JUST THE TWO OF US: Book II Mulder and Evan (1/3)

Date: Mon, 17 Jun 1996

JUST THE TWO OF US: Book II Mulder and Evan (1/3)
By S. Esty (AKA Windsinger)

Disclaimer: The characters of Dana Scully, Fox Mulder, and Walter
Skinner belong to Ten Thirteen Productions and are used here with
respect and admiration for their myriad talents.

Chapter 1

Washington, D.C.
Sunday, 11pm
December 16, 1993

The dark hid the sight of the icy Washington sleet, but not
the sound. The sound was like a shower of silver needles and the
fine pellets stung the cold skin of Mulder's upturned face. He
stood on the sidewalk before Scully's apartment building and stared
at her dark windows. The disappointment of not finding her hurt
worse than the sharp, icy pain on his cheeks.

He had waited as Sheila had urged him and hadn't begun calling
until three. There had been no answer except the automated response
from the infernal machine. Called again at three-thirty, three-
forty-five, four. Realizing that the intervals were becoming ever
shorter, he opted for a long run rather than continue his silent
pacing. Upon returning, he attacked the automatic redial on his
phone before his breathing had even returned to normal. Still no
answer, just one very tired answering machine. She would need a
new one after this.

At eight, Mulder drove to her apartment north of Georgetown
even though venturing out onto Washington streets in this weather
was, potentially, more hazardous than most of his cases. Not that
the condition of the streets was so poor - certainly for someone
who had learned to drive in New England, they were not - but the
city was infested with transplanted Southerners and diplomats from
warmer climes who panicked when they saw a snowflake. Now THERE was
danger.

He had so convinced himself that she was home and just not
answering his calls, that Mulder felt genuine surprise to find the
apartment dark, her car not parked on the street. Unable to think
of anything better to do, he pulled up the collar on his big black
coat, sat down on the steps in front of her building and waited,
watching the small white balls of ice dance on the wool of his
sleeve by the light of the street lamp.

Unbearable restlessness, boredom and a need to shake off the
bone-chilling cold drove him from the hard concrete step. Head
down, ungloved hands thrust deeply into coat pockets, ear tips red
and threatening to turn white from frostbite, dark hair slick from
the frosty mist, he walked. He quickly became familiar with the
sidewalks along the streets within three blocks radius. By his
third circuit he had learned to watch his step when crossing in
front of the fourth white facade on Jackson Place or he would trip
where the root of an ancient oak had pulled up the concrete. To his
annoyance, the owners of three houses on the block directly behind
Dana's building had dogs with very irritating barks. With a stab of
old childhood memories he noted that the owners of the sixth house
this side of Wisconsin Avenue had very poor taste in Christmas
decorations.

Upon returning, as he always did like cold iron drawn by a
loadstone, the windows were always as blindly vacant as before.
When he could no longer feel his fingers or his feet, he escaped to
his car, occasionally, even ran the heater, turning it off when he
began to feel drowsy. As a trainee riding with the Virginia police,
he had seen an entire household, dead. No murder of wife, husband,
children and ancient aunt, just a faulty heater left unattended to
spew its deadly fumes. So his own frozen flesh remained frozen.

Long past midnight, taking the key she had given him months
before for emergencies in numb fingers, he let himself into her
apartment. The warmth which met him was like a physical barrier.
Within moments his hands and face felt as if they were on fire as
blood rushed back into his constricted capillaries. All was quiet
except for the hum from the refrigerator. Everything was clean and
neat the way she always tried to leave her place when she went
away. Feeling like a stranger, both in her place and in her life,
he left the warmth and memories of more contented times, touching
nothing.

One final time he stood on the sidewalk staring at the
building which gave no answers. The sleet, which had waxed and
waned, fell as heavily now as it had all night. Oblivious to time,
he turned towards his car only when his feet felt like blocks of
ice. Hand poised, with the key in the ignition, he uttered a sharp
oath, the only sound he had made for hours. No, he would not allow
his mind to search for that one particular address among the
rolodex cards in his head. Only a fool would have waited so long in
such weather, he told himself, but he would be a bigger fool if he
drove to Evan's to see if her car was there.

The engine turned over hesitantly. Dragging, spiritless,
wrapped in a cold, dark fog, Mulder guided the car over the slick
streets, headed for his own apartment, which waited, laughing, for
his solitary return.

A stop light reflected blood red beams on the glare ice of the
pavement. Stop? Probably couldn't even if he felt any desire to. No
one else around, even the police knew better than to come out
tonight.

Why had she stayed away so long without calling? He must have
hurt her more than he realized. He wanted to apologize. On his
feet, on his knees, whatever she wanted, if only he could make up
for those horrible days. He would even agree to talk to her damn
doctors if that was what it took to convince her that he was back
to his old 'Spooky' self.

Big talk, Coward. Easy to agree now that he had nothing more
to hide than the usual. Somehow that seemed an insufficient penance
for having put her through hell.

Arriving safely at his own silent apartment, arms quivering
from his death grip on the steering wheel, too tired even to seek
a hot shower, Fox changed clumsily into dry sweats and two layers
of dry socks. After hastily piling his couch with every blanket he
owned, he crawled, trembling, underneath the pile, wondering if he
would ever feel warm again.

Sleep, please, he prayed. Forgetfulness for just a little
while. But Mulder's thoughts were, as always, racing, and the
controller for the mind numbing television too far away. In
reality, he probably slept quickly, only that mixture of half-
waking, fever dreams and aimless thoughts did not feel like sleep,
was not restful or healing.

One dream came back again and again and again. Frightening
silence and dark, numbing chill. The air, however, was strangely
fresher and dryer than that of the damp, mildewy concrete room
where he had been held captive. He was alone - no Stacie, no Vince,
no bull-like Joe with his club. And he was trying to sleep but
sleep would not come. For the surface he laid on was cold, even
colder than before, and was even more lumpy and uncomfortable than
he remembered.

Towards dawn, Fox struggled out from under the wool throws and
knitted cotton-polyester blankets in a fevered sweat. Groggily, he
stripped off the sodden clothes and, covering his nakedness with
one of the dry blankets from the top of the pile, passed out,
finally, for three hours of solid oblivion.

Mulder crawled into work Monday morning, only slightly late,
nursing the beginnings of a cold, and sustaining himself on a
forced optimism. Like Scarlet, tomorrow was another day and,
finally, tomorrow was today, though it was as gloomy and grey and
icy for December as he could remember. As he dressed, taking
greater care than he had for weeks, he listened to the list of
school closings on the radio and reassured himself that her plane
must simply have been delayed due to the weather. He found himself
grimly smiling as he waited in line to buy her favorite breakfast
bagel and gourmet coffee. A vision had come to him - Dana, grumpy
and tired, having just spent the night in the lobby of some airport
where her plane had been diverted. That thought was not the one
which made him smile, however. The image of easy-going Evan having
to deal with an annoyed Dana Scully under those circumstances made
him smile. The slight frown reappeared when he remembered that in
spite of everything, Dana always managed to be in control and look
beautiful.

Bribes in hand, Mulder pushed open the door to his
subterranean sanctum to find the lights still out. She had not come
and there were no messages. A quick run upstairs showed she had not
appeared at her other desk by the lab either, and as the morning
went on, the coffee went from hot to warm to stone cold. By early
afternoon, when her fine red head had still failed to make an
appearance, the coffee went down the sink and the stale bagel into
the trash.

If for no other reason than to help the time pass, Mulder
worked. Technically, he was able to concentrate far better than
before his sessions with Richard, but the work had no purpose and
the words no meaning and his mind strayed. Frustrated, he pushed
the files aside more than once, but finding the silence worse,
pulled them back towards him again.

At one in the afternoon Mulder gave up pretending to be
useful. He called her apartment again. Still only the awful
answering machine. Then for the first time tried her cellular. As
he punched in the speed dial code he tried to come up with a good
explanation for the call. The message came back that she was out of
range.

Scully, where are you?

Like too many times before, fear began to reach out its
clinging tendrils towards him, but he shook them off, fighting down
his innate paranoia which tried to convince him that something was
wrong. Languidly, fear retreated, cruelly chuckling.

<Don't make yourself look a bigger fool than you already have,
Spooky. Scully is well able to take care of herself. Crawl back
into your cave and work and eat and sleep and be alone. Besides,
Evan is a gentlemen, Evan loves her, Evan will see that she comes
to no harm.>

Mulder threw down the file he had read and reread five times
without comprehension, swearing at his active imagination. For his
stubbornness, he was rewarded with only more creative explanations
for her silence - plane crashes, rock slides, the flu, car trouble,
a honeymoon, alien abduction. He raved silently. Under most of
these circumstances, she could still have called.

Technically, he was the X-Files division manager and she was
assigned to work for him, but he had never been one to follow
protocol for protocol's sake. They had functioned, almost from the
start, as equals. Certainly, he had not acted much like a
supervisor the past few weeks. Thus, it was not unusual that Scully
had not requested this leave officially from him. She had informed
Personnel. Her informing him had been little more than a curtesy.
Mulder realized, suddenly, that he had only assumed that she would
return on Monday - his memory of that call was certainly vague -
and he refused to call Personnel to find out, officially, the time
she had requested and when she WAS due back.

He could just hear the office grapevine beginning its
inevitable creep. "He asked what?" And they would laugh in that
cruel way which Mulder tried not to hear but always did. Even when
the laughter was only in their eyes, only in their thoughts, he
always heard it.

Refusing to listen to their laughter, Mulder stared down at a
report he thought he had completed three months before. The central
question kept nagging at him. Why hadn't Scully tried to contact
him? She should have called just because they were partners and
friends, unless they were neither of those any more. The guarded
hope of the morning was fading fast. The dream that she wanted more
than just to be his partner was a delusion. After all, why should
she? She spent half her life, as it was, picking up the sorry
pieces of his life, why would she want more of that? He must have
dreamed all of the good parts of this novel, read too much into her
soft glances and worried expressions on his behalf. That velvet
voice on the phone, some trick of the phone lines. What might have
been, he had destroyed.

Mulder was just wadding up another botched form into a tight
ball when there came a tentative knock at his door. His stomach
clenched tight even though he knew Scully would not knock, at least
she never used to. A grey-haired, grandmotherly face showed itself.
With a practiced hook, Fox released the wadded paper into the trash
basket at the same time the fist in his stomach relaxed.

"What can I do for you this time, Mrs. Holbein?" Mrs. Holbein
was from accounting and she had been making an extraordinary number
of trips to his office over the last week.

"Just a few more questions on this expense voucher from July,
Agent Mulder."

Mulder cringed. Mrs. Holbein had a way of calling everyone
'Dear' even when she didn't. The large woman came in and pulled
Scully's chair over to sit down next to him.

"Are you taking a personal interest in auditing my expense
account, Mrs. Holbein?"

"Oh, you know the government runs on its paperwork, Agent
Mulder." She settled herself more comfortably into the chair -
Scully's chair - as if she were planning to stay awhile. "You know,
you certainly look better than you did last week."

Mulder grunted, non-committally. He certainly must have looked
like hell the week before if he looked better now after staying out
for hours in a Washington winter storm, getting maybe three hours
of useful sleep, skipping dinner the day before and breakfast and
lunch today, and battling a dilly of a cold with its aches and
runny eyes and low grade fever.

Still smiling, the big woman pulled opened a canvas bag she
carried and unceremoniously plopped a glass jar of sunflower seeds
onto his desk. Automatically, Mulder reached for the jar. Then his
hand paused in mid-air. Mrs. Holbein was an institution. It was
rumored that she had been J.Edgar's mistress - anyway, they used to
say that before some of the more colorful facts about J.Edgar's
personal life came out. She always kept a large bowl of candy on
her desk - Easter, Halloween, Christmas and every time in between.
All the late night workers knew where to go to get a quick sugar
high. She even carried a smaller jar around when she made her
'rounds'. Like now.

Only when did she start bringing sunflower seeds? When did she
notice that Agent Mulder did not have much of a sweet tooth? And
why should she change her routine for him?

Fox looked up at her, eyes widening. And she had been making
the long trip to the basement a lot lately. Daily in fact.

The answer came like a blow. Shit! she was a sneak! One of
Skinner's sneaks. With a surge of anger Fox realized that he had
become one of Skinner's 'projects', an agent that needed special
looking after.

Mulder had no doubt that Scully had originally been sent down
by Skinner's predecessors as Fox Mulder's own personal sneak. At
the time, Fox had actually reveled in how completely he was
irritating management. He did not care at that point. He had too
many contacts for them to fire him, he knew too many secrets, he
was too damn good at the VC stuff for them to let him go. So he had
taken it as a challenge to see how well he could mess with this
rookie's head. Management must be slipping, he had thought looking
at this slip of a young woman. 'Spooky' Mulder could eat this one
for breakfast.

At first it did not seem like it was going to take very long
to get under that creamy skin. The case itself had been unique and
exciting in a way few of the previous ones had been. He had gotten
closer, much closer, to something extraordinary and Dana Scully,
after a shaky start, had kept right up with him. Over the cases
that followed they had come to forget the reason she had been given
this assignment. The intellectual jousting, the danger, at times
the closeness, the horror, and the stubborn fights had supplanted
that original mission.

And as far as getting under a person's skin - they had gotten
under each other's in a way management never anticipated.

Mulder turned his attention back to the big woman sitting next
to him. Mrs. Holbein's smile was beginning to look a little forced.

Was her presence a hint? Now that the temporary sneaks were
back was this a cruel message that Scully was gone, perhaps for
good? A surer sign that she had asked for a transfer he didn't
need. Hell, they had not worked on a good case for three months!
Three! Not since before that debacle in the Everglades with the
hurricane, and the insects and the skunk. They had been great
together in the six months before that. But was that because they
were great 'together' or because she was just so good? Dana Scully
had just needed visibility to shine. Being on the X-Files had
certainly done that. Now she could go anywhere. She was on the fast
track and he was going nowhere and that destination was not likely
to change.

