From: "Natalie Durdle" <ndurdle@animatrix.ns.ca>
Date: Mon, 23 Jul 2001 18:12:29 -0300
Subject: Submission: "The Lost"
Source: direct

***********************************************

He had been able to justify the expense by 
blaming the Minnesota field office. The FBI had 
fucked up and now there was a violent, escalating 
sexual sadist on the loose. The fact that two 
agents were missing was almost considered fine 
print. He hauled in profilers from the VCU, 
agents from three separate field offices and task 
force members from municipal and state law 
enforcement agencies. The Minnesota FBI office 
building was suddenly thrust back into it's role 
as the hub and home of a command center dedicated 
to finding Samuel Walsh Corman. 

It was a little bit busier and a whole lot more 
crowded than the last go 'round.  Faxes hummed 
24/7 as copies of regional, local and state maps 
were sent to every state, city and mapdot police 
station across Minnesota. Locals confirmed the 
accuracy or inaccuracy of the maps and swarms of 
deputies were sent to check on every cabin, 
cottage, summer home and hunting cabin they could 
find. When they were done, hunters and old-timers 
were polled to see if they remembered any cabins 
not marked on the maps and these were checked out 
too.

Roadblocks were set up around entrances to 
rivers, lakes,state parks and state border 
crossings. Flyers were dispatched, hunters were 
warned to keep their eyes open and the owners of 
abandoned cars suddenly found state troopers on 
their doorsteps. Descriptions of all cars stolen 
within 48 hours of the estimated kidnapping were 
circulated,and on the off chance Corman might try 
to slip into Canada, marina and boat docks were 
canvassed, patrolled and more flyers distributed. 
The RCMP and the OPP did the same on the Canadian 
side of the Great Lake. Special bulletins were 
faxed to radio stations, tv stations and web 
stations across North America and because of the 
serial nature of his crimes and the escalating 
danger level, Skinner approached the producers of 
America's Most Wanted.

Thousands of tips poured in. Tens of thousands of 
man-hours were spent following up each and every 
one. Hundreds of police officers and field agents 
manned  phones, faxes and computers hoping to 
find the one clue that would catch a killer.

One day into the investigation, the status of the 
missing agents was considered grave and 
endangered. Three days into it, the profilers and 
task force members started to avoid the eyes of 
Assistant Director Skinner. They nodded as he 
told them that if anyone could talk Corman into 
making a mistake it was Mulder. Then, when he 
stalked from the room, they looked again at the 
MO and swallowed. At the five day mark,  they 
agreed with him that the agent profiles on Mulder 
and Scully showed an enormous will to survive, 
then they reread the nighttime temperatures for 
the last three days.

On the seventh day, during the tail end of an 
arctic snow storm, they said nothing at all.

Officially the investigation began to shift 
focus. Corman, with two live agents, would be 
holed up somewhere cutting chunks from their 
dying bodies. If they were dead, with his blood-
lust temporarily assuaged, Corman would be on the 
move and looking for more victims. Troopers spent 
less time chasing where he had been, and starting 
spreading more flyers around where he might be 
going.

On day 14, Agents Mulder and Scully were 
unofficially presumed dead.

Maggie Scully glared at an exhausted Walter 
Skinner as he stood in the doorway of her motel 
room and told him flat out that she did not 
believe it. She had given up too soon once 
before, she was not going to do it again. Tara 
Scully, curled up on one of the beds,was too 
emotionally battered to react. This was not the 
first time she had seen her husband's family in 
turmoil, but it was the first time she had seen 
first hand the effort, the hours and the 
emotional rollercoaster behind the official 
words, "We're doing all we can". 

Because "all we can" was not enough, and the 
world was suddenly a much larger and scarier 
place than it had been two weeks before.

Over the next seven days, missing person's 
reports from Minnesota and bordering states were 
scoured for a match to Corman's victim profile 
and methodology. The profilers expected at least 
one, possibly two matches based on the pace of 
the killer's escalation. Nothing. They expanded 
their search across the country.

Still nothing.

VICAP considered the disturbing possibility that 
by breaking his pattern in order to go after 
Agents Mulder and Scully, the killer may have 
discovered something he liked, and altered his 
MO. They reran the missing person's data looking 
for signature commonalties separate from modus 
operendi. They still came up empty. Finally they 
went back to AD Skinner with the answer he did 
not want to hear.

Without bodies, there was no trail to follow. 

There was nothing more they could do.

On day 21, Tara Scully tearfully told her mother-
in-law that she had to go home. Maggie Scully 
calmly said that she understood, but that she 
wasn't leaving. Not this time. Not yet. Then she 
went to the church and lit bitter candles that 
seemed to burn too softly for the anger and fear 
in her soul.

On day 28, without more bodies, without more 
leads, the investigation was downgraded to a 
local operation. The task force was downsized 
and the case assigned to four agents from 
Minnesota who would send fresh flyers out around 
hunting time and who would dutifully co-ordinate 
any follow-up on leads that might arise. 

On day 29, Walter Skinner was ordered back to 
Washington by the Director himself.

Maggie Scully found him sitting alone in the 
motel bar, staring into the bottom of a glass of 
Coke. He said nothing, having found nothing there 
to say. She met his eyes defiantly, but when only 
bewildered pain and confusion looked back, her 
face began to crumble. For the first time in 29 
days, she cried for her daughter. 

Thirty days after Samuel Corman escaped, Margaret 
Scully and Walter Skinner flew back to Washington
DC. 

Special Agents Mulder and Scully vanished without 
a trace.

********************************************

One more week turned into two, then three and 
finally four. With his new jacket, Mulder was 
fully woods functional and the agents spent
a couple of days sorting out a new division of 
responsibilities. As it turned out, their 
respective talents did the choosing for them.

They quickly discovered that Mulder had a better 
touch with the traplines. In addition to 
the greater reach and strength which helped with 
building the predator traps, he seemed to have an 
instinctive touch when it came to setting the 
rabbit runs. Scully had teasingly suggested that 
perhaps his parents had known what they were 
doing. He actually smiled as he found himself in 
the unusual position of having his partner using 
his first name as an occasional nickname.

The thought of trying to explain that to anyone 
had him snickering off and on for an hour.

On the other hand, while Mulder could identify 
the deer tracks when he found them, actually 
locating the tracks was difficult. Locating the 
animal that made them proved almost impossible. 
By the time he got to where they had been, they 
were always somewhere else. Scully on the other 
hand seemed to be developing an almost 
subconscious instinct for where the animals were 
hiding. She still found herself watching flagging 
tails and bounding hind-quarters, but she was 
getting closer. While Mulder would spend two days 
checking and resetting the traplines and then two 
days back at camp skinning and tanning the 
results, Scully spent every hour learning to 
stalk her prey, pausing only to collect and haul 
back a load of wood at the end of the day.

Mulder found himself watching his partner with 
increasing fascination. Partly it was the 
profiler in him, the psychologist, but 
mostly it was just the chance to witness 
the genesis of a new aspect of Scully. 

It was tiny things. Things like developing an 
unconscious habit of continually scanning 
the sky, scenting the wind and noting the breeze. 
Twice she had surprised him by hauling in loads 
of firewood instead of practicing her deer 
stalking. Twice, snow had started falling within 
six hours. The fact that she had developed that 
skill was not so odd, but the speed at which 
these new habits were forming was uncanny. He 
suspected that she had probably always been 
sensitive to these things, and now, with her 
whole mind and body focused on learning and 
absorbing as quickly as possible, her body was 
able to catalogue and cross-reference the things 
it already knew. In a way, her habit of continual 
analysis and quantification of her environment 
probably assisted this process.

Partial skills and almost instincts, things that 
were dormant in civilization for the simple fact 
that there was nothing to apply them to, were 
suddenly stripped clean of constraints and 
actively being sought out and developed. 
Everything he saw, he had seen in diluted form in 
other situations, their odd careers sparking 
the need for limited development under certain 
circumstances. But this was the first time there 
had been enough time and enough need for the 
skills to develop into near full potential.

Her eyes scanned continuously for hollows and 
brush. Places her chosen prey might be inclined 
to rest, to sleep or to hide. Her path no longer 
headed in one straight line, but wandered as the 
terrain meandered, her body instinctively seeking 
to stay downwind of these likely places and 
choosing routes that should lead her to her 
quarry. Her growing skills were tallied in the 
increasing numbers of tracks and sighting. Her 
failures to get close prompted other changes.

Her eyes no longer focused on bush, on tree, but 
absorbed landscape, sensing rather than searching 
for that which was unusual or out of place. Her 
gait altered, becoming less heavy in the heel, 
path unconsciously chosen with an increasingly 
unerring eye to avoiding the noisy crunchy crusts 
of snow that would collapse with explosive 
suddenness and send her target bounding away as 
if from a gunshot. She learned to differentiate 
between the wind through the bush and the brush 
of fur against tree. 

Four weeks, six weeks earlier, she trooped 
through the bush as though one of Hannibal's foot 
soldiers. Point A to point B in a steady rhythm 
designed to get her to her destination without 
fail,without complaint. Now, Mulder watched as 
she drifted, occasionally walking, suddenly 
pausing for no reason to listen and evaluate and 
then move on. He watched her follow tracks for no 
other reason than to learn where they went. From 
some of things she said, the vast empty 
wilderness was suddenly one big extremely 
populated and interconnected society whose rules 
she was just beginning to learn, whose 
inhabitants she was just learning how to see.

In the process, he learned that they were not as 
alone as he had thought. Wolf packs, fox 
families, badgers, bobcats and beaver. Squirrels, 
rabbits, martens, fishers, coyote and wolverine. 
Deer, elk and moose.

Lions and tigers and bears...oh my.

She didn't shoot any of the predators. There did 
not seem to be a point. It was only a matter of 
time before she learned to find the deer and one 
deer gave them so much that they needed. Now that 
they both had warm clothes, it seemed both a 
waste of ammo and a waste of life to take 
something simply because she could. It was the 
same reason he had stopped setting predator 
traps.

Mulder's unbelievable luck with rabbit runs had 
bagged them enough furs to finish two pairs of 
boot socks for each of them. Even after Scully 
co-opted a handful for feminine hygiene purposes, 
they still had enough to start on rabbit fur 
vests. By design, the vests were little more than  
long rectangular strips of leather with a hole 
cut in the center for  the head to push through. 
The vest was laced loosely at the sides and was 
originally meant to be worn under the deerskin 
jackets. Both agents however, often found 
themselves using just their vests when working 
around the camp and on warmer days.

It was actually a good thing for their food 
stores that the rabbits were available in such 
numbers. They had found their appetites roaring 
back with painful demand. Instead of the vague 
urgings that normally prompted a call to the 
House of Taiwan or a run to Burger Boy, this 
hunger was a vast hollow emptiness that ached in 
intensity and demanded to be filled. Both agents 
found themselves craving the higher fat cuts of 
meat and only a worry over e-coli and worms kept 
them from devouring the meat at the rare rather 
than medium-rare stage.  

In spite of their appetites, a box full of smoked 
rabbit joined the boxes of smoked deer.
By this point, they had reached a state of 
equilibrium. They were no longer adding to their 
stores, but they were not really eating into 
them. There was a definite shift in the 
proportions of deer to rabbit however as they ate 
more of the high fat deer than bunny.

Mulder was not really worried about starvation. 
What he worried about was where the hell they 
were going to put the meat when Scully finally 
figured out the last pieces of the hunting puzzle 
and started bringing the deer home on a near 
daily basis. He had a feeling that once she 
figured out what she was doing, they were in for 
a major meat packing moment. Not that he would 
complain. The old bullet wound in his left leg, 
his butt and both his knees were getting more 
insistent about a warm pair of leggings and they 
needed rawhide, tenthides, sleeping furs and more 
rawhide. Scully had commented that a native 
American wardrobe of outer robe, shirt,jacket, 
leggings, and boots could take about ten hides. 

He had just looked at her in shock and started 
building another meat smoker.

He had also started building more boxes. Lots of 
them.

Based on their current intake, he estimated that 
they each were going through two to three lbs of 
meat a day. The days were only getting colder and 
they would be dragging heavy sleds so he 
cautiously doubled that estimate to an average 
equivalent of five lbs of fresh meat each per 
day. It seemed like an unbelievable amount, but 
better safe than sorry. They were already eating 
the highest fat cuts of meat and although they 
had stopped losing weight, they were not gaining 
any either. So...10 lbs of meat per day between 
the two of them. The average deer dressed out 
somewhere between 60 and 90 lbs. That meant that 
the average deer, assuming they ate the whole 
thing, would last them 6 to 9 days. 

