Scully wondered if he’d tip his hat and say ‘aw shucks’ next. Instantly, she trusted nothing this man said, if he could be called a man. That would have been the case had Mulder and Bill not encountered Super Soldiers on the road. Although Mulder was the naturally more intuitive investigator, while she was the analyst of cold facts, she was still human. This guy was trying to sell them something they didn’t want or need.

Scully looked over to Mulder, his body like a tightly coiled spring. To see him like that was unsettling. Mulder was often able to appear relaxed under the most difficult of circumstances, especially if his curiosity was peaked. His demeanor now told her all he felt was suspicion and hatred for the soldier. She caught his attention with a look, silently asking him if he knew for sure if the soldiers were hybrids. Barely perceptibly, he shook his head. Mulder’s telepathy was clumsily calibrated, coming and going, and difficult for him to control with any consistency. He couldn’t tell for sure.

“Well, we’re not corpses, as you can tell,” Bill said. Scully had almost forgotten he was there. “Alive and well.”

“That is certainly good to see, what with the state of the world these days,” Gulliver said.

“Have you found other survivors?” Tara asked.

Gulliver looked over Bill’s shoulder, his grin still broad. “Only a few ma’am, but we’re taking in refugees at our camp. It’s not very far away and you all are certainly welcome.”

“And where is that?” Mulder asked.

Gulliver turned his head towards Mulder and Scully, looking both of them up and down before answering. Scully shivered. “Good morning, sir,” Gulliver said. “We’re holed up at Camp David.”

“Yeah? With the President?” Mulder asked.

“No, sir. President’s dead, I’m afraid,” Gulliver said.

“Is that so? It’s been hard to get the latest news. Vice President then?” Mulder asked using his I’m-fucking-with-you tone, one he’d honed over the years as he (and she) had become more and more of a punchline in the FBI. Mulder’s approach had usually been to mess directly with ignorant people unaware at his mastery of subtle irony.

“Dead as well,” Gulliver answered, and although Scully didn’t know the man, she suspected he was using his I-*know*-you’re-fucking-with-me’ tone, suggesting he was a man they should be cautious of even if he turned out to be completely human.

“Who’s in charge then? Speaker of the House?” Mulder continued.

“’Fraid not, sir. Also dead. I can’t speak for the rest of the world, but my C.O. is General Mark Suveg. We’re just trying to put the world back together again, one corner at a time.”

"That's a very noble goal," Mulder said.

"Shut up, Mulder," Bill said.

Scully's heart sank again. Now the soldiers knew someone here was named Scully and someone else was named Mulder. It was possible, Super Soldier or not, that this man was so low on the Conspiracy Chain of Command that he had no clue who they were, but it was not something Scully wanted to test. Mulder's jaw tightened and Scully knew he felt the same way. *You egged them on* she thought, hoping he'd hear her in his mind.

The name the Captain had mentioned, General Suveg, seemed familiar to her somehow, but she couldn’t quite squeeze it out of the vast list of names in her Conspiracy Memory Bank. Any familiarity usually meant something terrible. She’d ask Mulder if he remembered as soon as the men left.

"Anyway, we're all fine here, as you can see," Bill said, moving towards the Captain, unconsciously pushing the man back a step. Gulliver took the hint and turned slightly towards the front doorway, seemingly poised to leave.

"Our offer still stands, if you need help, we're just down the road, working hard to fix this mess," Gulliver said, sounding like Andy Griffith without the Mayberry accent.

"We'll keep that in mind," Bill said. “It’s certainly good to know you boys are nearby. We were beginning to wonder if we were the last people on earth.

Gulliver glanced at Scully as he turned his body towards the door, lingering on her a fraction longer than was comfortable. He glanced down at the floor, his smile widened, and he turned back to face Bill. "Oh, I almost forgot. My C.O. would throw me in the brig for sure if I didn't mention this," Gulliver said, laughing. “It’s why we’re here.”

“Thought you were here to fix the world,” Mulder said.

"What is it, Captain?" Bill said, cutting off further interchange.

"It’s probably nothing to worry about. You folks look like you're set up safely," Gulliver said. Scully wanted to punch him in the face and tell him to just spit it out already. This was clearly the real reason he and his men had come here. Her body tensed, and she glanced at her gun sitting on the chair pushed into the dining room table, calculating in her mind how many shots she could get off before Gulliver reacted.

“We’re trying to find an alien last seen nearby,” Gulliver said, making eye contact with her and lingering too long for comfort.

"An alien?" Bill asked, forcing a laugh. "Like E.T.?"

Gulliver laughed in kind, turned his attention back to Bill. "I wish that were the case, sir." Gulliver narrowed his eyes, cocked his head. "You do know aliens caused this, don't you sir?"

"Sorry, bad joke. Yes, I'm well aware of what happened to the world, Captain," Bill said. “That is unsettling. Everything had been so quiet, I guess we were hoping the aliens were all dead.”

"Unfortunately not, sir. Several are still alive and out there," Gulliver said. "We've been tracking one of the aliens so we can bring it to justice for its crimes. It was last seen in this area."

Bill cleared his throat, lifted his chin. "Well, we haven't seen any aliens."

The irony was Bill thought he was lying. In his mind, Jake was an alien. Scully was happy to see her brother had at least a little bit of good sense to keep anything about Jake's presence a secret from these men for the time being, if for no other reason than he knew she’d be angry with him.

"Don't be so sure," Gulliver said. "This alien can appear as anyone. To you, it would have looked like any other human."

“That can’t be possible,” Bill said. Although Bill knew about aliens, and clones who could look like someone else, shapeshifting was a new thing. Scully almost felt sorry for her brother having to take a crash course in what she had been able to digest over the course of twenty years.

“It can be, and is possible, I’m afraid, sir,” Gulliver said. Some of the Grays, as the aliens are known, have been on earth for decades disguised as humans, preparing the way for the invasion. They’re a remarkable species.” On his last sentence, Gulliver sounded awestruck. Despite proclaiming the aliens were dangerous, he seemed enamored by them, lending further credence to the likelihood he was a Super Soldier. Gulliver's smile widened even further. Scully hadn't thought that was possible. "This particular alien wasn't this far northeast until a few days ago. He survived the crash of a nearby fallen ship."

"Well, if we see anything like that, we'll be sure to let you know," Bill said.

"Very good, sir," Gulliver said. "And so you know, its last known appearance was that of a twelve year old human boy. If you see it, do not approach it. It is extremely dangerous. Just look at what his kind did to the world."

"Should we really be so afraid of a little boy?" Scully's mother asked.

"It’s not a little boy. Just assuming a boy's appearance," he said.

Scully could see the gears inside Bill's mind turning and she was afraid of what he was about to say, but what he finally said was not what she expected. "How can we get in contact with you, if we see it? Just drive up to the camp?" He wasn't coming right out and telling the soldiers Jake was in the cabin, but he was thinking about next steps.

"You can do that. Otherwise, do you have a radio?"

"No, but I have a phone. Been keeping it charged, just in case things turned back on," Bill said. “Has family pictures on it, too,” he added, lowering his gaze. Scully and Mulder hadn’t carried phones for years, so she hadn’t been caught up in the world of smart phones and social media. A person’s entire life had been online up until the Plague. Her own mother had kept physical photo albums, but people didn’t do that as much in recent years. Her brother’s voice conveyed all of that loss, and it melted her heart a little bit. He’d been clinging to the entire record of his family’s life by keeping that phone charged.

"Well, sir, you're in luck," Gulliver said. He dug inside one of his front pockets, pulled out a small rectangle of stiff, white paper with small black text. "Here's my card. That's the main phone number to the switchboard. That number routes through landlines, so it should still work fine. Most of the telecommunications infrastructure still works, thanks to the foresight of the NSA. If you see that alien, call me immediately. That’s my personal extension. Do not approach it. Calling me could save your family's life."

He’d used the world “me” a lot, Scully noted.

Finally, Gulliver turned towards the door, and stepped through it. Scully exhaled. As Bill was about to close the door, and watch the soldiers make their way back to their truck, Gulliver turned around, and held the door open.

"One more thing, Captain Scully,” he said, emphasizing the word Captain, like Bill had earlier. “General Suveg has assumed command of this area for the time being. You know, until things get back to normal. You’re living under his jurisdiction. If you see the alien, and don't tell us about it, we'll consider that treason. I know you'll do the right thing to keep your family safe and help out your country, sir. Goodbye, Captain Scully." Gulliver let the door go, and it shut behind him as he headed back to his truck, his men following behind him. Bill watched from the front porch as the truck moved down the driveway, before turning onto the road.

Twenty years together, Scully anticipated what Mulder would say next, so she mouthed the words as he said, "I miss him already."

Scully looked at the clock above the kitchen. It was 8:16 a.m. She hadn’t even had coffee yet. Just above the clock, poking up above the ledge that hid the loft over the kitchen were two domes of bed messed brown hair, and four identical bright blue eyes.

Those sets of eyes did represent a danger, but nothing like the one Gulliver had suggested. The danger was to anyone who interfered with her own determination to protect the owners of those eyes. All four of them.

“Bill, you’re coming with me,” Mulder said, and Scully returned her thoughts to the adults on the main level. “Scully, where are the keys to the XTerra?” he asked.

“And where are we going, Mulder?” Bill asked.

“We’re driving back to your Jeep, getting it unstuck, bringing it back here, so we can all leave,” he said. He looked around the room for the keys, probably assuming Scully had put them somewhere nearby after he’d been shot.

“To go where?” Tara asked hopefully. “To Camp David?”

“That’s the last place he wants to go,” Bill said. “He thinks those soldiers are some kind of monster.”

“And he’s right,” Scully said.

“Dana, all I saw were decent men trying to do the right thing. That could have been me if this had happened when I was on duty. It probably should be me. I tried contacting anyone at my chain of command when this happened but haven’t had any luck,” Bill said.

“Keys Scully?” Mulder asked again. He was barely paying attention to anything Bill said. All that mattered was getting as far from Camp David as possible.

“On the nightstand in the bedroom,” she said.

“You should get dressed. I need you to drive so Bill and I can push the Jeep,” he said. He walked quickly into the bedroom, found the keys and walked back out. “We should go now.”

“There is no way I’m leaving that thing here alone with my family,” Bill said as Scully had begun to walk back to the bedroom to change.

“Billy, we’ll be fine here,” Margaret said. “Help Fox and your sister.”

“Mom, there’s no—“

“William Patrick Scully Junior!” Margaret yelled. Her hands were flat against the kitchen countertop, and her eyes shot lasers at her splayed fingers. Her jaw was tightly set as she took even breaths. Regardless of their ages, this was the tone that instantly turned Scully and her brother to children. “There are things you don’t know. Now help your sister.”

Bill shook his head with pursed lips, fighting back the words he wanted to say to his mother, but too polite to do so. “I’ll get my coat,” he said tersely.

This was sure to be a fun drive.

^^^^^^^

The Jeep was stuck about seven miles west of the cabin, on the other side of Highway 15, south of Camp David. Scully was grateful the drive had so far been silent. She knew her brother only wanted the family to be safe, but his stubbornness and need to be the one in control was going to put them all in danger. Thank god for their mother. Scully looked out the passenger side window. It had started to snow again. The day before had been warm, so some of the previous snow pack had melted. Overnight the temperature had dropped again, covering the road in ice. The thin layer of snow now covering everything and the mountain forest they drove between was postcard beautiful, but treacherous, so they moved cautiously.

“So, what’s the plan? We just stuff the family into two vehicles and drive off into the unknown?” Bill asked.

So much for silence. He had a point though. She and Mulder knew better than anyone what the world was like now, and it would be an understatement to say that leaving a safe, well supplied place like the cabin would be an extreme risk, exacerbated by the size of their group and the range in ages from five to seventy-three. And they didn’t have a specific destination as a goal, like their group of three had on the way to Scully’s mother’s house. Where they should go to from here was anyone’s guess.

“I’ve been thinking about it. I think our best options for now would be to drive back to your mom’s house. Either that, or we could head east. I bet my parent’s old summer house in Quonochontaug is still there. It’s relatively isolated. Big enough for all of us. It’s near the water. We’d be able to fish.”

“Have you noticed it’s snowing again?” Bill said. “What if we slide off the road on the way? You’re willing to risk all of our lives on the theory the soldiers stationed at Camp David are, what exactly?”

“Alien-Human Hybrids. That particular type is known as a Super Soldier,” Mulder said with typical neutral inflection. “They helped the aliens with colonization.”

“Super Soldiers. Right. Like Super Man? Makes total sense,” Bill said. Scully thought she could hear his eyes roll. “Captain Gulliver said they were looking for a dangerous alien. If they were working with the aliens, why would they say that?”

“Oh, I don’t know, because they were lying?” Mulder said, his frustration finally poking out after being well-behaved for the morning. Scully was surprised it had taken him this long.

“But for what reason?” Bill asked. “As far as I can tell, those soldiers – super or not - are trying to help people. They were trying to help *us*. I don’t know why I lied to them about that clone. As a Navy Captain, I should be driving over there right now to resume active duty.”

After a few moments of thick silence, Mulder asked, “Did you tell them to come to the cabin?” His grip tight around the steering wheel, his jaw tense.

“What? Of course not,” Bill said. “I had no idea they existed until we saw them on the road, and I keep my promises to my family.” The jab at Mulder was obvious to them all. When Mulder had been abducted during Scully’s pregnancy, Bill believed he had actually just run away. So much of her relationship with her brother was based on fundamental misunderstandings of reality. Bill continued, “And I’m still not planning on saying anything to mom until Dana talks to her. Not that I’d regret it if she found out sooner.”

“What will it take for you to open your eyes,” Mulder shouted, surprising Scully. Generally, Mulder cared very little about wasting energy trying to convince people unwilling to believe. More often than not, he willingly allowed people to believe he was crazy, playing into their prejudices, and not giving a damn. On the last word, he turned his body slightly towards the back seat, involuntarily turning the wheel with him, causing the truck to swerve.

“Jesus Mulder, watch the road!” Scully said.

Mulder recovered the truck and mumbled “sorry” to her, resuming his quiet brooding.

“Yes, please let me drive across the country with you,” Bill said.

“Bill, Mulder’s right,” Scully said, edge now in her own voice. She’d grown tired of arguing, and listening to anyone argue. Part of the problem was that Bill had always disliked Mulder. Her brother blamed Mulder for everything that had gone wrong in their family. Despite the fact that if she had never met Mulder, they’d all be dead right now, the past twenty years had inflicted pain on all of them. The other part of the problem was Bill didn’t have all the facts, only half understood pieces of them. At least she and Mulder understood what had been happening and had been able to do something about it. Bill had mostly spent the past twenty years in the dark, merely reacting to tragedy after family tragedy, and trying too hard to shield his family like he knew their father would have done. She knew he loved her, but this conflict between him and Mulder was now an incredible liability. Mulder wasn’t making it easier either, but at the end of the day, he was right. They needed to leave the cabin, and do so without alerting the Super Soldiers at Camp David. It made her heart sink to think about it, but it was necessary.

“Dana, I told you, I understand what happened to the world. And I know you know more about it than I do. But this is just paranoia. I spent my whole life in the military. Why wouldn’t I know something about this? Super Soldiers? It is ridiculous, even by current standards.” Bill said.

He had a fair point. Bill’s own experience in the Navy would make it even harder for him to believe that some of those he served with had helped bring the world to its current state. Bill knew about clones. He knew about Grays even. He had experienced the alien virus first-handed, and Charlie’s death had proven what would have happened if he hadn’t taken her serum. Yet, convincing him the soldiers at the Camp were part of the same conspiracy was going to be difficult. She wasn’t sure what would convince him.

“I can only ask that you trust us,” she said. “I think I’ve earned that.” She heard the weariness in her own voice.

Bill sighed, the haughty tone replaced by one she recognized as the brother she used to admire when they were kids. “Dana, I love you. And I do trust you. I just think you’re wrong about this. That boy in our shed. That clone. Or alien shape shifter. God, I can’t believe you convinced me to leave it alone with our kids,” he muttered. “Whatever it is, it’s going to be our downfall.”

He could be right about that, she thought, but not for the reasons he believed. She turned to look out the window again. She was empty of anything else to say.

“We have a problem,” Mulder said. They were approaching a rise in the road, and Mulder slowed the truck.

“What is it?” Scully asked, sitting up straight in her seat, tension taking over her body. She had begun to feel as if tense was her natural state of being. The rare moment she’d had time to relax had felt foreign.

“Why are you slowing down? We’ll never make it up the hill,” Bill said. “Too icy.”

“We can’t get through here,” Mulder said.

“Why not?” Scully asked. She looked forward, trying to see what Mulder was worried about, but all she could see was the top of the snow covered road and the tops of the trees beyond. But Mulder was sometimes able to see more with his mind than any of them could see with their eyes.

“There’s a roadblock up ahead,” he said. He stopped the truck, and shifted in his seat, twisting around to look in all directions.

“Soldiers?” she asked.

Mulder bit his lower lip, looking into the distance. “I can’t tell for sure, but I think so. Son of a bitch!”

“What are you talking about?” Bill asked. Mulder and William’s telepathy was just one more thing Bill was in the dark about. She suspected believing in that would be even harder for Bill than believing in Super Soldiers. Or, maybe they’d be a tie. She hadn’t wanted to give him any more of a reason to think Mulder was nuts, or to be leery of his nephew.

Mulder shifted the truck into reverse, the tires slid fruitlessly for a few seconds before gaining traction. He turned the truck around back in the direction from which they came.

“Mulder, this is nuts!” Bill said. So much for that hope.

Scully touched Mulder’s forearm, giving him a gentle squeeze to let him know she trusted whatever he was doing. He smiled a thank you in return as Bill continued to call Mulder’s sanity into question. Scully looked out the window again, and tuned her brother out.

^^^^^^^

William followed a step behind as Jake walked through the wooded area behind the little red shed they’d found him hiding in the day before. He couldn’t believe it had only been one day. He already felt like he knew Jake better than he had known any friend he’d ever had before, despite Jake’s inability to think in perfect English.

*Only a few of them spoke English back home,* Jake’s voice came into William’s mind.

*I know. It’s ok. I just don’t think I can learn your language at all. It’s weird,* William thought-projected back.

The boys had been speaking like this to each other since Jake had appeared. William had never had another telepath to really communicate with. At Canyon City, he’d had the other Hybrids and of course, Joy, Christian and the other children. And there was Jeremiah Smith, but he’d never had someone who he trusted completely from the start, who seemed to understand him in a way his adoptive parents, and even Dana and Mulder couldn’t. It was almost like he had befriended himself.

*It’s easier than talking,* Jake thought-said.

“What’s hard about talking?” William said out loud.

Jake had been showing him some of the path he’d taken to find the shed and the cabin in the woods. Along the way, William had been helping Jake with his English, playing the same game they’d played in the cabin. William hadn’t directly asked, but he sensed that Jake enjoyed being outside, despite the cold.

William stopped walking. Jake stopped a few feet in front of him and turned around. *Hurts,* he thought-said. *Here.* Jake touched his throat.

William laughed. “I never thought about it,” he said out loud, then finished telepathically, *You get used to it I guess.*

A high pitched chirping sound coming from somewhere in the snow covered brush entered William’s mind. No, his ears this time. He looked around the area. “Look,” he said out loud, habits of speech hard to break completely. He pointed to the base of a tree a few feet away from both boys. A bed of soaked leaves was matted on the ground, and laying on top was a tiny squirrel. “It sounded like a bird.”

*What is it* Jake thought-asked.

*Squirrel,* he answered. Jake crinkled his brow and shook his head. William repeated more slowly, *Skwer-rel. My dad used to call them tree rats. My mom used to feed them though. She thought they were cute.*

*Do you miss them?* Jake thought-asked, looking down.

*My mom and dad?* William had told Jake about his adoptive parents, and how Dana and Fox had found them at his house all the way across the country before the aliens had invaded. *Yeah, a lot.*

*What about you?* William thought-asked, changing the subject. It was still too painful to think about his parents’ death. Growing up, he’d always wondered about his real parents, and was happy to finally know them, but he’d always love Rob and Susan Van de Kamp.

Jake was looking at the squirrel, took a few steps towards the animal. The creature remained motionless, except for its labored breathing and occasional vocalization. The squirrel was sick. Out here in the cold, it probably wouldn’t last long. One more death to add to William’s memory banks.

*I never knew my parents,* Jake thought-said absently. *Not in real life. I’ve seen pictures of them.*

Jake kneeled down on the ground near the squirrel. The area was dampened by the melting snow, but clear near the base of the tree. Jake moved his hand over to the squirrel, hovering just above the animal whose eyes flickered open with the movement.

“Careful. It might bite,” William said. His dad used to tell him that squirrels may be cute, but they can carry rabies and other diseases.

Jake seemed unconcerned. He lowered his hand, and with one fingertip, he touched the top of the squirrel’s head, holding it there for about ten seconds. The animal gave out one more, squeaky cry, and then seemed to gasp in air. As William was about to ask Jake what he was doing, the animal jumped up from his bed of leaves, and skipped off into the underbrush, eventually scampering up a tall ash tree about twenty feet away. Once safely at the top of the tree, the squirrel stopped, and began to bark at the boys.

Jake’s grin widened, filling his face from ear to ear. *Can’t win them all,* he thought-said. As Jake stood up, William became aware his jaw was gaping open. He wondered what other things he still had to learn about his doppelganger.

*Just ask,* was Jake’s only response. William closed his mouth as Jake continued their walk through the woods, and followed him.

^^^^^^^

The clone would be their downfall, Bill thought. A few hours had passed since he’d returned home from the insane trip with his sister and her… what exactly was Mulder anyway? Not Dana’s husband. They weren’t FBI partners anymore. The father of the child that she’d inexplicably given up for adoption yet found again. Bill could never see what his sister saw in that lunatic. But right now, Mulder was not his main concern. As annoying as he was, Bill had to admit Mulder loved Dana. Misguided as he was, he’d do anything for her.

Unfortunately, she seemed to have lost her skepticism over the years. Her need for rational analysis had frustrated him when they’d been kids. He may not have admitted it to her because he wanted to play the role of responsible older brother, but he often thought she needed to relax a little more. She’d been a serious kid who’d grown into a serious woman. That seriousness had managed to serve her well, leading to admission into a top medical school, and eventually all the way to the FBI. Unlike their father, Bill had been really proud of Dana’s admission into Quantico. He’d kept that quiet, but it wasn’t all that different from his own chosen path of following their father into the Navy. He thought being an FBI agent would suit her personality well.

But toward the end of her career there, as Mulder had pulled her further and further into the abyss of alien conspiracy theories (which Bill hated to admit to himself had come at least partially true), he noticed her skepticism wane a bit. He saw it first when she’d gotten ill from cancer, then saw it full force when she’d wanted to adopt a sick little girl named Emily she’d just met. Now that he’d been reunited with his sister, he could barely find any trace of the skepticism that made her who she was. The rational little sister he’d grown up with would never have allowed an alien clone who looked exactly like her own son into the home where her family slept with barely any questioning. What the soldiers had told them about a dangerous alien that can look like anyone hadn’t even made his sister blink. He’d wanted to tell the soldiers then and there the thing was sleeping in the loft upstairs, but he’d known Dana would have killed him, if not literally then metaphorically.

He loved his sister, but she’d lost her edge. Growing up, the Scully children had been raised to care about God, Family, and Country above all else. Dana’s faith had clearly become lax over the years, and she made no qualms about her feelings for the government, going so far as to fake her own death and become a fugitive for a man that had been convicted of treason. But while Bill knew his sister loved her son, their mother, and the rest of the family, he felt her decisions were clouded when it came to this stranger who looked like the son she’d given up for adoption. Somehow that decision to send William away as a baby had manifested itself in a need to atone by helping this… alien. He couldn’t exactly understand why, but he knew he would not be able to reason with her. And wherever his sister went, Mulder would follow. Together, they’d lead the entire family into peril.

So, Bill decided, he would have to take action alone to save them all.

^^^^^^^

Scully made her way downstairs to the large great room. The cabin had a large basement entertainment room, fully loaded with a pool table, large screen television, DVD player and even an old VCR, hundreds of movies, and Xbox games to keep them occupied through the end of the world, and then some. Convenient. Although they planned to limit their use of the electronics in order to conserve gasoline for the generator, especially through the winter. There were also board games, books, and many other activities available for their entertainment. The basement was a vast, spacious area that allowed them to spread out during their winter confinement with so many people in one cabin. If not for the threat of the Super Soldiers at Camp David, this would be a perfect place to survive, perhaps even thrive.

Her mother sat in one corner of the large three sided sectional sofa reading a book. If the upstairs décor was stuck somewhere in the seventies, the downstairs was modern and plush. Matthew sat in another corner of the room in an oversized chair, also reading, while Jake and William looked through the large stockpile of DVD’s and video tapes neatly stored on a shelf near the large LCD television. Understanding the need to save power, the boys seemed content to read the back of the box descriptions. Scully wondered if William was explaining the storylines he knew to Jake. She wondered if Jake had even seen a movie. She wondered so much about this boy.

“Hi mom,” Scully said, approaching her mother. “Where’s everyone else?” Since she and Mulder had returned with Bill the house had gone eerily silent, everyone going off into their own corners, processing all that had happened in a day that still had some light left.

“Tara and Katy are outside building snowmen, Bill is somewhere. Not sure where Fox is,” Margaret said.

“He’s out jogging,” Scully added.

“He’s ok to jog?”

“No, but it’s not like he’ll listen to me when I tell him that,” she said. “It’s his way of processing new information when he doesn’t have bad movies to watch.”

Her mother laughed. “Headstrong like someone else I know.”

Scully walked over to her mother, and curled up next to her on the couch.

“This is still all so unbelievable,” Scully said.

“What is?”

“I can’t believe I’m sitting here next to you. That we’re all together. That I found you. I can’t believe this is happening,” Scully said. She knew there were still plenty of things to worry about, but she felt content for the first time in more than a decade. She could spend the rest of eternity in this cabin with all of the people she loved most, whether or not there was another soul alive out there. Having her family alive and together perhaps should not make up for the loss of most of the world, but it was what she had, and it was good enough. Maybe they’d bought some time with the Super Soldiers, and could just be here in the moment for now.

“I can’t believe you found him,” Margaret said.