The office chatter was clear on that point - she was wasting
her talents pulling his ass out of fires, playing nursemaid and
patching up the crazy man from the basement. Probably tired of
trying to make their field reports read like great literature. Fox
looked around the office with hooded eyes, not even acknowledging
Mrs. Holbein any longer who was becoming more uncomfortable by the
moment under his unfocused stare.

His eyes slid over the poster, the oddities Richard had picked
up, the file cabinet. For all that felt right about his work, just
as much felt wrong. At times he was so tired of the embarrassment,
the laughter, the snide comments. He wished he could turn his back
on it all. He had never even wanted the FBI. For Sam he had done
it, dedicated his life to a compulsion outside of himself, a quest,
a mission, but it was like looking into a dark closet of horrors
every day of his life. Being a little crazy was the only way to
cope. There had to be a better way to live than that.

"You're supposed to be such a smart guy, Spooky," he grumbled
to himself. "So much potential." Or so his parents, his teachers,
his supervisors, his former partners always said as they wagged
their heads. So why is your life so fucked up?"

Mrs. Holbein was still talking, and he hadn't heard a word. By
the glazed look in her eyes, she was probably as unaware of what
she was saying as he was. His silence finally got to her. Her face
a little pale, she gathered her belongings and packed away the jar
of untasted Mulder food, her eyes betraying how much she wanted to
get away. Unsteadily, she stood and more shakily still said, "You
really are looking so much better today, Agent Mulder."

Why did she feel that she needed to lie?

"Did those cold compresses I suggested that you put on your
eyes before bed help?"

Bed, that was a laugh.

The woman edged towards the door, waved a feeble farewell,
never got her form signed. Never even asked.

Fox barely noticed that his visitor had fled. His eyes had
come to rest on Scully's clean desk which Sheila had dusted. It
still sat empty and waiting. <Step back, Mulder.> Distance was
needed, dispassionate distance. Without it he would not be able to
function with her so close when she did come back. He leaned
forward in his own chair, hands clasped between his knees and
stared at where she used to sit, working. Working alongside him,
working for hours at a time. He missed her energy-laden little
body, missed hearing her quick, sure steps on the stairs outside
their door, missed the swing of her hair, her expression of cool
professionalism, the set of her chin when she refused to go along
with one of his off-the-wall theories.

The kind of detachment he needed would take time and control
to achieve. So build the lonely tower walls higher, thicker this
time, Mulder, and be content with her friendship.

Of course, even that much depended on her coming back. The
thought made him shiver unless that was from the ache and fever
from the cold he had caught. As he popped two antihistamines into
his mouth, washing them down with stale coffee, Mulder wondered
again if Dana had asked for a transfer. No, Skinner would have
called him to his office and told him, those stone-carved features
showing how disappointed he was that Mulder had, once again, failed
to hold onto a partner. At least this one had lasted longer than
most.

The phone on Scully's neat desk rang. Automatically, Mulder
rose to answer it. A colleague from Quantico was calling to ask if
Dana could take a class for him. Absently, Mulder searched for
something to write with, checked behind his ear, then in his shirt
pocket. He found nothing like a pencil though he did come up with
a dry cleaner's claim ticket to write the date and time on. Still
no pencil. The top of her desk was, of course, disgustingly neat.
The top drawer was almost as empty. Muttering distractedly, Mulder
was searching the back of the drawer where his pens always vanished
to, when his hand closed on some objects, one of which was soft,
almost furry, and about the size of a large lump of charcoal.
Automatically, his mind put a name on the object. Praying he was
wrong, Fox slowly drew it out, the phone call forgotten.

A black velvet jeweler's ring box slid into sight, pulling
with it a piece of paper which looked like it had been torn from a
stenographer's pad. Even though he knew this was private, Mulder
found himself opening the box. It was empty. Then he unfolded the
paper.

"'Dana, take as long as you need to think about this. We both
know this is not a step to be taken lightly. Whatever you decide,
I'll be there for you... Evan."

Mulder sat down heavily into her chair, a lump forming in his
throat, his chest, which made breathing nearly impossible. His
logic screamed for him not to jump to conclusions, but his emotions
were not listening. Red caution flags were everywhere. Memories of
her actions, immediately before she had taken her few days, were
coming back to him. The secret meetings, the late nights, the
furtive conversations which had clearly been with that Adonis, the
phone calls that ended when he entered the room.

Recalling his own behavior, shutting her out, screaming at
her, putting his hands on her as he never had done to any woman,
freaking out on her and criticizing her professionalism - how
could he blame her?

And Evan...

How had he failed to notice how quickly their relationship was
moving? Only a few weeks before Fox remembered Evan's veiled
congratulation on their relationship - Fox's and Dana's - as he had
breezed out of Mulder's hospital room on his way to a date with Dr.
Adams. <'Well, I wish you two the best of luck.'> Brain befuddled
on painkillers and antibiotics, the intent of those words had gone
over Mulder's head at the time, but he had taken it into himself
during the weeks that followed like the velvet sound of her voice.
What had happened?

Evan had happened, Dr. Adams obviously not being to his taste.
The researcher had seen a void and come drifting back. Such a good-
looking, intelligent, solid man. A colleague, too, who could share
her interests and was supportive and clearly in love with her.
'I'll be there for you,' he had written. Something Fox knew he had
told her, as well, but not often enough and not recently. And he
had not been there for her, not lately and not as Evan had. 'Take
as long as you want.' And the letter was dated the Friday before
the Tuesday evening when he had overheard her phone call about the
'reservations' for Wednesday. Wednesday, when she had called saying
she was going to 'take a few days'.

The ring box was empty. Clearly, she had made up her mind.

End of Book II, Chapter 1

=====================================================================
======

JUST THE TWO OF US: Book II Mulder and Evan (2/14)
By S. Esty (AKA Windsinger)

Chapter 2

The X-Files Division Office
Monday 2pm
December 17, 1993

Mulder clutched the little box in his fist, at once both hard
and soft, and felt something break. Something crumbled into little
tiny sharp pieces that cut and hurt and kept hurting and the object
being crushed was not the soft little jeweler's box. He looked
around at his office with its mementos of all his work and it
seemed an empty substitute.

Slowly, getting up from the chair at Dana's desk, he stepped
over to his own. For a moment he touched the face of the young
dark-haired girl in the picture on his desk. <You and me, Sam.
That's the way it's always been.> He pulled on his black coat where
it hung limply on his bowed shoulders. As an after thought, the box
and the note deep were thrust deep into a pocket. Later, he would
apologize for taking it, but for now he just wanted to keep them to
remind himself of hard reality. He paused in the doorway to turn
off the lights and then without a backwards glance closed the door
resolutely behind him.

********

Ten minutes later, Edger Miles, the FBI's junior mail room
clerk for the Washington office, appeared at the door to the X-
Files Division office carrying a smaller than usual stack of mail.
The personal attention would have been unusual two weeks before,
now the delivery was a twice daily occurrence. In response to a
distinctly troubled tone in Mrs. Holbein's voice when she called to
give her report, the young man had grabbed the small bundle from
the mail slot assigned to Agents Mulder and Scully and hurried down
the back stairs to the basement, even though not all of the noon
delivery had been sorted yet. He panicked when he saw that the
office was dark. Hesitantly, he knocked and then slowly opened the
door. No slide show going on, no videos, no light box lit. The
young man panicked for real. Already he could hear a certain
Assistant Director's disapproving tones, like thunder coming up
behind distance hills.

********

4:30pm

The bar was quiet, but then happy hour had not begun yet. The
smoke was thin yet, but still clinging and omnipresent from
countless nights before. A dark-haired man, wrapped in a dark,
desolate cloud sat in a shadowed booth and swirled his fourth shot
of scotch, sipped it, and thought seriously about going home while
he still could. But going home to what? His eyes burned and
watered. Wretched cold. Without thinking he popped in two more
antihistamines.

*********

Alexandria, Virginia
Monday 1am
December 17, 1993

Mulder stirred on the couch and wrapped his arms around his
aching head as he tried to block out the booming, rhythmic crashing
in his skull. Groggily he wondered if the pounding was really in
his head or whether someone was pounding on his door. Both, he
decided after several more wood-splintering explosions. Something
like alarm crawled into his chest. Reaching in the dark towards the
place on the coffee table where he usually kept his gun, he over-
balanced on the well worn cushions and ended up, with a painful
jolt, face down on the floor. Or he thought it was face down for a
moment. His cheekbones hurt so badly it was impossible to tell.

He stared into a darkness that stared back, grinning.
Instinctively he sought for his weapon again, his hand flailing
ineffectually on the surface of the table for the feel of leather
or iron. This attempt knocked over a half full coffee mug,
scattered some mail and magazines onto the floor and sent the VCR
remote sailing into the dark. No gun. Shit. Wait... a memory wormed
its way up into his blurry consciousness. He had put it away,
buried it... somewhere, during a moment of lucidity in the middle
of the night. Would have been irresponsible to allow anyone in his
condition anywhere near a gun.

!! BOOM !! !! BOOM !!

Fox made a grab again for his head. A pile driver for a
skyscraper made less noise. His visitor must have heard movement
within because the pounding was now more insistent. Fox tried
asking who it was, but for some reason could not remember how to
make lips and tongue and diaphragm generate sound. Not at the
moment, anyway. Just try to remember which direction he had to go
to find the door... Only he couldn't feel his feet, his legs either
for that matter. Crawling began to look better and better.

Eventually, by holding onto the weaving walls, he found the
door. Leaning for balance against the wood that thrust into the
room with each massive 'BOOM', clumsy hands fumbled with the dead
bolt for far too long before the connection was made in his
deadened synapses that the bolt had never been thrown.

<Great, Spook, you practically live in D.C. and you don't even
properly lock your door?> A child of ten could have broken in. But
if that was the case, then why hadn't the enraged being on the
other side?

"Who iz ih?" a voice totally unlike his own croaked. His mind
was a dark, formless swirl, the muscles of his mouth, like those of
his limbs, nearly beyond his control.

The answer from outside was harsh and curt but not loud,
certainly not loud enough for Fox to hear over the roaring in his
ears. It was as if the speaker, after pounding on his door with
what had sounded like a baseball bat for five minutes, was afraid
of waking the neighbors.

Mulder had just put his hand on the cool knob, had just begun
to turn it, when the door exploded inward, throwing him back as a
large man thrust himself into the opening. Mulder began to go down,
his strength in his knees and his balance tenuous before the door
hit him. The visitor reached, trying to grasp the slighter man by
the throat, forcing the weaving figure backwards into the room.

"Where is she?" the attacker demanded finally getting a solid
grip on shirt front and shoulder.

Anger surged up from somewhere and colored Mulder's vision a
flickering bloody red. Ineffectively, he fought the rough hands
while completely unable to comprehend the words. "Fuck-ck, you!" he
growled, "Geh yer hans ov -"

A fist came out of nowhere to find its target on Mulder's jaw.

Breathing heavily, the visitor stood, legs apart, and looked
down at the sprawled, unmoving body of the agent, lodged between
his couch and a coffee table. Mulder's sturdily-built, nocturnal
visitor shook his head as he stared at his fist and then stared
down at the fallen man as if astonished at what he had done. "Damn,
Mulder, you make me so mad. Look what you made me do." But the only
answer was the soft night traffic noises from the street.

Grumbling, the visitor pushed the coffee table aside and knelt
down before the fallen man to check respiration and pulse, to run
his large hands over Mulder's skull looking for the spot where he
was sure he had heard that dark head impact with the edge of the
low table. He found a swelling already on the back left side,
thankfully on the really solid part of the skull. Very unlikely to
be a fracture then, just a nasty big bump, but someone would have
to sit with this useless sack of bones just in case.

With no attempt at gentleness, Mulder was lifted and dumped
onto the couch. His body fell like a child's rag doll, arms and
legs falling in all directions. The bigger man stepped back in
disgust. The limp figure on the couch reeked of alcohol and
tobacco, and since Mulder's apartment didn't smell of smoke, only
Mulder, it was a good bet the agent had acquired that scent from
way too many hours in a smoky bar.

"Mulder, you are blind, dead drunk." With a snort, Evan Byers
turned on his heel and trudged to Mulder's kitchen in search of
ice.

Mulder came awake with a painful jerk when something
incredibly cold dribbled into his ear. He lurched up, hearing the
welcoming creak of his own couch but, too fast, much too fast. The
room spun, his stomach lurched and his head exploded. He flopped
down again, willing himself back into unconsciousness, away from
the agonizing light. But someone had other ideas.

A large hand that seemed painfully familiar grasped Mulder by
the shirt front and yanked the upper half of his body off the
couch. "Wake up, you drunken sot. I've waited long enough. Where's
Dana?"

Mulder tried to focus, but his eyes would not stay still,
tried harder to understand, but the sounds made no sense, tried
even harder to make an intelligible sound, but his tongue felt like
a prickly pear in his mouth.

"Wha?"

The face close to his had wild blond hair, a wide scowling
mouth, and looked vaguely familiar, but certainly not one he had
ever had the bad fortune of seeing so intimately before.

"You piece of shit, Dana didn't come to work yesterday. I want
to know where she is!"

A moaning started up in his skull. <Scully... didn't come to
work... didn't call.> "Don you thin-kk I don know?" Mulder's head
dropped back, and, as his body began to shake, his breath came in
gulping gasps. Very few other things could have convinced him to
go out and get so thoroughly, completely and gut-wrenchingly
plastered.