Not long.

Add to that fact that logically they should only 
carry the choicest cuts with them, eating the 
lesser cuts here at camp and saving the high fat 
cuts for the trip. Assuming they took the best 
40% of the deer with them, that meant that one 
deer might only provide 25-35 lbs of high fat 
meat. Assuming a three week supply - probably the 
minimum they should consider carrying - they 
would need four deer apiece.

Any way you looked at it, they needed a hell of a 
lot of deer. 

No wonder humans learned to grow vegetables 
and raise cows. At an average dressed out 
weight of 800 lbs, a cow was the meat equivalent
of ...gee,  ELEVEN deer. More than twice the 
hide, too. Hell of an incentive to build fences 
and grow corn. And then there was the milk, the 
cheese, the sour cream, the...

Mulder had yanked that train of thought to a halt 
when he realized he was drooling.

The beginning of week eight,Scully finally got 
her deer.  She got another two days later and 
dammed if she didn't get two more three days 
after that. By the time she finished off her 
first  clip and was halfway through the second, 
Mulder was so sick of skinning and smoking deer 
he was ready to lay down in front of the first 
UFO he saw and say "Take me."

Scully had started field dressing the things 
which made life a little easier. Skinning the 
deer on site, she made a rough pack of the hide 
and internal organs and carried it back to the 
camp. The deer itself spent the night hanging in 
a tree. Because of the offal left on the ground, 
they made it a practice for both agents to 
retrieve the deer the next day. There was usually 
evidence that something or many somethings had 
found the entrails in the night. Occasionally, 
all that was left on the ground was bloody snow. 
But they never ran into anything. Luckily.

Whether she just came into her own or it was the 
fact that she had been studying the local 
territory for almost four weeks or just the 
bloody weather, she was bringing the damn things 
down faster than they could be tanned and smoked. 
Raw frozen hides hung from the trees while Scully 
alternated between hauling back wood for the 
smokers and hunting down more victims for the 
assembly line. 

Mulder just sank into a haze of slicing and 
smoking. He was keeping up until she brought down 
deer number five. Then he started freezing the 
strips on racks before dumping them into boxes 
and hauling the boxes into the trees. The car 
trunk was already full by the time she killed 
deer number six and around the time Scully 
brought in seven, eight and nine, Mulder had two 
smokers going full-time plus the smoke chamber in 
the lean-to. With all the deer meat, he was 
tempted to just skin the rabbits and toss the 
meat, but something in him cringed at the 
thought, so he skinned and froze the rabbit furs, 
then tossed the roughly jointed meat into a box 
for storage.

A three day snow storm forced Scully to 
temporarily abandon her efforts to single-
handedly thin the local ungulate population. It 
was the smoking that was the time consuming 
chore. By the time the storm hit, the deer were 
sliced and frozen into boxes so the agents  
worked in shifts to keep the smokers going all 
night. During the day, they hauled back firewood 
and tanned rabbit pelts. 

They had finished with the rabbit furs, made an 
impressive number of boxes and had boiled down 
the hooves and collected the neatsfoot oil. 
Scully was making plans to collect more deer, but 
for the moment had vanished into the woods on 
some mysterious errand. Mulder did not ask. For 
once, his curiosity was comatose and he simply 
relaxed as the scent of smoking meat and 
woodsmoke combined with the aroma of pine needle
tea.

He almost could not believe they were finished. 
Oh there was still a hell of a lot of work left 
to do. Fleshing and tanning hides, equipment to 
make. And no doubt Scully would be hauling back 
at least two or three more deer. But for now,
the frantic pace that had ruled them for the last 
two weeks was temporarily on hold.

Mulder looked down at the private project he was 
working on and wondered if Scully even remembered 
the date. She hadn't brought it up, and he hadn't 
wanted to ruin his surprise. So he had said 
nothing and silently worked on his secret project
whenever she was not around. Because according to 
the watch in his pouch, today was December 24.

And tomorrow was Christmas day.


*******************************************

The shadowed living room, lit only by the 
burnished glow of a quietly crackling fire, was
a deceptively peaceful place. Certainly no one 
watching the lonely figure sprawled in a deep 
chair pulled close to the fireplace would ever 
guess that within these walls a quiet war was 
being waged.

In deference to the season, a small Christmas 
tree rested in the corner, but the man had not 
bothered to plug in the long string of white 
mini-lights he had clumsily wrapped around the 
tiny pine. No. The most important light was 
already lit and shining in the window.

Would they laugh if they knew?

Somehow, he thought they would understand. Or 
perhaps, if not understand, then appreciate. This 
tattered custom born of long ago superstitions 
and half-remembered folktales. It was more 
appropriate than they would ever know.

The flame they had started was burning bright.

<We are the dead>

Walter Skinner allowed his lips to stretch over 
bared teeth as he contemplated the files resting 
on the table beside him. These...these were a 
Christmas gift he had saved all week to savor. 
Now, picking up the topmost he allowed himself 
the indulgence of contemplating the strength and 
power of small things.

<Short days ago we lived>

The tattered remnants of the Consortium must be 
shitting bricks right about now.

It had started quietly enough, the small 
revolution. Alive, his two monster chasing agents 
had been a potential embarrassment to the FBI. 
Dead, they might have been a footnote. But 
missing...now that was a whole different story.
Skinner's smile took on a dark edge as he 
imagined the consternation the men in the shadows 
must have felt when they first realized what the 
rumblings foretold.

Or maybe they had not seen it yet. 

But they would. 

Sidelong glances that were just a bit too long 
and held a hint of suspicion. Agents who formally 
might have chuckled nervously when the leading 
class wit made the requisite Spooky jokes now 
stayed conspicuously silent. Off-hand comments 
about government conspiracies suddenly no longer 
seemed as funny and Skinner had noticed a decided 
shift in attitude gathering slowly, moving on
soft feet through the halls of the Hoover 
building.

<Felt dawn, saw sunset's glow>

It was not an overnight rebellion. None of his 
male agents were showing up at work wearing glow-
in-the-dark Marvin the Martian ties, but suddenly 
the PD was finding it possible to actually get an 
agent to talk to them if they called about... 
unusual case reports. Agents who would once have 
merrily thrown the file on a trolley to the 
basement suddenly found themselves in a quandary. 

What to do with the files?

Some just shrugged and dumped them. But a few got 
through. Reluctantly. With grave misgivings. 
Federal officers who ordinarily would have felt 
silly taking this seriously, did it anyway. 

<Loved and were loved>

Some did it because the two downed agents were 
owed at least this much. Others did it out of  
guilt. Others accidentally stumbled over 
something they could not explain and found it 
that much harder to ignore the next time. Slowly 
but surely, a handful of people got up the nerve 
to say "what if".

And the first domino fell.

<And now we lie in Flander's Field>

Agent Caplan, unhappy about the evidence on her 
case disappearing one night, commented out loud 
that maybe the aliens stole it. Someone laughed 
and jeered that she was beginning to sound like 
old Spooky and his missing partner. Caplan 
growled and snapped back that maybe they were 
missing because they got too close to 
something...and several people in the crowd 
shifted uneasily and forgot to laugh.

One of those people, Agent Gilbert, found himself 
staring at a casefile involving a witness who 
claimed a werewolf did it. With Mulder and Scully 
in mind, he was perhaps more patient and polite 
than he might have been normally and the deputy 
on the other end of the line was grateful to be 
taken seriously. So grateful, that when the odd 
disappearances continued into the neighboring 
district, he confidently urged the Sheriff to 
approach the local field office. 

Needless to say, the local agents were a bit 
startled, but in return for the respect he had 
been shown, young Deputy Willis had taken care to 
study the FBI crime scene field manual cover to 
cover and he made sure that he did not miss a 
thing. The field office was not only thrown by 
the meticulous evidence gathering and labeling, 
they actually found something.

<Take up your quarrel with the foe>

They just did not know what it was.

Someone mentioned the X-Files, and when the 
locals called Washington to request their 
assistance they were informed that the division 
was shut down due to the fact that the agents 
running that department had disappeared. After 
determining that this actually was not a joke, 
the cop jokingly asked if they had been kidnapped 
by aliens. The silence on the other end was just 
a bit too long and the voice just a shade too 
light as it said 'the FBI has no opinion on the 
existence of extraterrestrials". Which had the 
unusual affect of giving the listener the odd 
feeling that maybe the FBI did not have an 
opinion, but the agent he was talking to was 
contemplating the possibility.

That slight hesitation before denial was more 
damaging than any photograph taken since Roswell. 
Because these were feds. And the cops took them 
seriously. They began to ask "what if".

<To you, from failing hands we throw>

Skinner watched from the sidelines as five weeks 
after Mulder and Scully disappeared, someone out 
in Nebraska very seriously asked Research to get 
them everything they had on vampires. Annoyed at 
what he perceived to be a waste of time and a 
personal insult, the head researcher, under the 
guise of saving himself from redundancy, threw 
the information up on the internal server and 
gave said agent's email address as a contact.

Within a week, the bewildered agent received 
twenty-three very serious information requests 
from people who normally would have talked to 
Mulder. Many of them had talked to Mulder. They 
ranged from an NYPD detective who thought he had 
a serial killer who thought he was a vampire to a 
Deputy Sheriff in Iowa who thought he had a cult 
related killing on his hands. Hasty information 
requests to other agents inevitably led to 
numerous references to the X-Files. In 
desperation, the harried agent started asking 
Research for relevant X-file casefiles to be 
cross-referenced to the information requests.

The assistant to the original researcher suddenly 
found this new influx of information requests 
tossed onto her desk. By chance, she was one of 
the researchers who had worked with Agent Mulder 
to reassemble much of the data lost in the fire. 
As a result, she actually had many of the 
casefiles with accompanying documentation scanned 
and digitally available. She also had much of the 
research information done for Mulder over the 
years still rolling around in the bowels of her 
computer. 

She had the information, she just needed a couple 
of days to put it all together.

Without realizing that the first researcher meant 
it as a nasty joke, the assistant followed his 
example by placing the gathered data on the 
secure server. The combination of meticulous 
background notes and cross-references to 
digitized casefiles created an instantly credible
database of the paranormal. 

The researcher found herself the defacto database 
manager and in an effort to keep all of the 
information current, sent a very serious memo out 
to all FBI personnel asking for notification when 
filing related reports. For most people, it was 
just another resource, but the memo stuck in a 
few people's minds. The existence of the database 
was justified when the NYPD detective, using 
information from the site, not only caught the 
killer but specifically noted in his report that 
the information provided had given him the keys 
to predicting the killer's behavior. 

One agent noted that the differences from 
traditional myth and the manner in which the 
crime differed from the historical, actually gave 
clues to the behavioral profile. BSU received so 
many emails and phone calls regarding this theory 
that they put together a research group to 
analyze past cases. A chatroom was opened and 
links added.

All of this simply meant that the embryonic tools 
were there when the inevitable happened and 
someone stumbled over something that could not be 
programmed, categorized or easily referenced. On 
the other hand, it also could not be denied. Nine 
weeks after Mulder and Scully disappeared, a 
bandaged and limping field agent pinned up 
several memos around the Hoover building and 
emailed copies to all field offices. Further 
investigation proved it to be a darkly humorous 
list of all the ways not to try to kill various 
monsters. 

Most people just laughed and took it as a joke.

But some made photocopies.

<The torch be yours to hold it high>

Skinner had watched all this in silence and done 
nothing. Until today. Today he had given himself 
an early present and fired the first shot of a 
civil war. And the funny thing about it...he was 
just doing his job.

Heavy laughter swirled in the room as he 
considered his next move. This morning, he had 
called two agents into his office and summarily 
closed their case. No reason. No explanation. No 
recourse.

The two agents had stood there stunned. He did 
not blame them. The case was a two bit scandal 
that had accidentally crossed paths with Rousch 
Industries. Rousch was not even involved. But 
that wasn't the point. The point was that two 
highly intelligent agents were justifiably 
wondering why the AD had suddenly pulled out the 
big guns for a non-existent case. And if they 
thought to do a database search of the server, 
Rousch Industries was going to come up in a few 
strange places. 

X-Files places.

How ironic that he was pulling a leaf from 
Kritchgau's book. Creating phantom conspiracies 
where none exist to convince the ignorant of a 
real conspiracy no one could talk about. He would 
chose his cases wisely. Then he would close cases 
just a bit too fast, come down just a bit too 
hard and give particular agents serious reasons 
to remember certain names. 