Scully pulled back to look at her mother, looking at William. “It’s still hard for me to believe too,” she said. “I missed so much. I still think of him as a baby sometimes.”

“That never stops,” Margaret said. “Not completely.” They sat silently for a few moments, Scully basked in the comfort of her mother’s arms, understanding what her mother had meant. No matter her age, Scully always felt like a safe little girl in her mother’s presence. That had probably been part of her desperation to find her. Nothing could make her feel as secure as being wrapped her mother’s arms. Like all mothers, Margaret understood that intuitively, and held her daughter close. Finally, Margaret asked, “Dana?”

“Yeah mom?” she said, slurring her words slightly as her eyes closed.

“Do you really think we need to leave?”

Scully sat up to look at her mother, her trance shaken back into the present situation they were facing. “Yes, I do. This is serious, mom. Unfortunately, I don’t know where we can go or how we can get there at this point. Mulder thinks the soldiers have all the roads blocked. We were lucky to get here ahead of them.”

“Well, we’ll do what you and Fox think is best,” Margaret said.

Scully chuffed. “I don’t think Bill would say the same thing.”

“He will. He just needs to feel like he’s in control. It’s a Scully habit,” Margaret said.

“I haven’t felt in control of anything in years,” Scully said.

“You don’t think there’s any chance what the soldiers said about a dangerous alien are true, do you?” Margaret asked.

“No mom, I think they’re liars. If they’re saying Jake is dangerous, it makes me more confident he’s anything but that. Most likely he’s a danger to them.”

“So you think he’s like William?” Margaret asked.

Scully smiled. She’d told her mother the entire story, but it still took her aback to hear her mother talk so openly about things she’d tried to hide from her for years. Scully promised to herself to stop underestimating her mother.

“Honestly, I don’t know what he is mom, but Mulder and I don’t believe he’s an alien shape-shifter like the soldiers said, or a danger to us. One thing is clear, he can read minds just like Will can,” she said, keeping her voice needlessly low. She looked at the boys, and sighed. “I just wish he could talk to us.”

“Maybe he’s not ready to yet,” Margaret said.

Scully considered that. Like William, Jake clearly held his thoughts close, probably a natural reaction to being a telepath. Knowing the intimate thoughts of others, means you know how easily a person’s inner life can be used against them. If Jake truly did grow up on an alien spacecraft, it meant he lived amongst other telepaths, so he’d be even more protective of his mind, she reasoned. And it was still possible he couldn’t speak. Mulder had met clones incapable of language before, on a bee farm in Canada.

“Well,” Margaret said, slapping her hands on her thighs and sitting up straight, snapping Scully from her own mind. “I have a lot of nervous energy myself, so I think I’ll get dinner started. Some things never change.”

“I’ll be up in a second to help,” Scully said, keeping her eyes on William and Jake.

“No need. I can manage,” her mother smiled. “You stay awhile,” she added before heading up the stairs. Scully wondered if she could have ever hoped to be the kind of mother she had. She had lost more than ten years of practice, so she doubted it would ever be possible to catch up.

Scully watched the boys for a moment. They no doubt felt her mind focused on them. She was not the telepath, but she suspected she was being slightly creepy, so instead she walked the short distance to them and sat on the floor cross legged next to them in front of the wall of DVD’s and old video tapes it seemed the cabin’s owners had been collecting for years, since the time when watching movies in the home had started. Since before streaming and Netflix and storing your media in the cloud. The cloud was gone, but these bits of plastic and data remained.

“Maybe if we find some more gas, we can start up the DVD player for one or two movies. See anything good?” she asked.

“A couple,” William answered without looking at her. “He hasn’t,” he added after a second.

Scully shook her head. “Hasn’t what? Found anything good?”

“Seen a movie before. You were wondering,” William said timidly, surely knowing it was impolite to read her mind, let alone make her aware of it.

“It’s ok, Will,” she said, sensing his embarrassment. She looked at Jake whose face mirrored William’s emotions. Jake looked at her, and she caught his eyes, “We’ll have to fix that soon, then.” It was faint, but his lips curled slightly upward. He definitely understood more English than yesterday, or that he had first let on. His rate of learning was astonishing. She tried to push aside her scientific curiosity, but she couldn’t help herself. *Where did you come from?*, she asked herself before she could control the thought. It must have been a lonely world to live in if he’d never seen a movie before. Did he even have parents, or had he simply awoken one day not so long ago developed already into an eleven year old boy? Years ago Mulder had seen Kurt Crawford clones growing in vats, and clones of his own sister at various ages. The aliens had the power, it seemed, to choose any stage of human life to bring their creations to consciousness.

Jake lifted up a video cassette, twirled it in his hand before giving it to her. The title of the film was unfamiliar to her. It was called “Men Behind the Sun”, apparently made in the late ‘80’s.

“Hey, Will,” Matthew said out of the quiet. “You guys wanna play pool?”

“Yeah,” William said. He and Jake stood up. As Scully read the film’s dust jacket summary, her heart stopped. The movie’s plot involved experiments done by the infamous Unit 731 in Japan during World War II. It was about torturing human lab rats.

Several minutes later, Scully finally shook thoughts about Jake’s experience aboard the alien ship out of her mind, and she put the tape down. Her heart broke for the boy who looked like her son. She didn’t care how he had come to be; no child deserved the things he’d likely been subjected to for any length of time. She would do whatever she could do to help him forget, and make a new life here with them. If he was a clone of her son, that made him no different than Emily in her mind. She looked over at Jake and William starting another game of pool with Matthew. *You don’t have to be afraid now,* she thought. Even as the words crossed her mind, she knew they were a lie, but she wanted to believe them nonetheless. She hoped Jake would understand, and maybe believe them too.

^^^^^^^

The jog hadn’t cleared Mulder’s mind at all. If anything, it raced more speedily and chaotically than ever, and now his gunshot wound radiated flames into his ass. He stared out the downstairs window at the snowmobile parked just a few feet away from the little red shed where they’d found Jake only one day earlier. They needed to leave this cabin, but they had nowhere to go, and seemed to be blocked by Super Soldiers on every major road. They currently only had one mid-sized SUV and a two person snowmobile as transportation options. They could cram everyone into the truck if they had to, but they’d have to sacrifice almost all of their supplies to do so. That was not an option, even if they could get past the road blocks. Mulder was at a loss for what to do next. And it was pissing him off.

“Let’s go for a ride,” William said from behind him. Mulder jumped slightly at the surprise, and laughed at himself. Jake stood next to William, though his head was down, looking at his toes. In some ways, Jake reminded Mulder of Peter Pan’s shadow: A mirror image that moved independently.

“A ride? On the snowmobile?” Mulder asked.

William nodded. “I’ve never ridden one. Neither has he, obviously,” William said, pointing his thumb towards Jake.

“Might not be a good idea, Will. We should probably save the gas,” Mulder said.

William frowned. “Yeah, ok,” he said, his shoulders slumping. Moments later his shadow’s shoulders followed suit. Mulder hadn’t had much time to be a father. He’d spent less than a week with William after he was born, and had only been reunited with him for a little more than three weeks now, but he got the distinct sense he was being manipulated by his son. What was more astonishing to him was that he knew this fully, but didn’t care. He thought it might be similar to the way narcotics make a person feel about pain. His son was going to get what he wanted. Mulder may not be able to keep him perfectly safe, but goddamn it he could take his son on a snowmobile ride.

“Get your coat,” Mulder said. “You too,” he said to Jake. Both boys faces lit up, and Mulder’s heart melted.

“Can I drive?” William asked, as he skipped away to get his coat.

“Don’t push your luck,” Mulder said loudly. There was a 95 percent chance William would be driving the snowmobile at some point in the next hour. Mulder looked around the small mud room in the basement so that later he could at least tell Scully he’d been somewhat responsible. “Where are those helmets?” he asked himself. For the first time in a while, he felt the spread of endorphins pulsing through his body, the result of his own ridiculous, cheek-hurting grin. This was a kind of pain he could get used to.

^^^^^^^

Day 7: January 11, 2013, 21 Days After Invasion

Scully stifled a yawn as she stepped into the cabin’s great room. She’d taken a shower, and was fully dressed, but her mind hadn’t quite eliminated the morning fog yet. Mulder was slouched over the long formal dining table, his head turned to one side, his cheek and arms sprawled on top of an open paper map. She looked above the kitchen to the big clock. It claimed the time was 9:07 am. Two empty, dirty serial bowls sat in the sink, and a pot of coffee was brewing. She vaguely heard sounds coming from the basement suggesting at least some part of the rest of the family was awake.

Based on the lack of disturbance on Mulder’s side of the bed, it seemed this is where he’d spent the night, pouring over the map trying to find some alternate route away from the Super Soldiers at Camp David, and the surrounding road blocks. Like her, he’d taken to wearing his weapon in the cabin, Mulder’s resting in his hip holster, her own in the small of her back. They’d had a few days of pre-apocalyptic normalcy where it had seemed odd to carry a loaded weapon around a house, but the encounter with the Super Soldiers had shaken them back to the new norm. She was about to wake him, when movement in the living room caught her eye.

Sitting in the oversized chair near the fireplace, looking even smaller than his presumably eleven year old frame, was Jake. Funny, she thought. It hadn’t even occurred to her that it might be William. The boys were identical, but the boy sitting there now was most definitely Jake. In his lap rested a large open book. Scully couldn’t tell exactly what it was from this distance, so she stepped a little bit closer. He turned his head towards her, his eyes open wide, his brows raised. He was silent, as was his norm, but seemed to be asking her if it was ok to look at the book he held. 

  “It’s ok,” she said softly. She glanced at the book. It was one of her mother’s photo albums, presumably one of those she’d noticed was missing from the shelf at her mother’s house. “Where’s Will?” Jake nodded backwards and up toward the loft.

She smiled. “He’s not really a morning person I guess.” She added, “a little like me.” Scully stepped even closer, and sat on the armrest of his chair, hoping she wasn’t pushing him too far. Jake nodded, and returned her smile. “What do you have there?”

Jake looked at the photographs on the two open pages. They were miscellaneous pictures of Scully’s family when she and her siblings had been kids, and some were from the trip taken to this same cabin. There was one photo with the entire family, including Scully’s father and her sister Melissa. Jake pointed to the much younger version of Scully smiling in the photo, and then pointed to her directly, his face questioning, hopeful. 

“Yes, that’s me. Unfortunate hair, don’t you think?” She shrugged. “It was the ‘80’s.”

Jake’s grin widened even more, and Scully thought he might almost laugh, but he stayed quiet. She doubted he’d understood what it meant to live in the 80’s, but she was happy to see him smile. Jake flipped forward several pages to a picture of Scully dressed in a cap and gown sandwiched between her parents. Jake looked up at her.

“I think that’s when I graduated from Medical School,” she said. Jake’s brow creased as he looked at the picture again. She’d done a quick, and what she hoped had been a painless, medical exam on Jake when he’d first appeared to them, but she wondered now if he might have a fear of doctors. From what she was beginning to understand about his time on the alien ship, he could have had many unpleasant encounters with doctors or other scientists.

Jake shook his head, and smiled. What he did next, surprised her. He pointed to her, then to himself, and finally placed his palm against the top of her hand, pressing down gently, then pulling away before she could say anything. He seemed self-conscious about the gesture, and she wanted more than anything to ask him what he’d meant by it. Instead, he refocused his attention on the photo album on his lap.

There was a picture of Scully with her mother when Scully was about eight months pregnant with William, and another one of Mulder and Scully holding a newborn William. Scully hadn’t realized her mother had kept a copy of that photograph, one of the few Scully herself had of William when he’d still been hers. Her own was weather-worn from years of pulling it out to secretly peer at it. This copy was slightly faded, but otherwise crisp as new. Jake pointed to the picture of baby William, and turned to look upwards to the loft, the same question on his face as with the earlier photo. “Yes, that’s Will. Only a couple of days old there,” she said.

Jake traced the picture, outlining William. Then his finger slid over to trace the photographic version of her. She wondered what was going through this boy’s mind. Did he know what he was? Did he know who any of them really were? Jake moved his hand to the other picture, the one where Scully was pregnant. He continued outlining her shape, then stopped at her stomach. He peered at the photograph, his brow creased, reminding Scully of a tea leaf reader she’d seen once. In that case, the woman had been scamming the victim, but in this case, Jake seemed to be seeing something real. Something in the photograph that she couldn’t see herself. He traced his finger over her belly again, then he touched his hand to his heart, lost in whatever thoughts he had. Transfixed.

“Dana?” Bill asked touching her on the shoulder, startling her again. She hadn’t heard him enter the room. “Sorry,” he said, actually sounding sorry. He glanced at Jake and the photo album on his lap. He tried to hide it, but anger flashed over his face in the space of a microsecond. “Are you ok?”

She stood up straight, shaking herself from the thoughts that had been going through her mind moments ago. Not really thoughts. Feelings? Intuitions? Something about Jake. Fuzzy now.

“I’m fine,” she said. “What do you want?” she asked tersely. 

Bill sighed heavily. “I don’t want anything, Dana. You just looked… well, you were freaking me out a little.”

“Well, I’m fine, Bill. You don’t always need to worry about me,” she said, softening a little.

Bill pursed his lips, no doubt wondering if he should say anything else. What was this cycle they had with each other? She knew Bill loved her. She loved him. As kids they’d gotten along well enough, but as adults it had been a constantly escalating battle of wills.

“No!” Mulder shouted, cutting the thick air between them, making Scully and Bill jump. He sat up straight in his chair, frozen, with a dazed look on his face.

“What’s wrong?” she asked, her heart racing, forgetting her brother entirely.

Mulder stood up, his chair violently tipping over behind him. He looked at Scully with a mixture of fear and anger she had never really seen on his face. “They’re back,” he said seconds before the front door blew open. 

^^^^^^^

“Get down! Get down!” Mulder shouted, waving his hands downwards. He reached to his hip for his gun, which he’d kept on his body at all times since the encounter with the soldiers. The cabin’s front door had been obliterated, fractured into several large shards, sprinkled with hundreds of smaller wooden chunks. Thick smoke had replaced it with equal opacity. Mulder moved towards the now empty space. Several pops filled the air as little bursts of wood flew up from the floor in a straight line from the doorway back to the kitchen island. Someone from outside was shooting into the cabin with rapid fire weapons.

Mulder heard the Super Soldier – he was now certain that’s what he was -- Gulliver in his mind before he heard the man’s voice coming over the loudspeaker fixed to the top of the armored Humvee he’d returned in with four other of his goons. Although Mulder was face down on the floor, he could see the scene outside perfectly in his mind. Now that he knew what they were, the Super Soldiers’ minds were relatively easy for him to read compared to telepaths, and even non-telepathic humans. Apparently, they were less super in many ways other than having a deadly iron allergy. Mulder saw three fully armored battle ready soldiers standing on either side of Gulliver, the muzzles of their M4 carbine’s smoking. One soldier remained in the driver’s seat, while another manned the top side gun turret. Instead of the typical high powered, rapid fire .50 caliber machine gun, the man in the turret held a simple scoped sharpshooter’s rifle, which he had pointed through the cabin’s front doorway.

Mulder looked over to Scully. She had thrown Jake onto the floor behind the chair Jake had been sitting in moments earlier. She covered him with her body as Bill ducked behind the end of the long nearby sofa that ran perpendicular to the cabin’s front wall. Mulder glanced up to the loft. He saw William’s eyes peeking from the top of the short wall, and Mulder told him with his mind to stay down.

Gulliver’s calm voice came through the speaker again. The sound carried easily now that the cabin’s door was gone. “There’s no point in resisting! We know it’s in there. Bring it out and you all can live!”

Mulder could feel his heart beating in his ears like a timpani. He inhaled deeply, willing himself to calm down a little so that he could try to hear Gulliver’s mind instead. The soldiers hadn’t come inside the cabin for a reason, and Mulder knew what it was. They wanted the humans still inside to help them get their prize. They’d come for the clone, but they were afraid to get near him. The man in the turret with the scoped rifle was waiting for a clear shot of the clone only.

Mulder looked across the room to Scully. “I’m going out,” he said jumping up.

“Mulder, no!” she yelled springing up to mirror him, now holding her own weapon. He’d made up his mind. He was convinced Gulliver wouldn’t hurt him until he had what he’d to come to get. The man had frivolously come here on his own, hoping to go back to his superiors as a hero. He was being very cautious despite the heavy-handed knock on the door.

“It’s ok,” he said. He held up his hands, one still holding his gun, and quickly moved through the door. He vaguely heard Scully say “dammit” as he crossed the threshold.

“Good morning gentlemen,” Mulder said, forcing himself to sound disinterested. “How can I help you?”

“Mr. Mulder, you know why we’re here. We know it’s in there. Now bring it out and we’ll be on our way. Nobody has to get hurt,” Gulliver said.

“It’s a little hard to believe you won’t hurt us after that wake up call,” Mulder said, stepping a few feet behind the edge of the long front porch. The porch had an open front end, but was only about ten feet deep. Three steps descended from the top to the bottom walkway leading to the driveway, a distance of about twenty feet to where the soldiers stood. He wanted to get closer to them to better hear their minds, gathering intelligence. He needed to know as much as possible to figure out his next steps. They obviously wanted the clone, but there was more Mulder wasn’t quite picking up clearly. He needed to keep Gulliver talking. Fortunately, the man seemed to enjoy hearing his own voice.

“Just wanting to make sure everyone is aware of the gravity of the situation. We’re done playing games, sir,” Gulliver said.

“Yes, we are,” Mulder confirmed. “You think the dangerous alien you’re looking for is here? Well, he’s not, but we still have your number. We’ll definitely let you know if we see him.”

Gulliver smiled. It was the kind of smarmy smile that only assholes who’d grown up with power trips but who rarely had power could properly pull off. Mulder suspected that even before this guy had become a Super Soldier he’d been the kind of shithead who’d throw nerds in dumpsters in high school. He’d joined the military so that he could get paid to be an asshole with a gun. And then he’d been made indestructible. Perfect. “I know he’s in there, sir.” He emphasized the word ‘sir’ with ironic condescension. “And I know who you are. Just hand him over and everyone wins.”

“How’s that exactly?” Mulder asked. He scanned the faces of the other soldiers in Gulliver’s crew. Their minds teetered between anger and fear. None of them wanted to be there. Perhaps Mulder could use that to his advantage. Yet he worried their fear meant they would have a hair trigger reflex, quickly escalating the situation into impossible to recover from territory. Mulder looked back inside the cabin. From his angle, he could see Scully standing, holding one arm back to keep Jake behind her, holding her Glock in the other. She shook her head, silently pleading with him to stop pushing and to not do anything foolish.

“You bring him out, we leave and you all get to keep living. You don’t. We go in there, kill everyone in the house, drag him out ourselves,” Gulliver said. He’d said *him* out loud, but Mulder had heard another word in the man’s mind when he’d said it. Gulliver did not believe the boy inside was an alien like he’d told them yesterday, but he did believe he was dangerous.

He believed the boy was William, and he knew what William was capable of doing to all of the Super Soldiers under his command.

 “Sir, let’s kill this asshole, and set the house on fire. The kid will come out one way or another,” the soldier to the left of Gulliver said. He raised his gun slightly, his body language showing impatience.

Gulliver’s brow crinkled. Mulder could hear the debate in his mind. He hated his subordinate for speaking in front of the others without being asked, but he liked the idea the man had raised. This was about to go badly one way or another. In the seconds between this realization and Mulder’s decision to duck back into the cabin and start shooting, he heard a voice yell “No!” The voice had a similar timbre to that of his son, but with the kind of clarity and volume that usually only came to Mulder during telepathic conversations. Mulder glanced back inside the cabin once again, and then the next few seconds slowed way down.

Jake was running through the door. Noticing too late, Scully’s fingertips grasped for his shirt, but she came up seconds too slow. She followed him through the door, calling him back. Mulder couldn’t understand the words, or really hear any sounds clearly. Jake’s hands were straight out in front of him, his palms flat and pointed to the sky. One by one, the Super Soldiers saw the boy coming towards them, and they pointed their weapons at him, and at Mulder. Scully’s gun was drawn as she came through the door way. Mulder now tried to hold Jake back, but as he reached out, a force pushed him backwards, and he fell on his ass, landing hard on the cold wood planks of the front porch.

Jake had not touched him; Mulder was sure of this. He had been repelled by something. It had felt like he and Jake had been two magnets of the same pole colliding. One Super Soldier aimed his weapon at Scully, while the one with the scope pointed his gun at Jake. Jake raised his hands again, one towards each soldier, and their weapons flew out of their hands, the heavy nylon straps that cinched the guns around their bodies snapped like cheap plastic.

And then things got really crazy.

Jake continued his push towards the soldiers, walking slowly but with determination. He disarmed each of them, and before they had time to recover and reach for their side arms, or the rifles scattered around the yard, Jake would anticipate their move. He would push his hands out, lift a soldier in the air and throw him several feet away, like he was a puppeteer controlling marionettes. Jake did this several times before Gulliver finally made it back to the passenger side of the Humvee, motioning to the driver to turn around. The soldier who had stood next to Gulliver, the one who’d wanted to burn them out and start shooting, picked himself off the ground, and reached for his handgun as he took large strides towards Jake. Jake stepped forward, his face intensely focused on the man, his hands at his sides. The soldier pointed his weapon at Scully this time, and Jake took another step forward to the edge of the porch, only a few feet from the Super Soldier now. The man stopped almost in mid stride. His gun fell from his hands and he began to shake violently. Mulder had seen this before. The Super Soldier’s face turned to charcoal, and smoke evaporated off his exposed skin. Jake raised his hands again, and stepped forward. The Super Soldier’s feet lifted off of the ground a few inches as he convulsed.

And then the Super Soldier burst into flames, writhing in mid-air for a few moments, until he was still. Only then, Jake released him, and the man slumped to the ground boneless and motionless, a charred mass of flame and carbon.

The Humvee’s driver floored the gas pedal, and the truck spun loudly in the gravel driveway. The soldier in the turret popped back up with an M4 rifle. He pointed it at Mulder and Scully’s yellow XTerra sitting nearby in the driveway, and squeezed several rounds off before Jake shifted his focus back to him, and threw the weapon out of his hands, where it landed in the deeper snow in a wooded patch to the side of the cabin. The remaining soldier still outside of the truck ran towards his comrades abandoning him, and leaped. He landed on the back bumper moments before the truck caught traction and moved towards the road. Jake pushed his hands out one more time. The back end of the truck lifted off the ground for several seconds, even as it rolled forward on its front tires. When the back end finally plunged downward, it bounced, causing the truck to fishtail. The soldier hanging on the back wheel rack nearly fell off, his legs flying up so that his body was horizontal like Super Man flying through the air, only his grip of the back of the truck keeping him secured. His feet regained purchase with the bumper as the truck’s engine growled, the driver flooring the gas through the turn taking him onto the road towards Camp David, and the hole they’d come from.

Scully stood on the porch, jaw gaping open, her chest rising and falling rapidly, trying to fill her shocked lungs with air. Her gun still pointed towards the spot where the Super Soldiers had been standing in the driveway when it had all began, but her head turned to Jake. Her eyes wide.

Mulder pushed himself up to a standing position, stepping over to Jake. The boy’s face finally showed emotion. Distress. Other than that, he seemed calm. No heavy breathing. No sweating. What he’d just done had not taken any obvious physical toll. Mulder put his hand on Jake’s shoulder, giving him an appreciative smile. Jake’s eyes glistened, swelling with tears, his gaze locked on the smoldering wreckage of the Super Soldier’s body.

Jake had saved Scully’s life. He’d saved all of their lives, but he was horrified by what he’d just done. He seemed to know exactly what his actions would do, but Mulder would bet he’d never killed anything before, purposefully, or accidentally. Mulder turned back to look inside the cabin. The rest of the family, including William who’d come down from the loft, stood over the smoking ruins of the destroyed front door, each with their own version of shock on their face.

Except for Bill. His face merely showed anger as his gaze tracked beyond the threshold to the small boy on the front porch. The boy who Bill believed was an alien who adopted the appearance of his long lost nephew. The boy the Super Soldiers believed actually was Bill’s nephew, William. Mulder thought, the truth was buried somewhere in the middle. He just had to figure out from which end he should start digging to get there first.

^^^^^^^

“They shot out the front tires, and hit something in the engine,” Bill said, stomping the snow off his boots as he reentered the cabin. “I might be able to fix it.”

Bill and Mulder had so far been able to distract themselves from what had happened with the Super Soldiers, thereby delaying the inevitable conflict Scully was steeling herself against. Bill investigated what the soldiers had done to the XTerra outside while Mulder studied his map for locations to possibly find a new vehicle or two. Currently, they had one working snowmobile to carry five adults, three teenagers or close to teenagers, and one little girl. The Super Soldiers would return for sure now, and they’d be bringing friends. How much time they had was unknown, but it wouldn’t be long. Everyone was on edge and terrified, but they currently had few options.

William and Jake were doing something in the basement, which meant that Matthew and Katy were upstairs bored out of their minds. Bill was no longer allowing his children to be near whatever he believed Jake was. Scully suspected that if he hadn’t been afraid of Jake himself, Bill might have already tried to handle the problem directly. Her brother believed that there was a dangerous animal inside the house with his family. Bill knew how to take care of dangerous animals. Thankfully, for now, he seemed focused on fixing the truck.

“I’m going to take the snowmobile and scout for another car,” Mulder said. He sat at the breakfast bar with his back to the rest of the silent group, hunched over the map. Scully’s mother absently cleaned the kitchen, although it was perfectly clean to begin with. Tara swept up remaining pieces of the front door off the great room floor. They’d covered the front doorway with a heavy plastic tarp Mulder found in the red shed where Jake had hidden. The patch job managed to keep the wind outside, but the cabin air was cool despite the fireplace burning full force.

“Bill said he can fix it," Scully said, sitting on one of the high stools next to Mulder, hugging herself tightly to hold back the chill.

"*Might* be able to fix it. We might not have time for *might*, Scully," Mulder said.

"It’s getting dark, Mulder. You can’t go alone.”

“He doesn’t care,” Bill said, throwing his coat into a corner near his boots. Not missing a beat, Tara walked over to pick it up and hang it on the coat rack, always watching out for her husband, playing the good Captain’s wife. Bill typically was not a sloppy person, but he also had difficulty focusing on more than one thing at a time when his emotions were flaring. His anger nearly evaporated off of him into visible clouds rolling off the top of his head.