Astonished, Evan stared at the dark-haired man for a second
with something almost like sympathy, but he had no patience for
this, not now. By the time he had returned from the Mulder's
refrigerator with the first handful of ice, Mulder had already
begun to come around, but in his drunken stupor had been unable to
respond to a single shouted question. Exasperated Evan had let the
man sink back into the dark nothing that drunks seek but that had
been hours ago and Evan's patience had finally played out. Without
taking his fist from where it was clutching Mulder's shirt, Evan,
none too lightly, slapped the agent's bristly cheek with his hand
to get his attention. "Damn, you Mulder, don't become a weepy drunk
on me. I need you to tell me where Dana is!"

The head on the limp neck rolled from side to side a little.
The words came out raggedly. "Scuuully, gone." .

Evan hissed in exasperation. "I KNOW that! Gone where? With
whom?" Evan released his grip and Mulder fell back onto the couch,
felt the blackness try to close in, but some of the words at least
were beginning to get through.

Mulder's face contorted in misery. "Evan. Gone wid Evan. Gud
time." Mulder seemed on the verge of taking his depression and his
killer hangover and sinking back into oblivion.

"I'M Evan, you pot-hugger! Now stay with me!" and Evan picked
up the towel-wrapped, plastic bag of ice from the couch, which he
had been holding to the back of Mulder's head, and upended the
contents - ice water, remaining cubes and all - over Mulder's face
and chest.

The drunk burst up, hands frantically flailing. His face ached
so badly from the blast furnace in his head that the cubes had felt
like bricks, the ice water like he was drowning in polar seas.
Seas. The rapid change in position had convinced his heaving
stomach that he had stayed far too long upon the wild, open ocean.
With a gagging groan, Mulder staggered drunkenly to his feet,
pushed past Evan and charged for the bathroom, hitting the coffee
table with his shins and three walls - one twice - on his way. He
almost, but did not quite, make it.

Exasperated, Evan listened the unmistakable sounds of Fox
Mulder losing it, partially in the hall and then crawling the last
few feet to finish emptying his stomach in the bathroom. The door
closed and Evan let the man alone for ten minutes. He paced,
waited, cleaned up the mess on the hall carpet and paced some more.
Finally he pushed open the door to the small bathroom to find
Mulder collapsed against the wall beside the porcelain god, his
face the color of bleached cement, except for the eyes which looked
like coals, coals nearly burnt through and ready to collapse into
ash.

"Had enough, Mulder?" Even threw down socks, boxer shorts and
a t-shirt and hung a suit, shirt, and tie behind the door. None of
these, Mulder noticed later when he cared, had been any of his
favorites. "For what good it will do I'd better take you with me."

The dark-haired man weakly raised his eyes. Lifting the moon
with those eye lids would have been easier and less painful. There
was no one much home still. "Yer jus here t' gloa..t, are'n you?"
Fox murmured. With that the last of the researcher's patience
evaporated.

"Haul your ass into that shower, Mulder, and then get dressed.
And you'd better look decent because hell knows where we'll end up
today."

But Fox just sat. He had been pushed into a shower before and
even his drunken mind did not want to suffer that indignity again.
Besides, he didn't think he could if he wanted to. The signals did
not seem to be getting from his head to his legs. In addition to
paying big time for indulging his darker side the night before,

his heart was not in the effort. He had not been out on a binge for
more than a year and wished he had passed this time by as well.
Constant work and Dana's omni-presence had given him no time and no
desire, but that meant he was suffering now for his abstinence.
Whoever said virtue had its rewards never tried half a bottle of
scotch whiskey on a sober and empty stomach.

Fox felt strong hands under his arms, lifting him, but not to
his feet. Lifting and turning him around to drop him butt first
into the tub. Evan only leaned in long enough to keep Mulder from
whacking his already well-traumatized head on the tile.
Uncomprehending, Fox took a uncoordinated swing at Evan. As a punch
it was about at well-aimed and ineffectual as a rookie's curve ball
in the ninth inning of a double header. Evan evaded it easily,
bent, and turned on the water, full and as cold as only December
water can be.

Evan swiftly departed to the sound Mulder's sputtering howl of
outrage which most of the apartment building probably heard.

Five minutes later Evan opened the bathroom door to find a wad
of sopping wet fabric sitting in a puddle on the floor which was
all that remained of the suit and shirt Mulder had selected with
special care for Dana that morning. The air in the room was warm
and wet and a motionless dark form could be seen through the shower
curtain.

"You awake in there, Mulder?" Evan called. The answering groan
was reluctant but immediate and amazingly more coherent than any of
Mulder's previous attempts at communication. "Five minutes, Mulder,
and we're out of here, so move your butt!"

Fox ground his teeth and rested his forehead against the
smooth tile as the water coursed down his body. This had happened
before, to be drowning in despair, unable to see past the black
beast that loomed before his eyes and tried to consume his mind. He
had felt then that he had lost Scully, his job, his life. Then he
thought he had lost her because of what he had done with Angela.
This was too much like that, the hangover accentuating his emotions
like the drug he had been given then, but the act and the guilt, as
before, were his own. Thinking was as impossible as making sense of
Evan's presence. The weekend with Richard and Sheila seemed as if
it had happened in another existence and little good their advice
had done him.

Mulder shook the wet hair out of his eyes where the shower
water had plastered it over his forehead. This was the here and
now, not last night, not last month, and Evan was asking after
Scully which made no sense in Mulder's reality.

A door creaked open in Fox's hungover brain. The right
hemisphere scowled at the trenches and traps his unbridled left
side had created. Though it hurt like hell, Mulder forced himself
to think through all the dark illusions that his brain, his
hormones, and the alcohol had created from supposition and
conjecture. His vision cleared, not completely, but enough.
Shivering from the winter draft and Fear's icy fingers on his skin,
Fox reached for the towel Evan had dropped on the floor for him.

When he charged unsteadily from the bathroom scant minutes
later, Mulder's face was still the color of warmed-over oatmeal,
all that is, except for those red, blood-shot eyes ringed in black.

His hair was wet and wild, his tie crooked and he had missed a
button on one side of his shirt. The attempt at shaving was
obviously hurriedly done. The job was uneven, a few spots missed,
and Evan noticed there was a trickle of blood under the left side
of the jaw where the area was swollen from its acquaintance with
Evan's thick fist. The whole appearance was twisted and rumpled. A
impressive feat, Evan thought, to look so bad in such a short time,
but the end result was better than he would have thought possible
thirty minutes before. Evan had had uncomfortable visions of having
to dress the man.

Mulder nearly fell over when Evan thrust a hard object and the
agent's own coat into his arms. Mulder found himself staring down
and holding a long breath. The object he had been given was the
thermos Sheila had brought to Arlington. Richard, Richard as he
remembered him as they had worked together in that little office in
the back of the Denver police station, had poured him a cup of
coffee from this as Mulder had sat on the ground by the stone wall,
stiff and cold but clear headed. For a moment Fox wished Richard
was at his side and that Sheila, who was like Scully in so many
subtle ways, was guarding his back. But, no, they were gone, back
to their own world of mountains and grey-eyed little girls. Why
shouldn't they? He had just been a chapter in their lives to be
read and passed on. He was alone, as he always had been. Only Sam's
needs forced open the gates to his high tower, and for a little
while Scully had scaled its rough stone walls.

<You're wallowing,> a tiny sober voice warned.

Evan made impatient noises, as Mulder struggled, somehow
finding it difficult to maneuver the thermos and get his hands into
the arm holes of his coat. The mind was clearer but the signals
were still not taking a direct path from his brain to his limbs. As
Evan waited restlessly, he glanced at the window and found one of
the panes was broken, a series of fine cracks radiating from a
central contact point, a depression seemingly made from a small,
hard object thrown with great force.

"What happened?" Evan asked pointing.

Mulder squinted against the light and his headache, saw the
cracked glass and frowned with his lips in a tight line. "Nothing
important."

They left the room. Beneath the window, surrounded by chips of
glass, a stone, the size of a robin's egg, lay abandoned on the
floor where it had fallen after being hurled in despair and anger
the previous night.

end of Book II, chapter 2

=====================================================================
======

JUST THE TWO OF US: Book II Mulder and Evan (3/14)
By Sue Esty (AKA Windsinger@aol.com)

Washington, D.C.
Tuesday 9am
December 18, 1993

Chapter 3

Trying to match Evan's breakneck plunge down three flights of
stairs in his current condition was an experience, Mulder had no
desire to repeat. He found himself clutching the railing just to
keep from taking a header down his own steps. Outside, he turned
wavering towards his car, but Evan made an impatient sound and
motioned the agent towards his. "Nothing doing. I'd be an
irresponsible citizen if I let you behind the wheel in your state."

Painfully, Mulder raised an eyebrow but accepted the point by
crawling ungracefully into the front seat of Evan's Blazer. A small
corner of his mind was at least thankful that, being a large man
himself, Evan understood the necessity of adequate leg room, but
Mulder would have traded all the leg room in the world at that
moment to be crammed into the passenger's seat of Scully's small
car with her driving beside him.

"Where are we going?" he asked. It took all his concentration
to form the words so that they did not come out slurred.

Evan pulled the car out of its parking spot. "Dana's. Maybe
she left some hint of where she was going. Just do what you can to
sober up before we get there, okay?"

Fox collapsed against the seat, no longer trying for any
attempt at alertness. The man was driving him to where he wanted to
go, so he would go along for now. He recognized well enough,
however, that in his current state, not only did he not have a
choice, but could not think of an alternative. Coffee was called
for.

Three minutes later, as the car bounced over the rutted pot
holes for which the District was so famous, Mulder finally gave up
the attempt to pour the coffee from the thermos into the little cup
it was supplied with because his hands were shaking too badly.
Desperate, he lifted the opening to his mouth and drank. The coffee
was scalding hot and burned his mouth and his esophagus all the way
down to his empty stomach. It was also vile, strong stuff which,
must have been made from the old jar of instant that Mulder had
bought a year before for emergencies. At least, his head did begin
to clear as the caffeine hit his system.

The car made a couple of sharp turns, and, feeling the coffee
slosh alarmingly within his lurching insides, Mulder wondered with
alarm how long it was going to be willing to stay put. Rapidly he
opened the window and let the sting of the winter air hit him full
on his face. His eyeballs felt like they were going to explode, but
he persevered, ignoring Evan completely. He saw no need to be civil
to the man to his left or to even pretend to be more sober than he
was. Mulder just had to be able to think by the time they got to
where they were going.

They passed the next few minutes in silence, maybe it was
something about the red-rimmed hazel eyes, but Evan seemed to tell
when the stimulant took effect. "Feeling better?"

As his senses began to sharpen, the bump in the back of
Mulder's head became his single most stubborn torment. He was also
finally able to distinguish the swollen jaw from the rest of his
aching face and head. He touched it carefully, trying to remember
how he had hit himself.

"You're a lost cause, Mulder!" Even grumbled as he noticed the
other man's movement. "I'm a non-violent guy. You are the only one
I know who can make me so damn mad. How do you do it?"

"Practice," Mulder muttered, remembering the fist now. "I
aggravate just about everyone." He stared out the window wishing
the four aspirin he had taken would start working or if they were
working, glad he was not feeling any worse. "For being non-violent,
you pack quite a punch."

"I was a wrestler in college," Evan admitted. "Weight lifter
now."

Looking at the thick neck and broad chest Mulder rolled his
eyes. <Right, well tell me something I didn't know.>

Evan continued. "I hope the super recognizes you. Otherwise I
don't know how we are going to get in."

Shifting in his seat, trying not to move his head any more
than necessary, Mulder managed, after a few tries, to extract his
keys from his back pocket. These he dangled before Evan's face. He
allowed himself to grimly enjoy Evan's look of surprise and then
vexed jealousy. <At least I have something he doesn't,> Mulder
thought smugly as he replaced the keys. Then he hoped his face was
not really twisted into a lopsided sneer like he thought it was.
<Good move, Spooky. Alpha male posturing? That's subtle.>

Shivering in the icy draft from the open window, Evan looked
over at his passenger. Worried as he was about Dana and disgusted
as he was overall with Mulder, Evan had to marvel at the extent of
the guy's masochism. If he hadn't thought so before, he was certain
now that Mulder was in serious trouble. Last week a dark monster,
today this. Alternately pathetic and sarcastic. Tomorrow, if he was
unfortunate enough to be stuck with Mulder, he was certain the
agent would be something else entirely.

A chill not caused by the draft from the window suddenly made
the hairs on the back of Evan's neck stand on end. Just how much
trouble was Mulder's head in? From Dana's actions and the depth of
her concern, he must be in a bad way. Though he had not seen Mulder
often since they had returned to Washington, there was little
evidence of improvement.

When Evan hazarded a quick glance at the scowling presence
beside him, Mulder turned on a smile that had no humor in it, but
was something more akin to a feral grimace. Evan gripped the
steering wheel harder and drove faster.

Whatever had possessed him to bring this psychotic drunk into
his car? At least appearances indicated he was probably
psychotic and most definitely drunk. Once assured that Mulder was
not going to die, Evan should have just left him to throw up all
over his own couch. Under his own power this pathetic excuse for an
FBI agent would not have gone far.

The thermos came up to those pale lips again. Evan muttered,
not really expecting an answer, "So what do you get when you give
coffee to a drunk?"

The thermos paused. "A wide awake... d-drunk," Mulder slurred,
not making the effort to form the words so that they would come out
distinctly.

The car was stopped at a red light. Evan swung about and
stared. Mulder shrugged and went on, slowly, in an odd sing song
voice, its tones rising and falling but clear enough. "'For the
sufferer of occasional alcohol abuse... caffeine and aspirin only
alleviate the symptoms of d-drowsiness and headache, the drowsiness
because alcohol is a... depressant, the headache because stretched,
dilated blood vessels in the brain are now returning...
painfully... to their natural state.'" The thermos started to come
up again and, as before, paused. "Where did that come from?" Fox
asked himself but loud enough for Evan to hear. Another shrug.
"Must have read it in a book somewhere."

Mulder drank and only after several moments shivered. That
recitation had come unconsciously. Shit, he wished his brain
wouldn't come up with this stuff and the alcohol only loosened his
tongue.