Even his own death at this point would only add 
fuel to the fire. Because there would be plenty 
of agents who rightly assumed he had something to 
hide. The uneasy suspicion in the two agents this 
morning was just the beginning.

<If ye break faith with us who die>

Maggie Scully believed that her daughter was 
still alive. Walter Skinner was choosing to 
believe her. He wanted to believe her. He needed 
to believe her. But for now, he would use their 
disappearance to make things as uncomfortable as 
possible for the shadow men. And make sure there 
was a war for them to come back to.

Turning his head he stared at the fat pillar 
candle shining in the window. The same candle he 
lit each night, a beacon to bring the lost ones 
home. Raising a glass of wine, he let the light 
shine through the ruby liquid and phrased a toast 
to old memories, lost friends and fallen 
comrades.

<We shall not sleep...>

"Merry Christmas, Agents."

****************************************

So what do you get for the person who has almost 
nothing?

It had to be practical. They were not wasting 
resources on frivolity. So none of this "get them 
something they would not buy for themselves" 
stuff. But the list of things they needed or 
wanted was getting to be increasingly long, and 
there were small things that had been regretfully 
put aside...

It had to be lightweight. Once they were on the 
move, personal items were limited to what they 
could carry.

And it had to say something. Mulder pondered over 
that one. Everything they needed right now was of 
such a direct practical purpose, that it was 
difficult to find something that not only met 
those practical needs, but was something that 
could actually be made with the limited time and 
resources available. 

But what could he make that showed both 
practicality and caring? A possible answer had 
occurred to him just before Scully started 
knocking deer down like nine pins. Instantly he 
had rejected it as being something that would 
embarrass the hell out of her. The problem was, 
that the more he thought about it, the more it 
made perfect sense. The fact that it was 
something one partner would not ordinarily get 
another...well, hell. 

Partners would not ordinarily know their partners 
needed something like this. 

It was the situation that was so cock-eyed.

So he squashed his initial qualms and worked on 
his gift while Scully was out hunting. The first 
part was easy. Taking one of the larger deer 
hooves he had boiled it until it softened. Then 
he had flattened, scraped, smoothed and carved 
until he had comb she could use for her hair. His 
partner was fastidious about her grooming habits, 
and using nothing but her fingers was driving her 
crazy.

The second part? 

His partner needed a replacement for her bra.

Repeated washings, heat from the fire and the 
abrasive effects of the pine needles was breaking 
down the fabric of their clothes quickly. As far 
as Mulder could tell, she had more or less 
stopped wearing it during the day in an effort to 
make it last longer. 

If he had thought he would survive, he would have 
just suggested that she stop wearing it at all. 
He had already had to bite his tongue several 
mornings when he saw the way the heat twisted 
fasteners on the shoulder straps were digging 
into her skin. Unfortunately, he could not come 
up was with a politically correct way to make 
that suggestion.

And considering where his hand occasionally ended 
up, he could see why she might have a few doubts 
about the selflessness of that idea.

The fact was, however, that somewhere along the 
line they had perfected the art of looking 
without seeing. He had once tried to explain to
another agent that while he was perfectly aware
that his partner was a beautiful woman, that most 
times, he was well and truly not consciously 
aware that she was female. Which, when you 
stopped to think about the low level hum of 
sexual awareness that seemed to wrap itself 
around their partnership like background noise, 
it was not surprising that the other man had just 
looked at him funny.

But hell, that awareness was something that they 
consciously chose to...repress wasn't the right 
word. Subsume? Convert? Channel? As frustrating 
as it could be, it was also fun. And so many of 
the needs that people satisfied with sex were 
already being met by their partnership in other 
ways. So he knew why they confused people. The 
fact was, that he was more than capable of 
looking at his partner, recognize and enjoy what 
he was seeing, without being trapped in the 
moment.

Most of the time.

There were good reasons after all, not to sleep 
with your partner. Not the least of which was 
making sure you were doing it for the right 
reasons. They respected each other enough to need 
to know why the hell they were doing it in the 
first place. 

A mistake could cost too damn much.

He had no problem with the concept of sleeping 
with someone for simple human comfort. Hell, he 
had done it. Certain years while at the BSU 
immediately came to mind. No harm, no foul...as 
long as everybody knew the rules. But that was 
with people who really were nothing more than 
colleagues. Co-workers. But his relationship with 
Scully was so damn convoluted he did not know how 
he felt half the time.

Did he love her? Of course. Was he attracted to 
her? Sometimes. Was she someone he wanted to 
spend his foreseeable future with? He was already 
doing that, wasn't he?

But could they survive all that togetherness 
without the work to hold them together?

That was a larger issue. Throw in the question of 
whether they could hold both relationships 
together at the same time and it became a 
logistical nightmare. Trying to sort all that out 
while in the middle of a shooting war was a 
nightmare. They were still looking for emotional 
down-time to deal with issues from last year. And 
the year before that. And probably the year 
before that. So in the middle of all this, how 
the hell could you justify turning to someone for 
nothing more than comfort when you knew they 
would not turn you away?

You could not.

You would not.

Because it was an abuse of trust no matter how 
you looked at it. And the potential hurt cost a 
hell of a lot more than a little self control. 
Their existing relationship put them in a unique 
position to hurt each other if comfort was all 
that was asked or could be given. Especially if 
the need was one-sided.

So run Fox run. See Fox run. See Fox bolt for the 
goddamn door when she caught him off guard with 
wine and cheese and possibilities turning in her 
eyes. Because if she had asked, he would have 
said yes. 

They needed to wait. Wait until they knew for 
themselves what they wanted, what they were 
really asking. He owed her the certainty of 
knowing she was choice, not lack of alternatives
or even laziness and convenience. He owed it 
to himself. 

She owed it to him.

They were too aware of the damage they could 
cause if they moved too soon, promised too 
much...were just plain wrong. He would rather 
regret lost time than destroy everything by 
moving too fast. By being too greedy. Too 
desperate.

By finding out that the answer was no.

He could wait.

They had both lost too much. Their certainties, 
their privacy, the sanctity of their own homes. 
They had had every illusion stripped away, until 
control over their lives and their bodies was 
nothing more than a hollow fantasy. They walked 
in a world where doors meant nothing, where every 
action even in the privacy of their homes was 
done with the full knowledge that it could be 
taped, watched and scrutinized by the uncaring 
enemy.

Was it any wonder that they guarded the only 
thing they truly owned anymore...their hearts and 
minds.

And to ask someone to drop that last barrier. To 
know that if you told her that you not only loved 
her, but that you were in love with her, that she 
would trust you, would believe you. Even if she 
feared you did not know what you were talking 
about she would take the chance anyway because 
your existing relationship would not allow her to 
not believe you. To force her to take that 
risk...you had to be damn sure you knew what you 
were talking about. Because what if you were 
wrong? What if you mistook need for love and 
found out too late that you could not keep the 
promises you made her?

What if she decided later that with the best of 
intentions, what you offered just wasn't enough? 
That she could not keep her promises to you?

They did not have the luxury of walking away from 
a mistake.

They needed each other in far too many ways to 
play careless games in the name of "taking a 
chance". Their fears were valid. Seven years. So 
much time and too little. Too much too lose and 
so little time to be sure.

Because neither of them could afford to make 
promises they could not honor.

Their lives depended on it.

*************************************

Scully had excavated a large pit starting about a 
week earlier. At first, Mulder had thought that 
she was planning another smoker, but the pit had 
gotten bigger and bigger and she had dumped most 
of the dirt close enough to the pit to keep it 
thawed. She had also kept a roaring fire going in 
the thing until the ground for almost two feet 
around was warm and dry.

Christmas morning, she had gotten up early and 
started another hot hardwood fire. He had gone 
for firewood at her request, and when he came 
back, the pit was filled back in and there was a 
fire blazing on top. He did not ask, she did not 
offer. He had however, been about to bring out 
her gift when she suddenly grabbed her snowshoes 
and high-tailed it for the bush.

He was only slightly miffed since he was looking 
forward to seeing her face. On the other hand, he 
was starting to have second thoughts and dinner 
was looking more and more like a better time. 
Heck, he could wait until after dinner. Late 
evening even.

He sighed.

They had finished the smoking the day before, all 
of his rabbit hides were tanned and the deer 
hides could wait until tomorrow. No big messes 
today. Finally, he took out the woodsled and 
spent the morning searching for wood. Not 
firewood. Wood for travel-sleds. It was late 
afternoon by the time he made it back to camp, 
and Scully was waiting for him.

She was kicked back in the lean-to by the fire 
and drinking pine needle tea from the skull of a 
wolf. The first time she had done that it had 
seriously grossed him out. Now? He told himself 
that he should find it bizarre. But the fact was, 
was that sitting by the fire with pine boughs at 
her back and dressed in bush tanned leather and 
fur, it did not look fantastic at all. 

It looked primitive as hell, though. And every 
once in a while, he would glance at her lit by 
the firelight, her hair wild, her blue eyes 
intense, and he would suddenly get this weird 
feeling of being caught out of time. For a split 
second, she would look up and he would see, not 
Agent Dana Scully, but some warrior woman from 
her Gaelic past. 

She would probably laugh if she knew.

Then again...he looked at her amused eyes as they 
watched him over the rim of the skull and sighed.

"Merry Christmas, Mulder."

Her accompanying grin was smug and he wondered 
what exactly her devious little mind had been up 
to. His eyes slid back to the fire and narrowed. 
Her grin widened.

"Uh uh. Christmas gift first."

She suddenly picked up a parcel by her side and 
before he guessed her intent, she tossed it at 
him. He caught it neatly, then eyed her 
speculatively. That grin...

"You are looking entirely too pleased with 
yourself, Agent Scully." 

She grinned again and shifted over as he stepped 
into the lean-to. However, instead of sitting 
down beside her, he flashed her a grin of his own 
and dug a small stick box from the corner. He 
handed it to her with a flourish and the gleam in 
her eye brought back memories of another 
Christmas and tearing into wrapping paper at an 
ungodly hour Christmas morning. The speculative 
delight had been almost identical.

Her parcel was wrapped simply in a clean square 
of the car upholstery, the ends brought up and 
tied with leather lace. The fabric fell away to 
reveal a beautifully tanned deerskin pouch 
designed to slide onto his belt. Obviously Scully 
had snagged a piece of hide when he wasn't 
looking. And it was heavy. Curiously he undid the 
drawstring and his jaw dropped as he looked 
inside. Seeds. Nuts. Dried berries. All kinds. At 
least four different types and from the delicious 
aroma, the nuts were roasted. He looked up at her 
in astonishment. Except for the acorns, most of 
the seeds were tiny. When had she had time to 
gather all of these?

She smiled,"In case you're wondering, those are 
acorns, maple seeds, birch seeds, pine nuts, wild 
raisins and high bush cranberries."

Mulder shook his head in bemusement,"All of this 
is available in winter?"

"Uh huh. Although I committed felony theft for  
the acorn stash. The squirrel is filing charges."

Mulder grinned,"Why Agent Scully, I'm shocked."

Dryly,"So was he."

Mulder experimentally crunched a few of the seeds 
as her fingers worked to untie the laces binding 
the top of the box to the frame. They were 
surprising good. Almost painfully delicious after 
two months of nothing but meat. Mulder sighed 
happily. Warm clothes, Scully's company and snack 
food. What more could a man ask?

Well...maybe indoor plumbing.

Scully finally managed to get the laces undone 
and he suddenly found himself wondering again if 
this had been such a good idea. The hoof comb was 
lying right on top and from the pleased 
expression on her face, he had scored a hit with 
that one. It was not the comb, however, that had 
been giving him second thoughts.

She gave a surprised murmur as her fingers dug 
into the rabbit fur and realized just how soft 
the leather was. She had mentioned that repeated 
freezing and thawing before tanning was supposed 
to soften leather through the tenderizing effect 
of the ice crystals. Apparently it had worked, 
because the leather had come out sensuously soft 
and he had spent extra time on the rubbing and 
stretching part of the process.

He shifted uneasily as she turned it over in her 
hands and the underlying shape became clear. For 
a long moment she just held it in her hands. Then 
he heard a soft, "Oh Mulder." And then she was 
smiling at him, not a bright happy smile, but a 
fuzzy, tearful one that off hand, he could not 
recall seeing before. But she did not look 
unhappy,so he must have done something right.