“Billy,” Margaret said clicking her tongue, looking up from her own distracting work which had shifted from cleaning to fixing an elaborate dinner that would likely not be eaten. The preparation of completing a familiar task was how she was dealing with what had happened. What exactly had just happened was something Scully was still trying to process. In and of itself, it wasn’t anything more extraordinary than anything else she’d witnessed since her career on the X-Files had begun, or what she’d seen during the past few weeks since Colonization had initiated. But she’d never known a clone to have telekinetic power. William had it; others like Jeremiah Smith – himself a Gray alien – had it, but clones… no that was new. Also new was her brother and the rest of the family witnessing alien powers first-hand. The Plague had certainly made him a believer in aliens; He hated them in fact. But what he’d been able to observe during the outbreak had been cloaked within mechanisms Bill understood: Humans have died of disease since they’ve walked the earth. Bill had accepted the world had ended because of a plague unleashed by aliens. But now his acceptance exacerbated the problem. He’d seen what alien power meant. That power had killed their brother Charlie, and had nearly killed the rest of them, including Bill’s wife and children. And he believed Jake was an alien who had just incinerated a man in front of them.

“No, mom, I’m sick of it!” Bill uncharacteristically snapped at his mother. “He’s never cared about this family; only about what he wants to do at any given moment.”

Mulder closed his eyes and clenched his jaw tightly, forcing himself to take controlled, even breaths. Scully touched his forearm, caressing him gently to assure him she felt her brother was gravely wrong, and that she appreciated how hard it was for Mulder to keep quiet now. And that she loved him for it.

Bill continued. “We find out someone is out there trying to put the world back together again, just down the road from us. They offer us safety. Numbers. You both take a dangerous goddamn alien into our home, and I have no idea how, whatever that was, just happened, but I saw it with my own eyes. We all saw it!” Bill waved his hands towards Mulder. “And all he cares about is taking us all out on freezing snow covered roads to find a new hole to hide in.”

Scully was exhausted, but couldn’t take it anymore. She would do for Mulder what she knew was taking all of his energy not to. She stood up, the chair sliding back with a loud squeal before bumping on the edge of the breakfast bar. “Shut the hell up, Bill! You have no idea what you’re talking about!”

“Dana, you need to wake up! You saw what it did! There is a dead man lying outside in the driveway, and I don’t know how that thing did it, but I know why. The soldiers warned us it was dangerous, they tried to *help* us, but you let it into our home! All you had to do was give the thing to them! Now, who knows what they’re going to do to us!”

“They’re probably going to kill us,” Mulder said calmly, still not looking up.

“Not if we turn him in,” Bill said. “That’s all they want.”

“They can’t have him,” Mulder said. He spun around in his chair, eyes locked on Bill’s. His face blank, only the slight tension in his jaw betraying his frustration.

“You saw it yourself, Mulder! You’d risk all of our lives to save an alien? You’re a bigger asshole then I ever imagined.”

“Be quiet!” Margaret said, putting down the knife she’d been using to chop potatoes as if she knew it was better for it to not be in her hands. “All of you. There’s no point in attacking each other!”

For a moment, they were all quiet, summarily scolded by the matriarch of the household, yet the tension between them all lingered on the cold, damp air.

“The soldiers didn’t come here looking for Jake,” Mulder said finally. He kept his eyes lowered, avoiding Margaret’s censure. “They came for William.”

Scully felt herself gasp. “What?” she asked on a shaky exhale.

“What are you talking about? They told us yesterday they came for an alien that escaped from one of the spaceships,” Bill demanded.

Mulder turned his back to Bill, and looked at Scully. “They think Jake is William. I don’t understand why, but they do,” he said, his voice low. He wasn’t hiding what he was saying from the others, but his tone was clear: He only cared that Scully understood him.

“How does he know that?” Bill asked no one in particular, extending his arms out, confused.

Mulder kept his gaze on Scully, raising his eyebrows and nodding, giving her silent permission to tell her brother about his recently rejuvenated and sporadically improving skill set.

After a deep breath and exhale, she said “He read their minds.”

Bill laughed. “Right,” he said.

“Dana,” her mother said, stepping close, touching the top of Scully’s hand resting on the counter top. “Just tell him. Secrets aren’t helping anyone.”

Scully had told her mother about William’s powers, and everything that had happened since they’d been reunited with him, but she’d been hesitant to tell her brother. She was tired of the conflict that arose every time she talked to him, and of Bill doubting her. But their mother was right. He needed to know. She looked to Mulder, asking silently if it was ok with him. He closed his eyes, and nodded nearly imperceptibly.

“There’s more. What Jake can do, at least to some degree, William can do it too,” she said.

“Dana, you’re nuts. Jake is an alien. No human can do what I saw him do.”

“It doesn’t matter if you believe me or not, but it’s true,” Scully said. “Truth is Bill, we’re all alien. Mulder, William, maybe Jake… their alien pieces just work better than the rest of us.”

“What in God’s green earth does that mean, Dana?” Bill asked, looking to the ceiling, perhaps asking God directly.

“It means,” Mulder started slowly, remaining seated, his eyes still closed, “if you do anything to hurt that boy, it’s going to take more than God to protect you.”

For the first time since she’d met him, Scully shuddered at something that came out of Mulder’s mouth, and at what she feared he’d do if forced to make good on his promise. What he’d do if forced to choose between her brother, and the boy that looked like their son. Perhaps Mulder, not Jake, was the dangerous animal.

^^^^^^^

Scully pulled Mulder by the wrist into their bedroom and closed the door quickly. He knew as soon as he’d said the words he shouldn’t have, but he’d grown tired of tiptoeing around the truth. He could read minds (intermittently), and the thoughts he’d read from Scully’s big brother Bill were blocking his ability to think rationally, creating a dam in his brain that was going to spill over through his body in one form or another if he didn’t address it.

“Mulder, you’re scaring me,” Scully said, snapping his wandering mind back to her.

He took a deep breath, controlling his exhale. “You don’t have to worry, Scully,” Mulder said, and he meant it. He’d also meant the words he’d said to Bill when he’d said them. Now, only a few minutes later, he’d calmed down. He did not believe Bill was a monster. Mulder had caught more than a few of his thoughts since they’d arrived. It killed him to admit it, but the man was decent. He loved his family, loved his sister, and truly wanted to protect them all. He was also afraid of failing them more than anything, and desperately hated feeling out of control. Unfortunately, like so many of the people Mulder had crossed paths with along the way during his work on the X-Files, he was also missing, or intentionally blinding himself from knowing, key pieces of information that would hopefully take his assholery down a notch or two. Bill believed three basic things, only one of which was true:

He believed the Super Soldiers from Camp David were humans trying to help other humans by eliminating any remaining alien threat. Not true.

He believed that aliens had destroyed the world. True enough.

He believed Jake was an alien.

For now, Scully believed that last one as well in so much as she believed Jake was a cloned version of their son. Mulder couldn’t change Bill’s mind, but he could let her in on what he’d only suspected until he’d seen Jake do what he’d done, and heard from the Super Soldiers’ minds that they believed the humans in the cabin had been hiding William – though they’d called him Quetzalcoatl -- from them. He’d finally decided there was only one possibility about Jake’s origin. And it was insane. So insane, he was having difficulty articulating it in his own mind.

“Scully, I have to tell you something. I think it will make you understand why I said that,” Mulder said. “I think you should sit down.”

“Ok, now you’re scaring me more,” she said.

Mulder smiled. He couldn’t help himself. She did not look as amused. Holding her hand, he led her to the bed, and they sat down, slightly facing each other. He did not let go of her hand, but looked her in the eye. “Scully, the Super Soldiers believe Jake is William.”

“Yeah, you said that already.”

“Why would they think that?”

“Because they know William killed the aliens on the ships, that he was physically on a ship to do it, and because Jake looks just like him,” she said, brow creased. “That seems obvious.”

“I agree with that,” he said.

“Ok… then what are you trying to tell me?”

“Why does Jake look like William?”

“Because he’s a clone?” she said. When he didn’t answer she creased her brow, let out a frustrated breath. “Enough of this old game of stringing out the case facts, Mulder. I don’t have the energy for it. Just tell me what you want me to figure out, because I have no idea what you want me to say.”

Mulder sighed. The truth was, he wasn’t really sure what he was trying to tell her either. He was working it out in his mind as he spoke. There was only one thing he knew for sure. “Scully, I don’t think Jake is a clone.”

“And I don’t think he’s a shape shifter,” she said.

“Neither do I.”

“Hybrid? Like Joy?”

Mulder shook his head back and forth slowly.

“What then?” she asked.

“Honestly, I’m not sure. Something else. Something to do with the Hybrid program Tom Davis was involved with maybe. Involving the other twelve kids. Something similar, but something completely new.”

They were quiet. Mulder felt like he was close to understanding, but it was like having a word stuck on the tip of the tongue. Close to understanding might as well be worlds apart from it.

“He bled red,” she said, looking at her fingers as they worried a loose thread on her sweater.

“What?”

“Jake… that first day in the shed. He scraped his arm, and I saw blood. It was red, not green. Some of it got on the shelf. A few seconds later, his arm was just a little red. The cut was gone. Healed.”

Mulder tried to absorb this new detail. The only creatures he knew that healed quickly from injuries, but who also bled red were alien-human hybrids like Tom Davis and the twelve children he’d rescued, Super Soldiers, Alien Replicants, and of course, the most advanced hybrid the world has known. William. Clones… they always bled green, more a gas than blood, toxic to humans, just like the Grays themselves.

Before Mulder could think about it any longer, he heard the thudding of footsteps running up the stairs the from the basement moments before he felt an intense burst of pain in his temples.

^^^^^^^

Mulder’s grip tightened on Scully’s hand, sending pain radiating up her arm. She had no time to react before he released her, putting all ten of his fingers to his temples, closing his eyes like a vice.

“Mulder, what’s wrong?” she asked, recognizing this response as some kind of telepathic echo. Before he could answer her, she heard frantic thumping as someone ran up the stairs from the basement. Mulder relaxed, the pain seeming to dissipate. “Are you ok?”

“Yeah, I’m fine. Let’s go,” he said, standing up.

Matthew burst through the doorway into the kitchen as Mulder and Scully re-entered the room. He took a few heavy breaths, and said, “Jake’s gone. Will went to look for him. He wanted me to tell you.”

Scully was trying to process what Matthew had just told them. Mulder jumped up. He ran to grab his coat. “He’s not far. I’ll get him! I’ll get them both.”

“Mulder, wait!” she said, but the only response she got was the tarp flapping in the wind as Mulder leapt off the front porch into the fading winter evening light. Grimly, Scully thought, at least he’s wearing his coat.

^^^^^^^

Mulder felt bad leaving Scully in a panic, but he knew there was no time if he wanted to catch up to William before he made it to the main road. William was a genius at reading minds, and although he would know when danger was approaching under ideal circumstances, from the glimpses Mulder could hear, his son’s mind was chaotic and stressed. He rarely was able to read anything from William, so the very fact that he could, told Mulder he needed to run.

As he ran he wished he hadn’t sensibly grabbed his coat. Within the warm, down-lined garment, his clothes were soaked with sweat. He ran through the thick snow packed forest, his long legs helping him push through the difficult terrain. Telepathy wasn’t necessary to figure out which way William had gone. He thanked the stars his son was still growing, slowed by the deep snow pack in the thickest part of the forest. Mulder came to the edge of the woods, his last few steps echoing loudly, crunching through the mostly snow dampened quiet. A few yards away near the tree line, William stood stick straight, looking out to the road which was buffered by a shallow ditch.

Mulder stopped. “Will?”

William’s shoulders sagged, but he kept his back to Mulder. “I just went to the bathroom. Couldn’t catch him in time,” he said. “And he’s so good at hiding his thoughts.”

Mulder took a few steps closer. “Will, you must be freezing. Come back to the cabin with me.”

William shook his head. “He’s out here somewhere. I just need to listen. I didn’t hear him leave. He didn’t want me to hear him. This is my fault,” William said. Hearing his son judge himself so harshly over something that was not within his power to control gave Mulder chest pains. William had saved what was left of the human race only a few weeks earlier, yet he still believed it was his responsibility to do more. His special abilities had saddled him with unimaginable knowledge of not only what, but why things happened, and this in turn burdened him in a way Mulder could only guess at. People used to say Mulder had a Christ complex. His son had inherited that bit of narcissism from him as well. Was it really narcissism if you truly are the center of a global conspiracy?

Mulder reached out and touched William’s shoulder. “Will, it’s not your fault.” Mulder knew William would not believe him, but it was his job as his father to try. The air was warm despite the snow that seemed to always be falling since they’d crossed into Virginia a few days earlier. Perhaps a normal father would insist his son come back with him to at least get a coat, but instead of trying to be normal, something he’d never been particularly good at, Mulder would do what was needed to save the other boy, the boy that looked like his son. He felt an indescribable pull to do so. Jake was a stranger to them. He may look like William, but he wasn’t William, yet there was something drawing him to the boy he couldn’t explain. He knew Scully had felt the same way, and now it was clear William did too.

William wiped a tear from his cheek, looking away to hide his emotion. He was like his mother in so many ways, but must have gotten his obsessiveness all from him. There was no way William was letting this go. And Mulder didn’t want him to.

“Let’s get him back,” Mulder said. “But put this on,” he added, removing his coat and handing it to William. Mulder squeezed his son’s shoulder. “At least I can tell your mother I did one sensible thing today.”

^^^^^^^

He wish he’d remembered to take the, what was it called again? The jacket. Before he’d left the ship, he had never known what it had meant to be cold. The ships were always warm, humid, and thick. If there was anything he missed at all about where he’d come from, it was the warmth.

The cabin had been cool, but warm enough. He’d wanted to stay there more than anything. He’d finally found what he’d always been searching for in his mind. Family. That was the English word.

When he’d first gotten out of the smoldering spaceship, and seen the earth sky for the first time in his life, he’d had no idea where he should go. But then there had been voices. He’d seen images. They were the same images and voices from his dreams. They were the images and voices he’d seen in the ship’s computers when he’d break in to files he knew he’d get in trouble for knowing about. He knew he had to run or they’d catch him. So he ran towards the little red shed. But now he knew he had to run away from it. It was the only way to save them all. They were coming back for him, and even though he knew they were bad men, he hated what he’d had to do to them.

Jake’s mind whirred, unable to focus, unable to listen. He felt something cold and wet falling down his cheek. What was the English word for this? He knew why it was happening. He knew he’d never be able to see his parents again. Or his brother. He needed to get as far away as he could. He wiped at his cheek, resolved himself to keep running, and then there was a sharp pain in his neck. He looked around and saw nothing with his eyes but a small flicker of light reflecting in the distance. As the sky around him dimmed into darkness, his mind saw the man who had shot him, saw his eye through the long scope of his rifle. And then Jake’s mind was quiet.

^^^^^^^

Mulder and William walked at a fast clip through the woods that paralleled the road. The snow was deep, but uneven as it covered piles of dead leaves, rotting logs, and other natural debris, making it difficult to see if they were following foot prints, animal prints, or just wishful thinking.

“Are you sure he went this way?” Mulder asked.

“No,” William admitted. His son was the most gifted human telepath in the world as far as Mulder was aware, so for him to be unable to find someone who should be relatively nearby was scaring him a lot. “He’s scared too.”

“Scared? Of us?”

William shook his head. “Of the soldiers. And that guy. Dana’s brother. I guess he’s my uncle, right?”

“Yes, but you’re not named after him, in case you’re wondering,” Mulder said absently.

William crinkled one eyebrow, not understanding.

“Never mind,” Mulder added.

William continued, “Jake heard Uncle Bill’s mind. He knows what he wanted to do. What he did,” William said.

“What did he do?” Mulder asked.

“Called them. Last night. That’s why the bad guys came back,” William said.

“What?” Mulder asked, stopping them both. Mulder knew Bill wanted to turn Jake over, but he hadn’t realized Bill had actually taken action to make it happen. Damn his inept telepathic ability. Mulder had heard scattered bits from Bill’s mind, but hadn’t picked up on that at all. He’d been preoccupied with finding an escape plan, he hadn’t allowed for the danger already with them.

William added, “He doesn’t know what they are. He hasn’t seen what we’ve seen. He thought he was protecting us.” Despite his anger over what Bill had done, William tried to let his misinformed uncle off the hook a bit. “He’s scared too.”

Mulder smiled. His face felt white hot and he tried to tamp down the rage that was filling him, knowing William would pick it off of him. Bill had nearly gotten all of them killed. While it was good William wanted him to know Bill wasn’t evil, it was more reassuring to know William seemed to have gotten the Scully genes for compassion even if Uncle Bill hadn’t. Mulder inhaled deeply, and his heart rate slowed a beat or two.

“You and Jake talked a lot, then? His English must be improving,” Mulder said, walking again. He ducked under a low branch high enough for William to simply walk under.

William shrugged. “He told me about being on the ship.”

“Yeah? What did he tell you?”

William nodded, his voice softened. “They did really bad things to him. He lived there his whole life. Maybe he was born there? I don’t know.”

“Do you know why he came here?”

William nodded. “He doesn’t think you’ll believe him.”

They heard a mechanical growl just before a light flashed towards them from the road. “Shhh… crouch down,” Mulder said. A military truck sped from the distance towards them along the road which was about twenty feet from where they hid in the brush. The winter trees were thick, but mostly bare except for modest fresh snow covering their branches making Mulder and William more exposed than they would have been in summer, when the forest would be green with thick leafy foliage. The truck kept a steady pace as it passed by them.

“They don’t know we’re here,” William said. “They’re not like Aiden.” William referenced their telepathic Alien Replicant friend from Canyon City to clarify the soldiers were Level C Hybrids, merely tools created in the hybrid program. They had super human strength and regenerative abilities, but they were not imbued with the powers of the hybrids that came later, like Aiden and the other children. They were drones with the same flaws the aliens themselves had. They could be killed with iron, and couldn’t read minds. And in general, they were colossal douche bags.

William spoke again, disturbing the eerie quiet of the naturally muted, snow packed woods. “Jake is my brother.”

“You guys have definitely gotten close in a short amount of time,” Mulder said. “It’s good you’ve bonded. Sounds like he didn’t have many friends growing up.”

“No, Dad,” William said. “He’s my actual brother.”

Mulder’s tongue was instantly dry, and he found it difficult to find enough saliva to speak. “Will, I don’t think that’s possible,” he said, but in his mind something had clicked. That had been the word on the tip of his tongue. Twins. Jake and William were twins. He couldn’t explain it, but he knew it was true. This was the craziest thing Mulder had ever believed. This was bigger than learning aliens planned to take over the planet, aided by a conspiracy of humans. This was the biggest X-File of his life. He had another son. He had twin sons. Despite that, what had actually hit him hardest was that William had called him “dad.” It wasn’t the first time he’d said it. William had called him dad as he’d been lifted aboard the alien ship just before he stopped colonization. But this was the first time since then, and somehow it solidified what William had just told him. Before his son probed much further inside his mind, Mulder finally rasped, “How do you know?”

William nodded. “Jake told me. He was looking for us. After he escaped, he heard Grandma Maggie nearby. And then he heard us coming. He called me to the shed. You know it’s true, too.”

Mulder tensed the right side of his face, squinted his eye.

“Sorry,” William added, apologizing for reading his mind.

“It’s ok. Why didn’t he tell us? Can he talk at all?”

William lifted his shoulders. “His English isn’t perfect yet. And he’s never had a family. He was worried you’d send him away. Back to them.”

Jake spoke the language of the Grays, which from the little Mulder knew of their race was largely a telepathically spoken language. Perhaps there was one person out there more skilled at telepathy than William after all. “It makes sense why he’s so hard for you to hear in your mind. If he’s as good at reading thoughts as you are, you’ve met your match. Other telepaths are always harder to read. Unless he wants you to hear him, you might not ever be able to,” Mulder said.

They walked a few more steps, the weight of what he’d just learned making it physically difficult for Mulder’s legs to move forward.

“Why’d you call him Jake anyway,” Mulder asked.

“I just liked the name. He reminded me of a character in a movie I saw once,” Jake said. Before Mulder could ask which movie, William added, “We have to find him.”

“We will, son. I promise,” Mulder said, knowing William would be able to see through his lack of complete confidence. He knew two things for sure. He wouldn’t give up on either of his sons until he took his last breath. And Bill Scully would have a black eye before night fell.

^^^^^^^

“So, Will is an alien mutant and he took down all the alien ships about to destroy the planet with the power of his mind?” Matthew asked, breaking the dead silence of the room.

Scully nodded. “In a nutshell…” That wasn’t quite right, but a close enough summary from a teenager, and a better one than most adults could offer.

“Cool,” Matthew said.

She shocked herself, but Scully laughed out loud, releasing tension that felt like part of her skin. Her nephew had barely spoken since the three of them had arrived at the cabin, but he seemed to be a thoughtful young man. It was refreshing to hear such acceptance. The adults could learn a thing or two from him.

After Mulder ran to catch William, Scully told the rest of the family the entire story this time, trying not to leave any of it out. She told them of Mulder’s visions. How they’d been chasing after his dreams of William for nearly a decade until finally finding him at his adopted parents’ house the day after the Plague started. She told them of everything that happened in Canyon City with William’s adopted father, Rob Van de Kamp, and the colony of Alien Replicants, getting shot by a crazy man who believed William was the alien Messiah, the reincarnation of the Mayan and Aztec god, Quetzalcoatl, come to usher in peaceful human-alien coexistence. She told them of how she’d died from an infection after being shot in the arm by the crazy man, and of being revived by a friendly alien immune to the iron allergy named Jeremiah Smith who taught William how to focus his mind in order to perform his mission, and how a hybrid named Tom Davis had defected from the Project to save eleven hybrid children, and help her create a super serum that William would eventually use to kill the aliens, and save what was left of mankind. She told them everything, except the part about Jake bleeding red. She knew that meant something important, but wasn’t sure what yet.

“Well, he also had Dana’s serum,” Tara added proudly. Scully couldn’t help smile at her sister-in-law. She sometimes gave her little credit for having a mind of her own, and for her perpetual, dizzying optimism, but like her own mother, Scully suspected Tara knew how to pick her battles with a strong military husband intent on controlling the situation.

“A synthesized version of it that Will replicated once he was on board the ship,” Scully clarified.

“Well, without you, the aliens would have won, Dana,” Tara said. “So thank you. For all our lives.”

Scully looked down, unable to accept the compliment, but not wanting to insult Tara’s kindness. She had never thought of herself as a hero in this tale. Not once. She had felt like a failure more times than she could count for her inability to shield her son from the burden he had to face. From her failure to let him have a normal childhood. Logically she knew she was not entirely at fault here. But a mother’s guilt at not being able to protect her child knew no boundaries.

She looked up and saw her brother. He slouched in the chair furthest away. His head was cradled in his hand, elbow bent and leaning against the armrest. Finally, he looked at her. “Dana…”

She braced herself for yet another smug rebuke. It had become a reflex. “I don’t… I just don’t,” he tried again. He exhaled, and slumped deeper into the chair.

Scully shook her head. She didn’t have the energy to ask him what he wanted to say to her. He hadn’t spoken at all while she’d told her tale. At least instead of dismissing what she’d said outright, he seemed to be thinking about it. Perhaps there was hope for her brother, and her relationship with him after all. She smiled to herself. Then a sound interrupted her thoughts. It was a sound she hadn’t heard in a long time, even before the apocalypse had begun due to her and Mulder’s isolation from the world and technology.

Somewhere, a cell phone was ringing.

It took them all a while to register what was happening. It was a basic telephone ring tone, not a song or customized sound effect. Simple and old school. The ringing ended, interrupted in mid-tone. “Hello?” Scully heard her mother’s voice ask. Scully leapt up. They shouldn’t answer. She should have remembered to turn it off and remove the battery once they’d encountered the Super Soldiers. Bill’s phone had been charging in the corner of the room the entire time. It had been a remnant from the old world he’d been reluctant to let go. Before she could grab the phone from her mother’s hands, and smash it against the floor, her mother calmly added, “Dana? It’s for you.”

^^^^^^^

Mulder’s teeth chattered. He’d worn boots, but he’d forgotten a hat and gloves, given his coat to William, and now the temperature was dropping rapidly as the light faded from the sky, dragging them down from evening into early nightfall. They hadn’t brought a flashlight either, so he and William couldn’t stay out much longer without risking getting lost in the woods in the dark.

“We can’t stop looking,” William said, anticipating what Mulder was about to say. “Just need him to know we won’t hurt him. Just need him to hear me.”

“Will, we have to go back. Just warm up a little and then maybe get the snowmobile. Drive up the road a bit and shine the headlights.”

William shook his head, and then his face contorted into uneven shapes. He lifted his hands to his ears, and shrieked in obvious pain. He doubled over like he was about to vomit.

“What’s wrong?” Mulder felt panic hit him instantly. It constantly took him aback at how easily any pain his son experienced wounded him as well, but he didn’t know how to help, and couldn’t understand what was happening. The only thing he could think to do was pick William up and run him back to his mother. Scully would know what to do to help their son.

“No, I’m ok,” William gasped, breathing heavily, but standing straighter, his eyes still tightly closed. “Just caught me off guard.”

“What was that? Are you ok?”

“Yeah. Its Jake… they got him. The bad guys. They took him.”

Mulder understood instantly, telling himself to worry later about how the Super Soldiers were able to capture the boy with deadly Jedi powers. “You tell him to hold on. We’re coming for him. Let’s get back to the cabin.”

William nodded, and they both sprinted back home.

^^^^^^^

Mulder burst through the cabin’s front door with two primary thoughts. He scanned the room for Bill, found him sitting on a stool at the kitchen island, and took a few long strides over to him. Without hesitating for a second, he punched Bill in the jaw before he could even fully stand up. So, maybe Bill wouldn’t have a black eye, but it would be a blessing to them all if Mulder's bad aim made it harder for the man to speak for a few hours.

“Mulder, stop!” Scully said, jumping up to hold him back. He felt bad about hurting her by hurting her brother, but not bad enough to have stopped it from happening. This was years in the making. Before Bill could retaliate, Mulder grabbed Scully’s wrist and pulled her down the hallway into their bedroom. He slammed the door shut.