He sensed when Evan looked his way. He saw a man who was most
likely praying that he would not have to be in Agent Mulder's
company any longer than necessary. In addition, Mulder also saw
something new in the man's face. Fear. Of him. <What's going on
here?> he wondered, but that concern slipped away, his own fear for
Scully supplanting both his remorse over the slip he had made
revealing one of his tricks and his curiosity about what was going
on in Evan's mind.

The realization that had come to him in the shower came back.
If Evan didn't know, where was she?

Evan turned off Rock Creek Parkway and the knots in his
stomach relaxed. They were less than five minutes away now. Most
importantly, he was now driving in a business area and later there
would be residential streets. People. Just in case Mulder got
weird.

Mulder was occupied, however, in feeling depressed that Evan
knew the way so easily. Surprisingly, Evan pulled into a gas
station. "I have to make a call," he told his passenger in an odd
voice. As Mulder, over the protests from his stomach, drank more
coffee, he wondered what could possibly be so important to require
a stop now.

The call was short and the researcher returned in less than
three minutes. Actually, Mulder noted, Evan had made two calls.

"Well, did your bookie have a good tip for you?" Mulder
muttered as Evan climbed back in.

"You're a bundle of laughs, Mulder." The speaker's face,
however, was troubled. "How does Dana stand it?"

"My delivery is usually better. My timing's off."

They drove in silence. Mulder kept his peace when Evan made a
couple of incredibly stupid moves, putting the car on one way
streets heading them in the wrong direction. Torn between the still
far from sober part of him which wanted to gloat over Evan's
ineptitude and his own desire to reach her place as soon as
possible, Fox drank more coffee and, slouching down, propped his
chin over the edge of the open window as a dog would. If Evan was
to be believed, Scully had not been with him, but still Mulder felt
the green eyed monster clinging to his back. There remained the
note and the empty ring box.

Even did not seem concerned that he had added ten minutes to
their travel time. He drove up and parked easily in front of Dana's
building. It was, after all, a normal work day for the rest of the
world. After the dose of cold air and the coffee, Mulder found he
could unfold himself from Evan's car, if not with his usual aplomb,
at least with more grace than a recent graduate of the District's
drunk tank. When he tried to walk, though, he found that the very
soles of his feet hurt. The day was not getting any shorter.

Mulder hesitated when he saw Evan was not following him but
had remained beside the car.

"Mulder, I think you'd better wait."

The agent stared at the large blond man uncomprehending. At
that moment a police cruiser pulled up quietly, but with lights
flashing, and parked.

Mulder whirled, anger eating through the fuzzy edges of his
consciousness. "What the... You called them, didn't you?"

Mulder took satisfaction in seeing a man as large as Evan
Byers cringe. "I thought it was for the best under the
circumstances."

"What damned circumstances!" Mulder shouted, his anger blazing
up like a torch. "We haven't even begun to look yet." Instantly,
Mulder read Evan's silence. "You don't think... You fucking
bastard!"

Evan stared, almost in fear, at the fevered eyes, eyes that on
countless occasions had interrogated the monsters of humanity long
into the night and did not relax their intensity one thread for
Evan Byers. "Mulder, you haven't been yourself for the past two
weeks... I found you dead drunk last night... "

"And since when is that a crime? Who's the law enforcement
officer around here, anyway?"

"Me, actually," a thick-waisted, middle aged policeman
drawled, as he walked up to Mulder with caution. His fingers
twitched ever so slightly near the weapon at his hip as if to say,
"Here's a live one."

In an attempt to prevent himself from doing something he would
REALLY regret, Mulder took three deep breaths of the cold air
slowly into his lungs. Trembling with rage, his head ready to
explode, he carefully reached for his ID and found he had been so
wasted that morning that he had forgotten to pick it up. Thank
little grey men, he had also forgotten to pick up his gun. His
hands came up empty, slightly away from his body. "I guess I left
my ID at my apartment. I'm Special Agent Mulder, FBI." Reluctantly,
he gestured towards Evan. "He'll vouch for me."

The cop hooked his fingers into his belt trying to look
casual, but not managing. He was poised. He had been warned.
"Actually, I know who you are."

"You do? Then what are you doing here?"

"There's a missing person -"

Mulder stared at Evan accusingly. "You filed?"

Evan studied the ground. "Not officially."

"Certain parties," the cop with the badge that read 'Sergeant
Timmons' explained in the voice he used for soothing irrational
parties, "thought it best that there be an impartial person present
when you enter the lady's apartment."

Mulder glared bullets at Evan, who flinched guiltily. The
agent's expression was plain enough. <I may not have my gun but
that doesn't mean I'm not armed.>

In addition to intimidating Evan, Mulder's anger had an added
benefit - the adrenalin rush was taking a significant edge off the
affects of the hangover. In fact, sobriety was being accomplished
with amazing rapidity. With more surety than he would have thought
possible, Mulder started up the walk, pausing only when a second
car pulled up, a second car with a familiar look about it. When
Assistant Director Skinner's drill sergeant features emerged,
Mulder was, first astounded, and then his fury rebounded.

"What the hell -" Mulder swore and stormed towards Evan,
checking his charge only after he noticed Officer Timmons' hand
grasp the handle of his night stick in warning. Words would have to
do then though Fox really wanted to bury his fist in that broad,
football-player handsome face. "Game's over, Evan. Did you call
Skinner first or the police? Why do you feel I'm so damned
dangerous?"

At that moment, Mulder looked damned dangerous. There was
desperation as well as barely contained rage in his posture. His
body was coiled tight, like an animal's ready to spring, and the
wildness in his eyes broadcast that that could be at any time.

Skinner strode up. Taking in the situation, he had moved
quickly without seeming to. "What is going on here, Agent Mulder?"

"You tell me, sir. Agent Scully is missing and instead of
pooling all our resources to look for her, Byers here wants to
waste our time playing private detective."

Skinner jerked his head in Evan's direction. "Dr. Byers, I
came at your request so this had better be good. The FBI does not
call in the District police for casual manners."

Physically, Evan was a larger man than Skinner, but, for sheer
'presence', he was out his league. "Assistant Director Skinner," he
began, uncomfortably, with a glance at Mulder's darkness, "Dana was
due to have returned from her time off by Monday morning. I haven't
heard from her. I tried to call you yesterday, to see if you knew
anything, but you were unavailable. Agent Mulder also claims he
hasn't heard from her. If there was trouble -" Unconsciously, Evan
gestured towards the apartment house.

Skinner studied the building with cold detachment before
turning his attention back to Evan. "Calling the locals - and me -
seems an extreme precaution. Agent Mulder is more than qualified to
examine a possible crime scene without destroying evidence."

"Unless he is somehow involved," Evan responded bitterly. He
turned his back on Mulder's pacing form and addressed Skinner in a
low voice. "Sir, may we speak privately?"

Skinner felt the blast from Mulder's blazing hazel eyes. "If
you wish to voice any suspicions you may have, and these concerns
involve Agent Mulder, then, no, we may not. I believe there has
been far too much left unsaid during this entire incident."

If Mulder appreciated his supervisor's support, his only
response was to stop his pacing and plant himself conspicuously
behind and to the side of the Assistant Director to glare into
Evan's face.

Evan took a breath and plunged on to voice what he would never
have had the courage to say if Skinner and Timmons had not been
present. "It's just this. As you know, Agent Mulder has displayed
marked psychotic tendencies over the last two weeks. It's possible
he may not be in complete control of his actions." At this point
Evan's courage failed and he stared off to Skinner's left and away
from Mulder's bitter glance. "Sir, in his current mental state he
may be capable of - anything. Last night I found him dead drunk and
completely incoherent. I'd like to know why. He didn't even
recognize me -"

Mulder sprang forward, advancing on the larger man with
murderous intensity. It was not in his nature to suffer idiots, and
at that moment he had forgotten about Timmons and the ex-marine who
was his immediate supervisor. Skinner reacted even more quickly
than the District officer and jumped in between the two younger
men, closing one strong hand on Mulder's shoulder, effectively
displaying his still quite remarkable strength.

"At ease, Agent Mulder!" he barked, with a voice that allowed
no discussion.

Only when Mulder's eyes dimmed to some semblance of sanity did
Skinner release the shoulder under that hand and straighten to face
Byers. His voice was as cold and as sharp as ice. "Am I hearing
what I think I am hearing, Dr. Byers, because if I am, that is a
very serious accusation."

Evan had gone pale and was obviously struggling with how to
defend himself here. Mulder would have liked to have let the
bastard hang himself, but there were more important issues at
stake.

"Don't you think that an appeal to the facts might be in
order?" Mulder grumbled.

Skinner motioned up the walk. "Finally, a sensible suggestion.
Yes, let's go in and not let Agent Scully's neighbors see us
squabbling on the street. Agent Mulder, I believe you have a key."

Mulder was startled by Skinner's knowledge of the key, then
assumed that Evan had told Skinner that little fact. In fact, Evan
had not. Since Skinner had found Scully in Mulder's apartment the
night of the plane crash, he had assumed that Agent Mulder would
have her key, just as she had his.

Noting with some small satisfaction that Skinner signaled the
District officer to remain by his squad car, Mulder pulled out his
ring of keys as he strode towards the door. But if Evan's fears
were unfounded, why did his hands tremble ever so slightly as he
tried to fit her key in the lock?

Dana's apartment seemed unchanged since that briefest of
inspections late in his long, cold Sunday vigil. Had that been only
two nights before? Without a word needing to be spoken between
them, Mulder took the lead and the others followed. As he moved
through the silent apartment, senses sharpening automatically,
Mulder made to mental note to find some way of thanking Skinner for
giving him the lead in this at a later time, as well as for
defending him before Evan. Why his superior was being so
supportive, however, was a mystery.

The first inspection was cursory. No one touched more than was
absolutely necessary, but any space large enough to hold a body
Scully's size was checked - behind and under the bed, the bathtub,
the closets. As they searched, Mulder's emotions swung wildly. He
was relieved that there was no indication of 'foul play' and yet
frustrated that they found no clues, whatsoever, as to her
whereabouts. Mulder's eyes unceasingly swept each room and every
single item in it. So did Skinner's, he noticed. So did Evan's.
Nothing was out of place that any could see.

Skinner stood in the kitchen, hands on his hips, his relief at
not finding anything grisly, or even mildly suspicious, was obvious
from his posture. "I gather you see nothing unusual, Agent Mulder?
Is Agent Scully always so neat?" Mulder heard the unspoken follow
up comment well enough. <So, pray tell, why is your office such a
disaster area?>

Unconsciously holding his breath, Mulder slowly opened the
refrigerator. He could sense a tenseness in Skinner though nothing
from Evan. Skinner had worked the field and knew what horrors could
be found in that everyday appliance. Evan was more naive, but then
Evan probably slept nights.

As the door opened, Mulder let his breath out silently, felt
Skinner relax. The contents of the refrigerator were typical for
Scully but sparse, even for her. Mulder forced his voice into an
even tone. "Agent Scully doesn't like to come home to a messy
apartment. If she has the time, she cleans out everything from her
refrigerator that might spoil while she's gone." Unlike Mulder's
refrigerator, no alien life forms waited in Agent Scully's
Tupperware to extend a greeting upon her return.

"I'll check around the windows from the outside," Skinner
announced curtly. He did that, but Mulder noticed, he must also
have detoured to inform the impressive Sergeant Timmons that the
officer could leave, because within a minute the patrol car was
gone.

When Skinner returned, Mulder turned from the window, eyes
hooded. "I take it the Inquisition has been called off for the
day?"

"There was never one in effect, Agent Mulder," Skinner
informed him in clipped tones. "Just precautions - both for her and
for you." Skinner headed towards the living room. "Dr. Byers, Agent
Mulder, sit down. We need to talk." Skinner positioned himself
conspicuously in the center of the room.

Evan took one end of the couch. Mulder came, but fidgeted,
moving restlessly between the window and the small gas fireplace.

Assistant Director Walter Skinner, wearing his sternest former
Marine expression, walked up to stand nose to nose with his
disheveled employee and actually stared him down. "Agent Mulder, I
said SIT down!"

Mulder slid away to an arm chair beside the couch, but did not
sit easily.

End of Book II, chapter 3

=====================================================================
======

JUST THE TWO OF US: Book II Mulder and Evan (4/14)
By S.Esty (AKA Windsinger@aol.com)

Washington, D.C.
Tuesday 9:30 am
December 18, 1993

Chapter 4

<Under his anger, the man looks utterly wasted,> Skinner
thought as he moved back into the center of the room. <I can't
believe this has happened. With all of the disasters which have
befallen those two lately... Even though Byers doesn't know about
the weekend, I admit he has reason for concern. Only he's
premature. If something has happened to her, Mulder could come
entirely unglued this time.>

"Let's summarize," Skinner began aloud, staring at the floor
as he paced. "Agent Scully sent an e-mail to the Scheduler in
Personnel late on Tuesday night asking to extend the leave she had
requested. Originally, she had planned to take only Wednesday off.
She changed that to Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. The message
said it was a family emergency, though I take it, the reason was
personal. Very well. Do either of you know where she went during
this time? Who she was with?"

"I thought she was with Mulder," Evan answered. When Mulder
did not respond to the inquiry in Skinner's expression, Evan added,
"He thought she was with me."

Anger seethed behind hazel eyes.

Skinner's eyebrows lifted as he shifted his attention from his
agent back to Byers. "With you? Since Wednesday? I don't -" The
dynamics of the situation suddenly became all too clear to the
Assistant Director, but he warned himself not to jump to
conclusions. Evan Byers had obviously already done that. "Agent
Mulder, you thought Agent Scully was with Dr. Byers and he thought
she was with you. Do either of you know who she WAS with or where
she went?"