He grinned in sheer relief and was startled when 
she took one look at his face and started to 
laugh. Despite a couple of inquiring eyebrows she 
just shook her head and smiled. Then she 
surprised him by turning her back and pulling off 
sweater and vest to try it on. He gazed at the 
fire while she laced and adjusted. Then studied 
her with curious eyes when she turned back 
around.

All in all, he had probably seen more of his 
partner's naked and semi-clothed body in the last 
two months than he had seen in the entire six 
years previous. As he had thought earlier, he had 
perfected the art of looking without seeing. 
Which is why he found himself totally unprepared 
for his emotional response to her attire.

It was little more than a rectangular band of fur 
with laces that almost completely pulled it 
together at the front. He had managed to give it 
a little shape by cutting out tiny slivers at the 
four main compass points  around each breast and 
sewing them back together with tiny almost 
imperceptible stitches. Ultimately, he assumed 
that through wear and the constant tightening and 
retightening of the laces, the thing would 
eventually stretch to form fit. Even without 
that, however, he noted absently that it looked 
comfortable.  

It wasn't the fact that, for all intents and 
purposes, it had been designed as a bra. It 
actually didn't look like one. It looked like a  
cross between a halter top and a bikini. In it's 
primitive functionality, the white fur suited 
her. Her hair had grown slightly past her 
shoulders and without the attention of hairbrush, 
gel and blowdryer, her natural wave caused it to 
flow and curl in wild abandon. She needed only 
leggings and a wooden spear and he would have no 
difficulty imagining her as some ice age Viking 
warrior queen come to life.

So it wasn't how it looked that sent a blast of 
emotion screaming across his nerve endings and 
woke the animal instincts that lurked beneath 
civilized custom. It was seeing something that he 
had made, something crafted by his hands, 
touching her skin. It was the fact that she had 
accepted the gift. As if by wearing it, she had 
acknowledged some unspoken claim and primitive 
reflex wanted nothing so much as to stand up and 
growl "Mine!".

He bashed primitive reflex on the head with a 
mental fist and reminded it that instinct and 
reality had diverged in this situation. 

Reflex wasn't convinced.   

Nor was another part of his anatomy.

Which would have been fine if he had not looked 
up into her face and seen something feral and 
hungry staring back. For a long moment neither 
agent spoke, then Mulder managed a shaky breath 
and as if by unspoken agreement, both looked 
away.

She had the good sense to stay on the other side 
of the lean-to. He heard a unsteady sigh and a 
short unamused laugh.

"Shit."

His mouth responded before his brain could check 
the words over first,"I'll see that and raise you 
an uh oh."

There was a moment of dead silence, then she 
collapsed onto the log and startled to giggle so 
hysterically he was not absolutely positive she 
wasn't crying. When she finally raised her head 
there were tears running down her face, but she 
was definitely laughing. Nearly out of control 
and an edgy kind of laughter, but laughing.

"Jesus Mulder. Your partner almost drags you 
back to her cave and all you can say is 
"uh oh"?"

Mulder smiled weakly. Should he explain that his 
brain was not exactly the part of his body in 
control of his thought processes right about now?

"Tell me again why this would be a bad idea?"

Uh oh.

He babbled the first things he could think of," I 
haven't brushed my teeth in four months. *You* 
haven't brushed your teeth in four months. No 
deodorant. No silk sheets. No candles. No bed..."

His brain was getting off track again and she was 
looking at him with the strangest look of 
surprise in her eyes. Almost as if she had had a 
revelation of some kind. 

She murmured a couple of additions to his ad hoc 
list, " The situation is unnatural- due only to 
circumstance, we're partners, it might ruin our 
friendship..."

Oh right. He had forgotten those. Surprising 
how natural unnatural could feel. And what the 
hell was that look in her eyes?

"Was that everything?"

What was she finding so fascinating about his 
answers? Was that everything? He was having 
trouble remembering why he was trying to talk her 
out of this. 

Oh right. 

He dropped all pretense and went out on the limb 
as far as he had ever gone. No innuendo. No fall 
back. No safety net. No drugs to blame it on. 
Just a brutal honesty and the terrified 
vulnerability of his heart.

"Be very sure, Scully. Please."

Was that ragged whisper a warning or desperate 
plea? Did she even understand what he was telling 
her? 

There was none of the sudden shock that he 
expected. Not even any real surprise. Just a 
thoughtful gaze that was as turned inward as it 
was directed at him. Then she was studying him 
again, weighing some decision in her mind. In a 
way, he almost wished she was not taking this so 
seriously.

Because no matter what she decided to do, he was 
screwed.

If she said yes...would she really be saying yes? 

If she said no... 

Despite the fact that he wanted her to say no, 
needed her to back off, his mind was crying out 
that it was not fair. He had not expected to be 
judged today and if she would just tell him what 
she wanted, he could find a way to give it to 
her. That he would do better, plead his case 
differently, offer her a hell of a lot more if 
she would just give him another chance...  

Finally she stood and he was too terrified to 
look into her eyes. He did not want to see the 
choice he feared she was about to make. Either 
way, he knew he would lose.

"This isn't the right time to make this 
decision."

For a long moment he remained frozen, then he let 
out a single explosive breath that he had not 
even realized he was holding. She had found a way 
not to choose. Thank God. Thank whatever. She had 
not decided against him. He still had a bit more 
time. He refused to consider the swirling mass of 
emotion beneath the relief that felt like 
disappointment. 

Emotions were damned illogical.

"Mulder?"

He looked up at her, too caught off guard to 
completely hide the confused mess he knew was 
visible in his eyes. But that was okay. Because 
he was staring into a mirror image of those 
emotions and they were not his alone.

"We both need to be sure." 

He absorbed the words she spoke, as well as the 
ones she did not say. Then he nodded. This was 
not the time. He knew that. He really did. The 
disappointment...was something he could live 
with. 

He was not alone and he was not the only one who 
was scared.

If she had said the words, if he did, in this 
place, under these circumstances, they would 
always wonder.

She was right.

They both had to be sure.

So he took a deep breath and dredged up a wry 
twist of the lips. "Dinner?"

She gaped at him a moment, then laughed outright, 
this time without the edge, without the pain. 
Normality returned to their abnormal lives.

"Dinner." she agreed.

As a diversion it was inspired. 

Burning curiosity had it's occasional uses and 
he really truly wanted to know what was up with 
that pit. The expression on her face was too 
self-satisfied. Whatever it was, it was gonna 
be good.

He could feel himself starting to drool.

Getting his Pavlovian responses under control he 
ignored his partner's smirk as he helpfully 
volunteered to move the fire and dig up whatever 
she had buried. He also resisted the urge to 
strangle her as she S..L..O..W..L..Y dug into the 
soft earth with a deer bone digging stick.

It was worth it.

The smell almost carried him off. Turkey. Oh God. 
TurkeyTurkeyTurkeyTurkeyTurkey. Where the hell 
had she found a turkey? Did wild turkeys 
grow...well... wild? He knew there were people 
raising wild turkeys for sport hunting, but were 
the really wild cousins still running around or 
were they extinct? Maybe some of the domesticated 
stock got loose and avoided the foxes and wolves 
long enough to reproduce. Actually, he found he 
did not care. 

He just wanted her to hurry the hell up and...

...crack open a ball of mud?

Mulder stared down at the offending object. Then 
he looked back at his partner, a dismayed 
expression on his face. 

"Where's the turkey?"

Okay, so that had come out sounding truly 
pitiful. But he...he still smelled turkey. He 
poked at the ball of mud suspiciously. Then he 
ducked reflexively when Scully yelped and yanked 
the mudball away from him.

"Don't!"

He froze.

Scully checked her mudball for cracks, then 
glared at him.

"Don't touch. If it cracks out here it'll be one 
god awful mess."

The turkey was inside the mudball? Mulder studied 
the soccerball sized thing with renewed interest. 
Now that he looked closer, he could see that the 
mud actually appeared to be clay.

"Hey Scully. Isn't that roaster pot thing that 
Bill and Tara got you for Christmas last year 
made of clay?"

"You remember that?"

Was she joking? It was shaped like a chicken. Who 
could forget something like that? 

Apparently clay was an all purpose cooking tool. 
The fire-hardened clay cracked and pulled away 
from the bird inside as Scully laid it on the 
table and smacked it. Skin and feathers tore 
away with it leaving the tender meat steaming 
in the winter chill. Hunks of meat fell from 
the carcass and it was neither pretty nor 
graceful.

It didn't last long enough to matter.

Scully had stuffed the cavity with a combination 
of cracked,roasted acorns and wild onions. The 
pungent aroma after nearly three months had both 
of them nearly to the point of hyperventilation 
as they luxuriated in the smell. The taste was 
beyond description.

Despite their efforts to be moderately civilized, 
they suspected that anyone watching from the 
outside would not have noticed the attempt as 
they ripped hunks of meat from the bones and 
scooped hot bits of stuffing with their fingers. 

It turned out, however, that it was not turkey 
after all.

"Pheasant? As in $10 a pound pheasant? That 
pheasant?"

Scully just grinned at the irony of eating luxury 
game bird while trapped in the wilderness and 
scooped more of the acorn stuffing. They had long 
since reduced the first mudball to bare bones and 
were making serious inroads on the second. There 
was even a third one for leftovers.

Then she lit a tallow candle for her family and 
they both stared silently into the flickering 
flame as they thought about the ones they had 
left behind. Surprisingly enough there were no 
tears. Pain, yes, for Scully's family and those 
few friends close enough to miss them on this 
first Christmas after their disappearance. But no 
regret for themselves. 

They were warm, they were safe and they had each 
other. They had peace,and hope,and a temporary 
reprieve from the war...but no regrets.

In the midst of nothing, they had everything that 
mattered.

********************************

True to his predictions, Scully brought down 
three more deer before turning her attention to 
other matters. Unable to leave the camp while the 
meat was smoking, Mulder started fleshing the 
deer hides, but left the tanning until evenings 
when both of them were present to work the large 
and unwieldy hides.

Scully, meanwhile, started a new career as an 
acorn pirate. No squirrel den was safe from the 
red-headed scourge of the wilderness and their 
breakfast diet soon expanded to include acorn 
porridge. The added oil and protein allowed them 
to move completely to eating rabbit and the low 
fat cuts of deer meat. 

Following the deer had led her to the wild 
onions, and she soon discovered several swampy 
areas around moving water that had not frozen 
over yet. In addition to a few bitter greens, 
these unfrozen areas provided wild carrots (with 
deer and onions, they actually had a stew) while 
the brooks and rivers yielded up a small harvest 
of fish.

Mulder was ecstatic and some of his enthusiastic 
experimentation with the greens and other edibles 
Scully brought back were actually quite good. 
After she showed him where she had found the 
clay, Mulder spent several fruitful hours 
recreating her clay bakeware. The resulting pot 
with lid, seized with oil from the deer meat 
roasted in it, made an excellent dutch oven when 
buried in hot coals. Mulder was so pleased with 
it, he made another just in case they broke the 
first one.

They were halfway through January when they 
realized that they were almost ready. The deer 
hides were tanned, they each had a soft leather 
shirt to wear under their vests and their jackets 
had acquired hoods of warm fox fur. Leather 
leggings covered tattered jeans and for the most 
part, with the leather acting as a windstop and 
the fur turned to the inside for an insulating 
layer, they found them adequately warm. Of 
course, mostly that was due to the high energy 
activities they were engaged in when away from 
the fire, and the trade off was an enormous need 
for fuel.     
 
The fish helped, as did the acorns,but the 
additional muscle mass they were rapidly gaining,
as well as the caloric cold deficit ate into 
their stores of deer meat at alarming rates. 
Mulder started putting on a Dutch oven of rabbit
stew in the mornings just to give them something 
to eat between meals.

They could not stop eating.

Scully was giving serious contemplation to going 
after two or three more deer when another 
opportunity presented itself. At least that was 
how she described it after the fact. Asinine and 
reckless were the kindest words that Mulder used 
after he calmed down. She did not have a 
descriptive phrase for it herself. She had been 
too busy running for her life.

Despite the appeal of a bear skin blanket, 
neither Mulder nor Scully had any intention of 
hunting bear with 9mm handguns. The thought was 
ludicrous. So Scully had taken careful note of 
the one bear den she did find and kept as far 
away from it as possible. Avoiding it entirely 
would have been better, but not practical. So she 
was careful.

Unfortunately, Fate resolved to stir things up 
and while Scully was checking her fishing lines,
the hibernating bear decided it was time to take 
a pee and find a few winter berries to snack on 
before he went back to sleep. She did the only 
thing she could do...

She ran.