“Scully, just listen, ok” he said. “He deserved it, and you know it. I’m done. I’m not going to hit him again. You can lecture me about it later.”

“*You* may not hit him again, but he’s probably going to hit you! This won’t solve anything, Mulder!” she said. He put his hands on her shoulders, but she pushed them off.

He backed away, putting his hands on his hips, breathing heavily. “Fine, just call it getting even for shooting me then. I don’t care about Bill, Scully. Those Camp David Super Soldier assholes have Jake. Will heard them take him, and we need to get him back. I’m trying to forget for a moment that this is all your brother’s fault.”

“Bill’s fault?” Scully asked.

Mulder nodded. “Jake read his mind. Bill called them, Scully. He called the Super Soldiers’ number so they’d come and take Jake.”

“Are you sure?” She asked slowly.

Mulder nodded. “Jake ran away to protect us. He’s worried by staying he put us all in danger, so now they have him. Your brother tried to hand him over.”

“Are they hurting him?” she asked softly, her voice barely rising above the background noise of the wind howling against the cabin outside. She seemed to have forgotten about Bill as soon as Mulder had mentioned Jake’s abduction.

“If they haven’t already, it’s a safe bet they're probably going to try. They think he is William. And they know what William did. I’m guessing they’re pissed.”

Silence spread between them. They stood a few feet apart, each breathing heavily from adrenaline, looking in each other’s eyes. Mulder tried to read her mind, but he couldn't focus.

“What aren’t you telling me, Mulder?”

Mulder took in a deep breath, preparing to tell her about his suspicion. She wouldn’t believe him. He had only his intuition and William’s belief for evidence. Scully was much more willing to believe the incredible these days, but she still needed facts to support wild ideas. And this was as wild as they came.

“Scully…” he started. She stood waiting for him to finish, but before he could speak again, a sound invaded his mind. No, not his mind this time, his ears. He heard a low, fast-paced THWAP THAWP coming from somewhere outside the cabin, above them, growing with intensity. “Is that a helicopter?”

She grimaced. “Oh yeah… that’s my ride.”

^^^^^^^

The deafening sound of rotary blades cutting through the air at high speed descended from the sky, seemingly landing on the cabin. Branches from nearby trees struck the exterior walls and windows, and a bright light shown on the snow-covered front driveway. Deftly navigating into the clearing between the cabin and the woods, a small black MH-6 helicopter, known as the “Little Bird”, landed barely missing the out of commission, bright yellow Nissan XTerra.

Mulder watched three soldiers leap out, and jog to the cabin's front porch. With the front door missing, they banged on the door frame with authority. Polite, considering they could have just walked inside without any barrier. Unlike earlier in the day, this time the visitors were expected and at least tentatively welcomed. Mulder had almost no idea what was going on. Scully only had time to tell him that while he and William had been searching for Jake, she’d received a phone call, and to trust her. He trusted her, but Mulder was on edge. He was armed, and so was she. She stepped in front of Bill, who had taken a step towards the door. Lucky for him, her brother decided it was best to follow Mulder, and let Scully take the lead. Each man held back, waiting for her to let him know if she needed him.

Scully held her Glock, raised and ready with her right hand, and waved the soldiers in with her other. Mulder’s weapon was raised as well, mirroring Scully.

"Dr. Scully?" The man in the lead asked.

Scully nodded. "Come in, slowly, hands up please." She stood aside as two soldiers complied with her instructions and stepped inside. They wore their battle dress uniforms like the Super Soldiers had, and their weapons were in harnesses against their chest pointing downward. "Stop there. Don't move." She kept her gun pointed on them. To their credit, they did not seem offended. "I need to do a quick test. Take your gloves off and hold out your hand." The soldiers complied with her orders without saying a word. Scully reached into her pocket and withdrew a small vial filled with amber fluid. She removed the cork cover with her thumb, and poured one drop into each of the soldier's hands. "Now, squeeze your hand tight, and reopen it." Again, they complied. Scully peered into the spot where she'd dripped the amplified Mesabi Ferrum serum she and Tom Davis had engineered. No reaction. They were human, or at the very least, not a Level C hybrid. Not a Super Soldier. "I'll need to do the other one too," she said. She repeated the process on the third soldier who had remained outside. Satisfied with the result, she holstered her weapon, and exhaled. She’d test the pilot before they took off, but it wasn’t likely he would be the sole Super Soldier of the group.

"Dr. Scully, our orders are to take you back with us to meet our commanding officer," the taller soldier said. From his position, Mulder noticed the nametag on the soldier’s uniform said "Madison."

"I know. We spoke on the phone," she said. “There’s no way that’s happening though. I told your commander that. You could have saved yourself the trip.”

“Dr. Scully, the General would have come here himself, but all of the equipment is back at the facility. He needs your expertise.”

“I’m going to need a little more evidence that you are who you say you are,” Scully said.

“You already used your serum on us. You know we’re not Super Soldiers,” Madison said. “What will convince you?”

“Scully, what’s going on?” Mulder asked.

Madison turned his head to Mulder, and smiled, making the man appear human for the first time. "Are you Fox Mulder?”

“I can’t go anywhere these days,” Mulder said.

Madison laughed. “General Moffitt has also asked that we ensure you come with us as well," Madison said. He was a Lt. Colonel if Mulder remembered his Army insignia correctly.

“Mulder’s staying here,” Scully said. “We both are.”

“Dr. Scully, the General wants to interview Mr. Mulder, and start some physiology comparisons.”

“That’s not happening,” Scully said.

“And where exactly are we going?” Mulder asked.

Confused, Madison said, “I’m sorry, I thought Dr. Scully would have filled you in.”

“I haven’t had a chance to explain anything to Mulder yet. Mulder, these men are from Raven Rock, which is…”

“Raven Rock the ultra-Top Secret military installation a few miles north of here, known in some circles as the backup pentagon and believed to be the headquarters for some of the most advanced weaponry in the US Military’s arsenal? That Raven Rock?” Mulder asked.

“You know it then?” Madison asked.

“More or less,” Mulder answered.

“Mulder, according to the man I spoke with on the phone while you and William were gone, it’s also the headquarters of the Counter-Project. The project fighting against the aliens and the Super Soldiers. They say they have a weapon that can defeat them for good. That’s what they say, anyway.”

“It’s certainly true. With the help of Dr. Scully’s serum, of course,” Madison added. “I’m sorry, Dr. Scully, but did you say William was here?”

“Yes, he is now. He and Mulder were out looking for Jake, the boy I told your commander about on the phone. I said he was lost in the woods.”

Madison’s face contorted into more confusion, as William popped up from around the corner, coming up from the basement. Scully had told him to stay downstairs, but that was a pointless request. He had been listening to everything happening upstairs, and his concern for Jake would make it difficult to stay back.

Scully sighed upon seeing William reveal himself. She didn’t censure him, knowing as well as Mulder that their son had enough stubbornness to put each of them to shame. His proximity to the men did confirm what her serum had proven upon their arrival as well. They were not Super Soldiers or else they’d have burst into flames by now.

Madison gawked at William in a similar way that the Canyon City hybrids had when they’d first seen the boy from the prophesies, although Madison tried to hide his reverence. Madison cleared his throat. “Dr. Scully, you told General Moffitt that the Super Soldiers at Camp David had tried to take your sons earlier in the day, and that one of them ran away.”

“No, the first part is true, but I said Jake had run away, not William.”

“Right,” said Madison. “And the other was looking for him.”

“Wait, did you say ‘sons’ as in plural?” Scully asked, equally as confused as Madison now. “I never said that.”

“Um, Scully, remember that thing you said I wasn’t telling you?” Mulder finally said. If Mulder was unsure about Jake before, all of that was gone. He couldn’t clearly hear Madison’s thoughts, but the man clearly believed Jake and William were brothers.

“I’m sorry, but my orders are you bring you and Mr. Mulder back to base immediately, so to speed this along I just want to clarify the situation. Your son William, the boy who used your serum to destroy the alien ships and the Grays onboard is standing right there, while your other son, Jake as you call him, ran away to hide from the Super Soldiers at Camp David? Is that right?”

Mulder spoke before Scully could tell Madison he still had it wrong. “Yes, that’s right, except now we know that they captured Jake while William and I were searching for him.”

Scully’s jaw dropped, as she turned her head towards Mulder. He clenched his jaw and tilted his head. This was not how he wanted her to find out.

Without understanding the subtext of what had just happened, Madison continued. “Ok, then that changes everything. We need to leave right now. With both of you. These men will stay here to protect your son. We’ll send more as well. I cannot accept no for an answer.”

Of course, these men would be able to take them against their will. They had more than enough firepower to do so, especially without the vulnerability to iron that the Super Soldiers had. Scully did not trust these men even a little bit, but they were out of options, and for now these soldiers were the lesser of evils.

“I’ll watch him too, Dana,” Bill said. She’d forgotten Bill was in the room, and his voice sounded smaller somehow, like the brother she remembered from her childhood. “Please, let me.”

“We can bring him with us,” Mulder said.

“There is no way I’m letting Will anywhere near a military base. If they wanted to keep him, there’s nothing we could do about it, Mulder,” Scully said. “I can’t put him through that. I can’t take that chance.”

“If anything happens to him,” Mulder said, looking at Bill.

“I know,” the man said simply. “It won’t.”

^^^^^^^

The chopper’s rhythmic whir made it easier for her mind to shut out the conflicting emotions and thoughts swirling in her brain. The past twenty minutes or so were a blur of meaningless time. Scully diagnosed herself with mild shock. Mulder sat beside her in the tiny helicopter as they flew the short distance to Raven Rock. She absently noticed him glancing at her with a worried face, no doubt he was trying to listen to her thoughts despite their rule. The joke was on him though, because her thoughts were incoherent to her, let alone to an unskilled telepath like Mulder. He crinkled his left eyebrow. She was glad he heard her think that, even though it disproved her point. Something else she hoped he’d hear, she was pissed. At him, herself and with the universe. And confused. Confused was the emotion she felt most.

Somehow in the past half an hour she’d learned she was the mother of two sons. Even as she allowed herself to think those words, she couldn’t comprehend them. This was by far the craziest thing that had ever happened to her, and that was saying a lot. How was this possible? Women don’t have twins and not remember it. Not when they’re conscious during the delivery, and she most certainly remembered giving birth to William. It had been a harrowing experience, and not just because it was her first time having a baby. Alien Replicants who she believed were there to steal William from her had encircled the remote place she’d been brought to escape them. She’d never lost consciousness. Not until she’d been choppered to a nearby hospital after Mulder had arrived.

“Scully?” she jumped as she heard Mulder’s voice boom inside the headset she was wearing to hear the commands of the pilot and Lt. Colonel Madison. “Sorry,” he added softly.

She wasn’t sure if he meant sorry for being loud, startling her, or for withholding what he knew about Jake.

“All of the above,” he said. He turned his head and looked out the chopper’s window, allowing her time to process it all alone. He knew her well. Her anger softened a little.

^^^^^^^

Raven Rock Military Facility

10:28 p.m.

Mulder yawned more broadly then he thought his jaw was capable of stretching. After initial introductions (which were truly one-sided as everyone at the facility knew who each of them was), they met with a man named Jefferson Jackson Moffitt who said he was in charge of the compound. He appeared to be a three star General approximately Mulder’s age or slightly older, but he wore a white lab coat over his fatigues, and introduced himself as the Chief Scientist at Raven Rock and of “The Project”. The project he meant was the Counter Project, not to be confused with other “The Projects” out there. He was the man Scully had spoken to on Bill’s phone. Another scientist following them around named Roberts called Moffitt “the man in charge.” Mulder had never heard of anyone named Moffitt involved in the alien conspiracy. It’s possible that back in the X-File’s heyday he was lower on the totem pole. The man seemed cordial enough, almost the stereotypical absent minded professor type, but with a slightly grown out crew cut and a semi-automatic Glock strapped to his thigh. Apparently since the world had ended they’d mostly dispensed with formalities in the compound. It seemed that every one of every rank referred to Moffitt simply as “JJ.” As he ushered them through the maze of non-descript hallways, Moffitt would point to this door or that corridor and explain to where it led. Cafeteria here. Gym there. Advanced weapons testing range over yonder. Mulder was fairly certain they no longer gave a rat’s ass about Top Secret clearance.

“You’d be right, Mr. Mulder,” JJ said.

“Did I say that out loud?” Mulder asked, stopping in the hallway, holding them up.

JJ turned around with a grin on his face. “No.”

“So the head of The Project is also telepathic?” Mulder said.

“Yes. To be more specific, I’m a Level A Hybrid as well. I trust you know what that means?”

Mulder merely nodded, and allowed JJ to resume his tour as he led them to the main laboratory. Another two minutes in, after learning about the location of the break rooms and officers lounge, Mulder was about to interrupt when Scully saved him the trouble.

“I’m sorry General Moffitt,” she said.

He held up a hand. “JJ, please.”

“JJ,” she continued, saying his name pointedly, her jaw tight. “This is all very interesting, but you do understand the gravity of the situation, right? A little boy… our son – a son I just learned exists -- is in danger, and you said you could help us. And I need to return to my son at the cabin ASAP.”

“Yes, of course, we’re just all so excited to have you both here,” JJ said. “William will be more than safe, of course. We’ve been monitoring the movements at Camp David from the skies in the skies. I’d be alerted immediately if anything was wrong. And the men I’ve assigned to stand guard at your cabin would all die to protect him.”

Mulder saw Scully’s body tense. It would seem like the right thing to say, but Mulder understood how she felt. William had been the object of worship by hybrids since his birth. They both just wanted him to be free to be a normal eleven year old boy. They both wanted to live in a world where nobody had to give their life for anything. They just wanted to be left alone.

“How exactly is it that you knew how to contact me, and why now?” Scully asked as JJ swiped a key card through a secure door lock. He pushed the door open, and Mulder noticed the label on the wall next to the card reader said ‘Top Secret/SCI Clearance Only. Special Biological Weapons Facility’. They stepped inside to a vast laboratory, with several stations scattered about the room, some with various liquids in vast arrays of glass tubing.

“A few days ago, the chip in your neck alerted us you were nearby,” JJ said. “We did a sweep of nearby technology and finally came across the cell phone number we called. A bit of a shot in the dark. Your brother’s phone, I understand?”

Scully lifted her hand to the back of her neck, unsettled by the idea she’d been trackable all this time she and Mulder had been in hiding. They’d thought of it occasionally throughout the years, but removing it was not an option. The last time she’d done that, she nearly had died of cancer. So, they tried to ignore it. When nobody came looking for them in ten years, she assumed its tracking features no longer worked, or if they did, those who cared to find her no longer had access to them.

“Yes, well, frankly Dr. Scully, once you broke Mr. Mulder out of prison and stayed quiet, nobody really cared to track you down, on either side of this fight,” JJ said.

Mulder and Scully had been told this before, by a Super Soldier who’d tried to kill them on their way to Canyon City. It hurt to be reminded of it. All that time wasted.

“Oh, rest assured if either of you had made your faces public, that disinterest would have changed, so you were right to hide. It was really our mistake for not realizing how important you were. It wasn’t until the experiments on the children at Mt. Weather yielded interesting results about your son’s powers that anyone was interested in finding him, and not until he destroyed the mother ships with your compound did we realize how important you were.”

“How do you know I had anything to do with that?”

“We’ve been monitoring the alien ships for some time, and monitoring the other groups within the government helping them. Through a network of Signals and Human Intelligence, uh spies, we had on board those ships, we were able to glean that information from a man you knew named Tom Davis.”

“Tom Davis… is he alive?” Scully asked, her face brightening. She and Tom had developed the final compound version of Scully’s Mesabi Ferrum serum together. Tom had traveled with Mulder and William to the ship, but when it crashed, William and Mulder hadn’t found any sign of Tom.

“I’m afraid not, but before the crash, we found out what we needed to know,” JJ said. “We began paying attention to your movements, hoping you could help us with the lingering loyalist hybrid problem. But we didn’t have the manpower to go out and get you at that distance. Besides, you were coming towards us anyway.”

“Loyalist hybrid problem?” Mulder asked.

“The Super Soldiers, or more precisely, the level C hybrids at Camp David, among others out there,” JJ said. “There are several groups scattered over the country.”

“Terrific,” Mulder said.

“Yes, well, destroying the mother ships was brilliant, and certainly went a long way to solving the alien problem, but unfortunately, those hybrids loyal to the aliens still on the ground, or far from a networked computer system that dispensed your serum, survived. And unfortunately, so have a few of the colonist Grays,” he said.

“Excuse me?” Scully asked.

“Some of the Grays are immune,” Mulder said, hearing JJ’s thoughts before he could say them. “I’m guessing not all of them were rebels like Jeremiah Smith.”

“Many of them were also killed on the ships. They are not indestructible, so crashing thousands of feet to the ground did them in as well as any iron rich compound, but there were a few on the ground. Personally, I’m not worried about them. They are now a minority faction amongst their people. But the surviving loyalist hybrids worship them, and want to continue what they started. The man leading the group at Camp David is a man I’m familiar with named General Suveg. He knows who you are. He knows who your son is. He knows what your son’s role in the destruction of the aliens was,” JJ said. Mulder could feel him hesitate, unsure if he should say more.

“And what does he want?” Scully asked.

“Revenge,” JJ said. “And total power.”

 ^^^^^^^

DAY 8: January 12, 2013, 22 Days After Invasion

Raven Rock Military Facility

2:28 a.m.

Scully spent the next several hours helping JJ understand the molecular structure of her super Mesabi Ferrum serum. They planned to use it in combination with the weapons Raven Rock already had designed to fight Loyalist Super Soldiers. They were specially equipped to shoot bullets laced with the compound, and they came in a variety of sizes, from hand guns up to .50 caliber fully automatic machine guns, and even a few specially outfitted Howitzers, Bradley’s, and shoulder fired rockets. Mulder had helped her by staying mostly quiet. Fortunately, he was exhausted, and despite fighting his fatigue as much as possible, Scully smiled when she’d glance over to see him nodding off in his office chair.

“JJ,” Scully said, “Can I ask you something?”

“Yes, of course,” he said, his eyes focused on his screen as he ran a calculation through the computer.

“You haven’t asked me…” she started.

“Why I wasn’t more surprised to learn William was the boy still at your cabin instead of the other one you called Jake?”

“Yes,” she said, feeling violated. When Mulder read her mind, it irritated her, but she trusted him with everything, her heart, and mind. With this man, she trusted nothing. JJ showed no indication he was bothered or had noticed.

“Once I learned you meant they’d taken the twin, I put the pieces together,” he said distracted by his work, answering casually.

“But you know what pieces to put together in the first place. Did your project have anything to do with me not knowing I had another son?” She laughed mirthlessly. “How is that even possible?” When he didn’t answer, Scully grabbed his wrist to snap his attention away from his computer screen. He looked at her, and Scully caught a twinge of fear reflected back at her in his eyes. The man was probably indestructible, but she’d scared him a little. This made her happier than was probably normal.

JJ coughed, and sat up straighter, no doubt absorbing the seriousness with which she had asked the question and understanding that if he lied to her, she would make him hurt. “No, Dr. Scully. That was all part of the other project. The one that created the Super Soldiers in the first place. The one collaborating with the aliens. That abducted you. Stole your ova. We learned about William’s twin long after he’d been sent to the live on the ship.”

“But I only gave birth to one child. I am certain of that,” she said, feeling her cheeks burn. This was an intensely personal discussion with a total stranger she was trusting merely out of convenience. It felt foreign to her private nature, but she needed to know.

“They took him from you long before you entered your second trimester,” JJ said, turning back to his monitor as if this was a perfectly normal thing to say. As if children were stolen from their mother’s womb all the time, merely to show up a decade later alive and well.

“What?” She asked.

JJ turned to look at her, apparently not completely oblivious to tone after all. “You had a procedure at a military installation you entered during your fourteenth week of pregnancy with a woman named Mary Henderschott who was about to deliver her own baby. This was shortly after you ended your relationship with your fertility doctor and his clinic, Zeus Genetics.”

“I had an amniocentesis,” Scully said.

“No, Dr. Scully, you didn’t even have that.”

“There’s no way. At fourteen weeks, the fetus is too large for an amnio to be a cover for what you’re suggesting. And besides, none of my previous ultra-sounds showed more than one heartbeat. It’s impossible.”

“Your doctor, Parenti, he made sure you never saw the actual ultra sounds. They did the same thing before your amnio, I suspect. Played a video tape of another pregnancy instead of recording yours. And the amnio wasn’t the procedure where they extracted the twin. That was how they sedated you and prepped. Later, when you tried to escape with Ms. Henderschott, you fell unconscious. Do you remember that? Ms. Henderschott gave birth to an alien-human hybrid in the van you were escaping in. A Level D hybrid specifically. Then they went to work on you. With the alien technology, it was easy to do quickly without any trace from you other than what you expected from the amnio. It wasn’t perfect though. You had a difficult pregnancy after that. The aliens have wondrous technology, but it’s not perfect.”

Scully sat back in her chair, feeling violated, as if the “procedures” as he’d plainly called them, had just taken place. After that event with Mary Henderschott, she’d worried throughout her pregnancy that they’d done something to her baby. And then after William had been born with extraordinary abilities, she’d always wondered if that procedure had played a role. It hadn’t. But the truth was beyond anything she could have imagined. She’d had a son stolen from her before he’d even been born. Before she’d known he existed. She wanted to throw up, but fought back a wave of nausea.

She started to ask how removing a fetus in vitro, to have it survive, was possible. That technology didn’t exist. But of course it did, along with technology to travel light years in space, and clone other humans, and synthesize molecular compounds. That question was interesting, but irrelevant at this point. The truth was staring her in the face whenever she looked at Jake.

“May I ask, Dr. Scully,” JJ stuttered. She lifted an eyebrow in response. “Why do you believe?”

It was a question she’d been asking herself since Mulder had told her. The plain truth was it hadn’t shocked her to learn Jake was her son as much as it should have. She’d already believed he was a clone. Emily had been her daughter. Jake was no different.

“His blood was red,” she said.

“Ah, yes,” JJ replied simply. A scientist himself, he understood what that would tell Scully. But what was not obvious was motive.

“What could they possibly have wanted to accomplish by doing this?” she asked.

“I honestly don’t know, but I think,” he said, pausing, taking the glasses off his face. He wiped the lenses with his shirt as he continued. “I don’t think it had anything to do with an experiment or rationality.”

“I don’t understand,” she said.

JJ put his glasses back on, but would not meet her eyes. “I think the other Project gave him to the aliens as a peace offering. You know that some of the aliens saw your son William as Quetzalcoatl’s second coming? They saw him as a god?”

Scully nodded slowly. The reminder made her blood run cold, and she shivered involuntarily.

“Well, I think they saw Jake as you call him, in the same way, except they meant to use him as a sacrifice. When the invasion was completed, they were going to kill him in a grand ceremony. They raised him to sacrifice him to complete the myth.”

Scully couldn’t hold back a shudder.

“Precious Twin,” Mulder said, causing her to jump a little. Scully had almost forgotten he was there, lost in her own horror show of memories and regret.

“Excuse me?” she asked.

“Quetzalcoatl… it’s usually translated as ‘Feathered Serpent’ but is sometimes translated as ‘Precious Twin’. In some of the myths he had a twin brother.”

“Xolotl,” JJ supplied.

Mulder rose, walked a few steps to stand by Scully’s side. “Yeah, in some versions of the myth, after all the humans had been destroyed on earth, the twins go to the underworld, Mictlan, the Land of the Dead. They plan to convince Mictlantecuhtli, the God of the Dead, to give them the bones of men, and bring them back to restore mankind. Xolotl, the Evening Star who every night led the Sun down to die in Mictlan would lead the way. Quetzalcoatl, the Morning Star, who every day lead the Sun back up, would lead them back to Tamoanchan, their paradise on earth. Home. Maybe that’s what the aliens wanted to prevent. If they sacrifice Xolotl, he can’t lead his brother home and restore mankind, but Quetzalcoatl can still bring about the new age… the age of the Grays. ” He had that sparkle in his eye. The one she remembered from their time on the X-Files. It was like he was back in the basement throwing out crazy hypotheses about the latest monster they were about to chase. But this wasn’t an X-File. This was their family, and she couldn’t take it anymore.

“Mulder, it’s a myth! It’s not real!”

“Scully, you heard the hybrids back at Canyon City. You heard Jeremiah Smith. The human myth was born from ancient alien myths. Over thousands of years, stuff gets lost in translation. And reality doesn’t matter to the believers. It’s Truth they seek. Not reality.”

Scully pinched her fingers to the bridge of her nose, and squeezed her eyes tightly shut. Mulder was mercifully silent again.

Finally, JJ stuttered as he spoke again. “Dr. Scu-Scully… Suveg means to complete that plan of sacrifice now. I’m sure of it. And if he knows both Jake and William are alive. He’ll want to sacrifice them both.”

“Why would he want to kill them both? Why would he want to kill Quetzalcoatl?” she asked, her stomach riling that she was even entertaining the question.

“Suveg is a psychopath. I knew the man when he was human, and he’s only gotten worse. He doesn’t worship anything or anyone. He thinks the aliens and their followers are delusional in their religious fervor, but he knows the boys are powerful and can destroy the aliens, especially together, stealing the bones of men aside. Destroying the aliens means he has no way to control the men who worship the aliens. That alone makes him want to kill your sons. But he also knows many of his soldiers believe in the prophecies, and he’ll kill the boys just for the theater of it all. He’ll want to do it in grand style. Both of them together. In front of all his men. He’ll tell his soldiers that the Age of the Grays will dawn only when the twins are trapped in the Land of the Dead for eternity. He won’t believe a single word out of his own mouth, but he’ll convince them, even those who worship the boys as gods, its necessary. He’ll kill your sons. And he’ll enjoy it. That is the man we’re up against.”

The gravity of what JJ was saying was sinking in for Scully. This whole thing… may never be over. And William, and now Jake, would forever be pawns in a global pissing match. Even if they managed to squash General Suveg and his band of Loyalist Super Soldiers trying to suck up to the remaining Grays, would this ever end?

All that mattered right now was bringing William and Jake home.