Mulder's shoulders dropped a little. "She called me," he
admitted in a barely audible voice, "on Wednesday morning. She gave
me a phone number where she thought she was going to be. I didn't
write it down."

Evan leaned forward. "Why didn't you mention this before? She
didn't tell me. What is it?"

"I said I didn't write it down," Mulder snapped. "I was
angry."

"I was given the impression you remembered everything," Evan
accused.

Mulder's eyes narrowed. "Eidetic memory doesn't work that way.
At least not for me. It has to be visual, a scene, a face or
something written. I said I didn't write it down. I really wasn't
listening."

Byers, anger visible on his broad ruddy face, opened his mouth
to say something nasty, but Skinner intervened. "Enough, Dr. Byers.
To tell you the truth she called me, too, and left a message.
Before she left she told me she'd leave me a number where she could
be reached."

Though Skinner was not addressing him specifically, Mulder
groaned inwardly. It was clear why she had left her number with
Skinner. In case there were any 'emergencies'.

Skinner continued, "Unfortunately, I had a 'Temp' that day
because Marge's mother was in the hospital - and the worthless
creature mislaid at least half a dozen messages. So this is
everyone's problem. And a bigger one than if today were Thursday or
Friday and we needed to reach her. She failed to report for work
yesterday, as expected, nor did she call in. And as of the time I
left this morning, there was no word. Did she mention her plans?
Since Wednesday, has she contacted either of you?"

It was obvious from the expressions on the faces of both men
that she had not.

"Did either of you contact her mother?"

"I tried," Evan reported, quickly. "Her mother's not at home
and, if she has an answering machine, she's turned it off."

"We have to locate her," Skinner said. He knew mother and
daughter were close. "Agent Mulder, when did you last see Agent
Scully?"

"Tuesday afternoon." Slouched in his chair, there was a pause
before Fox admitted, "we argued."

"Damn," Evan swore. "No wonder she was so upset."

"And how would you know she was so upset?" Mulder asked,

rhetorically. "Because you saw her Tuesday night." Mulder's lean,
darkly dressed figure uncurled in his chair to stare rigidly at
Evan. "I know her moods," he snapped. "Certain people have been
confusing her, keeping her out till all hours, probably trying to
get her to transfer off the X-Files!"

"Mulder, you're delusional," Evan hissed. "You're the one
who's been pushing her away, you self-centered, insensitive ass!
You barely talk to her any more, you barely look at her. She felt
unwanted, unneeded. You're not the only one who has been through
hell these past weeks. She needed a friend. I was just trying to
show her a little attention!"

"A little 'attention'? Is that what you call it? You saw her
every night the week before she left. How many of those nights did
you stay till the sun came up, eh? No wonder she looked so tired."

"If she couldn't sleep it was because she was worrying about
you!"

"And how would you know?"

"Because she told me!" Evan realized that if looks could kill,
he would now be in serious trouble. "Damn you, Mulder, she needed
someone to talk to!"

Both suddenly remembered the third party in the room.
Skinner's brow was stormy. He was not pleased. He had been watching
this interplay with amazed concern. He had expected a briefing on
Scully's disappearance. What he had gotten was something entirely
different and he felt for a moment out of his depth.

"Gentlemen, if you are gentlemen, let us return to the facts.
Agent Mulder argued with Agent Scully Tuesday afternoon. Dr.
Byers... You said you saw her Tuesday night? Enlighten us."

Evan knew that he had no choice but to respond. Walter Skinner
was visibly struggling for patience. "Damn it, this is beginning to
sound like a bad murder mystery. All right, like I said, I did see
her Tuesday evening, and she was not in a good mood. The last time
I saw her was when I let her off in front of this building. I
watched her unlock the security door and that was that."

"That's all?" Mulder asked, not being able to resist a good
cut. "No little explorations inside?"

"Cut the crap, Mulder, and get your head out of the sewer."

"If you care for her so much how come you didn't even walk her
to her door. That shows a lot of concern. She might have been
assaulted. She might have been raped, kidnapped."

Evan snarled, "Hey, I watched until she went in." He gestured
with his long, muscular arms upraised. "And we haven't seen any
sign of a struggle, have we?" He paused, uncomfortable. "All right
we did have a fight," he confessed, profoundly distressed. "She
requested that I stay in the car, so I did. Nothing else."

Skinner, his high bare forehead beginning to glisten a little
with sweat, waved his hand as if he would wipe away the current
tense atmosphere in the room and start over, if he could. "What did
you fight about?" Skinner asked, voice level, weary,
nonjudgemental.

"You could ask Mulder the same question," Evan challenged.

Skinner turned to Mulder, saw swirls in the dark depths of
those still blood-shot eyes. He knew much about Mulder's behavior
the week before, more than either Mulder or Scully thought he did,
but he also had Richard and Sheila's report which he trusted
implicitly. Skinner turned back to Evan. "I think I can guess what
Agent Mulder and his partner discussed. But I would like to know,
what you fought with Agent Scully about, Dr. Byers."

When the big man did not answer Skinner hardened his glance to
one Mulder was all too familiar with. Byers wilted under the
intense scrutiny. "If you must know, I asked her to marry me."

Skinner felt the ground drop out from under him. Obviously, he
had had the wrong people under observation. He felt suddenly out of
touch, a feeling he did not like. He prided himself on being able
to read people - well, MOST people, Agent Mulder being a definite
challenge - and he found this twist completely unexpected. These
were also waters in which he did not usually get involved. Saying
he was 'over his head' in trying to intervene between these two now
would not be an exaggeration. The Assistant Director stared from
Byers to Mulder. Mulder was glowering, but had not made any
threatening moves.

"You don't seem surprised by this, Agent Mulder."

Mulder didn't respond, but Evan did. "I can't believe she told
you!" Evan exclaimed, incredulously. "You were barely speaking so
how could you know? Unless you saw her after I left her off.

Unless you were watching and caught her when she was vulnerable."
Evan's mind had jumped back to his original, and he had thought,
unsubstantiated deduction - that there had been violence done to
Dana. He launched to his feet gesturing to the room again. "And so,
of course, there is no sign of a struggle. She knew him! Didn't
think there was anything to fear..."

Amazingly, Mulder was still seated, seated and scrutinizing
the larger man as if he were some lower, irrational life form.
Feeling as if every thought in his mind was being examined with
tweezers, Evan stopped talking, stopped gesticulating, swallowed
and sat back down.

Only then did Mulder rise from his chair. He rose with a tight
grace, reaching into the inner pocket of his suit coat. He handed
Skinner a palm-sized object and a slip of crackling paper.

"I don't think Dr. Byers is being completely truthful about
WHEN he asked Agent Scully to marry him. I found those yesterday in
the back of Agent Scully's desk drawer at work. I wasn't snooping,"
he defended, shooting a murderous glance at Evan. "I was on the
phone and looking for a damn pencil."

Skinner read the note. Found a shiver running through him. He
opened the ring box and saw that it was empty. He could see what
conclusion Mulder had made. On one hand it made a terrible kind of
sense. The only problem was, what Mulder was thinking really made
no sense at all. These two were more devoted to each other than any
but a select handful of the hundred of agent pairs that Skinner had
had the pleasure to know. Regardless of their temporary
difficulties, Dana Scully would never have made such a decision at
a time like this.

Skinner handed the note and the box to Evan. "I can see how
this must look, Agent Mulder. Just remember your unorthodox methods
for developing hypotheses may have a higher 'hit' rate than any
other agent in the Bureau, but you've been dead wrong on enough
occasions at least to keep you acquainted with humility. When you
are, you have always admitted your errors without hard feelings. I
think you're going to find this is one of those times. Dr. Byers?"

Evan was shaking his head. "Mother in Heaven... I don't know
a thing about that box. I never saw it before in my life, or the
ring that must have been in there. The note is mine but it didn't
refer to marriage. I had attached it to a brochure for a clinic in
Pennsylvania I wanted her to consider."

Mulder had not sat down again but was moving, restlessly,
aimlessly, circling the room. From Evan's face and voice it was
clear he really did not know about a ring.

<Fine, let's move on. Why were they sitting here talking!>
Dana needed them. But even as he listened to Evan's explanation,
Mulder found himself still too tired and still too hung over to
keep his green monster under control. "Clinic?" he scowled. "Some
nice little place where you two can settle down and have a happy
little practice together?"

"That comment was unworthy," Skinner interjected, "even from
you."

Fox felt that sting, mostly because Skinner was right.
Wearily, Mulder returned to his chair. "I'm tired," he admitted,
his posture reinforcing the quiet statement. His eyes fell on Evan,
the big man looking pale and shaken. Suddenly he remembered Evan
the way he had seen him in the hospital during his recovery. A
decent guy. Dana's friend who had been there for her when he could
not or would not. "I apologize," he murmured, "and all in the room
knew he meant it. "What clinic then? Though I think I can guess.
Some place for me? Some place to SEND me."

"You weren't getting any better," Evan explained, sensing the
sudden change in the atmosphere, seeing the deep pain in the lean
man slumped before him. "You were right about a lot of things but
not about why. We did spend a long time together the week before
she took off. We spent part of each day at the National Library of
Medicine and every night on the Internet, accessing files at other
hospitals around the country, some even out of the country, looking
up cases, trying to find a case like yours, trying to find a
treatment program for someone like you. We interviewed more than
two dozen research or clinical psychologists and psychiatrists
either in person or by conference call. I thought this place had
merit." Evan stared fixedly at Mulder, no longer afraid. "You have
to understand. She kept denying there was a problem, even though
she knew there was. I tried to get her to tell you what we were
doing, but she refused. She knew how you hate the whole psychology
thing, at least when it applies to you, but I think she was just
too tired. She really wasn't thinking straight any more than you
were. She didn't want you to go back into a hospital, but you
bloody wouldn't talk to her or anyone!" Evan's voice had risen in
her defense. "She finally agreed to come with me to look at this
place, we even had plane reservations for last Wednesday, but the
head psychiatrist had to go out of town so they called and
cancelled."

"They hadn't cancelled as of six o'clock Wednesday evening,"
Mulder challenged, grasping at straws, still trying to find a hole
in the other man's story.

Evan's eyes narrowed suspiciously, clearly wondering how
Mulder knew so much. "His office called after that. There was an
emergency out of the country."

Mulder groaned and rubbed the back of his neck. "I knew there
was a reason my mother told me never to listen at keyholes." Evan
blinked and waited for more of an explanation than that. Skinner
stood with arms folded. So did he. "All right, I overheard Scully
talking to you about reservations. So when she took off for a few
days, I assumed you were going someplace together."

Even threw back his head as the pieces came together. "Dumb,
Mulder. She took off Wednesday partly because she had already
cleared her calendar for our trip to Pittsburgh and partly," he
admitted reluctantly, "because I was stupid and asked her to marry
me."

Reflecting, Mulder muttered, "I don't think someone asking
Agent Scully to marry them is such a stupid idea." Immediately, he
shook himself. Where had that come from? He must be more hung over
than he thought.

Evan chose to ignore the barely audible statement, sensing
Mulder had not meant to say what he had out loud. The words,
however, did send a flood of relief through his system. Mulder was
not as totally out to lunch, not as totally indifferent to Dana's
well being, as he seemed. Evan gestured towards the folded paper
Skinner held. "Even though that paper was not referring to an
engagement, I did ask her to marry me. I didn't have a ring with me
because I didn't expect her to accept."

Mulder's broad shoulders rose, perplexed, and more than a
little angry. "You asked her a question like that and you weren't
serious?"

"About how I felt about her, yes, but I know she doesn't feel
the same way. I just wanted to... " Evan looked down sheepishly, "I
just wanted to shake her up a little. She was looking at the here
and now, whether you would reject her if she forced you into some
kind of treatment. She wasn't allowing herself to look at the long
term benefits. I wanted her to remember where her priorities lay."
The large blond researcher studied Mulder, pleased by what he saw.
Maybe, just maybe, there was a hint of a red tinge on the pale,
poorly shaven cheeks. "It doesn't matter why," Evan continued. "It
worked. She turned me down cold. Why do you think we fought? Why do
you think she made me sit in the car when I let her off at her
apartment Tuesday night? Why do you think she finally found
sufficient reason to go ahead and take that time off for herself?"

Walking slowly up and down the room again, Skinner laced his
fingers behind his head and popped the bones in his neck and back.
He desperately needed another of Sheila's massages. Thank God, the
storm had passed between these two. One warning kept running
through his mind, however. It was dangerous to base a person's past
actions on current knowledge. One had to consider what that person
knew at the time, in Mulder's case, when there was so much
misunderstanding. When Mulder thought Byers and Scully were
engaged, regardless of whether it was true, how had he reacted to
the news? Mulder's vanishing act the afternoon before now made
sense. He had gone off and drowned himself in alcohol, which
Skinner knew was not one of Mulder's habitual vices.

"Off the record, gentleman: If I had been in Agent Scully's
position and had you two sad cases to deal with, I would have done
what she did - taken a few days and gotten as far away from the
both of you as possible. Now let's review: What did the apartment
reveal?"

Mulder raised his head, his face not quite as pale as it had
looked before, though the reminder that Dana was missing had made
most of the color Evan had seen so briefly drain away. "There are
no signs of a break in or any struggle," he reported without
emotion.

Skinner paced, hands in pockets, relieved that Mulder's brain
seemed to be able to function at least on an elementary level. "I
would agree with that."

"And no sign that she's been here since Wednesday," Evan
offered. "I checked at the landlord's office and she hasn't picked

up her mail or papers since last Wednesday."

"So until we come up with other evidence, we'll work on the
assumption she left as planned and for some reason has been
detained. We'll need to keep trying to reach her mother." Skinner's
commanding presence caught the younger men's attention. He turned
to scan the room as if he were studying the lay of the land for an
assault. "Maybe we can get some clues on where she might have gone
by what she took with her. For example road maps. Does she keep a
complete set of road maps, and, if so, are there any missing?"
Neither Mulder not Byers moved, each still eying the other with
suspicion. Skinner frowned. "Let's get moving, shall we? Agent
Mulder, I have a special task for you."