Playing dead only works if the bear attacking you 
thinks you are a threat. Most mother bears will 
settle for batting you around a few times until 
she is satisfied her cubs are safe. That does not 
mean however that the unhappy human is not going 
to get badly torn or chewed. And unfortunately, 
there are two types of bear attacks.

Playing dead with the second type just gets you 
eaten.

Having no idea which this would be, and knowing 
that at full speed a bear can run down a human 
without even trying, Scully headed for the trees. 
Black bears can climb too, but a full grown black 
bear weighs over three hundred pounds. Unless he 
is serious, he isn't going up that high.

And since he is heading up the tree with paws and 
claws occupied, it's possible to pull a 9mm 
handgun and put an entire clip into the roof of 
his open mouth before his teeth grab hold. He 
also makes an impressive hole in the branches 
when he falls out of the tree.

Still, avoiding the bear in the first place is 
the safest strategy for all involved.

Scully stared down at the motionless cinnamon 
furred lump for the better part of half an hour 
before climbing shakily out of the tree. Once 
on the ground she backed away from the body 
carefully, just in case there were any stray 
electrical impulses floating around the beast's 
jaws or paws.

Then she headed for the camp at high speed.

The bear was big and she was going to need help 
skinning and dragging it back to camp. That was 
not, however, the reason she was racing through 
the snow as fast as her snowshoes could carry 
her.

There was absolutely no way Mulder missed those 
gunshots.

She was barely sixty seconds into camp when she 
was picked up, shaken and spun around in a human 
version of a tornado. After doing his best to 
squeeze the last of her air from her lungs, 
Mulder frantically went searching for broken 
bones, open wounds and other medical horrors. 
Then, when he finally understood that she was 
safe, he started to yell. And shake. 

Finally she just wrapped her arms around his 
waist and waited him out. His voice had trailed 
off into incoherence and she suspected that the 
only thing holding him up was the grip he had on 
her shoulders. Mulder could fling himself into 
the hunt with the best of them, but pacing around 
camp gives the adrenaline no place to go.

For someone used to being able to do something 
about the things that scared him, Mulder had just 
spent an hour in his own personalized version of 
Hell. Given the circumstances, Scully could 
forgive a little shouting. What she would have 
done under the same circumstances did not bear 
thinking about.

However, they had work to do. Satisfied that her 
partner was done with his hysterics, she tossed 
him his snowshoes and grabbed extra knives, ropes 
and sled. Mulder even managed to maintain his 
cool until they made it back to the bear and he 
saw the size of the thing.

Since the curse words did not seem to be aimed 
directly at her, Scully ignored them in favor of 
trying to figure out exactly how they were going 
to do this. There was no way they were hoisting 
this beast into a tree even if the ropes would 
hold him.

Ultimately, Mulder scooped out the contents of 
the body cavity to keep it from tainting the meat 
while she loosened the fur from the carcass. 
Ordinarily they would spread the fur on the sled 
and place the meat inside it, but the bear was 
too heavy to roll out of his fur. Instead, they 
starting hacking off chunks of meat and placed 
them on clean snow to cool.As they went, Scully 
was able to separate large chunks of bear fat and 
these went in a separate pile to freeze.

As the pile of meat grew, they were finally able 
to roll the carcass from side to side by pulling 
up on one side of the fur or the other. Mulder 
took the first load of meat back to camp and 
started a fire in the smoker while Scully 
continued trimming meat from the bear. The large 
size of the bones made it impossible to joint the 
meat easily and there was no way they were going 
to be able to crack the rib cage without serious 
effort.

They would have left most of the bones for the 
scavengers, but Mulder wanted the ribs for the 
travel sleds. Scully figured he would probably 
find a use for the heavy leg bones as well.

Five trips were needed to get it everything back 
to camp. In spite of the blood, nothing bothered 
them. Whether it was the smell of the bear or the 
smell of the humans was anybody's guess. As nice 
as the meat was, however, the real treasure was 
the hide. Adequate as they were for clothes, the 
deerhides just would not be warm enough as 
blankets once they were on the trail. Not if they 
ended up using hastily built or snow-type 
shelters.

The bear hide solved that problem quite neatly.

In the end, she did not even have to use the 
brain to tan the hide. There was so much oil in 
the skin, she simply had to scrape it off as it 
oozed from the leather. It took two days to build 
the frame to stretch it out and another two weeks 
before it was ready for smoking, but in the end 
they had a luxuriously soft and warm - albeit 
heavy - bear blanket.

With the addition of almost two hundred pounds of 
high fat bear meat, they were able to scale back 
their food gathering efforts to acorn foraging 
and the traplines. They did not need the meat, 
but they needed the rabbit fur. 

Most of the remaining deer hides were stitched 
tightly together to form a tent designed to 
stretch over a detachable wooden skeleton similar 
in design to the wedge-shaped burrow they 
currently occupied. The easily assembled 
structure could then be covered in snow. The 
temperature inside would never get above zero-but 
it would never get below a few degrees below zero 
either- no matter how cold it got outside. The 
remaining deerskins would be thrown over pine 
boughs to protect them from the ground while a 
rabbit skin blanket and the bear skin would 
act as an arctic sleeping bag.

Mulder threw himself into the task of building 
their sleds, while Scully finished preparing 
everything else for the journey. By the second 
week of February, after the worst of the cold 
weather had mostly passed, their preparations 
were complete.

Each sled was just over eight feet long and two 
feet wide. Four of their maple stick boxes fit 
comfortably in a single layer with room along the 
sides for the pieces of the tent skeleton. Each 
sled was designed to carry eight boxes in a 
double layer. The sled itself was strong enough 
to be hoisted into the trees to keep the food 
from tempting predators. Of the eight boxes on 
each sled, six carried food -four of meat, one of 
acorns and one filled with various containers of 
everything else from cranberries to onions. One 
box on each sled held various cooking utensils 
and misc. tools. Mulder's eighth box held their 
leather working tools, rawhide lace and other 
odds and ends. The remaining rabbit pelts were 
bundled and loosely tied on top. Scully's extra 
box held everything else that they could not fit 
in elsewhere. 

The hides stacked on top of the boxes and would 
be tied down with ropes on the trail. Their extra 
rabbit socks, whatever clothing they were not 
wearing, the extra knives and three days worth of 
smoked meat and acorns were stuffed in the 
deerskin packs they would wear on their backs. 

Amazingly, after almost five months, they were 
ready.

It was almost anticlimactic. Suddenly there was 
no more work to be done. They had more than 
enough food from what was being left behind that 
they did not have to hunt. There were no clothes 
to make, no hides to tan, no place to be.

Mulder laughed when Scully complained that it was 
like taking a vacation.

They did clean out the fridge, though. Mindful of 
the calories they were going to use, both agents 
spent the last two weeks of February eating 
everything they could stuff down their throats. 
Whatever they did not eat was getting tossed to 
the wolves, and they had worked too hard to do 
that lightly.

And then it was time.

February 28, four months and three weeks after 
they were kidnapped by a psychotic, Mulder and 
Scully built a bonfire and burned all evidence of 
their enforced stay in the wild. They covered the 
latrine with the bedding they hauled out from 
their burrow the next morning and tossed the last 
of their uneaten food to the wild.

With the worst of the winter storms behind them, 
the morning of March 1 dawned bright and clear 
and Agents Mulder and Scully started the next 
stage of their long journey home.

*********************************

Ordinary citizens had a hell of a time getting 
themselves declared dead if they were 
inconsiderate enough not to leave a body. The 
implications were quite staggering when one 
considered that until that official death 
certificate was signed, insurance would not be 
paid out, the sale or disposition of assets would 
be frozen and the assets themselves could be 
taken over by the government unless a valid power 
of attorney was held by someone else and pensions
could not be collected.

It also made it difficult to pay the rent on 
apartments and the insurance on cars when the 
paychecks stopped arriving.

Skinner filed all the necessary paperwork needed 
to keep the money flowing for as long as 
possible. As federal agents, it would have been 
easy for the estates of either agent to file to 
have them legally declared dead. The 
circumstances of their disappearance as well as 
their occupations meant that precedent existed.

Margaret Scully had flat out refused to take that 
step for her daughter and had forcefully 
threatened to go to court to have him stopped if 
Mulder's lawyer made any such attempt regarding 
Mulder. In addition to the fact that Margaret had 
both legal powers of attorney, as her daughter's 
heir and the ultimate beneficiary of Mulder's 
estate since he had left everything to his 
partner, everything would have ended up in 
Maggie's hands anyway. The lawyer conceded that 
it wouldn't exactly look good to the court to 
have the beneficiary fighting to keep from 
inheriting.

The courts get nasty about lawyers who look like 
they are doing things just to create billable 
hours.

Besides, with the estate in trust, the lawyer was 
collecting a nice retainer as a trustee fee. He 
was in no particular hurry to accrue legal 
expenses which could come back on him if he lost 
the case or his client returned from the dead. 

In spite of the AD's best efforts, the agents' 
paychecks would cease six months from the day of 
their assumed deaths and Administration was going 
to take another long hard look at the status of 
the X-Files. Luckily both Mulder and Scully had 
set up flexible financial arrangements that took
long term disappearances into consideration and 
Skinner thought he had a solution to the other 
half of the problem.

That solution was going to give birth to the 
pissing contest from hell if Mulder and Scully 
ever returned.

When they returned, Skinner chastised himself 
mentally. When they returned.

But the fact was, that they might not. So he had 
to consider how best to protect their interests 
and how to position the FBI for the coming war if 
they had to go on without them. In a way, their 
disappearance had created the circumstances which 
gave him the credibility to pull this off.

The VCU had profilers who studied ritual crime. 
Religious nutdom of some kind was a favorite 
flavor of psychosis among serial killers. But 
there were no agents that specifically 
specialized in all flavors of the paranormal. As 
a profiler and as a member of the X-files team, 
Mulder had filled a niche that the FBI had never 
officially recognized...just used when it became 
necessary.

That was about to change.

Without an official place to dump the 
unexplained, Administration was beginning to 
realize just how many query calls Mulder and 
Scully had taken. How many police officers and 
profilers from across the country routinely 
called in asking for this about vampires or that 
about werewolves. It was rarely that they thought 
they had a werewolf, but if the killer thought he 
was a werewolf then the pathology of the crime 
still fit.

They also discovered just how many civilians 
called in regarding everything from UFO sightings 
to bumps in the night. Looking for clues, cases 
and connections, Mulder had talked to them all. 
Again, now the switchboard had no clue where to 
send them.

The on-line database had just increased the 
problem. Police cases that formerly got shoved 
under the desk or behind a drawer were now being 
sent to the FBI. The backlog was getting out of 
control and the mailroom clerks were scared to go 
into the basement office for fear of falling 
files.

So...the solution.

Maggie Scully had refused a funeral for either 
her daughter or her partner. But she had held a 
memorial service for them on Scully's birthday 
and a general invitation had been issued. Skinner 
had been very surprised at the number of people 
who had shown up. 

Some of them were old acquaintances and friends. 
A surprising number of the growing legion of 
MUFON and other internet network administrators 
had arrived to pay their respects...and take 
surreptitious photos of the crowd. More than a 
few local police officers had stood in uniformed 
clusters as had a small crowd of lab techs and 
support staff.

Some had shown out of respect, some in anger for 
the perceived injustice of the treatment the 
agents had received, and others because of a 
burgeoning belief in the cause they had fought 
for.

The five agents currently being ushered into his 
office had also been there. 

On his orders.

The past was dead, Skinner realized suddenly. 
Even if Mulder and Scully returned tomorrow, the 
wheel had turned and the future would go on with 
or without them. He wasn't even sure how they 
would function within the new structure of the 
team. Their habits had been established to meet 
certain needs that no longer existed.

How would they deal with those changes?

Feeling a touch of sadness for the fact that this 
new team, no matter how they evolved, no matter 
what they encountered, would never truly 
understand what it had been like in the 
beginning. Would, in fact, probably never truly 
understand their predecessors even if they had 
the chance to meet them. The survival traits that 
Mulder and Scully had acquired would be seen as 
nothing more than idiosyncrasies.

Were his mavericks even capable of operating as 
part of a larger team? Maybe. Hopefully. He 
prayed he would have a chance to find out.

