Open Hearts

Wed Jan 29 1997

Disclaimer: characters, concepts and situations in this
story are property of Chris Carter, 1013 Productions, Vince Gilligan,
and other people who aren't us. No infringement on existing copyrights
is intended.

This is a journal story in our (still looking for a good
name for it) "Book" series. It takes place during the FOURTH SEASON
episode "Paper Hearts", written by Vince Gilligan. We present this
as a tribute and homage to a wonderful episode of our favorite show.

There is some "adult" language in this story. PG-13 and
4th season spoilers.

If you have comments, please write to us:
Vickie Moseley is vickiemoseley1978@yahoo.com <mailto:>
Summer is summer@camelot.bradley.edu <mailto:summer@camelot.bradley.edu>

...we adore and answer all mail.

Open Hearts
An X-Files Thing
by Summer (summer@camelot.bradley.edu)
In Tandem with Vickie Moseley

Part One

The Journal of Fox Mulder

Thursday, 11 November 1996

Hadn't realized how long it's been since I made a journal
entry. Not regularly for quite some little time now... getting lax
again. Bad habit. God I'm tired. Gotta get this dream down.

A red dot of light appeared on the wall of my living room.
It turned into red letters: FOLLOW. So... I did. Wandered through
backyards filled with swingsets and gardens. Past a sign, but I
wasn't paying attention, didn't see the sign. The red dot led me
through the woods and I saw a little blond girl on the forest
floor.

She sank into the ground before I could reach her.

...Well, this is a new kind of nightmare, isn't it, Dr.
Mulder. And dammit, my leg's asleep from sitting on it when I fell
into the chair to write this. Okay. Okay. The little girl wasn't
Sam. Wasn't any child I've ever seen anywhere, even in case files
or the newspaper or on TV. She's a stranger to me.

That's odd. I always dream of people I've seen before: I
never forget anything I see, so my brain always has plenty of
visual resources to call upon. If it wants to show me a person, it
just flips through the mental photo album, grabs an appropriate
face and voila, instant dream.

But I don't know this little girl. I've never seen her
before. Who is she?

And why did this dream feel so different? Urgent. Foreign.
Like I was tuned into a new frequency tonight. Even when I dream
I'm someone else, instead of Fox Mulder, there's a sense of "me"
being in control. I didn't have that sense tonight.

Probably I'll psychoanalyze a perfectly obvious, ordinary
reason tomorrow, once I've actually managed to get some rest.

As if.

Friday 12 November

Well, now that I've dusted off the old journal, so to
speak... it's not that it's been a while since I wrote, it's just
that my "entries" lately have been fast notes on scraps of paper.
We've been out in the field nonstop for weeks. Time to catch our
breath and catch up on paperwork.

Times like these are slow torture to me, but Scully seems to
relish having a breather now and then. She's having lunch with her
mother today, apparently. I almost invited myself along. It's been
a while since I saw Mrs. Scully, and I'm still on edge... I never
could come up with the "perfectly obvious" reason for that fucking
bizarre dream last night, and it's been on my mind all day. I keep
jumping at shadows here in the office, of all places-- imagining I
see that red dot of light in the corner of my eye. It's not fear,
not even apprehension... it's even stranger. It's desperation. I'm
frantic to find out what that light is, what it means.

One thing my psychology studies ingrained in me was the
constant self-monitoring, self-analysis that led me to start this
journal in the first damn place. If I can keep track of my
problems, I've got a much better chance of understanding them.

Usually I'd just analyze the dream, try to understand the
subconcious motivators it portends, the whole tedious exercise. As
much distance as I've put between me and that Ph.D., I've got to
admit, it usually works. But I can't figure this one out. A red
light leads me to the woods, where a little blond girl lies dead
on the ground. The earth swallows her up before I can get to her.
If we were on a case, it would make sense-- the need to reach a
victim before it's too late--

"...dead on the ground". I didn't realize until just now.
The little girl was dead.

--shit, I thought I saw that red light again. No. It's just
the fluorescent tube by the door, flickering again.

Red lights, dead children. I think this should wait 'til I
have more time than my lunch hour to work through it.

Okayokay, same dream again but I managed to get some more
details this time... I'm here in the apartment, the red light
appears on the wall, spells "FOLLOW", so I do, go through yards,
swingsets, gardens, I pass a white car-- the red light lingers on
the car-- then it's into the woods, through trees and bushes to
the place where the little blond girl lies, and the red dot
appears on her for a second, it spells something or it makes some
kind of shape on her chest. She sinks into the ground before I can
reach her.