Scully was beyond tired, her thoughts were roiling within her, but she used all of her remaining energy to not cry. She was determined to transform that raw emotion into anger fueling her own determination to exact revenge. General Suveg would die tomorrow even if she used her last breath to kill him.

^^^^^^^

3:27 a.m.

While the scientists and soldiers at Raven Rock prepared to implement the plan to save Jake by synthesizing more of Scully’s super serum and loading it into weapons, Mulder and Scully were shown to private quarters so they could freshen up, perhaps get a few hours of sleep. She’d asked JJ to bring them back to the cabin, but he’d politely refused, citing some need to have her available for questions on the serum, and confirming Scully’s instinct not to bring William here with them was correct. Sure, they could just take William. They had enough manpower to do so, but they also needed her cooperation on the serum. The Raven Rockers, as she’d come to think of them, were simply the lesser of evils right now.

Inside their room was a bathroom with a small shower, a double bed, and a gift basket with fresh fruit, cheeses, meats and breads. It was a triumvirate of the most precious items this world now had to offer, yet Scully barely registered any of them. Her stomach involuntarily flip-flopped at the smell of delicious baked goods, but she wasn’t the slightest bit motivated to taste anything. There was no possible way she’d be able to sleep. She had insisted she be allowed to help the scientists with the final preparations, if they were going to keep them here, but they claimed they could make due without her for a few hours while they rested. Most of the remaining work would be in the hands of the weapons experts anyway. And unlike Mulder and Scully, most of the soldiers at Raven Rock needed little sleep to function.

The shower was the most tempting option for her. She felt grimy, and if anything, the shower might help her stay awake, be useful, and allow her to get back into the laboratory faster while feigning rest. She felt guilty for wanting even a tiny amount of comfort that her son would not have the luxury of having tonight or anytime soon.

Her son. Her sons. She had two sons.

“I can’t stop thinking about it either,” Mulder said softly.

Scully sat down on the bed, rolled her eyes, but didn’t rebuke him. What was the point anymore? She might as well get used to the new normal. Mulder could read her mind. In reality, it wasn’t that different than it had always been. Since she’d met him more than twenty years ago (Jesus, had it been that long?), he’d always been a remarkably gifted, intuitive person. It’s what made him an excellent behavioral profiler and FBI agent. Telepathy was just another notch above what he already possessed. She’d never told him back during their time on the X-Files just how impressive she thought he was when it came to digging through the bullshit and seeing things for what they actually were. Which sometimes meant simply finding more bullshit.

As skeptical as she was herself, Scully’s bullshit detector was amazingly bad. She was reminded of this most recently when she realized that her average intuition and overly trusting nature had allowed her body, and her sons’ bodies, to be compromised while they were still in the womb. She wondered how things might have been different if Mulder had never been abducted, and been able to stay with her from the beginning to the end of her pregnancy.

She pushed herself backwards on the bed to a fully prone position above the covers, staring blankly at the standard cheap government ceiling tiles.

“Don’t do that to yourself, Scully,” Mulder said, sitting next to her on the bed, turning to face her.

Scully threw an arm across her forehead. “Mulder, I think this is my fault,” she said.

“There’s no way you could have known this would happen,” he said, moving closer to her, lying next to her on the bed, pulling her arm away from her eyes.

“I should have known nothing good would come of trusting complete strangers,” she said, speaking of Mary, the woman who she’d thought she was saving by taking them both to the military facility where she’d had the “procedure”. “Every single decision I made from the moment you were taken was the wrong choice,” she said, tears forming in her eyes. If she could have, she would have ripped them out of their sockets and flung them across the room for their betrayal. She was goddamn sick of crying.

“Hey,” he whispered. He touched her cheek gently, but didn’t wipe away the tear. He knew it would just upset her further to call more attention to it.

She knew he knew she knew that, but he pretended that he didn’t.

She forced a smile, lifted her hand up to the back of his head, pulled him down for a tender, unhurried kiss. “Why did we waste all of those years as partners, all those hotel rooms, not doing this?” she said when he finally pulled back.

Mulder laughed out loud. “Probably because we were both idiots.”

“Probably,” she echoed.

“I think we both have plenty of moments we regret. Let’s make a pact to leave it all in the past. The only thing that matters from now on is you, me, and our family. When one world ends, another one begins, or something like that.”

She laughed as well, pulled him down for another kiss. “Agreed.”

“Now, I don’t know about you, but since we’re stuck in this room for at least another couple of hours, I plan to make use of everything we have in here. I’ll leave the order and exact method of use up to you.” He winked and pulled her into an embrace on the bed.

Scully knew they’d be lucky to muster the energy to grab a cracker before they each fell into a deep, hopefully dreamless sleep, but she appreciated the effort.

For the first time since Mulder had told her about the Super Soldiers setting up camp down the road from the cabin, she had hope again.

^^^^^^^

William sat alone in the dark, staring out the front window onto the snow covered driveway. The moon shone through the tall pine trees surrounding the cabin, creating the illusion of candescence. He’d been slumped in the soft loveseat that faced out the bay window for an unknown amount of time while everyone else in the cabin slept, except the soldiers who trekked around the perimeter to keep watch. One stood tall just outside on the front porch, his thoughts wandering between some girl he used to know named Lori and whether or not he’d be able to run back to Raven Rock, a distance of about 15 miles, in under thirty minutes. He thought he could because he was amazing, but he was worried the snow and ice might slow him down a bit. His mind drifted to various things, none of which included focus on keeping the humans inside safe from the Super Soldiers. William thought, he could sneak past anyone of the soldiers at the cabin if he wanted to, as long as he picked the right moment.

William picked up on random dreams from his family, but nothing that particularly stood out, or that interested him. The only thoughts he wanted to hear at the moment were his brother’s. William closed his eyes, trying to shut everything else out, so he could focus, using the skills he’d learned from Jeremiah Smith. He now knew his abilities could reach enormous distances, and from what William knew, Jake wasn’t more than a few miles away. He should be able to hear him, but he’d only picked up a few random images, and a handful of feelings since the Super Soldiers had captured him out on the road.

The feelings were the most disturbing. Jake was alive, that was the only good thing about receiving the emotions his brother was projecting, but they pushed William to the edge of panic each time they flooded him. Jake was alive, but he was mostly unconscious, his mind unable to focus.

Suddenly, a bright light hit William’s mind like a lighthouse beam. A fuzzy figure of a man approached William through the light, his features impossible to see clearly as the light wrapped around him. William put his hands against the glass.

“Hello, Xolotl,” a cold voice said. “How are you feeling? Not well, I suspect. It’s going to get worse, I’m afraid.”

William shivered, and his stomach turned. He felt a hand on his shoulder, and another voice say his name. And then the bright light was gone, replaced by the moonlight once again. What he’d seen had been through Jake’s eyes. What he’d heard had been what Jake had been hearing.

Behind him, his grandmother’s brow crinkled, and William heard the concern for him in her mind. “You’re up early, sweetie,” she said, her words not matching the fear in her mind. Like so many people, what they said rarely matched what they thought. “Are you ok?”

William nodded. “Couldn’t sleep,” he said, his own words supporting a half truth. He couldn’t sleep, but he was not ok.

“Can I make you some hot chocolate? It helps me sleep sometimes,” she said, winking. William laughed. He knew she was lying, and she knew he knew it. “Hot chocolate solves almost all problems. Come on.”

She wrapped her arms around his shoulders, and led him into the kitchen. William turned his head, looked out to the front porch, looking once again at the soldier guarding the front door. Some problems needed other solutions, he thought as he allowed his grandmother the indulgence of trying to help him.

^^^^^^^

Mulder awoke to heavy pounding on their door. The soldier on the other side told him JJ was ready for them now. It was time to move. Mulder looked at his watch.

“Scully, wake up,” he said, walking to the bed, tapping her arm gently. Her lids flew open in her characteristic deer in headlights daze of sleepiness. Now that he could read her mind, he confirmed what he’d always suspected. She literally had no idea what was happening, who she was, or where she was for about five seconds after she woke up. It was endearing. “It’s almost ten-thirty a.m. We need to go,” he said.

She jumped up like she was on a spring. “Ten-thirty? Why didn’t they wake us sooner?”

“Don’t know. JJ’s waiting for us in the lab,” he said, grabbing a few pieces of cheese and an apple as he followed her into the corridor.

Scully marched towards the lab, ticked off. “I can’t believe it’s that late,” she muttered. She threw open the door to the laboratory, and immediately, JJ’s held his hands up anticipating her assault.

“Before you shoot me, let me just say that everything is going perfectly” he said.

“Is going?” Scully asked. “It’s almost noon. I thought we’d be in the middle of the mission by now. I need to call the cabin. Make sure Will is ok.”

“William is fine. My men just updated me a few minutes ago. The night was quiet. Dr. Scully, everything with your serum is ready, but we still need more time to draw up an extraction plan. This is a very delicate operation, as I know you can imagine.”

“What I can imagine is that boy… my son, is being tortured by a man you say wants to kill him in some symbolic display of savagery, and you need more time?”

“I’m sorry, but we will need one more day to be ready,” JJ said, not looking at Scully.

Mulder knew he was holding back, but wasn’t able to pinpoint exactly what the man was hiding. JJ was a more experienced telepath than Mulder was, and that usually meant better control at concealing thoughts.

“One more day?” she barked. “That is absolutely unacceptable. No way.”

“They have Jake imprisoned deep inside the underground labyrinth of Camp David. Unless we know exactly where he is, it will be difficult to extract him with precision, and without Suveg being alerted. It will put the boy in extreme risk, so we need to get the plan right. My team lead believes he needs another few hours for planning, and we’ll go in early tomorrow, startle them in the early morning hours. If we go in with a bad plan, it will end in tragedy.”

“What if they kill him before then?” Scully asked.

“They won’t,” Mulder said. “Suveg wants to make it a show. He’ll want William, isn’t that right?”

JJ nodded, having the good sense to keep his eyes lowered. “Also, they know my men are at the cabin. They are trying to figure out how to capture William as well. That buys us time, but we have to get this right.”

“Fine,” Scully said. “Take us home.”

^^^^^^^

The chopper that brought them back was slightly larger than the one that had picked them up. This time, it was filled not just with Mulder and Scully, but ten other soldiers from Raven Rock, armed with weapons modified with Scully’s serum. The men that had been on duty the night before to protect the boy that had saved the world and his family lifted off with the chopper a few minutes after dropping the others off. The soldiers had replaced the front door sometime during the night with a sturdy storm door, so the cabin was pleasantly warm when they entered, the fire crackling as if nothing was wrong with the world.

“I still think we should just take the whole family back to Raven Rock,” Mulder said as they walked up the cabin’s front steps.

“I still don’t trust them, Mulder,” Scully said. She was tired. Mulder had slept soundly for the few hours they’d had in the facility, but he could tell from the weariness in her voice she had not. It was a twist of their normal sleeping patterns.

“I just don’t like the idea of being sitting ducks for another day, no matter what JJ says.”

“And I do?” she whirled around, stopping in front of him.

He tilted his head. “I know,” he said softly.

She exhaled. “Sorry. I just hate that we have to trust those guys,” she said, nodding in the direction of one of the soldiers guarding them. “As far as I’m concerned, they’re just as guilty of the state of the world as the other ones. I’d rather not give them complete control over our every move.”

Mulder nodded. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend, at least for a while,” he muttered.

Mulder glanced at the front window. William stood watching them. If Mulder and Scully were impatient, William was nearly exploding from the inside out in his desire to take action and save his brother. Mulder could feel the chaotic energy radiating from him, despite not being able to hear his thoughts directly. Scully followed Mulder’s gaze to the window.

“I guess we should tell him,” she said.

William frowned, and turned away, leaving their sight. They watched him pass in front of the entry way on his way to the basement stairs, and out of view.

“Sorry, I think I accidentally just did,” Mulder said.

“Great,” she said.

Great indeed.

^^^^^^^

After filling the family in on what had happened at Raven Rock and the plan to extract Jake tomorrow morning, the cabin fell into an earie silence. Mulder had entered into a habit of using one of the secure lines the soldiers had brought back to call Raven Rock every half an hour for an update on the plan, to which the response was always “We will contact as soon as we’re ready to brief you, Mr. Mulder.” To which Mulder would always hang up with a terse “Mother fuckers.”

Scully sat in the lush oversized chair in the upstairs living room holding an open book that she couldn’t even name. She was working up the nerve to talk to William, but she wasn’t sure what she should say. He was angry with them, and in her mind, with her specifically, for the delay in action. If her son had his way, he’d have gone to Camp David and rescued Jake himself. William was nearly indestructible, and he knew it. Scully worried his success at destroying the alien mother ships might make him over confident. If the soldiers had managed to capture Jake, then William could be captured as well. They must have some kind of inhibitor that renders the boys’ powers ineffective. It was probably the same type of substance William had been given when he’d been a baby, which had led Scully to give him up for adoption in the first place.

Despite her desire to protect her son, she understood his frustration all too well. She felt the same desire to take action, and it was all she could do to hold herself back from bringing Jake back herself. Before she’d been a mother, she’d been much more rational, she thought, laughing out loud to herself. This was the kind of thing she’d normally have to hold Mulder back from doing.

“What’s so funny?” a gruff voice asked from behind her. She jumped in her seat, turned around to see her brother standing over her. “Sorry,” he said, stepping over to the sofa where he took a seat, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees.

Her heart raced involuntarily as her body anticipated the inevitable conflict.

 “Dana, can I talk to you?” he said, almost sounding humble.

“Not if you’re going to tell me I’m crazy,” she said. “Or foolish.”

He shook his head. “I’m not. I promise. I just want to know what’s going on. Mom, Tara, my kids, they’re all terrified,” he said.

“I told you all what’s going on,” she said. “Tomorrow we’re going in with the Raven Rock soldiers to get Jake,” she said.

Bill sighed, and looked down at his hands. “You’re going in with them?”

“I told them Mulder and I are absolutely going to go. That was part of the deal, so yes,” she said.

“How can you do this?” he said. “You’d risk your life, you’d risk your son growing up without his parents – in this world, Dana -- all to save an alien clone who is obviously dangerous.”

“Bill,” she interrupted.

“No, just let me say this. I know I’ve frustrated you. I know you feel like I’ve never understood you, or your devotion to Mulder. It’s no secret how I feel about him. You know I think he destroyed our family. Melissa died because of him. You almost died because of him. Mom spent unmeasurable numbers of nights crying herself to sleep because she worried about you. If you’d just followed the plan Dad wanted for you and gone into practice as a doctor, none of that would have happened,” he continued, almost without breath.

“And we’d all be dead right now,” she managed to interject. It didn’t slow him down. He seemed to have had this bottled up for years.

“Dad loved his family more than anything, Dana, and you just threw all of that in his face. He would never have wanted this life for you,” he said, his voice escalating.

Scully’s heart pounded. She’d bottled up some things over the years herself, and she felt as though she were a soda bottle, tightly capped, being shaken.

“If you go in there tomorrow to save that thing, at the expense of your own family, you’re spitting on dad’s memory and everything he stood for!”

There. That was the heart of it.

She stood up, throwing the book she’d been pretending to read onto the chair in her place, where it landed with a dull thud.

“That thing, as you call him. He’s my son, Bill. He’s William’s twin brother. He’s not a clone. He’s not an alien. What you saw him do yesterday to the soldiers. William can do all of that, and has done it, to save you. To save all of us.” She bolted for her bedroom, wanting to be anywhere but near her brother. Halfway there, she stopped and whirled around, wanting to face him when she said one more thing. “If you think dad wouldn’t have done everything possible to save any one of us, then it’s you who is spitting on his memory!”

^^^^^^^

“Dana,” Margaret asked, arriving at the top of the landing from the basement to see her daughter nearly sprinting out of the great room. Dana made no indication she heard her as she stormed off towards her bedroom. Margaret looked around the room, expecting to see Fox, but instead she saw her son standing in the living room, brow furrowed. Of course it was Bill that had upset Dana. The siblings had been close as children, but that bond had diminished more and more as the years passed after her husband’s death.

"What’s going on?” she asked her son.

He hesitated.

“Billy?”

“What’s going on? Dana just told me some insane story about how that clone is my nephew! She’s completely lost it.”

Margaret exhaled deeply. Dana had told her earlier what the scientists at Raven Rock had told her about Jake. Since her daughter’s time on the X-Files, Margaret had to watch Dana experience some of the most unbelievable things, and she knew she had only been let in on a small fraction of them over the years. But somehow, when Dana had told her Jake was her grandson, she hadn’t been shocked one bit. From the moment she’d met the boy, she’d felt a strange connection to him, and Margaret knew that Dana had felt it too. Once the pieces of Dana’s experience with her fertility doctor and the difficult pregnancy she’d endured were added to the puzzle, everything had clicked in her mind. She had two grandsons. Only a few weeks ago, she’d thought nearly her entire family had been lost, and now she had even more family than she knew existed. This was a blessed day.

“It’s true,” she said finally to her son.

“What is?”

“Jake is Dana’s son, too.”

“Mom,” he started, smiling the way he did when he thought he was being a protective, dutiful son, but when he was actually being condescending as if his mother was a frail, senile old woman.

“Billy, it’s true. Someday, we can try to understand the logistics of such a thing, but for now what matters is that I have a grandson that is in pain. And it’s your fault,” she said. She knew the last part would hurt him. Perhaps not now while he was defensive, but later, once he accepted the truth – and she knew he would – he would feel the pain of what he’d done. She didn’t like causing pain in any of her children, but she needed him to understand the situation. Dana needed their support now more than ever. She needed her big brother. Instead of telling her son all of that, Margaret left him alone as Dana had.

^^^^^^^

The day had been going by at an intolerable pace. Nothing Scully tried could settle her mind. All she wanted to do was grab one of the modified weapons and storm into Camp David herself, and bring Jake back. She sat at the dining room table on the main level, cleaning her weapon. Before leaving on the mission, she’d be getting a more powerful weapon, modified with her serum, but having something practical and methodical to do was helping her slightly.

She heard a floor board creak behind her. She had been alone. Most of the family had scattered to cope with everything on their own, either downstairs or in their rooms. “It’s just me,” William’s voice came from behind her before she could turn around to see for herself. He walked over to her, pulled out a chair at the table, and sat down.

“Hey, how are you holding up?” she asked. She was surprised William had approached her. Since she and Mulder had returned, William had avoided them.

“I just don’t understand why we’re waiting,” he blurted out, answering her unasked question of why he’d been avoiding them.

“I don’t like it either. You know that right?” Scully said. She’d become somewhat used to conversing with William in this manner, skipping ahead of unspoken pieces of the conversation as they were partially kept inside one of their minds, either being sent by her, or received by him.

“They’re hurting him,” William said, looking into her eyes.

Scully put the pieces of her Glock down, and placed her palms flat against the table, shutting her eyes tightly. “What are they doing?”

“I’m not completely sure. I get glimpses. I feel it,” he said.

“You feel it?” she echoed.

William nodded. “What he feels. I feel it too.”

Scully opened her eyes, feeling tears burn, but thankfully they didn’t fall.

“I want to go with you,” William said. “To get him.”

“Not this time, Will,” she said.

“You can’t stop me,” he said. “I need to go.”

Scully understood her son’s desire to save his brother. William had already faced down the entire force of the colonists. Surely, he would think, he could handle a few Super Soldiers. If Scully were honest with herself, he probably could handle them, but she couldn’t allow it. Her son may be nearly indestructible, and far more capable of taking on Suveg’s men than she or Mulder, but if she let him go, she couldn’t live with herself. Her job was to protect her children. She would not risk one son’s life for the other. Even if she died saving Jake, William would not have to take on this burden.

“You can’t go,” was all she said instead. If he heard what she had thought, he gave no indication. William shook his head as he walked away, leaving her alone once again.

^^^^^^^

DAY 9: January 13, 2013, 23 Days After Invasion

3:48 am

Bill wasn’t sure how long he’d been slouched in the chair in the corner of the living room staring at nothing in particular, but his tongue felt like sandpaper, and the back of his throat like gravel. Had he even tried going to sleep, or had he slept and then awakened to come out here? He couldn’t remember. Although his body was still, his mind whirred like an egg beater, scrambling all of the information he’d gotten over the past few days. Things he’d learned included: Dana and Mulder were alive; His nephew who’d been given up for adoption when he was a baby was alive and with Dana; William and Mulder both believed they could read people’s thoughts; And most recently, he possibly had another nephew that he first thought was an alien clone who wanted to kill them but who wasn’t and who didn’t; He’d probably sent his new nephew to his death or at least certain torture; He was an asshole. That pretty much summed things up.

All he’d tried to do since the world began falling apart and after Charlie had died was to keep his children, wife and mother alive. That was his only focus. The truth was, if he’d not been terrified of Jake himself in the beginning, he’d probably have killed him already with his own hands. He knew very little of the details of how the aliens worked, but one thing he’d always remembered was that if you hurt them in the wrong way, they release a poison gas from their bloodstream. He was a career military man, but there was little in his experience and training to equip him for that kind of enemy. Instead, he’d done the only thing he could think of. It was what he’d have done in the old life. Call in the Army and let them sort it out.

Of course, he knew the soldiers at Camp David were working behind the authority of heavy weaponry instead of by legal obligation. The United States was effectively non-existent. No countries or governments existed anymore. Only the powerful and the weak existed in a vast continent filled with the most powerful weapons the earth has ever known ready for the taking. Bill only now realized that he’d been lying to himself in thinking the country he loved could be rebuilt, put back together as it was. According to Dana, and from what he’d learned before the broadcasts had ended, most of the population was dead. Yet, he’d found himself defaulting to muscle memory, accepting what Captain Gulliver had told him, despite his gut roiling, trying to tell his brain that the group at Camp David wasn’t the military so much as a band of thieves and thugs, brutal, power-hungry creatures, bent on controlling anything in its path. They were as bad, or worse, than the aliens that had terrified them before Dana had arrived. They were after control of what was left of the country, and promoting their own survival above all else. Bill had allowed the fear that he couldn’t protect his family in this new world control his rational mind, and render inert the skills he’d developed for years as an officer in the Navy.

Bill barely comprehended what his mother told him. What Dana had told him. How could such a thing be possible? There were many things he never understood about Dana’s work at the FBI. When she’d first been transferred to her new unit, and he’d learned it had something to do with aliens, he worried about her career. The FBI was a paramilitary organization. And like the military itself, it was an organization steeped in conservative traditions, and held together by conformity. Mulder was clearly a joke to his colleagues, and Bill wanted anything but that fate for his brilliant little sister. She was their father’s favorite, and she was going to save the world by being a doctor. Instead, she’d be lucky to climb the chain to a measly GS-14 level supervisor, if she lasted that long. When their father had died, he’d felt the need to step in, and take on his role. He could no longer stay silent about her choices. As the oldest son, it was his responsibility to protect his family, even from their own choices, above all else, whether or not his sister wanted the help.

But he was not their father. He had no idea how to help his headstrong, stubborn little sister. If it was true and Jake really was Dana’s son, it meant Jake was his nephew. Jake was his family. Jake was his blood. In the old world and in this world, family was all that mattered to him, and he’d do anything to make things right.

A sound coming from somewhere downstairs made him jump. He knew that the Cabin’s grounds were surrounded by the soldiers Dana had returned with, lining the perimeter to protect them all, but that couldn’t stop the adrenaline pumping through his body. He quietly jogged downstairs, not wanting to disturb anyone else in the house. He heard the sound again. It came from outside, near the back door that opened out to a trail which led to the little red shed. He picked up the flashlight that sat near the door, and walked outside.

The air was chilly on his bare arms, but mild for January. He shone the light towards the area he thought he’d heard the sound coming from. It was a mix of mechanical and animal that didn’t compute to a name in his mind. The light hit the white snow, bouncing off the crystal flakes, and as he lifted the flashlight up, it hit the snowmobile he and Mulder had found. Sitting on the machine, his hands searching up and down for something, was William. Upon being hit by the light, he looked up.

“Going somewhere?” Bill asked. His son Matthew was a good kid, but as he’d gotten older, Bill had dealt a few times with the repercussions of having a teenager, one of which was sneaking out. William was a little younger, but same idea.

William’s determined expression faded, and he smiled from the corner of his mouth, a confidence Bill hadn’t seen on many eleven year olds. “You can’t stop me. I need to get my brother back. I’m the only one that can do it.”

Bill smiled as well. His nephew had courage. That was clear, but he was also an eleven year old kid. “I think the soldiers and your parents have that covered. Come back inside, ok? At least my sister can say I did one thing right.”

“Not happening,” William said, returning to his search. He opened one of the dry compartments on the snowmobile, felt his hands along the space between the windshield and the dash.

Bill reached into the pocket of his jeans and pulled out a single key that dangled, ironically, on the end of a rabbit’s foot keychain. “Looking for this?”

William looked up, his shoulders slumping as he realized Bill held what he’d been looking for. Bill quickly put the key back in his pocket, and motioned again for William to follow him back inside.

“I know it was you,” Bill heard in William’s voice. He was still looking directly at his nephew, but hadn’t seen his lips move.

Bill nearly yelped, but managed to keep the appearance of calm. “Did you say something?”

William shook his head. The words “not exactly” came into Bill’s brain in William’s voice even as his face remained still. After a second, a glimmer of a crooked smile formed on his nephew’s lips.

I’ve cracked, Bill thought, and again words entered his brain, but William’s mouth didn’t move an inch.

“You are crazy, Uncle Bill, but not because you hear what I’m saying to you. If you want to do the right thing, just listen,” his nephew’s voice came again.

“Dreaming?” Bill asked in his mind. William shook his head more slowly than before.

“Listen to me. We don’t have much time,” William projected to his mind. The sound of the chopper arriving to pick up his sister and Mulder made it impossible to hear anything else with his ears.

Despite that, Bill listened.

^^^^^^

Scully Cabin

5:03 a.m.

The army chopper had come and taken Dana and Fox away to brief them on the mission and hour or so earlier. Margaret had attempted to fall back asleep, but rest had been fitful, and she finally decided sleep would not come to her until her daughter and Fox were back safely with Jake. She stood at the kitchen breakfast bar, wishing more than at any time in the past twenty years her husband was still alive, and here with her. She needed desperately to talk with him. She’d managed her life well since his sudden death. She’d had a strong group of friends she could turn to on a daily basis. She’d lost one daughter, but still had Dana and two sons. And she had beautiful grandchildren. To outsiders, her life had probably seemed tragic, but she’d never looked at it that way. It had been hard. Very hard, she’d admit in her most honest moments, but she truly felt blessed. Even when the world had ended, she still felt the pull of God’s grace, and her husband watching over her, seeing her through it all. Her family was alive, and now they were all together.