It was a given that the team would be called upon 
to assist the VCU. As a result, the inclusion of 
a profiler had been a foregone conclusion. Agent 
Mathews wasn't one of Patterson's Children of the 
Night, but he was solid, experienced and very 
very good at his job. Agent Vickery held a double 
degree in Accounting and Computer Science while 
Agent Landers was not only an ex-marine, she was 
a crack shot, had a black belt in a free form 
version of jujitsu and a degree in Criminal 
Psychology. Skinner had specifically chosen her 
over others with similar qualifications because 
of her fighting skills. The team would have 
standing orders to place themselves directly 
under her tutelage for regular training.

Mulder and Scully would be the last X-Files 
agents taken out by serial killers, bank robbers 
or any other form of low-life pond scum criminal 
if he had anything to say about it.

They might still get hurt, but it would not be 
for lack of training. HRT was going to look easy 
compared to the program he had in store for them. 
Besides, if they were going to save the world, 
they were going to need to know a few things 
about scaling walls and running for your life.

Hoo-yah.  

The fourth member of the team was Agent Harris. 
Both he and Agent Lewis were so new they 
squeaked. Skinner had never forgotten how useful 
Agent Pendrel had been. Harris had been turned 
down twice already. In spite of the extra courses 
he took at night, in spite of the self-defense 
courses he took, he had two things working 
solidly against him. First, he was extremely good 
as a lab tech - it did not matter that he wasn't 
happy there - the government was thrilled with 
his job performance. The second was that he 
looked like a lab tech. In person and on paper. 
He just did not stand out against all those other 
police officers, ex-military and people with 
double degrees. 

But AD Skinner was looking for very specific 
qualities. The X-Files dealt with strange 
substances and weird lab reports so often, it 
would not only be useful to have someone who 
could read the data- in a pinch, he could do the 
tests himself. Especially if they found 
it...prudent...to protect the credibility of 
those same lab tests. 

Skinner had seen too many doctored lab results to 
doubt that Harris would be worth his weight in 
gold. Throw in his dogged determination, drive 
and commitment and Skinner had requested his 
training and transfer personally.

And finally, Agent Lewis. He had been on the 
look-out for someone like her for almost two 
years. Ever since Mulder and Scully had returned 
from Antarctica and he had realized that there 
was not only a virus, but that there was a cure. 
A cure that both his agents harbored in their 
blood and bone. But Scully was the wrong kind of 
doctor. Despite what she could teach herself, 
despite what she had been forced to learn over 
the years, she lacked the basic skills to 
reverse engineer a vaccine. Assuming it could 
even be done. 

So he had gone looking for someone. Someone they 
could trust and someone who could hide the real 
work beneath the paranormal reality of the X-
Files.

Agent Lewis was the result of that search. 

Officially, she was a paper geneticist with no 
internship or practical experience. The ink on 
her university degree wasn't even dry before she 
signed the application papers to the FBI. But 
unofficially, Lewis had spent three years on an 
in-field virology team as an unpaid lab assistant 
from the age of seventeen. Her mother had been 
the head of research for a team doing field work 
on the Ebola virus. Lewis had returned home to 
the US to compete her studies while her mother 
ended up in the middle east as part of a UN team 
investigating bioweapons charges.

The charges turned out to be true.

The terrorists were poor, but they knew their 
bioscience. The jury-rigged weapon that the 
suicide bomber exploded in the center of the 
downtown market infected 4000 people in less than 
fifteen minutes. By the time they were done 
counting bodies, Agent Lewis's mother was among 
the casualties.

Lewis applied for the Academy the day she 
graduated. Too young, too overqualified for 
a lab position and without any secondary training 
in psychology or forensics, she just wasn't what 
the FBI was looking for. They did not need 
geneticists. Especially geneticists who wanted to 
join the anti-terrorism division and had an 
obvious ax to grind.

But AD Walter Skinner did.

As far as he was concerned, she was a gift from 
heaven. She was on a plane to the Academy so fast 
it probably made her head spin. He had already 
planted a seed. He had casually brought up some 
of the stranger medical anomalies and virally 
related cases as examples of the type of work the 
X-Files did.

Mulder's encounter with the retrovirus just sort 
of came up in conversation.

She was not stupid. She could guess that he was 
bringing up cases he thought would interest her. 
But any resentment over being manipulated did not 
have much of a chance against the fact that he 
was right. He had a feeling she was going to be 
giving the old case files an extremely close 
going over as soon as she had access. If he 
wasn't mistaken, that alone would be enough to 
drive the team in the direction he wanted. Once 
they were there...

Well, there were samples of Mulder and Scully's 
blood and tissue in a cold storage facility that 
only he and three close-mouthed computer hackers 
knew about.

These five people had just become soldiers in a 
war they knew nothing about. He could not even 
bring himself to regret that he had put them 
square in the line of fire. He needed them too 
badly and too many others had paid coin in blood 
to let him give up now.

Knowing Mulder, he would be on his doorstep like 
Jacob Marley, chains and all if he did. Scully 
had less of a sense of humor about that sort of a 
thing. She would just make sure he never slept 
again. Ever. Probably shriek like a banshee and 
lurk at the foot of his bed like some ice-eyed 
archangel of Hell.

And he had given them a backhanded sort of a 
warning. He had made sure they were at the 
memorial service. They had gotten a good hard 
look at the costs this division could demand. 

It's less than sterling reputation.

They were still here.

And they had a job to do.

*****************************************

Thinking about it later, they realized that they 
were each hauling almost 150 lbs of sled and gear 
and an additional 40-50lbs on their backs. 
Surprising, Scully had the advantage as long as 
they were on the older snowpacks. They found that 
most of their pulling power came from their legs 
and hips, and with her lower center of gravity, 
she managed as easily if not more so than her 
physically taller and stronger partner. 

That only lasted until they found themselves 
floundering in deep fluffy snow and the lifting 
power and upper body strength began to play into 
things. As a result, they found themselves 
packing the sleds with the heavier furs and skins 
going to whoever was going to have an easier time 
of it. Scully found herself grinning the morning 
she watched her partner unthinkingly hand her the 
heavier sled...and he did not even think twice 
about it.

Chivalry gave way to practicality extremely 
quickly.

Their plan had been to go until the first four 
food boxes were emptied. With luck, they would 
have reached civilization by then. If not, they 
would take a couple of days per week to set traps 
and hunt to replenish their foodstores as they 
used them.

Whether because they were using higher fat cuts 
of meat, because their activity level was 
actually not much higher than they were already 
used to, or because of the warmer temperatures, 
they found that they did not go through their 
foodstores nearly as quickly as they thought they 
would.    

They were each carrying an estimated 60 pounds of 
dried meat-the equivalent of almost double that 
in fresh. They had assumed that it would last 
them about three weeks give or take. Scully soon 
figured that unless something changed, they could 
double that estimate. Except for taking time to 
forage for more acorns, they actually had little 
need to hunt for food at all.

All in all, that was probably a good thing. 

They had thought that they had gotten themselves 
into good shape over the past five months. Fat 
had melted away, cardio had been pushed to the 
limit by all the trudging through snow and 
muscles were rock solid. Heck, they were 
discovering muscles they did not know they had. 

Now they were discovering a few more.

They were up by first light and gone an hour 
later. In that hour alone, they lowered the sleds 
out of trees, lifted, folded and repacked 
deerhides, tent hides and fur blankets. Then they 
followed up on this with six hours of back-
breaking, mind-numbing, leg burning 
uphill/downhill exercise that Scully could only 
compare to the Stairmaster from Hell. 

Then the work began. 

It may have been staying lighter later into the 
day, but they needed every second. They would 
spend an hour digging into the snow, pitching 
their shelter and then covering it with snow. 
Then came the hunt for firewood and the back-
breaking, finger cramping task of starting a fire 
from scratch with bow and drill, and finally 
dinner.

They had been careful with their matches and they 
had done well over the last five months. But they 
were down to the last few and they had determined 
to save those for emergencies. Carrying hot coals 
had proved to be an impossible task so they found 
themselves doing it the old fashioned way. 

Scully swore to put matchbooks in every pocket of 
every item of clothing she ever owned from this 
point on until she died. Mulder very seriously 
suggested sewing some into the liners of their 
jackets. She only had to think about the fact it 
was her turn to start the fire and she agreed.

For that reason and also not to waste the hard 
earned coals, Mulder took to dumping the stew 
ingredients into his clay pot turned slow cooker 
and burying it in the coals at night. The result 
was a cooked stew ready to be placed in the sled 
and that only needed reheating for a quick lunch 
or dinner. They quickly came to appreciate having 
two clay cookers, the second being used to make 
their acorn porridge for breakfast.

After dinner came hauling the sleds into the 
trees and mandatory sponge baths. There was no 
way they could risk sweat rashes or trench 
anything at this stage of the game. They had 
survived five months with all their toes and 
fingers...it would be foolish to do something 
stupid now that it was warming up.

Warming up was a relative term of course. It was 
still below zero most of the time. Occasionally 
though the temperature rose high enough to give 
the daytime temperatures a high enough nudge that 
the surface of the snow began to get slippery.

It was a good thing for the sleds. The crusts got 
harder as the snow compressed. But Scully was 
beginning to worry about their feet. It wouldn't 
be long before the snow turned slushy on them. 
Between the wolf fur and the rabbit socks their 
feet were warm enough as long as they were 
moving, but they were soaked by the end of the 
day. They started stopping in the middle of the 
day to dry their feet as much as possible and to 
change into dry rabbit socks. Then they spent 
twice as long drying both sets of socks and their 
boots at night. They also started leaving the 
socks off at night to let their feet dry against 
the fur blankets as much as possible and they 
made a point of washing and drying their feet 
again after breakfast.

It was obsessive. And it was absolutely 
essential. 

For the rest of it, they found that they were 
wearing less clothes than they expected. Except 
for snowy days or cold evenings, they found 
themselves working with fox hoods down and the 
rabbit hoods in their packs. By the end of March, 
their attire was down to shirt and vest with 
rabbit fur headbands to protect their ears. Even 
then they found themselves leaving the vests 
unlaced at the sides. It was rapidly getting to 
the point where as long as they were moving, they 
needed little more than the deerhide undershirts 
to cut the wind.

Of course, once they stopped, everything had to 
go back on again.

By the end of March, it was fairly clear that 
they were so far from civilization it was not 
funny. Mulder muttered something about ending 
up in Canada and after one quick snort of 
laughter, Scully realized that he probably wasn't 
joking. Their extreme isolation, the climate and 
the environment. All of it pointed to a national 
park. A very large national park.

Glacier National Park was over one million acres 
of primitive backcountry and was only three 
states away from where they had been kidnapped.

All in all, they could very easily end up in 
Canada.

They also had no idea that the road they were on 
was a fire access road that had been cut into the 
forest the summer before during a particularly 
bad fire season. The road was unserviced and the 
forest service was actually letting nature 
reclaim it. Corman had been using it to try and 
keep himself unnoticed. The road itself appeared 
on no maps, was not part of the backcountry ski 
trail system and they had no idea that they were 
lost in the most remote part of the park and 
actually heading deeper into it.

Corman had gained access to the fire line by 
virtue of an old logging spur that had 
intersected with the dirt track. Unfortunately, 
the clear-cut sides of the logging road had 
looked like open meadow and the agents hadn't 
even known they were walking past the road which 
had brought them there. They had followed the 
obvious unnaturally straight line cut through the 
trees and instead of heading toward civilization, 
walked directly away from it.

Five weeks and 497 km after they left their 
campsite, Mulder and Scully stepped out onto a 
deserted but plowed road and stopped dead. In 
disbelief they stared at the evidence of 
civilization at their feet and wondered what in 
the hell they were supposed to do now.

"Left or right Scully?"

His partner took one look at him and started to 
laugh.

***************************

Deputy Todd Perkins was bored. Not only was he 
working night shift in a sleepy map dot of a 
town, but it was a Monday night. Tuesday night 
was movie night and Wednesday was wing night 
over at Bob's Tavern. Thursday was pay day 
for everyone working at the plant and Friday
...well, Friday was Friday. But nothing ever 
happened on a Monday.

He had checked.

For the last ten years, according to Miller's Gap 
crime statistics, the only thing that had ever 
happened on a Monday night was the time Fred 
Durst's cattle had broken through the fence and 
ended up tromping through Edna Crane's vegetable 
garden. Even then Edna wasn't threatening to 
shoot Fred, she was threatening to shoot George 
and Daisy. 

If Todd remembered correctly, a large chunk of 
George ended up in Edna's freezer courtesy of a 
contrite Fred who, now that his wife was gone, 
had been actively trying to get Edna into bed for 
almost two years. In terms of relative 
priorities, George never had a chance.