I know the way through those woods, and I'm sure they're
close by... they seem familiar, and the trees, the air, the
atmosphere-- it's East Coast woods. Walking distance from here, in
the dream, but anything can be that close when you're asleep.
Where is it really?

Where am I?

--God, for a second I really didn't know if I was in
Arlington or Chilmark. Been a while since I had a lapse like that.
Could those woods be on the Vineyard? Could the girl be Samantha?

No. Why would I dream of stranger in my sister's place? It's
always been Sam in my dreams about her, even when other things
have changed. Sometimes it's just lights and I'm paralyzed,
sometimes I see the grey figures as they take her, sometimes it's
men dressed in black and someone holds me down, sometimes it's
dark and I can only hear her voice. But those dreams always start
with Samantha. And end without her.

Sam. It's not about you this time, is it? Why would I hide
fears about my sister behind another little girl's face? I've
lived with this all my life... there's nothing more to run from.
I've faced the awful truth.

Haven't I?

Saturday 13 November

Oy, expense reports, and on a Saturday, no less.

Scully's noticing the lack of sleep. How can she tell? Sure,
I'm irritable and jumping at every movement in the room, but I
always do that. I must really be bad, I guess, because she offered
to work at her desk upstairs, if I want the basement to myself.

I told her I'm just afflicted with cabin fever and the
deleterious effects of making out expense reports for our last
four cases, all in one huge doomed undertaking. There's no way I'm
going to get the Bureau to spring for TWO cellphones lost in the
line of duty... in fact, since I'm filing the reports en masse,
they probably won't approve EITHER remuneration. Thank god for
business deductions.

...Damn. Still can't get that dream off my mind. With Scully
gone to lunch, the office seems to fill up with it. Those woods,
right on the edge of familiar. The journey through backyards--
every yard filled with toys or swings or a flowering garden-- the
white car. Trees and dead leaves and earth. The red will-o-the-
wisp bobbing and shining in the darkness, leading the way.

That little blonde girl.

I can't see how the symbolism fits with anything that's been
weighing on my mind, of late. The last time I dreamed of Sam
was... four, five, six days ago... Right, the day we got back from
Montana. Six days ago. That was Old Faithful, complete with the
Stratego game and the Spielbergian light show out the windows and
the outline of the skinny grey alien at the door. I don't think
I'm due for any new gut-chewing over that one. The X-Files are
open, we are doing good work, and we will find out what happened
to Samantha-- we'll find her.

So if these images don't come from my present or my past,
then that leaves my future. Precognitive dreams.

Scully always insists on seeing my dated journal entries
whenever I claim precognition, and three times I've managed to
record a dream image that I later saw in reality and confront her
with it. Every little bit helps. Of course, she managed to explain
them all away, but I've come to expect that. And it's fun to make
her go dig through the science journals to come up with a
perfectly rational explanation. That is the foundation of our
relationship, after all-- ideological tug-of-war.

Cryptonesia is her favorite line, currently. Subconciously
stored information. This, though she usually doesn't go for the
Freudian idea that the subconcious mind keeps a record of
everything, only a small portion of which is accessible to the
conciousness. Hell, I never liked that psychological model myself
until it was convenient... no, it makes sense for me. My mind
really DOES work like a camera. I know the controversies about
hypnoregression, but I have every reason to believe that my
recovered memories are accurate.

Except that they keep changing every time I turn around.

Okay, maybe I am overdue for a gut-chewing session. Fuck.
Sure, this is a great respite from expense reports. If Scully
comes in here and finds me depressed, she'll either take off for
the second floor or try to make me talk about it, and I'd like to
avoid either option.

If it's a precognitive dream, it would probably have
something to do with a case we'll be going out on, eventually. I
should go through my prospective files, check my email, read the
latest issue of The Lone Gunman. Try to anticipate it. All right.
Good. That's a plan.

FOLLOW...

Home sweet apartment. I didn't find anything at work that
looked like a match, so I went through all my red-ringed articles
and highlit news stories here... there've been some disappearances
in North Dakota, children, that I think look like a pattern-- all
three kids went missing at school bus stops-- but those were boys,
five to seven.