Except they weren’t. They’d barely had one day to take a breath and enjoy the moment.

And Margaret only had one son left, now.

She shook her head, stood up from the table where she’d been sitting alone with her now tepid cup of coffee. She couldn’t think about Charles. Not right now. She had one son, and his two children. She had Dana, and Fox, and William. And now Jake. But the thought jumped back into her mind.

For how long?

Dana and Fox were off again. As much as she kept telling herself God had his reasons, she was struggling to make sense of it all. Dana had saved her life. Saved all of their lives, yet her daughter was once again putting her life on the line. Why couldn’t Dana – and if Margaret was being completely frank with herself, why couldn’t she – finally have peace? When could Dana finally rest, and enjoy life, after she’d done so much for her family and for humanity? Was that too much to ask?

Margaret looked up to the ceiling. She looked for God. To her husband. Anything at all. But all she could see were rustic wooden planks, and a few cobwebs.

“Grandma?” A voice somewhere between a child and a young man asked from the living room.

She turned around to find Matthew rubbing his sleep heavy eyes. Margaret covered her own face with both hands to clear any sign of her distress, and when she pulled them away, she forced a smile.

“Hi Matty, what are you doing awake this early?”

Matthew shrugged. Her grandson was a thoughtful young man. He was often quiet, and she wondered how much the past few days had impacted him. More than he’d probably admit to. The entire family had gone through such emotional swings, it would be strange for them all to rest easily.

“Hungry,” Matthew said. He shuffled towards the breakfast bar, pulled the stool out halfway, and sat on its edge. Margaret was struck for the first time how much he and William resembled each other. Matthew was a few years older and taller. Before everything fell apart, he’d been preparing to take his driver’s license test. His shoulders were broadening, and he had grown a couple of inches since the last time she’d seen him the previous summer. He was a young man now, and there was no doubt he and his younger cousin were related. Younger cousins, she amended to herself. This new addition to the family was still taking some getting used to despite it feeling right.

“I could whip us both up some oatmeal. Is William still sleeping?”

“Don’t think so.”

“Oh?” She looked over her shoulder.

Matthew had settled himself firmly on the stool, and yawned deeply. “He’s not in the loft.”

“He didn’t go to bed last night?”

Matthew shrugged.

Margaret stopped, turned around completely to face her grandson. Alarm bells were going off in her head. Dana may have been the FBI agent, but she had intuition of her own. Something was not right. She’d felt it all morning, but just assumed the stress was finally catching up with her. “Matty, sweetie, can you run downstairs and see if William is down there, please?”

“Sure,” he said calmly, sliding off the stool, his feet needing little space to reach the floor. A few seconds later he added, “He’s not down there.”

“You haven’t looked yet,” she said, turning to face him.

“Don’t have to,” Matthew stood in front of the closed basement door. He pointed to a piece of paper taped to it. “They’re gone.”

“Who’s gone?” Margaret asked, taking two large strides to press herself along Matthew’s side, stepping in front of him to peer at the note. Who could “they” include?

“Will. And Dad.”

“Oh, my God,” she squeaked, unable to make a louder sound. Her throat tightened, and her heart moved into overdrive. “Get one of the soldiers, and go wake up your mother.”

Matthew didn’t question her or grumble. The son of a career Navy man, he did what he was told. She wondered when her own foolish son, his own father a Navy Captain, had abandoned that practice. As bad as things had been… this was a whole new level. She looked to the ceiling once again, frowned and shook her head. “Consider us no longer on speaking terms,” she whispered to her husband. “Until you deliver our entire family back here unharmed.” In her mind she added, “So I can kill our son myself.

^^^^^^^

Raven Rock Facility

5:15 a.m.

Mulder’s knee bounced frenetically as he waited for the final preparations to be completed before they could move out, and rescue Jake. They’d been briefed on the plan, and now he and Scully waited in a small but comfortable room to get the final “let’s move” call. Waiting had never been Mulder’s strength. That had always been one of the most frustrating aspects of being an FBI employee… the government’s “hurry up and wait” typical business strategy. JJ’s team wanted to begin the covert entry into the Camp no later than six-thirty a.m, before the late winter dawn. Scully sat in the corner of one of the two small sofas. Her legs were crossed, and body was turned towards the arm as she looked off to the ceiling, her jaw tense as she fumed over the latest twist in the plan.

“Scully, I don’t like it either. I want you right there with me, but you know he’s right,” Mulder said, breaching the silence that had filled the room for about five minutes since she’d finally relented to the plan, laid on them just after their arrival back at the facility.

She huffed her response, and continued to look away from him. She rubbed the back of her neck. Turned to look at Mulder and finally said. “This goddamn thing again.”

The goddamn thing she spoke of was of course the chip in the back of her neck. It’s the thing that kept her alive, free from the cancer that had killed other abductees like her, and the thing that made her a hostage to nefarious actors time and time again. The Raven Rock operational planners had decided that while it was unlikely Suveg had the technology to locate Scully from her chip – the project hadn’t been based at Camp David – it was too big a risk to take to have her leading the charge into the Camp. They planned to go in stealthily to extract Jake, and then bring the big guns later.

Mulder tried to figure out what he could say to her, but was coming up short just as JJ entered the room. The man was a more neurotic version of his regular self. Twitchy and sweating. Mulder instantly knew that Scully’s role in the raid was not the biggest twist left for them to learn. “Spill it,” Mulder said standing up. He had lost all patience. Scully followed his lead, standing with a slightly confused look on her face, but waiting for Mulder to extract whatever he needed from the man.

“Yes, well, I see you’re telepathy skills have improved a little bit, Mr. Mulder,” JJ said.

“Just say it!” Scully hissed. “Now.”

“We’re ready to go, but…”

“But what?” Scully invaded JJ’s space. He stepped backwards reflexively.

“There is one other thing we need to make this work,” he said. “Like we briefed you earlier, everything with your serum and the overall plan is ready, except…”

“Except what?” Mulder asked quickly before Scully ripped the man’s throat out.

“Except, we’re going to need to involve William,” he said, each word uttered in staccato.

Scully actually laughed. “What could you possibly need William for?” She asked, her tone low and slow, drawing out each word opposite of JJ’s rapid fire response a moment earlier. She sounded calm on the surface, but Mulder could feel the white hot anger radiating off of her as it boiled her blood. This was the worst possible thing anyone could ask of her. It seemed that their son had been in non-stop danger from the moment they’d found him. And though they may have kept him alive, they’d put him through hell to do it. He’d watched his adoptive parents die horrible deaths, and then he’d been asked to save the world. That little boy had faced more in a few weeks than most people could ever imagine possible. And now they were being asked to risk one son to save the other. It was an impossible request.

But Mulder also knew from JJ’s thoughts that one more time it was a necessary request. There was no way he was saying that out loud. Better the stranger take the brunt of Scully’s wrath than Mulder. He’d consider stepping in before Scully physically assaulted the man. Maybe.

JJ cleared his throat. “We have no way of knowing exactly where they’re keeping Jake.”

“I was under the impression you were a level A, just like William,” Scully said. “There must be others like you here as well who can help us.”

“Well, I am a level A, as are a few others, but we are nothing like William or Jake. They are…” JJ paused to find the right word, but Mulder could hear it in his mind before he got it out. It was a word used to describe his son frequently. Scully beat him to it, despite her lack of telepathic talent.

“If you say ‘special’, so help me god I will empty this clip into you,” she said, putting her hand on her weapon but leaving it holstered. “I know it won’t kill you, but it will hurt.”

JJ smiled nervously, putting his hands up as a peace offering. The gesture was unlikely to sooth her. “Point taken. But even the most talented Alpha’s capabilities do not come close to your sons’. Short of the aliens themselves, many of whom had the capability to heal injuries and even reverse death, William is the most advanced creature that has ever been in this solar system. Well, William and Jake, of course. We need him to make this work. They’ll have Jake in a holding cell so deeply buried in the facility, and surrounded by dampeners, there’s no way we’ll get in there quickly enough to find him before they figure it out. Camp David’s layout was classified to ensure the President’s safety. Even those with the highest clearance at this facility, like myself, do not have access to those maps. They’re locked away in an off network server that the Secret Service maintained. The military personnel with access is now a Super Soldier at the camp. This needs to be a precision extraction, not an all-out assault, until we know the boy is safe. Without William, I don’t see how that would be possible.”

“No,” Scully said.

“Dr. Scully…”

“I said no! His entire life he has been nothing but a piece in a game. Played by aliens, by you, by the Syndicate!” Softer, looking at her feet. “…by me.”

“So has Jake,” JJ said. “More so.” This captured Scully’s attention.

“What happened to him?” she asked.

“You know about the Twelve under Tom Davis’ care?” said JJ. Scully nodded. What she had learned about the children’s existence in Tom’s lab had mostly come from Monica. She’d rescued Joy from the lab weeks before the invasion, which they’d later learned had been with Tom’s unsolicited, secret help.

“Jake’s life was similar. He was mostly taken well care of, physically at least. He was educated, allowed time to play, but his life was also mixed with regular experiments, some of which were of the kind each of you is familiar with,” JJ said, looking away from them to the floor. He had little social awareness, but the man had the good sense enough to know this information would sucker punch a parent in the gut.

Scully looked up. She blinked and a solo tear streamed down her cheek at JJ’s reminder to them both about what was at stake. “When does it end?” Scully asked, her voice a whisper.

“Maybe after this,” Mulder stepped in front of her, wiped the tear away with his thumb as his own eyes blurred with moisture. He wrapped her in a tight embrace, and more to himself, said, “It has to.”

“So, does that mean we have your blessing?” JJ asked cheerfully, smiling hopefully.

Mulder pulled away from Scully as they both glared at JJ. Mulder wondered how someone as socially obtuse could head a global project of such importance. JJ cleared his throat again. Message sent and received.

“I mean, do we have your permission?”

“If so much as one hair is lost on that boy’s head…” Scully began.

“Yes, well, obviously we’ll need to give him a hat then.”

"Scully, it’s ok,” Mulder said. “You’ve seen it. William will be fine. He can’t be hurt. He’s nearly indestructible,” Mulder said.

“Never try to reason with a mother, Mulder,” Scully said, a conciliatory edge in her voice. Mulder thought she was speaking more to herself than to him. She looked up, locking her gaze on JJ. “Besides, indestructible doesn’t mean pain free, isn’t that right General?”

“Yes, that’s right,” he said quickly. Mulder wasn’t positive, but he heard ‘and nothing’s indestructible’ coming from JJ’s mind. It was soft and fleeting, and before Mulder could process it, JJ clapped his hands together loudly, and added, “Well, we need to go get William and move out. We’ll stop by the cabin on the way there. With any luck, this whole thing will be over by midday.”

Since when had they been lucky, Mulder wondered.

^^^^^^^

5:16 a.m.

Approximately one hundred yards from Camp David’s front gate, a shivering Bill found himself wondering again why he’d allowed his nephew to lead him here. Leading *him* was exactly what had happened despite the fact that Bill had driven the snowmobile. Somehow, his nephew had convinced him to take him to the Camp David gate, and told him exactly how to avoid the Raven Rock soldiers protecting the cabin’s perimeter while using the cover of the noise from the chopper as it had lifted off with Dana and Mulder inside. It had been slow, stopping and starting, shutting the engine down and sitting for long periods of time in the cold winter night based on William’s insistence, but they’d finally made it to the edge of the President’s retreat. This plan – if one could even call it that -- was insane. It was never going to work and would probably get them both killed.

“Not possible,” William said sounding uninterested at best, condescending at worst. “Well, only half possible, I guess.”

Bill had finally accepted William was capable of reading his mind. It had taken several games to prove it, but he couldn’t deny it any longer. What was worse than that, William had some kind of mesmerizing power over him that was troubling. How else could he explain being convinced by an eleven year old to help extract a boy from a hornet’s nest? There was, of course, Bill’s growing guilt at his role in sending that boy into the nest in the first place, but if Bill didn’t know better, he’d say the kid was playing Jedi mind tricks on him.

“I wish,” William said. “That would be awesome.”

“Can you please stop that? And what did you mean by ‘only half possible’?”

William shrugged. They sat sideways on the snowmobile’s bench seat, looking towards the Camp’s main gate. William had pulled something golden from his pocket and was staring at it absently, rubbing a finger over it softly. They’d taken the snowmobile through the woods, staying clear of the main roads, but Bill was still amazed they hadn’t been approached yet by the guards. They had to know they were there.

“They don’t know. We’re hidden, and they suck at listening.”

“We need to make our move now or that won’t last for long. They’re going to notice us eventually. And I’m freezing.” He’d been wearing a fleece jacket when he’d encountered William, but had forgotten to grab his thicker coat when he’d returned from leaving the note upstairs. But there had been a hat and gloves near the door downstairs, and fortunately he’d grabbed them.

William sat up straight, shook his head seemingly to himself, like he was mustering up the courage to do something terrifying. The kid put on a strong bravado, but Bill didn’t have to be able to read minds to know he was scared. William shot him a look. Eyeball daggers, a typical teen response to annoying adults.

“It’s ok to be scared, Will. I am. Being brave means doing what you have to do in spite of the fear. Even the bravest men are afraid of the things they have to do.”

“Let’s do this then. I think I’ve figured out where he is. The others think they’ve hidden him, but they’re idiots.”

“He’s most likely in a locked cell, reinforced steel, possibly electromagnetically locked, guarded by armed soldiers. And what, they’re just going to let us in?”

“I told you already. The locked doors are not a problem.”

“And you just want to walk up to the front gate and ask them nicely to let us in?”

“Not exactly,” William said as he hopped off the snowmobile, his feet landing about a half foot down in the deep snow. Just before he put the object he’d been holding away, Bill got a better glimpse of it. He thought it looked like Dana’s FBI badge. Before Bill could ask, William added, “Follow me.”

They’d need to walk the final distance to the gate, to make sure the snowmobile remained hidden, and that they’d have an escape vehicle if they succeeded. Bill followed William’s lead, patting his hip to make sure he had his pistol. He wanted to bring the shotgun, but that would be too obvious from afar, and would alert the soldiers more than if they just walked up. As of now, they knew who he was. He’d delivered Jake to them, more or less. It hadn’t gone perfectly, but he was hoping he’d at least gotten them thinking he would be willing to hand over the other one as well.

“What should I tell them?” Bill asked as they walked, the snow crunching beneath their feet. He still felt off kilter asking his nephew for operational instructions. Bill was a twenty-five year Navy veteran, for Christ’s sake!

“We went over this,” William said. “Just tell them you’re here to turn me in.”

“This is a terrible plan, Will,” Bill said, finally realizing what he was doing.

William shrugged. Bill looked at his nephew. His eyes were fixed on the two soldiers at the front gate. He marched towards them like a man heading to the gallows, determined not to piss himself before it was over. Then the hair stood up on the back of Bill’s neck. “You don’t really care what I tell them do you?”

They kept walking, only ten yards away now. “Hey,” Bill said, putting his hand on William’s shoulder, stopping him. “What’s going on?”

“Stop right there, sir,” One of the soldiers shouted from the gate, putting his hand up. The gate itself was far from the main Camp David complex. Bill had actually been to the facility a couple of times before the alien invasion, when he was on active duty with the Navy, including a lengthy TDY for a few months. The place was meant to be a retreat, a resort-like facility for the President to spend some R&R with his family while staying in touch with the country’s pulse. There were many operational aspects to the place, but they were well hidden, and mostly underground. It was impossible to know exactly how much they were being observed, but Bill thought it was likely their every move from now on would be on camera if not seen by the naked eyes of soldiers posted strategically around the base.

William ignored the soldier’s command, and Bill’s attempt to hold him back. Before he took another step, William whispered “Stay here.”

“What?”

Another step. Bill grabbed his nephew’s coat to try to restrain him. Something was about to go very wrong. “No, Will! Stop!”

“Let him go, sir! Both of you stop right there!” Both soldiers moved towards them one hand raised in stop sign position, their automatic M4 rifles pointed downward, but ready. When they reached a spot about five feet from William, both of them froze. Their bodies went rigid, and they began to shake faster than Bill thought possible for any man. Their guns fell from their hands, swiveled around their bodies on the strap. Although their uniforms exposed very little skin, what showed blackened and cracked, like the bark of a tree in a forest fire. The small bursts of steam emanating from their breath in the cold air, spread and radiated from their entire bodies, even the parts covered by clothing. Bill saw no flames, but the men appeared to be on fire. And then they were on fire. In a sudden WHOOSH of air, both soldiers transformed into sticks of flame, human sparklers. And just as suddenly, each man collapsed. The fire extinguished in the heavy, wet snow, leaving them to smolder. Bill heard a couple of short POPs. One of the soldier’s M4’s was firing into the ground, propelled to life by the direct heat of the human kindling. Despite seeing almost the same thing a day earlier, Bill stood shocked by what he had just witnessed. It had taken less than a minute from start to finish. Unable to tear his eyes from the horror show in front of him, he caught movement out of the corner of his eye. He looked up to see William bolting towards the closed ten foot high gate.

“Will, no! Stop!” Bill managed to cough out, but his feet felt like blocks of ice frozen to the ground. He knew that any second more soldiers would be coming. They needed to get out of here now and abort the plan. As William reached the gate, he stopped and put his hands out like he’d seen Jake do the other day when the soldiers had come to the cabin. William pointed his palms towards the middle of the gate where the two wrought iron doors latched together. His hands shook momentarily, and seconds later, the gates swung open as if they were saloon doors in an old time western bar. Bill could barely comprehend what he’d just witnessed. William was wrong. He was indeed, a Jedi.

Bill finally found his legs, and pushed them forward, running towards the gate as William stepped inside the boundaries of Camp David. Just before Bill reached the threshold, William turned back, put his hands out once again, and the gates slammed shut.

“Open the gate, Will!”

William calmly shook his head. “Sorry Uncle Bill. You can’t follow me inside. It’s too dangerous for you.”

“And it’s not for you?” Bill shrieked. “You have to let me come with you. I have the gun, remember?”

“I don’t need it. Doesn’t work on them anyway. You saw what I did. They can’t hurt me.” William said. His voice was filled with maturity and a touch of melancholy. A fleeting thought crossed Bill’s mind. This boy has seen more than I’ll ever comprehend. He couldn’t let him go through anything more alone.

“Let me in, Will! You have to let me help you,” Bill pleaded.

“You can’t help me, Uncle Bill. I have to do this. Go back to the cabin. We’ll both be there soon.”

“No way. I can’t go back and tell your parents I just left you here!”

As William turned his back to Bill he said, “They’ll understand. I can do this. I have to save my brother. I’m the only one who can. I’m the only one who will.”

“This is crazy! You’re just a kid,” Bill screamed, shaking the bars to the gate with futility.

William said casually over his shoulder, “Thanks for the ride,” and then he ran.

Moments later, the shrieking WHOOP! WHOOP! of the Camp’s alarm filled the air. Bill turned around, and he ran, too. How many times would he fail his family before it all finally ended? He feared he was about to learn the answer, once and for all.

^^^^^^^

5:44 a.m.

Scully clutched the door handle, bracing herself as Mulder nearly slid the Humvee they’d been given off of the road, turning it into the long driveway leading back to the cabin. JJ told them they could keep this truck, and if they needed another, there were plenty available. Mulder and Scully planned to drop this truck off for the family, pick up William and then head out. “It does us no good if we’re dead before we can do this, Mulder!”

“Sorry,” he said not really sounding all that sorry. They’d hardly said a word as they’d made their way back from Raven Rock. The convoy of three Humvees, each with six fully armed Level A hybrid soldiers, and a snow plow leading the way remained on the road, waiting for Mulder and Scully to collect their son for the mission to save Jake. Scully still could not believe she’d agreed to this. The slow drive back to the cabin, stopping and starting as they allowed the plow to clear the path in front of them, combined with her sense of self-loathing had made her nauseous. She wasn’t sure if the first thing she should do upon entering the cabin was find William or vomit.

“I’ll find him,” Mulder said. “You can stay out here if you want.”

Scully snapped her head around to look at Mulder. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Scully…” he had that conciliatory sound in his voice that Scully sometimes hated.

William was angry with them for waiting so long to go get Jake, and Mulder was trying to take the brunt of that anger. She and William had had a tough relationship from the beginning, but they’d made tremendous strides as well. Mulder and William had a connection she could never understand, so naturally Mulder assumed their telepathic bond would make explaining the situation to William easier. He would always have an advantage over her. This somehow had manifested into an irrational paranoia in her mind that William blamed her more for all the things that had gone wrong, from Rob Van de Kamp’s death, to Jake’s kidnapping. It was an unfair projection onto William. She conceded what she really felt was the perpetual pain of failure. She’d probably never be able to completely forgive herself for giving William up, even if Mulder had found it in his heart to do so. And if that wasn’t bad enough, her guilt levels had exploded after allowing William to go on board the alien space ship to save the world, and here they were a week later asking him to do it again. And also once again, she was not going to be a part of it.

What made it worse was that Mulder knew these thoughts warring within her. His unfair advantage was really starting to piss her off. To Mulder’s credit, he opened the door to the truck, and said simply, “Let’s go then.”

She followed him into the cabin, stomping the snow off her boots as she entered. Before she could close the door, she looked up to see her mother standing a few feet away, staring at her with the same expression she’d had on her face when Melissa had died. The room was absolutely silent.

“What is it?” Scully finally asked, not really wanting to know.

“Dana, we have a problem,” her mother said, not bothering to couch the issue.

“What kind of problem?”

“That bastard!” Mulder exploded from behind her. “I may literally kill him now.”

“What are you talking about?” Scully asked. She had no idea what was going on. “Mulder?”

“Your brother has taken our son!”

“Where?”

“He left a note.” Margaret said, handing it to Scully. “Matthew found it.”

Scully read it aloud. “Mom, Will and I will be back soon. Going to get Jake. Don’t worry. Tell Dana I’m sorry. Bill.

“What is he thinking?” Scully asked no one in particular. She was struggling to comprehend this latest twist. Her very human brother had taken her extraordinary son into a viper pit of revenge-filled Super Soldiers to try to rescue her other son, a boy who until recently Bill himself hadn’t cared about. Had even tried to turn over to the bad guys.

“Get your boss,” Mulder said to one of the soldiers, meaning for him to bring JJ back. The General had accompanied them back to the cabin, claiming some operational need, but Mulder caught a glimpse of his mind. JJ was star struck by William, and wanted to meet him.

“On it,” the soldier said, spinning 180 degrees on his heels, and running out the door.

The room was spinning for Scully. Mulder was yelling at nobody in particular. The target of his anger was Bill who wasn’t there. Tara and Matthew had made their way into the great room, and Scully vaguely heard Tara defending Bill in some abstract manner. It all sounded like they were under water. Distorted and muffled. She squeezed her eyes closed tightly, and snapped them open again, clearing the fuzziness, realizing something she’d forgotten in the haze of motherly protectiveness. “Mulder, its ok,” she said slowly.

“What? Are you kidding me?”

“He’ll be ok. William can’t be hurt,” she said. “They can’t hurt him. Not physically. Like you said he’s going to be fine.” She sounded like she was on a sedative even to her own ears. She probably sounded like a lunatic to Mulder’s.

“Scully, you’re not thinking straight. They may not be able to kill him, but they can hurt him,” Mulder said slowly. “Just like they’ve been hurting Jake.” He grabbed her shoulders. Her brain still felt drunk. He looked into her eyes, getting her attention. “Ok?” Nodding as he slowly spoke, stretching out each syllable. “We need to find your stupid brother before this goes incredibly wrong.”

“Ok,” she said, nodding in return. She shook her head as time sped up, her mind clearing the momentary fog of wishful thinking. “You’re right. No, of course. You’re right. Let’s go now. The plan should still work. Just need to bring William back now too,” she said, spinning her heels to head back out the door.

“Somehow, I don’t think it’s going to be that simple now,” JJ’s said, entering the cabin.

 “Why not? The weapons are still ready. It just might take longer to find Jake without William but we don’t have that choice now,” Mulder said. “And I can help with that. Hell, you can help with that! We can both read minds.”

“With due respect, Mulder, your mind reading skills are still a work in progress, and that is me being very polite. And while mine are astoundingly better, that’s not our only reason for concern.”

“You have been hiding something from us from the beginning,” Mulder seethed. “Come clean now, or I will shoot you. I know it won’t make a difference, but it will hurt. And then I’ll do it again. And again. Get the picture?”

“Perfectly,” JJ said, his voice flat. “I was hoping to keep things under control. We really didn’t want to involve you at all, frankly, since you’re too emotionally connected. Emotional connections can get us all into trouble in this very delicate situation.”

Mulder put his hand over his gun. “I wasn’t joking about shooting you.”

“I’m trying to explain to you that I didn’t keep information from you for any nefarious reasons. I want to save both of your sons, and destroy all of the Super Soldiers at Camp David as much as anyone. Probably more than you can know.”

The way in which JJ said his last sentence, tugged at Scully. She saw a glimpse of the man he had been before the apocalypse. She couldn’t read minds like Mulder and the hybrids, but her FBI training had taught her to read people well. JJ looked up at her, making eye contact, and nodded nearly imperceptibly, but didn’t say anything more about the subject.

“They need to be eliminated in order for the world to have any chance of being restored. I want to be able to live outside of a secure bunker. But it’s not just Camp David that is the problem. There are pockets of Loyalist groups like them scattered all over the country, gaining control of military facilities and equipment much faster than those like me. This is just the start. But if Suveg succeeds, it will be over for us. They’re larger in number for one thing. Much larger. With your sons gone, they’ll become nearly indestructible, and then eliminate any surviving humans and sympathetic hybrids alike. And that will be the Endgame. So, we must succeed Mr. Mulder. Do you understand me? This is bigger than your sons.”

Mulder pursed his lips together tightly, unhappy to hear what JJ was telling him. “OK,” he began slowly, his voice filled with more gravel than usual. “Then what is the problem with following the original plan?”