Too far from the highway to be a good gas stop, 
too poor to be picturesque and too far from the 
plant to be a favored bedroom community, Miller's 
Gap eked out a living by catering to the summer 
tourist crowd which consisted mainly of back 
roads campers  and week-end cottagers from the 
city. Considering that Miller's Gap was a good 
four hour's drive from the city limits, most of 
the cottagers had inherited their property or 
bought it in anticipation of future retirement. 

Miller's Gap had a summer week-end population of 
about 4000 and a week-day and wintertime 
population of 350. And since the cottagers 
considered themselves to be locals, albeit locals 
who socialized in a completely different social 
strata and community network than the local 
locals, they stayed home and refinished the back 
deck instead of heading for the bar on Monday 
nights.  

So nothing much happened on a Monday.

Which is why when he noticed two vagrants camping 
in the day park he actually bothered to stop. 
Then he noticed other things. Like their 
weathered features, the leather clothing and the 
sleds that seemed to be packed with furs. He did 
not see two FBI agents. He did not even see that 
they were sober and not making any threatening 
moves. Nor did he see that they were actually 
starting to smile.

Deputy Perkins saw two scruffy, lank-haired 
criminals, probably native trappers from their 
outfits,with a shit load of illegal furs. He 
saw that he was twenty feet from his truck and 
that there were two of them. He saw broad 
shoulders on a man six inches taller than him 
and well used leather leggings that clung to 
well defined thighs. He saw lean waists, bladed 
cheekbones and glittering eyes. 

Then he saw the knives.

*********************************
 
Scully stared at the ceiling tiles.

"Not quite how you pictured our triumphant 
return, huh Scully?"

She sighed and rolled over on her side, eyeing 
the lanky form of her partner stretched out on 
the cot on the other side of the room. 

"Do you ever wonder whether or not our luck is an 
X-File, Mulder?"

He grinned and was about to reply when they heard 
the rattle and bang of the front door and then 
voices and footsteps echoing in the hall. Both 
agents rolled to their feet and were standing 
when the Sheriff flipped on the lights and moved 
toward the jail cell door.

Dark adjusted eyes that were finding the 
fluorescent lights to be unexpectedly painful 
after six months of natural light squinted 
against tears before widening as they recognized 
the bulky form standing at the Sheriff's elbow. 
Both agents stiffened reflexively and they 
watched Assistant Director Skinner slowly move 
his eyes from one to the other, his face rapidly 
losing all expression. Behind the mask, Skinner 
battled a swelling sense of disbelief as he 
absorbed their appearance. 

Mulder's hair actually fell to his shoulders for 
the first time in probably two decades-if ever- 
and Skinner noted a surprising breadth of muscle 
across upper arms and chest. The agent had been a 
gangly tangle of skinny arms and legs hidden 
beneath white shirts and tailored suit jackets 
for so long that Skinner had failed to notice the 
changes as he matured. Now, non-essential body 
fat pared away and wearing only supple leather 
leggings that hugged muscled runner's legs, the 
newly revealed strength of body combined with his 
graceful movement and restless air to give him a 
dangerously feral look more suited to his animal 
namesake than Special Agent Mulder, FBI.

But if Mulder looked dangerous, his partner 
looked deadly. Icy blue eyes roved constantly, 
not really looking, but scanning. Her body was 
held with almost unnatural poise and the coiled 
energy was more sensed than seen, explosive 
potential waiting to detonate into motion. Her 
hair flowed in a wild tumble down bare shoulders 
that curved and rippled with a wiry ripple of 
muscle that ran down her upper arms and forearms 
and across her chest. A white fur brassiere of 
some lace up variety left cleavage and ridged 
abdomen aggressively exposed while her grayish 
brown leather leggings clung to thigh and 
calf. 

Both agents stood in bare feet, barely clothed in 
outfits that would have done a costume designer 
from Xena:Warrior Princess proud. Their bodies 
bore the visible marks of weather and strenuous 
labor and they should have looked silly. They 
should have looked incongruous. They sure as hell 
did not look like FBI agents. But instead of 
looking like the shattered survivors of six 
months of purgatory, they looked blindingly 
alive, lethally primed and absurdly healthy. 

They *were* being rescued, right?

Unlike his two wayward investigators who, 
unbeknownst to him, were viewing their current 
situation with nothing more than mild aggravation 
and some rueful amusement, Skinner found himself 
battling a torrent of emotions that snapped 
frighteningly into focus when he saw the blue 
marks from someone's fingers clearly imprinted on 
Scully's right shoulder.

"Why are they in the same cell together?"

Mulder, who had been shifting bare feet self-
consciously, froze and regarded his boss warily. 
Scully just narrowed cold eyes and smiled. The 
sheriff, not being in possession of similar 
survival instincts, said nothing about the agents 
refusing to be separated. A fact which Skinner 
would have believed instantly considering it was 
both true and typical. Instead, the man wrinkled 
his nose and explained about wanting to limit 
both the smell and any possible flea or lice 
infestation.

Skinner's voice was biting.

"These agents have survived a serial killer and 
six months in the bush in a Northern Wyoming 
winter and you were worried about a smell?"

The sheriff paled as one word struck him. He 
stammered,"Agents? They really are..." His face 
whitened further as certain comments he had made 
to both of them came back to him. 

Skinner's upper lip curled and the sheriff 
hastily fumbled for the keys and unlocked the 
door. Scully actually sauntered through the open 
door with feline disdain and Skinner felt his 
face pulling into a frown as he contemplated the 
scenarios that might have prompted her attitude. 
Not to mention those of the obviously defensive 
sheriff and her partner. Mulder paused as he came 
abreast of the man and stared down at him with a 
profiler's darkness in his eyes.

Skinner felt his breathing tighten as the paunchy 
man whitened still further and leaned back 
slightly as the taller man leaned in. What the 
hell was going on here? Mulder intimidated people 
with the power of his mind or his status as an 
agent of the FBI. He did not intimidate people 
physically. At least, this was the first time 
Skinner had seen him try. Except for his height, 
Mulder just wasn't that scary.

At least, he didn't used to be.

"Thanks for the hospitality."

There was more than silence in the chill depths 
of that voice. Sheriff Rawlins broke into an 
unattractive sweat and then his head jerked as 
Scully chuckled softly. He seemed to shrink as 
he met her eyes. Skinner flinched at the contempt 
she did not bother to hide and her voice held an 
arctic amusement that flayed as it burned.

"Come on Fox, leave the rabbit alone."

Mulder bared his teeth in a lupine grin, then 
padded over to her. "I'm not hungry, anyway."

Skinner actually found himself holding his breath 
as their eyes met and the hallway seemed to shrink. 
Jesus. Who the hell were these people and what had 
they done with his agents? Christ, they were toying 
with the officious fool. 

Then both agents dismissed the sheriff with 
insulting totality and headed for the door. 
Skinner found himself focusing briefly on the 
unexpected sight of a circular tattoo on Scully's 
lower back before it was hidden by the palm of 
Mulder's hand. He had forgotten about that. The 
sight sent a visceral and totally unanticipated 
and almost inappropriate response zinging through 
his body. 

He wasn't sure why it startled him so much. 
Well, maybe he did. It seemed so shockingly out 
of place for Scully. Out of character. And all 
the times he had seen Mulder put his hand to her 
back, her partner had been touching that 
tattoo...and Skinner suddenly had to wonder if he 
had known it was there. 

Was it getting hot in here?

If he had thought the energy that had burned 
between them before was intense, this was almost 
inconceivably incandescent. It was as if the fire
burning beneath the surface was sucking all the 
oxygen from the room and he found himself 
literally battling a psychosomatic instinct to 
hyperventilate. Jesus Christ. Was this the result 
of six months of fighting for their lives? Or had 
this always existed? 

Was this what really lived hidden beneath suits 
and civilized protocols?

Holy Mother of God. 

This was what the Consortium had being playing
games with?

The blind eyed sheriff stared in horror as 
the burly ex-marine started to laugh wildly.

Both agents strode through the station with 
unnerving silence. They paused by a table 
where a twitching deputy was piling several 
unidentifiable objects. Skinner watched uneasily
as the agents pulled on leather shirts and knee 
high moccasins. Two of the items turned out to be 
packs and both agents appeared satisfied that 
everything was present although Scully was 
frowning over a broken lace on one of her boots.

Instead of knotting it, she nonchalantly 
drew one of the largest hunting knives Skinner 
had ever seen and cut a length of lace from a 
ball Mulder pulled from one of the packs. Then 
she calmly relaced her boot. Considering how 
completely she was ignoring everyone from the 
Deputy to the Sheriff, Skinner had the definite 
suspicion that she had flashed the knife on 
purpose. 

On the other hand, both agents were standing with 
packs shouldered before Sheriff Rawlins returned 
with their weapons and clips. Turning towards 
them with guns in hand, Skinner paused as his 
agents' bizarre attire hit him all over again. 
Scully was wearing some sort of leather jacket 
that looked vaguely like a tribute to Daniel 
Boone. In fact, if he ignored the modern style of 
the knife sheathed at her side, she could have 
walked right out of the pages of that novel. 

Did that rodent pouch actually have feet and head 
still attached?

Mulder's knife was strapped to his left upper 
thigh -which made sense as he did not appear to 
be possessed of pouch or pockets at the moment. 
Instead of a jacket he wore a leather shirt under 
a white fur vest and between the laces and the 
agent's height, Skinner couldn't decide if he 
looked more like a Viking or a Celt.

Skinner eyed the snowshoes strapped to their 
backs. They did realize that the car was right 
outside didn't they? Then he caught the 
mischievous glint in their eyes and it struck him 
that they were putting on a show. For him? They 
were waiting patiently for his reaction.

He couldn't help it. 

The grin he had been holding back, the one that 
had tried to start the moment he had got the call 
from ATF that someone had run the serial numbers 
on their weapons was accompanied by a caroling 
inner shout... 

<theyarealive!theyarealive!theyarealive!> 

... and exploded across his face.


They were alive.

First Mulder, then Scully responded and the 
deputies were treated to the sight of three 
federal agents grinning at each other like 
delighted idiots. Then the assistant director 
tossed over weapons and clips. He probably should 
not have done it. Considering their rather 
confused status right now, he should have kept 
guns and ammo-especially since it was obvious 
that both weapons had been fired and the third 
weapon, the one Mulder dropped into Scully's 
pack, had probably belonged to Corman. But he 
would be damned if they walked out of here as 
anything other than fully recognized agents of 
the FBI.

Even if they did look like escapees from Clan of 
the Cave Bear.

"What about the rest of it?"

Skinner jerked his head and stared blankly at the 
deputy glaring sullenly at the former jailbirds. 
The rest? How much stuff did they have? A curious 
glance just garnered him a couple of shrugs and 
he sighed. 

The "rest" turned out to be enough fur to pack 
the trunk of the Taurus. Skinner considered the 
bindings on the sleds contemplatively as he 
watched Scully finger the contents of one of the 
stick boxes that made up the bottom layer of 
their sleds. Finally she hesitated, then drew out 
another of those animal pouches. Sudden movement 
near her shoulder caught Skinner off guard and he 
realized that Mulder too, must have been watching 
his partner because he took the pouch from her 
hands, replaced it in the box and after brushing 
her hands aside and throwing in a few items from 
a box on the other sled, slung it into the 
backseat of the car. Skinner winced thinking of 
the damage deposit, then remembered the furs in 
the trunk and realized that it was probably a 
lost cause anyway.

At least neither agent seemed to be scratching.

Scully hadn't moved, nor had her expression 
changed. But when Mulder came back and simply 
said,"Decide later", she astonished Skinner by 
standing up and, without even a glance in her 
AD's direction, wrapped her arms around Mulder's 
waist. At that moment, Skinner determined to have 
an agent sent over from the field office to 
arrange to have all of this stuff shipped to 
Washington. If Mulder and Scully wanted to burn 
it all later at some celebratory bonfire that was 
their choice. He would be damned if he would let 
some stranger destroy something his agents had 
obviously invested hundreds of hours of work and 
energy into. The thought alone of how they had 
acquired that bearskin made his blood run cold.

If the accountants wanted to squawk he would be 
more then happy to...discuss the matter with 
them.

Without further discussion, Scully climbed into 
the back seat with the snowshoes and packs, 
leaving the front seat for Mulder. Skinner headed 
for the field office. About ten minutes down the 
highway, the AD was fiddling with the buttons to 
the heaters. He hadn't noticed anything wrong 
with it earlier, but he had been so focused on 
getting to his missing agents-to make sure that 
it really was them-that he probably wouldn't have 
noticed if the car even had a heater. Now, with 
his two passengers sweating uncomfortably into 
furs and leathers, the car was warm enough that 
the windows were beginning to fog up.