Mulder sat on Dana's neatly made double bed and stared at the
open closet door. Reluctance dragged at him. He didn't want to do
this, this was too personal. Skinner, however, insisted that her
clothes be gone through to see if he could identify anything
missing which might be suggestive of where she had gone, and
Mulder, having the most contact with her on a day to day basis, was
the logical person. The task, however, felt too much like going
through a person's belongings after they had died. With a twist in
his guts that was physical Mulder remembered coming back into his
apartment after his stay at GW, the night after they flew back from
Denver. There were boxes in his apartment. Half packed boxes.
Frantic and embarrassed, Dana had tried to quickly unpack while he
collapsed on the couch. At the time he had been too out of phase
from the sedatives to pay much attention, but now he realized,
perhaps for the first time, that she really had thought him dead.
She had actually started to clean out his apartment, to pack up his
things. Something had interrupted that sad task.

Mulder bent over, clutching his stomach. After that horror and
then after the way he had treated her upon his return, no wonder
she had felt the need to withdraw for a few days. Byers thought the
reason for her departure simple enough - she had already scheduled
the time off and, on top of everything else, he pushed her by the
marriage proposal. Despite Evan's offer to share the blame,
however, Mulder knew better. Initially, Dana would be angry over
Evan making an offer of something as important as marriage so
casually, but she also would have seen through his maneuverings in
a heartbeat. No, there would have to be other reasons and Mulder
knew on whose doorstep the fault had to be laid.

What had happened to cause her on Tuesday night of all the bad
nights to make such a drastic decision? The answer was there in
front of him before he even had time to phrase the question.

Tuesday afternoon he had thrown her out of his apartment. By
itself, pushing her would not have been enough to make her leave.
She knew he had a temper. Certainly, he should not have touched her
- hated himself for touching her like that - but, in truth, he had
not really pushed her very hard. He had been in such poor shape
physically that, if she had wanted to defend herself, she could
have taken him out with one well placed punch. He wished now that
she had. But she just stood there, irritating him with that glazed,
pitying expression in her eyes.

No, as bad as the shouting, the bitter words, the physical
assault, those would not have been enough. What then? What else had
happened on Tuesday? The answer took longer to come up with, mostly
because this was the one memory Mulder had tried hardest to bury.

Tuesday morning they had accepted the ill-fated assignment to
help that weasel Johnson look for evidence of drug manufacturing at
that abandoned farm. Gritting his teeth, Mulder forced himself to
pull it back up, knowing he needed to look, not only at the
newsreel version in his mind, but also through her eyes.

What he saw, what she must have seen, made him want to seek a
deep, dark hole somewhere. He had flipped out on her, saw visions,
attacked phantoms, went as crazy as she had ever seen him, and then
blamed her. He had embarrassed her professionally, she who had
worked for so many years, so incredibly hard, doubly hard, to
overcome the twin obstacles of being a female field agent in the
FBI and a pathologist in that male dominated profession.

Oh, Dana, forgive me.

She had gone off, firmly convinced that he had lost it
entirely, and with that lovely memory of his violent touch on her
body.

Oh, God...

Mulder bent over his knees and buried his face in his hands.

end of book II, chapter 4

=====================================================================
======

JUST THE TWO OF US: Book II Mulder and Evan (5/14)
By S. Esty (AKA Windsinger@aol.com)

Washington, D.C.
Tuesday 10am
December 18, 1993

Chapter 5

Curled over his knees, fists clenched against his temples,
Mulder sucked in air through clenched teeth.

He would make it stop. He had to.

The memory was agony. Seeing himself as she had was the stuff
of which nightmares were made. His humiliation was bad enough, but
hers was worse. And engaging in self damnation the most senseless
exercise of all. No amount of recrimination would find her.

Rise and walk. Use the brain you were cursed with. What is
past is past. Too late for whatever they may have had together, but
maybe not too late for her alone.

Mulder forced his eyes to fix themselves with detachment upon
her dresser as if it were a piece of furniture in any missing
person's room. Forced the cool logic to dampen the memories. Forced
his breath to come long and slow as he got to his feet. Moved as if
he were walking in a church and stood before the bureau - and
opened the top drawer.

Inside were the miscellaneous items one expected to find in a
single woman's top dresser drawer - pairs of sunglasses and
scarves, receipts and bits of broken jewelry, a few photographs -
and in the back, pushed way in the back, a small box of condoms.
Unopened. And that fact seemed tragic. What had he taken from her?
If she did not have a life, it was his fault, his work, his
obsession. Richard and Sheila had been right, he had taken her time
and her energy and given her nothing in return.

Closing the top drawer, he went to the second. Personal
things. Very personal. Lace and silk. Tiny underpants and
camisoles, white like snow and in colors like jewels, as soft as
silvery water flowing through his fingers. An inventory of these,
however, would not help him find her. He would not flatter himself
to imagine that he was in a position to know what was missing and
what was not.

In the bottom drawer he finally found what he had been looking
for - her casual summer clothes. The shorts and tops sitting on top
he recognized from their brief vacation in Key West. In real time
that was such a short time ago - a little more than two months -
but in Mulder's mind the span of a sad lifetime. More of the life
that she had given up for him. If he had not tried to appease his
conscience by taking that assignment with Angela, he would not have
been so badly hurt. If not so badly hurt, then he would not have
had to spend so much time in the hospital and would not have had to
be sent to Colorado for recuperation. If he had not gone to
Colorado, that other business would never have happened.

<If...if...if... Concentrate on the job at hand, Spooky, damn
you! Warm weather... She likes the warm weather, is that where she
went? Did she perhaps return to recapture the feelings from that
warm, still, moonlit lagoon when they had been contented and happy
and reaching towards something wonderful?> No, as he searched
under the cottons he found everything he remembered her wearing,
even the emerald green bathing suit that fit her like a gleaming
touch of sea foam, the one she had practically lived in. No, she
had not gone to anywhere warm, not back there, not without him.

He turned. From the living room he could still hear the sounds
of Skinner grilling Evan on every conversation the researcher had
had with Scully over the past two weeks, trying to uncover some
hint of where she might have gone. They were waiting for him to
finish this. The closet waited.

Three minutes later Mulder rushed from the bedroom and threw
open the door to the hall closet. Frantically pushing aside coats
and sweaters, he searched. He threw hats and scarves off the top
shelf and onto the floor, an odd expression of pleasure growing to
light his shadowed face as his search proved fruitless.

Skinner walked up, saying nothing at first, just watching with
patient eyes, knowing Mulder would tell him when he was ready. Evan
trailed behind curiously. "What did you find?" Skinner finally
asked.

"What didn't I find, you mean... I was looking at her shoes,
don't ask me why, she has so many I couldn't reasonably expect to
tell which were gone, but I noticed her walking shoes were gone -
and her hiking boots. She only takes those when she's going into
the woods. Her heavy outdoor parka is gone, too, and her backpack."

Skinner allowed himself a small smile. "That's just what we
were looking for. So she's gone into a wooded area where she thinks
she might be doing some hiking. That's narrows it down a little.
But damn," Skinner pounded a right fist into the palm of his left
hand, "I wish we could reach Margaret!"

To Evan's confused expression, Mulder nonchalantly explained
the reference, "Scully's mother."

Evan made an 'Oh' shape with his lips but made no other
comment. Only then did he vaguely remember Dana mentioning that
Skinner and her mother were very well acquainted.

"Agent Mulder," Skinner asked, heading back to the living
room, "when did you see Mrs. Scully last. Recently?"

"No, not since Scully left me there so her mother could play
nursemaid for a few days. That was just before I left for
Colorado."

Evan hit his forehead smartly with the heel of his hand. "What
a fool!" He turned to them both. "Now I remember. It was just a
passing comment so I didn't remember. It was after I told Dana that
the doctor from the Pittsburgh facility had called to cancel our
visit and she told me she was going to take a few days for herself.
I DID ask her about what she was going to do. I asked if she was
going to stay with her family and she said she wasn't, but she did
mention that her mother wasn't going to be home anyway. That she
was staying over at a neighbor's house for a few days. The neighbor
had just gotten out of the hospital and needed some help."

That rang true, Mulder realized instantly. Not having Fox
Mulder to mother hen any more, Mrs. Scully would be off looking for
another worthy candidate for her ministrations. "Did she mention
the neighbor's name?"

Evan strained but obviously was not coming up with anything.
"I don't think she mentioned it. Some old woman. Something to do
with the military."

Mulder paced, brow furrowed. "I think I may know the house.
Scully pointed it out to me once when we passed. The woman was in
poor health and her husband had been an old commanding officer of
Captain Scully's, but Scully never mentioned the name then either."

Evan's face broke into a smile. "Close enough! Let's go," and
he grabbed his coat from where he had thrown it over the arm of the
couch and headed for the door.

"Byers, wait!" But Evan was gone.

Skinner noted that this lanky puzzle of an agent of his was
distinctly not happy and he thought he knew why. "Trouble, Agent
Mulder?"

Mulder's eyes stared coldly at his supervisor. "I work alone
on this."

"No," Skinner told him emphatically, "you do not."

The fevered eyes from before, when he had argued with Evan was
back. "Don't stop me. I have to look for her!"

"I have no problem with your being involved with this. Only
someone will be assigned to work with you and I am assigning Dr.
Byers. I have an agreement with the FDA on this matter."

Mulder shook his head curtly. His face wore a hard, determined
mask. "I WORK alone!"

"You know better, Agent Mulder. Even when you are running on
all cylinders, you never go solo, especially you." Mulder could get
into more trouble than a half dozen other agents combined. He
didn't need a partner, he needed a defensive front line.

"This is not a case. It's personal."

Skinner stared him down. "It's a case if I say it is. Agent
Scully is my responsibility. Maybe she has just sprained her ankle
out hiking somewhere, but you and I both know it could be more
serious than that. You have enemies, Agent Mulder. Until we know,
I say it's a case and you do not work alone."

Angry, barely-controlled tension began to flow up from deep
places to encompass his entire body, but Mulder controlled it. He
could if he chose. Skinner had seen the demonstration before. Knew
the intensity of that anger and the strength it took to hold it in.
Impressive. "Sit down, Agent Mulder."

With extreme reluctance, Mulder sat. He might as well be in
Skinner's office. The man had a way of pulling rank with two words.
Skinner pulled a paper from his pocket, unfolded it and held it
out. "Do you know what this is? It's a copy of your official
medical restriction form. The one drawn up before you were allowed
to go out West to work with Dick. It's never been rescinded."

Mulder glared at the paper with grudging reluctance. "That's
old. There's nothing wrong with me. I'm not on medication any
longer."

Skinner shook his head. "I'm not a physician, I won't make
that judgement. I only know that you haven't had your final exam
with Dr. Adams. And, though you seem to have recovered, that was a
level five amnesia episode you had. Remember, Agent Scully was
there. She saw."

Mulder closed his eyes, saw again her red hair moving in the
light breeze as he had looked up at her from where he knelt in the
garden. His savior. His world. An angel with a touch of fire.

"Sheila and Dick called," the Assistant Director continued
with a gentleness in his tone Fox could not ever remember hearing
before. "They gave you a good report, excellent actually, but then
yesterday you swore at the secretary you were asked to leave some
files with, you scared poor Mrs. Holbein, you left work early to -
well, we won't even go into last night's irresponsible behavior.
You're probably still under the influence, certainly hung over."
The Assistant Director raised his brows, questioningly. "Need I
continue?"

Mulder's retort was immediate and accusing. "Does everyone in
that building report to you every little thing I do and say?"

Skinner's response was not without sympathy. "Sorry, but when
you stop acting like a loaded cannon, people will stop looking for
the burning fuse." The edge came back a little to that voice. "I
should tell you, I had an agreement with Agent Scully to keep an
eye on you while she was gone."

"I figured that out," Mulder scowled, remembering Mrs. Holbein
and her canister of sunflower seeds.

"You did? Then obviously my team needs a little more
training." Skinner sat across from Mulder and leaned forward,
forearms on knees. "Off the record, Agent Mulder... Is there
something I should know about? Is there more about your getting
plastered than what I can deduce from the display you two put on
here today?"

Mulder could not think of how to respond to that. What could
he say? That the week before she left, Scully had scared him? That
he had looked in her face and seen such distress and loneliness. It
frightened him that he was the cause of such misery in another.
That he had been thinking that for her sake it probably would have
been better if she had never met him. But if he really felt that
way he should have been happy for her when he thought she was with
Evan, but the thought was, instead, like the deepest pain.

"I would never hurt, Scully."

Skinner's eyes narrowed. "Did I ask that? If I thought you
could, you wouldn't be sitting here now."

Mulder hoped the spark of unease that flared up in him had not
shown on his face in response to that question. There were blank
hours the night before which Skinner did not need to know about.
"Nothing happened. I haven't seen her, I don't know where she is.
I wish to God I did."

"All right," and Skinner seemed more sure than Mulder at that
moment. "But we still have this medical restriction which Dr.
Scully and I drafted before you went to Colorado." He had
emphasized Dana's title. "She and I reviewed it last week. It is on
Dr. Scully's recommendation that it remain in effect at least until
you are cleared by Dr. Adams. Until that time, you are subject to
severe disciplinary action if you try to go off on your own."

Mulder looked down betrayed, wounded. "Why would she do that?"

"Because she cares, Agent Mulder." Skinner stared down at the
top of the dark head. "This at least allows you to work. She knew
there were problems, but she didn't want to recommend that you be
forced to take a leave of absence, since previously you seemed to
thrive on your work. She promised she would tear it up the day she
felt you were steady again."

Steady? How does one define 'steady'?