JJ took a deep breath. “Without William’s help, we have no access to telekinesis. We needed his help getting into the facility undetected, to warn us when one of them is approaching, and to break open the secure door they’ll surely have Jake hidden behind.”

“Then let’s go. Nothing you’ve said changes anything. We either do this and succeed, or do it and fail. Either way, I’m doing whatever I can to save my sons… now. And who knows, maybe we can find William and Bill before they tip anyone off at the Camp,” Mulder said.

“Unfortunately, that’s not going to happen,” a new voice said, startling them all.

Scully turned to see her brother, usually an imposing figure, especially to her vertically challenged frame, standing in the doorway looking as meek and small as a 6 foot 2 tall man could look. His shoulders were slumped, he was wet from head to toe, breathing labored. He nearly blocked the door, but Scully glimpsed through the tiny spaces into the cold beyond the door frame. Bill was alone. William was not with him.

“Son of a bitch!” Mulder shouted as he moved towards Bill in full rage mode. Bill barely flinched. Scully thought he actually leaned into Mulder’s punch, like he expected it, wanted it. Bill sank to the floor on one knee as Tara rushed to him, blocking Mulder from further assaulting her husband. Mulder didn’t take another shot, but he picked Bill up by the lapels. “Where is he?!”

“Inside Camp David. I tried to stop him, but he planned the whole thing.”

Bill explained everything that had happened with Mulder gripping his jacket tightly, not bothering to try to escape. When he was finished, Mulder shoved Bill violently to the floor and Bill just remained there, crumpled. Without looking at Scully, he said, “Dana, I’m sorry. I was wrong. I’m so sorry.”

“Not to spoil this family moment,” JJ interrupted. “But there’s one more thing you need to know before we go anywhere with anyone.”

“Another thing we need to know now that wasn’t important enough to tell us earlier?” Scully asked, her lips barely moving through gritted teeth.

“It’s what I was trying to tell you,” JJ said.

“Say it!” Mulder shouted.

“Suveg has access to an inhibitor,” JJ stuttered.

“Inhibitor to what?” Mulder asked, his voice cracking.

“The same inhibitor your son William was given as a baby. It will make both boys’ abilities inert, at least for a period of time. It’s likely how they were able to capture Jake in the first place.”

“And they’ll be able to capture William too,” Mulder said. “Frankly, at this point that doesn’t change a thing. Let’s go.”

“The thing is, at high enough doses,” JJ said shakily. “We have reason to believe that the inhibitor not only renders their abilities inert, but that it could kill them. It’s probably what Suveg planned to use to sacrifice them.”

“Again, this changes nothing,” Mulder said. “We knew that was his plan.”

“Yes it does,” Scully said. “Suveg will have them both. He won’t need to wait to do it. He’ll kill Jake and William today.” Scully heard herself say the words, but they sounded like they came from someone else as she processed the implication. She closed her eyes, inhaled deeply. She was done with all of this. She shook her head, and as she opened her eyes, there was only one thing that mattered. All of the aliens at Camp David would die today before one hair was moved on either of her sons. She moved her feet forward towards the door as she shouted, “Tell your men to move!”

“Dr. Scully!” JJ called. The force of his voice surprised her. He may have been an Army General, but she assumed his rank had more to do with his expertise in his field, than with his command prowess. In fact, the man had seemed to be afraid of her, which gave her, she admitted to herself, great pleasure. But his voice boomed now, and she stopped immediately, almost unconsciously bowing to authority, as if he was her father calling out to her. He wasn’t her father, but she was a mother who needed to save her son.

“What?” she asked without turning around. “Hurry up!”

“Dr. Scully, you cannot go on this mission. That hasn’t changed. We can’t risk the chance your chip will alert them we’re coming. You know this,” JJ said.

Her shoulders slumped. “Scully,” Mulder said, striding to stand next to her. He put his arms around her shoulder. Softly, he said, “Its ok. I’ll bring him back.”

“Mulder, I have to go,” she said. It was almost a desperate need to be a part of this mission. She hadn’t been able to go with them to the alien mother ship, and although her serum had made the mission possible, she’d felt just as feckless as she had when she’d stayed back from the trip to Oregon when Mulder had been abducted.

“Scully, we have a chance to save them because of you,” Mulder said. “Never forget that. I will bring him back.” He kissed her cheek, calming down her chaotic mind a notch.

“I’ll go with you,” Bill said. Scully faced him. “Before you say no, I know that facility better than anyone else here. Spent some TDY’s there. Had special access. I think I know a way in that will be low key. Maybe only one or two guards. They might not even know about it if we’re lucky. I owe it to them both. Please?”

Scully saw a glimmer of the brother she once admired return to this older man’s face. She nodded. “Go.”

^^^^^^^

 William told Jake to hang on as he ran along the fence line towards a door he knew would lead him to his brother. He’d managed to easily handle the first few soldiers who’d tried to stop him, and dodge the others that came out to assist. It was easy to do when you could hear their thoughts. He’d expected to have to wade through hundreds of voices, but it seemed the contingent of soldiers at this Camp was smaller than he’d originally suspected. Maybe a hundred at most. That was still a lot of men, despite their weak Super Soldier minds, to pay attention to, and he had to admit, he was tiring.

More than anything he tried to focus on the faint signals he was hearing from Jake. Shortly after William heard the soldiers capture him out on the road, the connection between them had both dwindled and strengthened in surprising ways. He was able to intensely feel everything Jake was feeling, from terror to nausea to pain, and his head was fuzzy constantly, like he’d felt once after waking up from getting beaned in the head by his friend during a pickup game of baseball. But Jake was less responsive to him as well, like his own telepathy had been muted. It was impossible to explain to anyone who couldn’t do what they could do, but if William had to guess, he’d say the soldiers had done something to Jake to make him powerless. William would have to be extra careful to avoid the same fate, or they’d both be screwed.

But he wasn’t stopping.

Two more men ran out of a nearby building towards William. He had ducked behind a large row of hedges, but the men continued in his direction. William lifted his hand to defend himself, which he knew would also alert any others to his location, but the men took a sharp right turn and went off on another route. William exhaled a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding in. He concentrated, focused his mind, hoping to send a message to Jake to hold on. He’d be there soon. What he was going to do when he found him, he wasn’t exactly sure. Whether or not his brother could receive his message, William wasn’t certain. He got no direct response in return, just a faint whisper of his Jake’s stomach roiling. William listened once more for the soldiers, and when there was nothing nearby, he stood up and ran for the door.

^^^^^^^

Scully watched out the back window of the Humvee as the truck loaded with Mulder and Bill sped away leading a convoy of Special Forces warriors towards Camp David, towards her sons. She wore a tactical vest, and across her lap was a modified M4, containing bullets laced with synthesized Amplified Mesabi Ferrum, or AMF, but she was headed in the opposite direction of the real danger. JJ sat beside her, glancing in her direction, no doubt reading her thoughts and knowing better than to say anything. She was the decoy. Although the top of the armored vehicle was equipped with an AMF-infused M-60 gun turret, they would not be going into the middle of the Camp David battle. Perhaps they would divert at least some of the Super Soldiers away as they chased after her and the chip in her neck that had once again caused her so much anguish. Years ago, it had been cancer, and this time the pain felt the same. When would they finally be rid of the cancer the Gray alien invaders had brought upon the human race?

“This is a start,” JJ said against his own better judgment, sitting back as if anticipating being attacked by a wild cat.

Scully smiled, letting him off the hook. He was a strange one, this brilliant scientist who was indestructible, but afraid of a 5’3” woman. “It’s ok. I just feel useless.” She looked out again, this time through the small side window as the truck wound its way through the treacherous, snow covered roads of the Catoctin Mountains.

“With any luck, this will be over before we get to the Maryland border,” he said.

“I don’t remember the last time I had luck, but I’ll try to see it your way,” she said. She glanced at him, looked down, played with the strap on her weapon, and finally looking at the Alpha Hybrid sitting next to her, she said, “If I ask you something, will you be completely honest with me?”

“I see no reason to keep secrets anymore, Dr. Scully,” JJ said in his casual matter of fact tone.

“I know you were not on the alien’s side, but you admit you were part of all of this. You were part of the original conspiracy… the Syndicate, right?”

JJ only nodded, no doubt anticipating her question, but allowing her to continue.

“I’m not sure I know where the line between your project and the other project exists,” she continued.

“For a few years, if I’m being honest, it was the same project. That’s how we each know so much about the other, and perhaps why neither side was completely successful in their mission. As you probably know, keeping secrets in the government is an impossible task, not that we didn’t try.”

Scully smiled mirthlessly. “So, and I realize this is not all on you, but…” she fumbled for the words.

“You can ask me,” he said, meeting her eyes, a seriousness reflecting back that she hadn’t seen from him before.

“How do you sleep at night? How do you justify all the lives you’ve destroyed? What I was put through is horrific, but people have died because of this, for nothing. My sister, Melissa. Mulder’s sister. His father. Our son… our *sons*, what Jake had to go through, never knowing there was anyone out there who would love him,” she paused and breathed in deeply. She would not allow herself to cry. She didn’t want this to be an emotional bloodletting. She merely wanted the answers she’d been seeking for more than two decades. “Why?”

“We believed we were doing what we had to do to save mankind. It sounds obtuse and grandiose, but that was what I believed. I can’t speak for anyone else, and I’m not justifying anything that was done to innocent people like yourself and your sons, but for me, I believed none of us was greater than the mission. Saving the human race, might require sacrificing some humans.”

Scully pursed her lips. He spoke of atrocities inflicted upon individual, thinking, feeling people as if he were evaluating short term losses to win big pots in a poker game. She felt his hand on her forearm, catching her attention. She looked him in the eyes.

“Dr. Scully, make no mistake. I do not take it lightly,” he said. His face grim, all traces of his jovial, nonchalance vanished. “I don’t want to insult you by begging for your forgiveness now. We’re too far gone for that, wouldn’t you say?”

Yes, they were.

“But perhaps, if we’re successful in saving your sons, we can try to build this world back up together. Maybe that can be a start at something new.”

The grinding sound of the Humvee’s engines was all that existed inside the truck. Even the air felt evacuated. But sound cannot exist without air, and neither can forgiveness. Not all was vanquished in this world. She was far from being able to forgive anyone who’d been part of this, but if William, Jake, Bill and Mulder returned to her alive, she might find the courage to try. If not for herself, but for the promise of the rest of their lives together. That might be a way to move forward. That would be a start.

^^^^^^^

Bill hadn’t been joking about knowing his way around the Camp David Facility. He’d managed to lead them into an underground network of tunnels through an obscure entrance far outside the main gate, and they had yet to see another soul. The Super Soldiers at the Camp clearly didn’t know about it, or they’d have blocked it or guarded it for sure. The plan was for the two of them and three other men from Raven Rock, armed with the modified weapons, to extract William and Jake before sending in the big guns to take out all of Suveg’s followers up top. Mulder’s primary job was to use his limited telepathy to find both boys as quietly as possible. His secondary job was to ignore the thoughts radiating from his common law brother-in-law’s mind. They varied between focus on the mission, and wondering if Mulder really could read people’s minds, and what his sister saw in her lanky former FBI partner.

“Primarily my ass,” Mulder said. Now that they were inside, he’d taken the lead.

“Excuse me?” Bill asked softly.

“Your sister. She likes my ass, among other qualities.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Bill asked, his face pale as if he’d just vomited in a bucket.

“You wanted to know what she sees in me,” Mulder said over his shoulder.

“I didn’t need to know that.”

“I could be more graphic if you’d like,” Mulder said, monotone. “This one time we were fooling around…”

“Shut up, Mulder,” Bill whispered forcefully. “We’re not supposed to be in here, remember?”

Mulder shrugged. He enjoyed making the man squirm. “Then try to keep your thoughts on the mission.”

They wound through brightly lit corridors. The walls and floors were white, devoid of anything interesting or less than functional aesthetics. It was a typical government series of hallways primarily used by the average Camp David worker, not the important people like the President and his family. They’d have been comfortably topside. In the light. Ironically, while the President had been in the light, he’d been mostly in the dark about what his shadow government – men like Suveg and Tom Davis and JJ -- had been doing. Not even the President had been immune from the Plague, or from the conspiracy.

They came to a large circular open area about 100 feet across with doors spaced in regular intervals all around radiating like spokes on a bicycle wheel. Some doors were marked with signs suggesting they led to rooms, offices, or labs, while others seemed to lead to corridors. The main circular room they stood in now included tables and chairs, sofas, televisions. It was some kind of lounge or breakroom room, but it was oddly empty. At about the twelve o’clock position at the top of the lounge was a set of double doors with security locks requiring a retina scan and a passcode. It was the only set of doors with these features.

“I think if they have him anywhere, it’s through there, down that hallway,” Bill said. “It leads to a detention area. I saw it on a VIP tour.”

“Let’s go then,” Mulder said, moving towards the doors. “Boys, you have something that can take care of that lock, right?”

“Yes sir!” One of the soldiers accompanying them said.

“Wait!” Bill said. “The minute we bust open that door is the minute we lose our stealth. We have to find another way.”

“Is there another way?” Mulder asked.

Mulder searched Bill’s mind, but his face told him everything. If there was another way, Bill didn’t know it.

“Lock and load,” Mulder said resuming his path to the door. When he was about ten feet away an alarm went off sending pain through Mulder’s ears with its evil WHOOP! WHOOP! WHOOP! The lighting in the room changed as red lights flashed in conjunction with the alarm. Mulder heard the pounding of several footsteps and voices coming from several directions behind them.

“Do it now!” Mulder commanded the soldier who leapt forward and placed something on the security lock.

“It’s open,” the soldier said.

“What?” he said. He looked at the door as the soldier turned the handle, easily pushing it open. “Someone’s going to get fired for that,” he said without emotion.

That the door was open, was strange, but Mulder didn’t care. It was where they needed to go. As they pushed through the door, Mulder saw the tips of the Super Soldiers’ guns as they entered the large lounge room behind them from one of the bottom spokes. Mulder turned to face them, and aimed his weapon. His mission mates followed suit as Mulder pulled the trigger. Each Super Soldier he hit stopped immediately and convulsed. Smoke poured out of any exposed skin, which opened into sickening blackened cracks like an erupting volcano, as they collapsed to the ground. Mulder’s group continued to fire, but the Super Soldiers still standing fired back. Finally, the last of Suveg’s men fell to the ground, but Mulder knew that was only round one.

“There’s more coming. Let’s go!” he said, pushing his team through the large doors. They ran down the corridor. It was long. Very long. Maybe a football field or more long. At the end, he saw a small figure standing with his arms straight out, palms up towards the door but not touching it.

“William,” he thought he said aloud, but his tongue was heavy and thick. Mulder turned back to Bill. “There he is!”

Bill was hunched over, holding his thigh.

“Are you ok?” Mulder asked.

Bill held up his hand revealing a large, expanding stain of blood flooding his pants leg. It was a bad place to get shot, close to the femoral artery. “Go get him,” he said. “I’ll be right behind you.”

“Can you walk?”

“No problem,” Bill said, wincing. “Just go!”

“Help him!” Mulder yelled to one of the Raven Rock soldiers on their team. Without waiting to see if they obeyed, Mulder launched into a sprint towards his son.

^^^^^^^

William approached the heavy metal door. He knew on the other side was his brother and the man that had captured him. He found it difficult to read the man’s mind, but he had caught glimpses. The man planned to kill him and Jake. But William knew something the man didn’t. William and his brother were impossible to kill. Whatever was coming would hurt, but he would survive. He was a freak of nature. The man on the other side of the door would learn about that soon enough. And if the man was like the others, William would kill him. Not because he wanted to, but because all that mattered was saving his brother, and the man would be in the way. William could not control that power.

But he could control this one. He held his palms up, as if he was going to push the door open. For William, telepathy was mostly effortless, but moving objects intentionally with his mind – Dana called it telekinesis -- took energy. He closed his eyes, and focused all of his mind on pushing open this door, which was probably as thick as a bank vault. Maybe thicker. He’d never tried to move anything this strong before. He vaguely registered a high pitched sound begin to whoop, and the lighting behind his closed lids wavered, but it was all background. All that mattered was opening this door. He faintly heard someone calling his name, but that was soon drowned out by the sound of metal cracking as the hinges shattered. Beads of sweat drizzled down his forehead, and he felt his cheeks redden. William concentrated harder. He thrust his hands out, extending them all the way. The door blew inward with a sound like rushing wind. William opened his eyes. The door stood upright a few feet inside its frame for a few seconds before lolling backwards and landing on the floor with a deafening metallic thud. Smoke surrounded him as he stepped through the entryway. He took several heavy breaths. As the smoke cleared, he could see the outline of a man standing several feet away. For the first time since this all began, he finally heard Jake’s voice in his mind.

“Go back!” his brother shouted telepathically to him. A moment later William felt a sharp pain in his neck. His hand instinctively covered the spot. He pulled his hand away holding a tiny dart the length of a pen cap, with soft downy feathers on the end. Instantly, his mind clouded. Jake’s voice faded into nothing. He stumbled and collapsed to the floor.

A voice he’d never heard before penetrated the fuzziness. “I’m glad you could join us, Quetzalcoatl. Xolotl and I have been having a lot of fun. It’s time to end this silly prophecy nonsense once and for all. It’s my turn to play God.”

Then William only saw the darkness.

^^^^^^^

Mulder ran down the hallway towards William, watching as he broke the door off its hinges and stepped inside. “No, Will! Stop!” he rasped. His throat was dry, and he wasn’t sure any sound actually came out. The hallway was long, and although Mulder was a fast runner for any age, his legs felt stuck in quicksand as he tried to push towards his son.

When he finally reached the door he coughed uncontrollably as the smoke hit the back of his throat. As his eyes adjusted to the dim light he heard a voice that he did not recognize. Instantly, he pointed his gun towards the sound.

“If you shoot, you’ll hit him,” the voice said. Mulder’s eyes finally landed on its owner.

General Suveg. Mulder had met him before. Seeing his face had instantly brought the memory back to him. He’d been one of the men on the panel that had falsely convicted Mulder of *killing* the Super Soldier, Knowle Rohrer, and had sentenced him to death. He had orchestrated the entire thing, and been responsible for Mulder and Scully’s last decade on the run. And he was standing behind a large wooden desk. The kind everyone in the government had in the 1950’s, when this entire conspiracy first began. Some things never changed.

To Suveg’s right was a panel of thick plexi-glass, behind which stood the boy that looked like William. Jake’s palms were flat, his eyes glassy but awake. The actual William was slumped over, but sitting in a desk chair in front of a standing Suveg. He appeared only semi-conscious, his head lolling back, body limp. Suveg’s right arm draped over William’s shoulder, propping him up. Mulder pointed the gun at Suveg, and applied a slight amount of pressure to the trigger.

“Easy, there big guy,” Suveg said. He held up his left hand briefly, flicking a glimpse at a small cylindrical object, similar to one Mulder had seen many times before. Suveg’s thumb covered one end, and he pressed the object’s other end into William’s neck. “My thumb has already pressed the button, but the fun part won’t happen until I let go. If you shoot me, I’ll release several thousand microns of special magnetite into his veins. I’ve already shot him up with a baby dose, but the one from this will probably kill him.” Suveg said, looking down at the unresponsive William. “He’s a little sleepy. Gave him an extra tranquilizer just to make sure there’s no funny business. So if you’re thinking he’ll be able to help you here, you’re seriously mistaken.”

“Let him go!” Mulder shouted. He aimed the weapon at Suveg’s head, and his finger tapped the trigger again. “Let them both go!”

“Why would I do that? This is what I’ve been waiting for. I can’t believe you brought them right to me. That is pretty incredible. What are the odds? I’m not a math guy, so I’m not sure,” he said, his smug tone adding to Mulder’s hatred of the man. “You’re the genius. Ooops. Not this time though, eh.” Suveg laughed. “So many times I advocated killing you, Mulder. But I’m glad I was usually shot down by my chain of command. This is so much better than I could have imagined, despite the fact you screwed it all up.”

Mulder looked back to Jake. Unlike William, he was apparently mostly tranquilizer free and awake, standing with his hands pressed up against the glass that sealed him into a small cell, watching the scene in front of him with a look of terror locked on his face. William tended to show little emotion, his face remaining neutral very much like Mulder’s temperament. But Jake seemed to wear his emotions on his face without restraint. It was fascinating that the son raised by humans seemed more stoic, while the son raised by telepathic aliens with limited ability to show emotion, was not.

“You like that?” Suveg asked, seeing Mulder’s gaze on Jake. “It’s a special cell. The glass is supposed to be stronger than steel or some strong ass shit like that. Don’t really know. I’m not an engineer. I know what you’re thinking… Why doesn’t he just break it open? You’re right. He’s got a bad case of magnetite, too. Xolotl over there gets a constant small dose released into his cell, a mist into the air through the vents on a timer. We got that brilliant idea from William, excuse me, Quetzalcoatl here, when he killed all the Grays on the ship. Thanks, by the way kid. Poetic really,” he said, squeezing William’s neck for emphasis.

Mulder vaguely wondered if this guy was such a chatty asshole when he’d been a normal human. If he could keep the man talking, maybe he could come up with a plan.

Suveg seemed willing to continue. “If my men weren’t such idiots we could have had the stuff ready to go when they first showed up at your cabin. Gulliver always wanted to be a hero. He got a nice iron bath as a reward.”

“Hero complex seems common with all of you assholes,” Mulder said. “Doesn’t seem very heroic to kill a couple of kids.”

Suveg laughed. “I can’t help it if you drove them right to my doorstep. We’d been tracking the other one for a while. Honestly, I thought he was Quetzalcoatl for a while. We weren’t sure which ship had been ground zero. Then we found out they were both alive and only a few miles away. It was too good to be true. These men of mine are funny. They’re into this whole ‘Twin Myth’ thing. I don’t give a shit about it myself, but a good leader has to go with whatever works to keep morale up.”

“I’m sure on this year’s base climate survey you’ll get the top score. Congratulations,” Mulder said.

“I’m not unreasonable, Mr. Mulder. I can see that we’re in a bit of a situation here. You’ve gotten this far. I watched you mow my men down on your way in here, so clearly you’ve got something more than bullets in those weapons. I assume you’ve made friends with General Moffitt at Raven Rock. It’s been a busy few weeks, as you can imagine, so we hadn’t gotten around to killing all of those guys yet. Probably a bit of an oversight on my part, but whatever special soup they made up for my men won’t work on me. Like I said, I’m reasonable. It’s why I haven’t killed you yet. With your help, I think we can both come out of this with something we want.”

“What do you want?” Mulder asked, relieved Suveg had finally shut up. He was using all of his energy not to shoot the man. Not that it would do much good. Like JJ, this man was an Alpha Hybrid. The special serum laced bullets would have no effect other than to slow him down and cause him pain. Mulder looked at Suveg’s hand holding the cylinder once more. Behind him, he heard more commotion coming from the hallways. Gun fire. Voices shouting. Several pairs of boots heading in their direction.

“I want to win,” Suveg said. “I want to eliminate anything that stands in the way of that. And I want you to suffer.”

“How is that what I want?”

“It’s not, but if you let me have one of these boys, and I’ll let you pick, I’ll let the other one go back to his mother. You’ll be dead, but I’ll let her live. That must be worth something to you.”

Mulder wondered how good his aim was these days, without the regular required trips to the shooting range for recertification. Would he be able to shoot the cylinder out of Suveg’s hand?

Before he could lift his weapon, the lights went out.

^^^^^^^

*Shots fired. Shots fired. Shots fired.* The two words recycled over and over again in her mind as the convoy sped back towards Camp David. Over the radio, the reports came into update Scully and JJ on the progress of the mission as they tried to divert attention away. Just as they had approached the Maryland/Virginia border, the news came that the covert mission had been compromised and there had been multiple shots fired at the camp. Scully ordered the driver to turn around immediately, and take her to her sons, Mulder and brother. There was no point in being a decoy now, and she needed to do whatever she could to keep her family alive. JJ had opened his mouth to protest, but the telepath heard the fire in her mind and instead ordered the driver to follow Scully’s orders.

“Actually, it was when you said to ‘turn the fuck around’,” JJ said.

“Excuse me?” Scully asked, her knee bouncing with impatience as the truck moved too slowly towards their goal.

“Nevermind. Air support will be there in one minute,” JJ said. Scully could see the main gate of the camp growing larger through the front window.

“No, you can’t risk hitting them,” she said.

JJ shook his head. “They won’t. They’re going to take out the main power generators, and then it will be the ground support team, ah… and us, that will go inside. They’re underground as we suspected.”

“If we’re too late,” she said, immediately trapping the rest of the thought, not allowing it to go any further.

“We’re not,” JJ said simply looking out the window.

Scully removed the clip from her weapon, inspected it for good measure, and then shoved it back in with a hard click. She nodded. “Let’s bring them home.”

^^^^^^^

The battery powered emergency lights projected an eerie red glow over the room, making it difficult to see details, disorienting everyone in the room. The power outage had made Mulder aware of how much background noise had existed in the room before, as now there was a disquieting silence, amplifying every movement.

“Dad?” William asked. His eyes fluttered as he tried to shake whatever the General had given him out of his foggy mind.

“Don’t move, Will. Stay still!” Mulder said.

“Dad, I’m sorry,” William said. For the first time since he’d met his son, William sounded like a little boy. He was scared, and humiliated, and Mulder wanted nothing more than to make it better.

“You don’t need to be sorry, Will. Just hold tight, ok,” Mulder said. His mind raced as he tried to figure out how to get both his boys out of this.

“Mulder,” Bill said, coming into the room, breathing heavily, holding his blood soaked thigh. “The other Camp David soldiers are dead. More coming. We need to move.”

Bill grabbed Mulder to pull him back, and then saw his nephew for the first time in the General’s arms. “Let him go!” Bill cried, releasing Mulder and pointing his weapon at Suveg.

“Don’t shoot, Bill. That cylinder he’s holding on William will spring load a poison into him if he moves his thumb,” Mulder said, holding his hand up to Bill.

“Who’s this?” Suveg asked Mulder. “Never mind. Don’t care,” he said. In one motion, Suveg reached to his side, keeping the other hand wrapped around the silver cylinder, holding it tightly against William’s carotid artery, and lifted his freed hand back up, revealing a handgun. He quickly pointed it at Bill, and pulled the trigger three times before he could react.