As a side effect, the smell that the Sheriff had 
mentioned was making itself noticed. It wasn't 
precisely unpleasant, the AD told himself, just 
strong. Very strong. Most predominant was the 
heavy odor of woodsmoke. Beneath that was the 
light scent of leather mixed with pungent human 
musk. Not a rancid or oily smell it was cut with 
the woodsy odor of pine and the tang of human 
sweat. Except for the woodsmoke, it was  a clean 
animal smell like you would expect from a horse 
blanket or animal den. 

Considering that they had just spent six months 
without soap and deodorant, Skinner was surprised 
that it wasn't actually that repellent. He still 
remembered staying upwind of the scouting parties 
getting back to base in-country. Back then, he 
hadn't known which was worse, the smell, the heat 
or the lice. 

Skinner eyed the side of Mulder's head 
speculatively, then made a quick executive 
decision and headed for the nearest Wal-Mart.
Neither agent had spoken a word since they had 
gotten into the car. A quick sideways glance 
showed only patiently calm faces and a quick 
glance at Scully's eyes in the rearview mirror 
showed him an expression he hadn't seen in 
over twenty years.

It was the expression you saw when a group of 
soldiers had been with each other so long that 
all the small talk had been talked out and all 
that was left was silence. Everyone knew what had 
to be done, so there was no need to talk about 
it. That was how you could always tell the 
newbies. They talked. God how they talked. Until 
they lived past the first six months. 

They eventually shut up.

One way or the other.

Most people talk to fill the emptiness. Mulder 
and Scully had already gone past that. It was one 
of the things that unnerved people who spent time 
in their company when they were not concentrating 
on being sociable.

But this was a whole other category of 
speechlessness.

He was actually looking forward to seeing the 
effect they had on the Hoover Building. He rather 
wondered if he should bring popcorn. Then again, 
when they found out about the invasion of their 
offices, he might need body armor.

Mulder and Scully silently followed him into the 
store and waited patiently as he came to a halt 
beside the cash machine. It was Tuesday. It would 
be at least Thursday before they got back to 
Washington. Way too late for them to get anything 
sorted out at the bank. Pulling his daily cash 
limit from his card he handed each of them $200 
and then gave his Bureau credit card to Scully.

He shrugged awkwardly when she raised a curious 
eyebrow.

"We may be here a couple days. Use the card to 
get anything you need. The money is for food and 
incidentals. Your accounts are all frozen and it 
may be a few days before you can get any money 
advanced. If you need any more, let me know."

Both agents thanked him quietly, frowns creeping 
over their faces in tandem. As they stood there 
lost in contemplation, Skinner realized that this 
was probably the first time they had really 
started to consider the difficulties with picking 
up their old lives. 

He knew from experience that it wasn't the big 
changes that threw you. It was small things. 
Things like car keys and credit cards and having 
enough money in your pocket to buy pizza. It was 
realizing that you did not even know if you had 
apartments and personal possessions to go back 
to. He cursed as he thought about the fact that 
he should have told them about that stuff first 
off.

"There's no food in the fridge, and the cleaning 
lady only comes in to dust once a week, but your 
places are waiting for you. We put your cars in 
storage and Mulder, your fish tank is at my 
place. They are all alive."

He carefully did not look at the agents as he 
spoke, keeping his voice casual. Even so, he 
heard the tiny indrawn breath from Scully's 
direction and felt more than saw Mulder touch 
her shoulder. A rustle of leather as they moved 
apart and her voice came across extremely 
controlled and quiet as she simply said,"Thank-
you, Sir". Skinner caught the bob of Mulder's 
adam's apple as the agent swallowed sharply and 
then nodded in agreement.

They stood like that for another long moment 
until the doors slammed open and a family of five 
crashed through them, the kids hollering 
something about Breakfast Burritos. All three FBI 
agents started momentarily, then they all 
laughed. At themselves, at the situation, but 
mostly just for being alive. 

Skinner hesitated then offered his calling card 
to Scully if she wanted to call her mother. He 
was startled when she hesitated. 

"Does she know?"

Skinner just shook his head.

Scully drew in a deep breath. "Then I'll wait 
until I get back to the motel, Sir."

He was about to protest when he realized what 
Mulder had probably already known since he did 
not seem surprised in the least. She was going to 
need time and privacy for the call itself, and 
probably afterwards. Hell. It was only 5am back 
in Washington. He should have remembered 
that.

Then she was gone.

Skinner blinked. Once minute she was standing 
there. The next minute she had handed Mulder the 
credit card and was gone. Mulder just started to 
whistle tunelessly as he grabbed a cart and 
headed for the clothing section. For lack of 
anything better to do, Skinner followed him.

Two pairs of jeans, two black sweaters and a t-
shirt were swiftly joined by a six-pack of socks 
and three pairs of boxers. Skinner then watched 
enthralled as Mulder ignored the stunned (and 
interested)looks from the sales ladies in women's 
wear and rapidly added jeans, sweaters, t-shirt, 
bras, socks and a triple pack of Hanes Her Way 
underwear for his partner. Skinner noted that he 
added an extra t-shirt that was both oversized 
and too long and he realized that he now knew 
what Scully would be sleeping in.

What a bizarre day this was turning out to be.

And if Mulder was doing the shopping, where was 
Scully?  

Looking at his watch he realized that they had 
barely been in the store fifteen minutes and 
Mulder was already headed for the sundries 
section. Hell. Who said that men did not know how 
to shop?

Skinner was frankly beginning to enjoy himself. 
The incongruity of Mulder's wild man appearance 
clashed with the domestic picture he did not even 
know he was making. Did Mulder even realize that 
he was talking to himself? It was an unusual peek 
into a partnership that had always fascinated 
him.

Soap, shampoo, a fluffy bath sponge, moisturizer, 
deodorants, toothbrushes, toothpaste, blue and 
pink packages of disposable razors, his and hers 
shaving creams and a box of Tampax all ended up 
in the cart in less than five minutes. It was 
when Mulder paused to search for a particular 
brand of shampoo that Skinner realized that he 
was actually making choices not just pulling the 
first thing off the shelf that he saw. 

Eidetic memory, Skinner remembered. Scanning the 
choices in the cart he wondered how many of the 
choices he was making for his partner were brands 
she preferred. Probably all of them, he thought 
ruefully.

Two pairs of black Brooks sneakers and two black 
duffel bags later, Mulder was pushing the cart 
through the checkout and Scully was walking 
toward them juggling three large bags from 
McDonalds and a cardboard tray of coffee.

Mulder's eyes lit up.

"Caffeine!"

Skinner considered the likely effects of a 
caffeine high on a man who had been clean for six 
months. He almost groaned. Scully was looking 
over the contents of the cart when Skinner heard 
her laugh.

"Jesus Mulder. We're going to look like the 
Bobbsey Twins."

The agent protested,"Hey, I got your sweaters 
in different colors and the ivory one even has a 
cable pattern."

Scully placed a hand solemnly over her heart,"I 
stand corrected. Ya did good Mulder. Here's your 
reward."

Mulder all but drooled as she handed him the food 
sacks and then she was swiftly dividing the 
contents of the cart and efficiently packing them 
into the appropriate duffel after the girl rang 
them through. Skinner barely even glanced at the 
total before signing the slip and replacing the 
card into his wallet.

He was more interested in watching his agents 
eat.

In the most co-ordinated food ballet he had ever 
seen, they handed bags and tray back and forth as 
they shouldered duffel bags and headed for the 
car. Between the checkout and the parking lot, 
they had eaten four breakfast burritos between 
them.

They weren't pigs about it. They were just very 
efficient. And hungry. Mulder handed his boss an 
egg McMuffin as soon as he was behind the wheel 
and then Skinner watched in disbelief as they 
proceeded to polish off eight more Breakfast 
Burritos, four egg McMuffins, six hash browns and 
two cups of coffee. That was when Skinner 
realized that the remaining egg McMuffin, six 
Burritos, and two hash browns were for him. When 
he told the agents faintly that he wasn't hungry, 
they ate those too.

They pulled up to the field office before he 
found out if they were hungry enough to start 
chewing on the upholstery. He thought at first 
that maybe they had gone hungry for two or three 
days but Mulder remarked casually that they had 
eaten before they got arrested.

So that was just breakfast.

He fiddled with the air vents as the windows 
starting fogging up again.

He only meant to pop in for a second, meet the 
local SAC and then explain that he would be back 
once his agents had a chance to clean up. The 
smell wasn't bad, but it was still...a smell. If 
he had been thinking at all he would have used 
his cell phone. They were ten feet into the doors 
when alarms were suddenly screaming their 
electronic heads off and agents were slamming 
into the foyer, weapons drawn.

Skinner had his own weapon half out before he 
realized the muzzles were all pointing behind 
him. He turned to see Mulder and Scully with 
their hands in the air, expressions of surprise 
and resignation on their faces. Skinner's own 
surprise lasted until he got a good look at them.

His first thought was "Oh shit, I forget about 
the knives."

His second,"Oh fuck. They went into Wal-Mart like 
that."

Well, hell. They were lucky nobody called the 
cops. That would have been cute. Not out of jail 
45 minutes and the local SAC would have been 
bailing all three of them out. 

He was so used to thinking about his agents as 
being armed and their whole attire was so bizarre 
that the knives just sort of ...blended. They 
were so unselfconscious he had never even 
noticed.

>From the looks on their faces, neither had they.

Luckily the SAC knew his face and had a sense of 
humor. He also had a camera. Turns out he even 
had the sleds to use as a backdrop. The local PD 
had unilaterally decided that they wanted 
everything to do with the FBI as far away from 
them as it could get and had dropped off the 
whole kit and caboodle about fifteen minutes 
prior.

The local agents were familiar with Wyoming 
winters and were inclined to be amazed and 
admiring. One of the security guards was an avid 
hunter and the look on his face when he saw the 
bearskin sent shivers down the AD's spine. The 
look when he found out that Scully had shot it 
with a 9mm told him more adequately than words 
just how close his agent had come. 

Knowing that the reaction from their colleagues 
in Washington was more likely to be disdain for 
getting themselves captured in the first place 
than admiration for their survival skills, 
Skinner wandered off to talk with the SAC while 
they enjoyed their 15 seconds of fame.

SAC Rivers just grinned as a lab tech rushed by 
carry a handful of film.

"His wife teaches social anthropology at the  
college down the street. Five gets you ten she 
wants pictures of *everything*."

He was right.

There was a regular photo op going on in the 
parking lot. Mulder was lounging good-naturedly 
against one of the sleds. The bearskin had been 
hauled from the trunk of the car and thrown back 
on top. Scully was talking seriously to a young 
woman who was probably the lab tech's wife. The 
contents of the second sled were being spread out 
across the pavement by a handful of chattering 
teenagers who were probably students.

Anything to get out of class, he supposed.

Except that they seemed genuinely impressed. 
Items that looked like nothing to him...a bone of 
some kind, those snowshoes, each engendered a 
hurried round of whispers and serious study while 
the lab tech took rolls and rolls of pictures.

They were seeing history come to life, he 
realized. This wasn't a textbook picture. This 
wasn't two hundred years ago. This was two people 
who had reinvented Native American tools for a 
specific purpose. The odd thought occurred to him 
that maybe the differences between what the 
natives had created with time and resources 
compared to what his agents had created in need 
could actually tell the students something about 
the people they could no longer interview.

Then he saw something that truly illustrated the 
demands the last six months had made on their 
bodies. They were not showing off. In fact, they 
did it so casually that he got the feeling it was 
something they had done many times before. 

Whoever had unloaded the sleds had done a good 
job of placing them out of the way. But with the 
contents of the second sled spread out like sales 
items at a bazaar, the car that pulled into the 
parking lot was forced to a stop. Before the 
driver could decide to back out and go in the 
other entrance, Mulder and Scully each casually 
grabbed an end of the bearskin covered sled and 
lifted it out of the way.

No one spoke for a long moment.

The lab tech snapped several hurried pictures.

Then Scully went back to her conversation like 
nothing out of the ordinary had happened. Which 
is when Skinner realized that for them, nothing 
had.

"It took four agents to get that off the truck. 
Partly it's a question of balance, but it's 
heavier than they think."

Skinner turned to see the SAC watching the two 
agents soberly.

"They don't know their own strength yet."

Skinner just shook his head. 

"You have no idea."








~The end~