This was a little girl, older than that, and I could swear
it's close by-- definitely on the East Coast, probably in
Virginia, dammit, I even think it's in Fairfax County. Why doesn't
that red fucking Tinkerbell light show up NOW and lead me to her?
I can't shake these images. It's that light. It's like somebody
trying to tell me something. But at least I know why I'm fixated
on this dream. If it's precognitive, and I'm more and more certain
that it is, then I may be able to prevent whatever's going to
happen to that child. Maybe if I recognize it, find it in time...
maybe when it really happens, I won't be too late.

Two nights in a row. I'm gambling for a third, leaving this
notebook comfortably in reach to write down whatever I see. This
time I'll get the details. The only dilemma: sleeping pills. This
dream woke me up two nights running, I was thrown out before I
could understand what was happening. If I took a pill, I might
stay in the dream long enough to find out more... or I might sleep
so long that I'd forget the dream entirely before I wake up. No.
No drugs.


I had it! Damn, damn, I had it, I saw it, WHAT WAS IT--

Red light appeared on the wall. FOLLOW. I followed through
yards, past the rope swing, through the garden. A parking lot;
asphalt under my running shoes; white car. The red light lingers
on it, spells MAD HAT. --Mad hat? Was that it? No, I had more...
mad hat. Mad hatter? Dam tah? An anagram? A rhyme? HAD THAT, mat
had, no, it must be mad hatter. The little girl, Alice, through
the looking glass-- through the ground-- through the land.
Wonderland. Oh god.

Oh god, the little girl. It's Roche. It's John Lee fucking
Roche, the light made a heart on her chest, it's his cloth hearts,
it's paper hearts. I saw the sign--

Sunday 14 November

She's dead. There was never anything I could do to change
it. Dead, long dead, twenty years dead. So many different ways to
say it's over.

For her. For us it means the start of a new investigation.
Skinner agreed to delay our current paperwork for this, though he
glowered at me when he signed off on it. Pursuing a case because
of a dream hasn't made me his candidate for agent of the year.

Scully wasn't thrilled either. She showed up at Manassus
Park when I called for the forensics team this morning. Shook her
head at me when I explained about the dream. But then we found
her. And while the evidence was dug up and recovered and brought
back for analysis, Scully thought it over and, of course, came up
with a sensible explanation. Apparently I'm so damn good that I
solved this one in my sleep.

I worked on Paper Hearts... was it '90? I was looking at X-
File cases at the time. God, that was a tough one. All the
victims, all those little girls. And at first I thought maybe it
was a series of abductions... it was too hard, then, to separate
the mishmash of my own recovered memories from the X-Files cases I
was going over and the literature I was reading about UFOs and the
cases I studied for the Investigative Support Unit. Fortunately I
never told anyone about the original ET theory, and eventually I
put enough distance between me and the case to be more objective
and see it truly.

I did a short assessment-- it was okay. Detached. He's a
travelling salesman, I theorized. Gains people's trust, comes into
their homes, tags their kids. Patterson wasn't satisfied with
that. "You're not letting yourself see this one's motives," he
said.

"He's a child molester. That's the motive."

"You can't shy away just because he preys on little girls.
It's that much more important for you to climb inside his head and
tell us what it's like in there."

I told him I could do the profile without getting that deep
into it.

"Not in my unit, you can't."

So yeah, I did it his way. And profiled the unsub and it
broke the case and VICAP caught Roche and he confessed to the
murders of thirteen little girls. Got a written commendation after
I testified at his trial and made sure he couldn't plead insanity.
Took a vacation after that one.

But we never found his souvenirs, the cloth hearts he cut
out of their clothes. Never got to count them to make sure the
numbers lined up. The case was closed, but it wasn't really over.

Scully says I've kept it with me, that I've been
subconciously putting together the pieces since 1990. Damn, I'm
slow. And now the case is open again. Roche started killing in
1979. It's still not over for us. Even if it comes so far too late
for this lost little girl.

But it will finally be over for her family. They'll have her
picture on the mantle, still. Her things packed away in a back
room. A favorite doll left out, maybe. Her coloring books still
stacked by the sofa. Now it can all be put to rest... that's how
Scully says it. Laid to rest. It sounds so proper and peaceful.

But it's not. It's never peaceful to put a child in the
ground. And never, never a murdered child. There's no rest in
that, no peace...