Bill cried out in pain as he doubled over and fell to the floor, holding his stomach. Bill’s entire lower half of his body was now a stain of blood. Satisfied he had eliminated one annoyance, Suveg turned his weapon towards Mulder. “I’m done being a nice guy. Make a decision, Mr. Mulder! Which son do you sacrifice?”

A sound like a trumpet wailing assaulted Mulder’s ears. And then the room began to quake.

^^^^^^^

Gray. Not black. Gray with a tint of red. The pain was intense at first, but as time passed, (how can time be slow and fast all at once?) the images in front of Bill became cloudy and dull. Sounds were all muddled together, like being underwater. He felt his heart rate race in a short burst, then begin to slow, matching his level of pain and worry. This was what dying felt like. It wasn’t so bad. Now that the pain was fading, he felt calm, like taking a warm bath.

NO!

A jolt of fire-tinged pain hit him in the gut, slapping him awake. He did not want to die. He opened his eyes. It was difficult to see clearly, but he could still make out the images in the room. Suveg held a weapon against William’s neck. Mulder had said if they shot him, a poison would flood into William and kill him. *Is the ground shaking?*, he wondered. *I’m hallucinating.* Sounds were harder to understand, but he thought Mulder was crying “Let him go!” over and over again, even as the ground shook harder. Vaguely, from somewhere in the distance outside the room, Bill heard tapping. Lots of tapping. Shots in the hallway maybe? Footsteps? Too difficult to tell. Too much energy to care.

Bill moved his hand from his belly, and felt something smooth and cool at his side. He slid his blood-soaked, sticky fingers over the object, finding the familiar stock, and then a trigger. Bill smiled softly. Mulder had called him a bad shot when he’d hit him with the shotgun a few days earlier. Ironically, even for a Navy man, Bill was an excellent shot. He’d hit Mulder exactly where he’d intended to, just in case he’d been wrong about him being a clone. He’d wanted to see whatever it was bleed first, and outside of the house. As Bill climbed to new heights in his career, and shooting was even less important, he’d always prided himself on getting his expert badges, and practiced regularly in his off hours. He’d managed to fuck up almost everything, not just since Dana had arrived at the cabin, but before that. He’d ruined his relationship with her. He’d only wanted to protect her. Protect his family. Be the man his father would have wanted him to be. He’d failed. So, if he was going to be reunited with his dad in a few minutes, he at least wanted to be able to look him in the eye, stand up proudly face to face.

Bill tried to lift his M4 rifle, but it was too heavy, so he moved his hand to Glock holstered to his right thigh, and pulled it from its sheath. His weakened muscles strained to hold the weapon steady. When did these things get so heavy? He felt his hand shake as he found the trigger. He closed his eyes, and summoned the remaining energy he had to keep his hand still. Opening his eyes, he searched out what he needed to focus on. The silver glinted in the reddened emergency, artificial lighting of this godforsaken hole.

Bill pulled the trigger, and then the world went black.

^^^^^^^

Suveg’s hand exploded in a spray of red, bone and matter, but all Mulder noticed was the little silver object he’d held against William’s neck flying into the cold concrete wall behind them and bouncing impotently to the floor. As the General fell to the ground clutching his partially missing hand, an explosion ripped through the tiny room.

When the shaking had stopped, Jake stood inside the threshold of his cell, staring coldly at the General a few feet away, his hands held out in front of him, palms flat. What had been the plexi-glass wall of his special cell was shattered and lay in rubble at his feet. Suveg moaned in pain, but reached with his good hand for his discarded weapon laying on the floor.

“Stay back!” Mulder shouted to his sons as he lifted his own automatic rifle, and emptied the magazine into every part of Suveg’s body. The man crumpled to the ground, but continued to move. He was an Alpha Hybrid, and even the Amplified Mesabi Ferrum-laced bullets would have only a mild inhibitor effect on him. Suveg was immobilized, but given enough time, he’d spring back to new. Even his hand would regenerate eventually.

Behind him, Mulder heard footsteps running down the corridor towards the room. When they sounded only a few feet away from the door, the thunder of hundreds of bullets assaulted Mulder’s ears, and made his body thrum from the vibrations.

For a few moments, there was quiet. And then more footsteps ran towards them. His rifle’s ammo spent, Mulder raised his Glock, prepared to shoot anything that moved through the door, until he heard a familiar sound. It was the sound that always calmed him. The sound that always reoriented him when the world swirled.

Scully’s voice grabbed him moments before he saw her enter the room, her own modified M4 ready, night vision goggles covering her eyes.

“Mulder?” she asked, ripping the goggles off her face, running to his side.

Mulder was glad to see her, but his attention was drawn back towards Suveg.

“If you let me go, I can speak to the others, convince them to leave you all alone,” Suveg was saying, his bravado replaced by begging. “The Grays, they trust me. You’ll need me to communicate with them!”

Jake’s eyes were fixed on Suveg as he helped William from the ground to a standing position. William looked at Jake, nodded somberly, before turning back to the General. He cleared his throat. “My brother says you’re a liar,” William said, turning his attention away from the man to Jake.

Jake looked at William. William nodded once more, and both boys turned back to Suveg. They raised their hands in mirror images of each other, holding them palms flat towards Suveg. The General began to shake. His skin blackened, and turned to charcoal. The same thing that normally happened whenever a Super Soldier got too close to either boy was happening to Suveg, a type of creature they’d believed was immune from whatever it was that gave William and Jake their powers. He burst into flames, and fell to the ground. His body convulsed for a few moments before coming to a merciful rest.

Both boys wobbled slightly, but leaned against each other to stay on their feet. Tears streamed down their faces as they looked at the smoldering remains of the man they’d just killed. Mulder walked over to them. He felt his jaw slightly agape, and thought he should close it, but was unable to do so. He put his hands on his sons’ shoulders, and finally pursed his lips together in what he hoped was an “its ok” gesture. “He didn’t give you a choice.”

“All clear!” some soldier – Madison, Mulder vaguely registered – said entering the room. “We’ve taken control of the facility,” he added.

William and Jake looked up at him, and Mulder thought, “Everything will be ok. Finally.” He even believed himself this time.

^^^^^^^

Scully’s heart was ripped out of her chest for what felt like the millionth time in the past week alone. Once they’d gotten the word that Mulder and Bill’s position had been compromised, she forced JJ and her convoy to turn around and go straight to the Camp. After the air support had taken down the main power, they’d fought their way in the dark through an onslaught of Super Soldiers, using their fortified bullets to mow them down, until they’d made it to the corridor where a trail of blood had led them to this room. She wasn’t sure exactly what had happened here moments earlier, but she understood the outcome. Her sons were alive. She had just watched in astonishment as they killed the man responsible for putting them all in danger, and her brother Bill was lying on the floor near her feet either dead or near it.

Her instinct as a mother was to run to her sons to make sure they were ok, but her rational brain kicked in to tell her they appeared physically fine, and her brother needed her. Knowing that William and Jake were safe, her gut now roiled at the realization that her big brother was in a grim situation. She dropped her weapon, removed the Kevlar body armor, and pulled her thermal long sleeve shirt over her head. She kneeled beside him wearing a tank top undershirt, and pushed the removed shirt into Bill’s stomach wound to try to squelch the bleeding, which seemed to be coming from his entire gut. He exhaled a long breath, but didn’t inhale.

“Bill, come on, Bill!” she shouted at him. “Stay with me!” She heard her voice crack, as her heart raced. Her face contorted as she felt the warmth of tears begin to flow. “Come on big brother,” she said. He was gone. She knew this. It was one more thing he’d done to anger her. “Who is going to boss me around if you leave?” She asked weakly.

“Scully,” Mulder said. She felt his warm hand on her bare shoulder, as he sat beside her next to Bill. Scully put her hands over her face as the tears came uncontrollably. Mulder pulled her into an embrace, holding her wordlessly as he allowed her to grieve, one more family member lost to this insanity.

^^^^^^^

Bill Scully had always been a thorn in Mulder’s side. Undermining his relationship with Scully at every chance he got, and second-guessing his brilliant and strong sister’s choices despite his own cluelessness about the state of the world, and the impending future. He’d almost gotten them all killed. Yet his heart ached for Scully now. Bill hadn’t been an evil man, just a man like so many others he’d encountered during this lifelong quest who couldn’t bring themselves to believe in the fantastic. This much was clear: he’d loved his family, including his sister, and he’d tried to make up for it in the end. And he’d saved William’s life. He’d made a shot Mulder could never have made in the calmest of target practice to shoot the cylinder out of Suveg’s hands. Mulder would never forget that, and he would make sure all of the Scully’s knew it was how Bill had died.

Mulder looked absently at his hands. On the back of his hand was a deep cut, blood flowed from it, nearly covering his entire hand. He had no recollection of when he got it, possibly it had come from a stray piece of plexi-glass shrapnel, but he really didn’t care. He barely registered any pain at all, except the pain he felt for Scully now.

Mulder felt a slight pressure on his shoulder. Jake stood next to him, smiling curiously before he looked to Scully. She had left Mulder’s embrace, sitting near him with her knees bent up, her arms crossed over them, her head down. “Mom?” Jake asked.

This got Scully’s attention, and she raised her head slowly. Tears had stopped flowing, but she had salt tracks trailing down her cheeks in their place. The first word Jake had spoken aloud was *Mom.*

As Mulder and Scully watched, Jake bent down, kneeling on the floor next to Bill. William had walked over, and stood a few feet away, looking on as his brother placed both hands over Bill’s wounds. Jake started with the wound in his leg, holding his hands there until even the blood staining Bill’s pants dissolved from the fabric. Once clear, Jake repeated the gesture on Bill’s stomach wounds. Although this time Jake’s eyes closed tightly after he found the proper placement for his hands, concentrating intently on his task. As the blood in that spot also lifted from the fabric, Bill gasped, his back arching as he inhaled his first breath in several minutes. Finally, Jake briefly touched Bill’s forehead, before sitting back.

Exhale. Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Bill’s breathing approached normal. Scully and Mulder looked at each other, eyes wide. They’d seen this phenomenon happen before. Scully was alive because of it, but they’d never considered the power to heal could come from their son. For a moment, Mulder wondered, was Jake really William’s twin after all? In response, Jake reached for William’s hand. William shook his head, confused, but Jake was firm, drawing his brother over. William complied and took Jake’s hand letting him guide William down to mirror his posture, placing his hand onto Bill’s chest over his heart.

William shook his head. “I don’t know how to,” he said. Jake smiled, nodded as the boys re-engaged in their telepathic conversation. William looked at Mulder and Scully. “He says I can do this too,” then added, looking at Jake, “you’ll have to teach me.” Jake nodded. Holding William’s hand, Jake touched Mulder’s cut hand, as they healed the wound there in a fraction of the time it had taken to heal Bill.

“I think I’ll need more practice,” William said. Jake smiled, released William’s hand, and pointed to Scully. She shook her head, not understanding what Jake meant. Mulder thought, Jake was still a little shy about speaking English, but now they knew he was physically capable of speech. William helped his brother once more. “He says we’re like you,” William said.

As Scully was about to protest that she could never do anything like the miracle she’d just witnessed, Mulder added, “He means, you’re all healers, just with different methods.” He and the boys would share telepathy, but healing was Scully’s domain. Mulder smiled, and took Scully’s hand, squeezing before raising it to his lips for a reassuring kiss.

She smiled back as Bill’s eyes fluttered open. Scully placed her hands on her brother’s face. He swallowed, and gnashed his tongue against the roof of his mouth as he tried to move the heavy muscle to speak. “Dana?” he asked, his voice rough from the sleep of the dead.

“Don’t try to talk, Bill,” she said gently.

“What happened?” he asked.

“Well, you, me and Mulder all have at least one thing in common now,” she said, looking at Mulder.

“What’s that,” Bill asked, pushing himself up slightly on his elbows.

“Are you a George Romero fan?” Mulder deadpanned.

“Excuse me?”

“Never mind,” Scully said. “Let’s leave this tomb and get this crazy family all back in one place. Let’s go home.”

^^^^^^^

The short ride back to the cabin was made in complete silence. Even Mulder’s mind was quiet as the thoughts of those around him were totally absent. He doubted his telepathy was gone for good, though if he were honest, he’d be completely ok with that. As entertaining as it sometimes was to tease Scully, he found the experience unpleasant, invasive, and tiring. He assumed the lack of static on the airwaves had more to do with his shear and total exhaustion than anything permanent. He could dream.

There were some advantages to hearing the thoughts of others. Advantages that could help to keep them safe, to help him be a better partner to Scully, and in particular, advantages that would help him be a better father to two gifted and very powerful sons, one of which had just saved the world for the second time in a couple of weeks, and the other who had just saved his family. *His* family.

Finding William and Jake had given Mulder more than what he’d ever expected when he’d convinced Scully to set off in the middle of the alien invasion to save William in Wyoming, following only his dreams. Along the way, he’d discovered he was part of a larger family, with all the insanity and frustration that comes with it. Jake had saved Bill Scully’s life even though he’d tried to have him killed. That was a lesson Mulder hoped he wouldn’t forget, and eventually maybe he’d even be able to forgive Scully’s misguided older brother. If nothing else, he was sure he could live with him in peace as part of this new, imperfect, extended family.

The large Army caravan truck pulled into the cabin’s driveway and dropped them off. Soldiers from Raven Rock would stay at the cabin for the time being to stand guard and make sure they were truly safe as long as they wanted them to. How long that would be was a decision for another time. The group made their way inside, but Mulder hung back for a moment, tapping William on the shoulder, holding him up.

“I know why you wanted to call him Jake,” Mulder said.

William squinted, trying to pry the answer from Mulder’s mind before he said anything, a playful look in his eyes suggesting he was skeptical Mulder knew anything at all. Mulder had seen this face thousands of times over the years in Scully.

“You can’t read my mind now can you? Apparently exhaustion is kryptonite even to the best,” Mulder said, laughing.

William shrugged, smiling. “Just fuzzy, not gone. In a few minutes, you’ll be just as talky.”

“I’m talky?” Mulder asked, eyebrows raised in amusement.

“Same in your mind as with your voice,” William said, continuing to give his father a good natured hard time. “I’ve gotten used to it.”

“I need to learn those Jedi tricks you boys have so I can block my thoughts from other telepaths,” Mulder said. “You both will have to teach me.”

“Like Jake will teach me how to heal things, I guess,” William said, his mood changing from cheerful to slightly melancholy.

“I think you already figured how to do that a little. My hand is back to normal. You don’t want to get better at it?”

William looked at his feet. “It’s not that. I just wish I’d learned it sooner. Maybe I could have saved my dad,” he said. He grimaced at the realization of what he’d said. “Sorry, I mean, my adoptive dad.”

“Will, you never have to be afraid to talk about your adoptive parents to either of us. Scully and I are so grateful that they were in your life. But you can’t feel guilty about what happened to them. Never let yourself for get this: Only the aliens and the humans who helped them are to blame for everything. Ok?”

“I’ll try,” William said.

“Good,” Mulder said. “So, do you want to hear my theory or not? Jake’s name?”

William smiled and crossed his arms smugly. “Go for it.”

“’The Cat from Outer Space’. That was the movie you saw, right?” Mulder asked. William’s cheeks turned bright red, but his face stayed neutral. “The *cat* was named Jake.”

“I saw it when I was little,” William said, his shoulders slumping slightly, embarrassed that he’d been caught liking a silly, fluffy Disney movie from the late ‘70’s. “How’d you guess?”

Rather than admit he also had an affinity for bad movies, Mulder said, “The cat could talk but his mouth never moved. Kinda like Jake when he speaks to you telepathically.”

“I guess so,” William said. “Don’t tell anyone, ok?”

“You’re secret is safe with me. For now. I won’t pretend I’m not going to use it to blackmail you into teaching me how to keep my thoughts on a private frequency,” Mulder said.

“That cat was awesome, though,” Jake said.

Laughter burst forward from Mulder’s gut. “He really was.” He clapped William on the shoulder, turned him towards the door. “Come on, let’s get inside.” *We’re finally home*, he added in his mind, hoping William could hear him.

^^^^^^^

“Dana? Am I interrupting anything?” Bill’s voice came from the hallway outside Scully and Mulder’s bedroom door. After they’d made it back to the cabin and told the tale of what had happened to the group, they’d all split up to decompress in their various ways. Mulder was out jogging, and Scully had just finished a very long, very warm, all too self-indulgent bath.

The door to the bedroom was slightly cracked. She removed the towel from her head, giving her hair a last pat down as she replied, “Not at all. Come in.” As he stepped inside the room the air hitting the steam from the bath swirled before colliding with her brother’s large frame. “How are you feeling?” she asked. After she’d been brought back from the dead, she’d felt better than ever before in her life, but she’d also felt different. It was how she imagined it would feel to drink from the fountain of youth. Like every ailment or symptom of aging had been eliminated. But she wasn’t sure it worked that way on everyone. And a few days later, she’d begun to feel like her normal, pre-death self, all nearly fifty years of her.

“I feel,” he started, crinkling his brow as he rubbed the back of his head. Yes, he felt the same way, she gathered. “I feel amazing, honestly. Weird, but better than I’ve felt in years.”

“I completely understand,” she said.

He smiled. “I suppose you do,” he said.

Scully lifted an eyebrow, and folded her hands over her chest.

“What? Getting shot, dying and coming back to life again changes a person’s perspective on what’s possible, you know?”

Scully laughed from every atom of her body, completely joyful. “I do, big brother, I do.”

“It changes a lot of things,” Bill continued, still smiling, but his tone sobering. “Dana, I just wanted to tell you…”

Scully lifted her hand, spaying her fingers wide. “You don’t have to.”

“Just let me say it, ok?”

Scully lowered her arm, closed her eyes briefly and nodded. She understood his need to get the words out there, out of his mind and into the air.

“I’m sorry. For everything. For ever doubting you. For being a complete and total asshole. And mostly for nearly destroying your family,” Bill said, his eyes pleading with her to let him off the hook, but not expecting it at all.

“Our family,” she said.

“Right,” he said, smiling with closed lips. “You and Mulder. I just mean… I am not going to lie. I don’t think Mulder and I will ever be best friends, but I see now how much he loves you and those boys, and I respect that.”

Scully smirked, laughed softly. “I meant ‘our family’ to mean including you, mom, everyone, not just Mulder, but it’s good to know all of that, too.”

Bill’s cheeks reddened, but to his credit, he accepted the teasing good-naturedly. “All I’m asking Dana is for your forgiveness. Will you forgive me?”

Scully stepped forward, reached her arms around her brother’s towering shoulders to embrace him. She felt his hands reluctantly slip around her back to return the hug that he felt he didn’t deserve. If she were honest with herself, she still held some anger towards him, and rebuilding her trust would take some time. His mistake was a big one, despite his intentions of preserving the family in this unstable and alien world they now inhabited. But he was her brother, and she loved him. And he’d saved William and Jake’s lives.

“That’s what family does,” she said, and she pulled him in even more tightly.

^^^^^^^

Day 10: January 14, 2013, 24 Days After the Invasion

Scully stood inside, behind the sliding door in the downstairs rec room, looking out onto a small back yard covered in about six inches of snow, three of it freshly fallen over night. The snow was heavy and wet, the Maryland air relatively mild. If she lifted her eyes to look towards the tree line she could see the little red shed where they’d discovered the boy that looked like William less than a week earlier, but at this moment her only focus was on the four children playing in the yard in front of the structure. Her left arm was across her body, propping up her right which held a steaming cup of coffee which she blew on absently as she watched her boys and their cousins play in the snow. Although William and Jake were identical twins, and she barely knew either of them, she could already easily tell which one was which. They were similar in so many ways, their appearance, and obviously in their telepathy and other abilities, but there were differences, too. Jake had a shyness about him that William seemed to lack. William was infused with tremendous confidence, yet also had a contradictorily intense fear of failure. Jake seemed unsure of everything, but willing to show his emotions overtly, while William was more reserved. They both seemed like the older and younger brother to each other in their own ways. There were so many things she didn’t know about either of them, of course, but she couldn’t wait to learn every last detail, hopefully over many years to come. For once, she allowed herself to believe she’d be given the opportunity to get to know her sons. And they’d need guidance. Her boys were blessed and cursed with enormous power, and she only hoped she’d be able to see them through that. She knew she wanted to try.

“Dana?” her mother’s voice came softly, in that soothing tone she’d needed so desperately to hear so many times over the past decade.

Scully turned her head, smiling as her mother took a few steps to stand next to her. “Hi mom,” she said.

“What are you doing?” Margaret asked.

“Indulging,” she answered simply.

Margaret followed her daughter’s gaze. “Hmm… reminds me of when you kids were growing up. I used to love to watch you all play together.”

“When we weren’t fighting,” Scully said, laughing softly.

“You got along more than you didn’t, but even when you fought, you always made up,” Margaret said.

“Bill and I talked,” Scully said, knowing this was her mother’s way of trying to make peace in the family. “We’re ok, mom. I don’t want to look back. The past will always be a part of us, but we only have the present. That’s all we have, and that’s all I care about.”

They were quiet for a moment, each enjoying the muted sounds of the children’s laughter through the glass.

 “Mom,” Scully said, turning her head to look her mother in the eyes. “Thank you.”

“What for?” Margaret said, raising her eyebrows.

“For everything. For being the best example I could hope to have. For always being there for me even when I was forced to be apart from you. For believing in me. Saving Bill, Tara, Matty and Katy when they doubted you. I know I put you through so much, but you’ve always given me strength and support.”

“I’m your mother,” Margaret said simply as she slid her arm around her daughter, and squeezed her tightly. Scully tilted her head to touch her mother’s, deepening the embrace.

Well,” Margaret said, “those kids are going to be hungry when they finally come inside. I think I’ll make some lunch.” She hugged her daughter once more before releasing her. “I love you, Dana.”

“I love you, too, mom,” Scully returned warmly and she watched her mother walk towards the stairs to the main level. Turning her head back to the scene in the back yard, she watched William and Jake pelt each other with snowballs, grins extending as wide as possible on each of their mirror-imaged faces. “I’m your mother,” she said aloud to herself. *I can do this,* she added silently as she took another sip of her coffee.

^^^^^^^

Epilogue

Two days after rescuing Jake, the Raven Rock soldiers had finally cleared out all remaining stragglers from Suveg’s group at Camp David. For the time being, the immediate area around the camp and the cabin were secure and safe. Despite that, Scully still found it difficult to come down completely from the adrenaline rush that had been the past week. Channeling Mulder’s usual restlessness, she couldn’t sleep and found herself on the cabin’s main level in front of the dwindling fire, sipping chamomile tea, and trying to read a book to put her mind to rest.

There was still so much to think about. Should they stay at the cabin? Should they try to find someplace more secure? They’d discussed taking over Camp David itself, ironically. It had been built to provide the President of the United States with a perfect and relaxing vacation but with all the advanced security one would expect for the leader of the richest and most advanced military nation the world had ever known, before now. But it was also the place where Jake had been tortured before they’d rescued him. Another option was Raven Rock. It truly was one of the most fortified places on earth.

“No fun living in a cave though,” Mulder said, making her jump slightly. “Sorry.”

Scully turned to find him slightly behind where she sat on the sofa, wearing his flannel pajama pants and a long sleeve thermal shirt, rubbing his hands through his hair, yawning. She closed her eyes and sighed. Happy to see him despite his intrusion on her thoughts. “Forget about it,” she said, letting him off the hook in part because he looked scruffy and delicious. She wondered if he had caught that thought.

When he made no indication he had, and he absolutely would have, she added, “Ah, still not a rock star at reading my thoughts, are we?” she said, teasing.

His face remained neutral except for the slight raise of his eyebrows. “No death by Copacabana, then?” he asked, before his grin filled up his entire face.

Scully rolled her eyes, looked down at her tea. She stretched the tired muscles in her neck as she turned her body back around to face the flickering fire. She felt Mulder’s fingers smooth over her shoulders, applying pressure as his warm hands massaged. She closed her eyes, and stifled a yawn. “If you keep doing that, no death by anything,” she said, her words slurred.

Mulder laughed softly. “I can think of at least one way I wouldn’t mind going,” the grit in his low voice telling her everything she needed to know about what elements his preferred death included. Before she could reply, her tongue lost the battle as the gods of relaxation wrapped her up in their blanket as he kneaded the tension from her muscles. “I thought I was the insomniac,” he said.

“Just thinking,” she said.

“About?”

“Do you really not know or are you just toying with me?”

“I have my suspicions, but this time they’re entirely achieved free of telepathic radar,” he said.

“Thinking about William, and Jake. Finding them both. Where we go from here,” she said, her words slurring as her thoughts began to lose their tether to reality.

“So nothing heavy then,” he said.

He stopped his hands, eliciting a slight unintentional whine from Scully, as the loss of sensation blocked the path she’d been taking towards sleep. She felt the sofa dip as he laughed and came around to sit next to her. He took the cup of tea from her hands, placed it on the table and wrapped his arms around her.

“This works too,” she said leaning her head against his shoulder, grabbing a small handful of the fabric of his shirt over his stomach. “No, nothing heavier than usual.”

They were quiet for a few minutes, the only sounds the crackling fire and Mulder’s relaxed breathing.

“I have a secret to confess, Scully,” he said softly.

“What’s that?” she asked, the steady, even pulse of his heartbeat lulling her into a peaceful trance.

“I actually like 'Copacabana',” he said. “And 'Mandy'. Pretty much all of Barry Manilow’s playlist.”

Her eyes opened wide, and this time a laugh flew out of her, waking her up again, and she sat up to look at him. “Oh god, I think that’s the most disturbing thing you’ve ever said to me.”

He leaned his face close to her. “Nice try,” he growled. Before she could protest, he kissed her gently, and pulled her on the sofa so they were both lying flat. They nestled into the plush cushions and he wrapped his arms around her tightly as she covered him like a blanket. Finally, he whispered into her ear, “Your secret is safe with me.”

She doubted that, but for the first time in years, she trusted in everything else that mattered. Giving in to him and to herself, she kissed him deeply one more time before pulling back to rest her head against his chest, basking in the warmth from his body, knowing her boys slept peacefully only a few feet away in the loft. *Right here, this is home,* she thought as she closed her eyes and let the crackling fire and Mulder’s heartbeat carry her to paradise.

The End

^^^^^^^

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