Skinner replaced the paper in his inside pocket. "So I can't
and I won't fulfill your request. I'm assigning Evan Byers to work
with you. No lone wolf this time. You two were the closest to her
just before she disappeared. You've shown already that together you
can come up with a lead that neither of you would have been able to
find on your own. "

Angrily, Mulder rose and his tone was biting. "May I stop
sitting here then, SIR, and start following that lead."

Skinner stood his ground. "You may, but -" Skinner's voice
became threatening, suddenly stern with warning, "if you try to
ditch Byers, so help me, Mulder, I'll stick you in Georgetown's
psych ward before you can draw another breath. Do we understand
each other?"

Fox Mulder burned. Understand? All too well.

********

Alexandria, Virginia
Tuesday 11am
December 18, 1993

Mulder stood quietly, trying not to think. He knew he should
be packing and not standing here in front of his window staring at
the exquisitely exciting view of the alley at the back of his
building. Byers would be returning in a few minutes to drive them
to Baltimore to find Scully's mother and he would be puzzled - no,
more than that - suspicious, if Mulder was not ready. Byers was
only placated, not convinced.

Scully, however, she would have understood. She knew his
moods, knew this was a part of the ritual he performed before going
out in the field. His mind craved time to clear itself of outside
concerns so that it could focus on the case at hand, and he needed
that time more than ever now. Whenever possible, he chose to do it

here, in this, his place, his sanctum, his cave. If not, he zoned
out in the car or on the plane, closing himself off from her and
yet aware of every breath she took as she sat beside him, her very
silence supportive.

But today the exercise was not working. There was no clearing.
One of those New Agers would say his channels were muddy - as good
a description as any - and the reason why was tragically simple. As
he had said to Skinner, this was not just any case. This was Scully
and he had blown it. Sheila and Richard had been right. Wallowing
in his own despair, his own disappointment, not thinking of her,
was self-indulgent. When she failed to return by Monday morning, he
had made the grievous, and possibly fatal, assumption that she was
safe with Evan. If he were any kind of a partner, any kind of a
friend, every alarm in his head should have gone off. Instead he
had thought only of how it affected him, how much HE was losing.

Standing with fingernails digging into palms, infuriated with
himself, Mulder swore on his immortal soul, if he had one, that he
would never, ever, make that kind of blind assumption again. If she
came out of this well and healthy and still willing to work with
him, she could bitch and complain about his being overprotective,
but he would never allow his vigilance to slip. Never again.

If she was willing to work with him again. The solitary
ticking of the clock in the kitchen was the only sound he heard
like the pounding of his pulse against his ear drums. Perhaps this
was the way his life was meant to be, separate, alone, without the
harmony of another's beating heart beside his. Probably would be
safer for those who might get close. Those who were unfortunate
enough to care for him received little except misery in return.

<You're wallowing again, Spooky. Do you think you're going to
find any peace with behavior like that?>

<No, probably not. Not today.>

Shaking off the cloying dialogue in his head, he turned on his
heel and headed for the bedroom.

Time to pack. Time to move. Time to stop being an ass.

He grabbed a duffle and began shoveling in clothes. Sheila had
done some laundry, but not all. There was not enough which was
clean. He would have to find a laundry if he was gone long. Hell,
he'd buy new. There was no time.

The clouds continued to dog him as he moved about silent
rooms. Where was Dana? Thoughts of Sam who had also disappeared
plagued him. No one had ever found any trace of her. Please, if
there was a god, let that not happen with Scully.

As an afterthought, Mulder felt at this waist. No holster. No
gun. He had not worn it for three weeks now and, in fact, had
gotten out of the habit of putting it on in the morning as he used
to do, even before he put on his tie. Officially, if the medical
restrictions were still in effect, he was not allowed to carry it,
or drive a car, but he was no longer on medication and Skinner had
not specifically mentioned that little limitation during their
'talk'. Mulder was stuck with Byers, he would even let the man do
most of the driving, but he would be damned if he would go out in
the field ever again without his gun.

He found his holster on the dresser but no gun. That brought
the night before back in a rush - what parts of that drunken
disaster he could remember. Sometime in the night before Evan's
arrival, he vaguely remembered waking, desperately needing to

crawl to the bathroom to empty his bladder, and he had taken the
gun and - what? Done something. Hid it. From whom? Himself, who
else, or at least from that dark side of himself the alcohol had
loosed.

A fragment of a shredded memory led him to digging under the
mound of dirty clothes on the floor of his closet and there he
found his Glock, but no clip. That was not surprising. Even a
drunken fool knew that it was best to keep the deadly elements
separate to prevent them from being used by someone in his
condition. He finally located an image of the clip in his brain and
came up with the real thing in the refrigerator behind the rancid
margarine in the butter keeper, the one really disgusting item
Sheila had failed to throw out. He tensed, checked the clip. It was
full. A tremor began at his shoulders and ended in his gut.

Why that sense of relief, he wondered as he drove home the
clip, checked the safety and slipped the cool metal into the
leather of the holster. Why so surprised, unless Byers was not
totally out of line in his suspicions?

He placed the duffle and two suits in a garment bag by his
apartment door. What had happened when he had been what people
called 'blind drunk'? Clinically, he knew the term was all too
accurate - 'blind' because one is not aware of what he is doing and
later cannot remember. Concentrating later would not help because
there was nothing in storage to recover. Research showed that
memories were laid down very inefficiently, if at all, when the
brain was bathed in too much of the grain. Considering how totally
he had been affected, his level of blood alcohol must have been
very high, even though he did not remember ordering that many
drinks.

That in itself was a bad sign. A very bad sign. Fox had had
enough experience with alcoholism in his immediate family to know
the warning signs.

He could not remember how he got home that night either, or
how his car came to be parked on the street outside. Fervently, he
hoped he had not driven it himself. On impulse, he tried to
telephone the last bar he remembered hitting - one he frequented
often the year before Scully came to work with him - hoping someone
there could fill in the blanks. Not surprisingly for such an early
hour, no one answered. There was a strong likelihood that Lew, the
barkeep, had extracted the bar bill, a good-sized tip and an
address from his inebriated client's wallet and then coerced a
couple of his employees to drive his customer's car home and dump
the comatose body on the couch. His ring of keys had been found on
the small table near the door, a place where he never kept them.
All this would explain why the dead bolt had not been thrown.

Unfortunately, Mulder's mind refused to stop here. He was,
after all a professional. He had trained his mind well to think
beyond the most likely explanation, to consider all the
alternatives, no matter how bizarre. He was very good at that. This
time, he wished he wasn't.

For there was another possibility, another explanation. Just
one among many, but being the most horrible, the most disturbing it
was, therefore, the one his mind fixed upon, the one he was forced
to watch behind his closed lids. He saw himself, staggering up the
lawn of her building, slipping on the icy, wet grass, not merely
completely and thoroughly intoxicated, but with the devils of the
previous week again on his back. Waiting in the cold, her arriving,
he calling to her. Her confused, concerned voice whispering
'Mulder?' into the dark as she crouched to peer at where she though
she heard his voice come from in the dark shadow under the bushes,
him pouncing in crazed drunkenness from another direction entirely,
accusing her of impossible, terrible things with Evan.

Mulder groaned, watching his control, his reason, evaporate in
a jealous alcohol haze. Yes, his experience with the drug, that
society considered no drug, extended this far, though he had
usually been on the receiving end. He knew well that in such a
state a drunk was capable of harming even those he professed to
love. He could have attacked even she who was just about the only
person in his life. Of taking her car and stashing it and her
small, lovely body somewhere where neither would ever be found. Who
knew better where to hide than the hunter.

But the rage? Was there anger buried in him enough for that?
Mulder could remember consuming murderous thoughts directed towards
Angela. Could still feel the blackness that urged him to hurt her.
He had not imagined the depth of that turbulent dark pool within.
And she had meant nothing to him and meaning nothing should not
have been able to hurt him. But Scully...

The discovery of this demon had been frightening and not so
long ago. There was no excuse that he was unknowingly suffering at
the time from the hellish downside of a drug he had not known he
had ingested. The devil was at home. Always at home. Probably
always had been home since a despondent child found, despite his
tears and struggles, that he could never fit into this world no
matter how hard he tried. He was just lucky the dark angel was
usually content in her closet and chose not to answer the door. The
alcohol could just have been the key to leave the way wide open.

But he hadn't. He couldn't

He could. He was 'Spooky' after all.

Whispers in the hallway, in the men's locker room. "Mulder...
he's down in the basement because he's insane."

Because he was Spooky.

What if the voices were right?

Mulder dropped onto the stiff, cold fabric of the couch and
bowed his head, fingers entwined in his hair. As with the other
'bad' cases, he knew his thoughts could become paralyzed here,
could replay these horrors over and over again - of surprising her
beside the bushes, closing his hands around the soft skin of her
throat, her eyes soft, soft locked on him in surprise until they
glazed into blankness, driving her car to a abandoned quarry in the
black night. Yes, his mind would relish replaying these scenes and
none other. But he could not function this way, could not allow
this.

Now was the time to reach down and pull up from deep within
himself the rigid strength that always served him so well, but left
him as cold and dispassionate as a barren skull.

And, therefore, look, Skull. Look at the facts with that cool
judgement, but look at all of them, the good and the bad. A half-
finished drink was taken from his hand at the same time he heard a
clock strike midnight. He hid the gun at the nightmare hour of two
in the morning. The time was pounded into his memory by the subtle
chime of that solitary kitchen clock that had sounded like Big Ben
in the echo chamber of his hangover. And Evan had arrived at three.
For the impossible scenario to have occurred, her car could not
have been driven far, for he would have needed time to stagger back
to her apartment to retrieve his own vehicle and then get home.

Hell, even finding his way back to her apartment in his state would
have been an amazing feat. Could it have happened this way?
Unlikely, nearly impossible, but Mulder had known the impossible to
happen, again and again. He just wished in the depths of his soul
that he could remember.

The insistent blare of a car's horn from outside was jolting,
but welcome. Further contemplation upon this most pleasant of
topics he didn't need. Facts he needed, not conjecture. He lifted
his head. The annoying noise was a signal, a gift, triggering a
surge of energy to evaporate the lethargy and the obsessive over
analyzing. Perhaps the exercise had helped after all. It no longer
mattered what he would find out about himself. What he knew already
was damning enough, thank you.

Only finding one red-headed woman mattered any more.

Rising quickly, finally with purpose, Mulder flung the garment
bag over his shoulder and grasped the handle of the duffle as he
headed for the door. At the last moment, almost as an after
thought, he stooped by the cracked window, picked up a small, round
object from amidst the sparkling crystals of glass, and dropped it
into his pocket.

I'm coming, Scully.

End of book II, chapter 5

=====================================================================
======

From: Windsinger@aol.com
Date: Mon, 17 Jun 1996 00:18:53 -0400
Subject: jttout book 2 chap 6-10

JUST THE TWO OF US: Book II - Mulder and Evan (6/14)
By S. Esty (AKA Windsinger@aol.com)

Chapter 6

Mulder found Evan's driving irritating. The man was too
cautious and too damn slow, but he slouched in the passenger seat
and forced himself to be silent. There had been no conversation
since he had thrown his luggage into the back of the man's Blazer.
Forty minutes fighting the trucks on I-95 had passed since then.

"Dana and her mother could be together," Mulder mused but
without much hope, not noticing Evan start as he was shaken out of
his own thoughts.

Evan sniffed. "Come on, Mulder. Get real. If a woman wanted to
get away to think about her love life, do you really think she
would take her mother?"

<Love life?> The raw wound inside closed momentarily.

Evan shook his head over Mulder's perplexed expression. "You
are an innocent, aren't you? And I thought I was dumb. When women
want to get away to think, they inevitably end up thinking about
their love life, the 'big' picture, the future. Not like us guys,
who are just trying to decide how to maneuver them into bed."

"Speak for yourself," Mulder grumbled.

Evan glanced at his grudging companion then took one hand off
the steering wheel to rub tired eyes. "You're right. That was low.
I sometimes think the male stereotype applies to every man except
me and then I end up perpetuating it."

Reluctantly, Mulder felt himself being drawn into the
conversation. "That's the problem with stereotypes: they're so one
dimensional they don't apply to anyone."

"Is that something you learned from all those psychology
courses?" Evan asked as he turned off the freeway exit and headed
in the direction of Margaret Scully's neighborhood.

Mulder frowned. "No, from my stint in Violent Crimes, which is
a classroom of a sort. You learn about just how complex a human
being can be." Evan was hesitating at a traffic signal even though
it had turned green. "Right turn, four blocks, left turn, two more.
Fourth house past the stop sign," Mulder murmured without thinking.

Evan whistled lightly through his teeth. "Now that's the kind
of slight of hand I expected from you."

Mulder was staring out the front window. "Not really. I'm not
good with maps. Orientation problems. Scully wrote down the
directions the second time we came here. She made me memorize them.
Just in case." <For times like this.> Long fingers closed tightly
around a pencil he was holding, nearly snapping it.

In his mind Mulder saw again the large white frame house. The
pillars beside the door and the flagstone walk. If only they would
find her there. If only, when they drove up, he could see her rise
from the swing on the side porch. Because of the cold she would
probably have a blanket draped over her shoulders like a cape and
one finger would close automatically between the pages of the book
she had been reading to save her place. If only she would come down
that walk to greet them, to apologize profusely for being in a blue
funk and not calling. If all this happened she would be able to
see, not the monster of last week, but Mulder - just Mulder. Just
her friend who, once again, was a little thin and pale because he
had not been eating and sleeping correctly.

The only problem with wishes, especially impossible ones, was
that they seldom came true. Almost a week had passed since she had
told everyone she was taking a 'few' days. This was Scully. If she
had been able, she would have called or had someone call for her.

As Evan turned the car at the final corner, Mulder sat
straighter in the seat. There was no need to refer to the old wood-
burned sign which hung from a tree in the front yard on which was
carved 'SCULLY' in shaky juvenile lettering. Simply by watching the
agent's eyes, Evan knew when they had found the house they were
seeking.

"I thought Dana's mother was staying with the old woman?" Evan
asked curiously when he noticed the sign.

"First things first." Mulder crawled stiffly from the
passenger's seat, wincing slightly against the headache and the
fuzziness that still lingered from the previous night's activities.
Evan followed, studying the quick efficient movements of the
agent's head and body. No car in the driveway. No papers on the
porch. No lights on in the house either, which would be expected if
anyone were home because, even though it just before noon, the sky
hung low and threatening with dark clouds. Mulder rang the bell but
was looking around the edge of the porch before anyone in the house
could possibly have answered.

"No one home?" Evan asked. Mulder ignored the rather obvious
question, instead, he began searching under the dying mums in the
flower bed until he found an odd-shaped rock, which, by the way he
picked it up, clearly weighed too little to be a real rock. Turning
it over, a key fell out.

"It's their spare," Mulder told Evan, forcing the slightly
rusty key into the lock. "I saw Scully use it once when she didn't
have hers." Though quiet and filled with dark and empty shadows on
this gloomy day, the old house still resounded with the voices from
long years of happiness with family and friends and the running
steps of children.

While Mulder stood, drinking in the atmosphere, sensing no
wrongness here, only temporary abandonment, a little loneliness,
Evan searched for the answering machine, finally finding it in the
den off the living room. "Looks like a lamp fell over and jarred
loose the power cord of the recorder," he reported. "That's why we
weren't able to leave a message. Do they have a clumsy cat?"

"They do," Mulder told him, checking the machine and the cord
himself and well remembering the animal that had disdainfully

leaped from chair to table to window sill, wandering in and out of
the house at will through its little swinging door, a being with
clearly more energy and freedom than he had been given when he had
stayed here. This was, after all, where he had been taken care of,
fed and mothered-nearly-to-death. A house that was beginning to
feel almost as much like home as his own. Evan's analysis was
correct, the disconnection did look accidental.

Still burdened with the sense of terrible urgency he had felt
since his last conversation with Skinner, Mulder quickly inspected
the rest of the familiar house. He moved skillfully, swiftly, from
room to room, making no extraneous movements, alert for anything
suggestive that Dana may have been here lately or anything out of
place. Evan had to hurry to follow, a clumsy shadow, using his eyes
as best he could but realizing he did not have the knowledge of
this family to be truly effective here. The tour complete and
finding nothing, Mulder moved to the front door, locking it
securely the second Evan was on the porch before replacing the key
in its hiding place.

Within five blocks Mulder pointed out the grey and blue
Colonial which Dana had casually pointed out as being the home of
the widow of Bill Scully's former commander. In truth, his eyes
identified Margaret's grey sedan in the drive before he recognized
the house. He knew that car, after all, he had tried to 'borrow'
it once. Mulder had started up the walk before he realized that
Evan was still standing on the far side of his Blazer.

"Are you coming?"

Evan frowned. "I'll wait. This will be tough enough for her.
Besides, Dana's mother always seems a little stiff with me -"

Mulder, who had never known Margaret Scully to be stiff with
anyone, found the last an odd comment.

The front door opened just as Mulder stepped up on the wide
porch and Margaret Scully stepped out, her coat on, her purse in
her hand. "Fox!" she exclaimed with a surprised cry of such genuine
pleasure that for a heartbeat he forget why he was there. Without
hesitation she hugged him and, putting her hands on either side of
his face, pulled him down a little to her. "Oh, I'm so happy to see
you! I wanted to come your first day back, but Dana said you
weren't well." She took a step back and looked at him
disapprovingly. "You're thin again. Need a few more days at Ma Scully's?"

Mulder found himself temporarily at a loss regarding how to
bring up the subject they had come so far to discuss. Margaret
Scully was the last person in the world he wanted to hurt.

Margaret saved him the trouble. She turned grey eyes
expectantly down the walk towards the car. Her eyes slid over Evan
with recognition, but kept moving, searching. "Fox, where's Dana?
Isn't she with you?" Her voice was steady until the end when she
focused, confused, on his expression.

Mulder's hopes crumbled. As he had feared, Margaret Scully did
not know where her daughter was. Something in his face had betrayed
him. She knew him too well, either that or he was too tired to keep
his turbulent emotions from showing. Margaret Scully, however, was
a Naval Captain's wife and knew about bad news. Her chin rose and
her lips tightened. Mulder knew that expression well, he certainly
had seen it often enough on Dana's face.

"Mrs. Scully, when did you last hear from Dana?"

The woman pulled her coat a little closer around her body as
if she were suddenly cold. Her eyes never left his somber face.
"Last Tuesday, Fox. She told me she was taking some time off. Why
do you need to ask? What's wrong?"

"She hasn't been heard from since Wednesday morning."

The woman held her breath, then slowly let it out. "And no one
thought that unusual?" she asked accusingly.

Mulder nearly found himself staring down at his own feet, but
forced his gaze back up to her face. "The circumstances were such
that... no, no one did." He glanced towards Evan. "Neither of us
knew she went alone. We thought she was safe, just - occupied."

Margaret glared coolly down the walk at Evan. "When I didn't
hear, I didn't think much about it. She gets so tied up with her
work sometimes, she forgets to call. Don't you know where she is?"
Her eyes were not so much hard as disappointed in him. Somehow he
would rather have faced her anger. "That was a rhetorical question.
Obviously not. Did you two have a fight?"

Fox felt the unaccustomed heat of a blush rising from some
unknown depth.

Margaret noted his discomfort and almost smiled. "Sorry, I
didn't mean to make it sound like a lover's quarrel - heaven forbid
- but I thought you two talked. Dana's told me more than once that
there isn't anyone who knows her as intimately as you do."

Now Fox did blush and Margaret smiled gently. "I'm sorry. I
didn't mean that the way it sounded either. Let me rephrase: 'That
there isn't anyone who knows her as WELL as you do.'"

Her attitude was puzzling. Concern was there, but no panic,
not that Mulder could imagine Margaret Scully, whose solid center
could smooth white water, ever panicking.

"Mrs. Scully, do you know something I don't? You don't

seem -"

She put her hand on his arm. "No, Fox, I don't know any more
than you. From what little you've let slip, considerably less than
you do about what's been going on lately. And, of course, I'm
worried. Inside, I'm falling apart, but if I allowed myself to fall
apart every time William's ship went into combat, or was out of
radio contact, or every time they had to cruise too close to a
typhoon or hurricane, I wouldn't have been able to keep it together
for the children." Her eyes, for a second, betrayed years of hidden
sorrow. "Some people think me cold for that."

He placed his other hand over the one she had placed on his
arm. An unusual gesture for him who was normally so reluctant to
touch others. "No one could ever think you cold."

She pulled him into a brief, sudden embrace, burying her head
against his black coat. "I think about her every day. From the time
she was a little girl I knew she would never grow up to do anything
ordinary, but, you have to admit... The FBI! Guns, the danger. I've
felt better since she began working with you. There's no one else
I trust more with my daughter's well-being." She had not said
'life' even as he detected a strain creeping into her voice, tears
she refused to show. "I know you'll find her, Fox."

As he felt her release him, bittersweet memories of his stay
at this woman's home during his recuperation brought an odd
lightening to the darkness: Bitter for the forced inactivity, the
weakness, for not being what he had wanted to be for Dana; sweet
for the feeling of being enclosed - smothered even - by the two
women's affection and concern. For that brief span of days there
had been no doubts, only a sure knowledge that Dana would wait for
him always.

Suddenly Fox felt ashamed. He had doubted Scully? Why? No, he
did not doubt her, he doubted only his ability to hold her, to be
worthy of her wanting to stay. He realized he had been standing and
staring off over this woman's head. Time later for recriminations.

"Mrs. Scully, did she tell you where she was going?"

"No, she said she wasn't sure exactly. That she just wanted to
tour around and stop when she found something that felt right to
her. It satisfies her craving for excitement, adventure, which is
one reason she joined the FBI. Working in the same hospital or
office, day in and day out, would not have suited her. She said
she'd call when she found a place she wanted to stay if she was
going to be gone longer than an day or two."

Scully had told her mother that she might only be gone a day
or two? The urgency, the anxiety was like claws under his skin.
"Did she call?"

"No, but I didn't worry about that. You often drag her off

unexpectedly on one of your cases and she doesn't always take the
time."

Dana, obviously, had not told her mother how 'ill' her partner
had been since returning from Colorado. If she had, Margaret would
have known there would be no running off suddenly on a case. What
people will not say and do, Mulder thought ironically, to shield
the ones they love.

"Do you have any idea where she could have gone? We know she
took her hiking boots and her backpack."

The older woman's eyes opened wide. "Fox, did you go through
Dana's things?"

"Mrs. Scully -" he began in protest, his expression showing
just how uncomfortable he had been about that.

"It really is that serious?"

"Please, Mrs. Scully..."

Margaret tilted her head, a pensive expression on her face.
"You know, when we were talking about her calling, I reminded her
that I had her cellular number and she said something about her not
being surprised if it wouldn't work where she was going. Does that
help?"

Mulder shifted his feet. Time, time seemed to be flying past
him. "Mrs. Scully...."

Margaret saw the twitch of the muscle along his jaw, the
clutching and unclutching of his fists. "The Potomac Highlands of
West Virginia," she decided quickly. "I know she didn't want to be
gone long - I could tell that by the sound of her voice - but she
did need to get off by herself for a while to feel nature around
her. To feel something bigger than herself. She's done that before,
in college and med school when there were rough times."

"You're sure about that? The Potomac Highlands? Can you be
more specific?"

"Sorry, no. She knows them too well. They are as wild as you
can get this close to the Baltimore-Washington Metropolitan area.
When Bill had only a short leave in port we often went there as a
family. Over the years we hit all the high spots - Seneca Rocks,
Molly Sods, Blackwater Falls, Canaan Valley, Cass Railroad... " Her
face brightened with an idea. "When the children were older, we
went to Canaan Valley in the winter to ski. She liked that."
Mulder's brows drew together. Margaret noticed the pained
expression. "A ski resort... Not likely this time, I guess."

"I don't see it, besides it's been a dry season so far. No
favorite state park? No special place she liked to go."

After a moment's thought, Dana's mother sadly shook her head.
"I'm sorry. Dana was always very considerate of her father. When we
sat down as a family to decide where we would go, she always let
him have her vote. She knew how much these trips meant to him
because he was with us so seldom. And when she got to be older,
like most teenagers, she got pretty silent. If she had a special
place she kept it secret."

Mulder sighed deeply. At least a direction but not much to go
on. Unexpectedly, he felt Margaret's hand on his cheek. "A lot of
those state parks close down in the winter. That should narrow your
search. Check the Visitor's Center. The Bureau's database is pretty
complete, I'm sure, but, under current budget constraints, I doubt
they would see a need to keep current records on the operating
hours of the West Virginia Park System."

He gave her a small smile and his eyes had softened to a fond
warmth. "I see where she gets her gift for deduction. Visitor's
Center, I'll do that." He took in his long hand, her slim one, as
small as Dana's, though the skin was no longer as soft and smooth.
"I should go, we have a lot of driving ahead of us."

That brought Margaret's attention back to Evan. He had
advanced part way up the walk but kept his distance, unable to
ignore how comfortable the lean agent and the woman were with one
other.

"What is HE doing here?" Margaret asked in a whisper, a little
unhappily.

Mulder looked over his shoulder. If Byers, with his wrestler's
build, strong neck and broad face, had been dressed in a white
uniform, he could easily have passed for an orderly from a state
hospital. The comparison was not that far from the truth. "He's my
'keeper'. Skinner doesn't want me on this alone."

Taking the glance in his direction as an invitation, Evan came
forward. He and Margaret greeted each other with a formal civility.
After briefly filling the physician in on the little he had
learned, Mulder turned to follow him back to the car, but was
stopped by Margaret's hand on his arm.

"Fox... a moment."

The attractive man, who had captured so much of her daughter's
affections and her own, turned, "Mrs. Scully, we'll find her."

"I know you will, Fox. I trust you. Dana trusts you."

He let his chin drop onto his chest, the wayward lock of hair
falling across his forehead. "There are times I wonder why."

"Do you?" Intently, she watched those sad, hazel eyes close as
if in pain. "She worries about you, you know."

"Since that damn Witness Protection Program assignment with
Angela..."

"Since the day she met you, but especially since then."

"I haven't been there for her."

"Don't worry. I know Dana. She has patience. She'll wait."

He made no response but, as if he would have added something,
if he could only have found the words, he didn't turn away either.

"She told me about the amnesia," Maggie said softly, brushing
his hair back, unaware that she had lightly touched the spot where
the hired thug's baton had brutally impacted with his skull,
bringing on the blackness, the emptiness, the unknowing. He
shivered.

"You scared her so. She felt so guilty for being the cause of
your memory coming back so terribly. She had thought for a moment
-" she halted.

"What?" he asked, afraid to speak above a whisper.

"That you would die. Of the shock." He bit his lip and closed
his eyes again, saying nothing. "She was pretty quiet on the
subject after that. I was worried, but I didn't want to push her
for details."

"It was bad," he whispered, amazed he was able to reveal this.
He had never admitted even this much to Scully. Though he knew the
older woman wanted more, he took her hand from his cheek and held
it in his for a moment. "I have to go. Evan's waiting."

Margaret was disappointed, hurt that he would not let her in
and sensed he had also pushed Dana away like this. Her voice
sprinkled with bitterness, she said, "I'm sure Evan Byers is a nice
person, Fox, but what do you think he is really waiting for?"

<I've been wondering the same thing,> Mulder admitted sadly to
himself as he walked out to the car where Evan, indeed, waited.

End of Book II, Chapter 6

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