I can do this. Handle this. We've done it before. It's never
easy for anyone to deliver this kind of news, and at least I can
offer some empathy. I know what it's like... to always wonder. And
now they'll know. I know how they think they've accepted this
possibility. And I know they're wrong. She's still there, and nine
years old, until we find her, and suddenly after all these
years... she's dead..

Already I'm anticipating delivering the news, and we haven't
even found out who she was. But Scully's so fast at making
matches. It's the thorough examinations she does, all the
infinitesimal details she manages to discern. Most pathologists
would stop at clothes and teeth.

Scully will want us to tell the family ourselves. I'll have
to be ready for that. I need to see the body again, the cut-out
heart in the pajama top, the clothes she was wearing, and make
that twenty-year-old skeleton become a real person again for me.
Someone's little girl wore those clothes before Roche cut the
heart out of them. Easier to see "the body" while we're exhuming,
but I have to remember her as a living child, now.

And find a way not to see Samantha in her place.




Dana Scully's Personal Log

Thursday, November 11, 1996

My angel wing begonia died. What was I to expect? We've been
on the road almost five solid weeks. Nothing can go five weeks
without water, and since it hadn't been that well cared for to begin
with, it succumbed this time. Just as well. I think Mom's right--I
need to start collecting cacti. Or air ferns. Or get a fish tank and
just keep water and plastic plants in it like Mulder does. At least it
would add a little humidity to the apartment.

Aside from the demise of my houseplant, it was so nice to be home.
I had a closet full of dirty suits that I had to drop off this morning.
If Mulder comes up with another road trip in the next three days,
before they're out of the cleaners, I just might have to shoot him
again to avoid going naked while we investigate the case.

I can never let him read this log.

I was glad to get Mulder back in DC in one piece, actually. These
cases were grueling and more taxing than any we've had in the last
several months. I didn't think I would make it through the last one.
I was positive that even if I did, I would be flying home with
Mulder on a stretcher again. Someday the man will learn to duck.
This time he was lucky and the bad guys were just bad aims. But
one of these days, the old Mulder luck is gonna run out.

Mulder luck. An oxymoron.

I have to fold the load that just quit in the dryer and then I'm off to
bed. Tom Clancy's latest (still waiting on my bedside dresser) and
my own bed with my own pillow awaits.

I feel like I've died and gone to heaven.

Friday, November 12

Today was a great day! I got most of the reports finished up, at
least as far as I can go before handing them off to Mulder. I had
lunch with Mom and she forgot to nag me about not calling her
while we were out of town. She didn't even remind me to ask
Mulder to Thanksgiving (although I suspect that's because she's
going to call him herself this year). And, if wonders will never
cease, I got home early enough to get caught up on my bills and
watch some television.

There are times that I almost wish this was the norm of my life,
rather than the exception. It's nice to have a nine to five, not too
much to worry about job. It's nice to come home during rush hour,
rather than in the middle of the night. It's nice to get to the video
store and actually find titles that I want to watch.

Oh, god, I'm making myself sick here.

Seriously, I'm happy to have the time to relax. I wish the same
were true for my partner. I would have expected Mulder to be well
into his normal at-home routine by now. It's like he flips a switch.
He comes home from cases like these, sleeps for 18 hours straight,
eats like a horse for two days and then he's chomping at the bit,
complaining about the paperwork at the office, the traffic at rush
hour commute, his cable company's latest offerings--anything to let
me know that he's ready to go out and play again.

Not that way this time. I should have noticed yesterday, but I was
so glad to be home that I didn't let it sink in. He was in the office
before me. I got in at 8:30. If he was on his normal schedule,
Mulder would have dragged his sorry ass in around eleven and begged
to go to lunch immediately.

Both yesterday and today he's been jumpy as hell. Come to think
of it, I don't know if he even went to lunch today. I almost asked
him to come with Mom and me, she always asks about him, but he
was so deep in thought (or half asleep) at his desk that I decided
not to disturb him.

I hate this. Now I don't know if Mulder is really having problems
or if it's just my 'mother hen gene' kicking in. Mom is always
warning me that I make too much of some of Mulder's little
'quirks'. She tells me that dark circles under the eyes of a bachelor
do not necessarily mean that he isn't sleeping. It _could_ mean that
he has better things to do with his time than sleep.

I wanted to squelch that one real fast, but what could I have said
that wouldn't have gotten me in instant hot water? I mean, if I
were to tell her that Mulder doesn't have anyone to cause him to
lose sleep, she would immediately want to know how I know. And
then, the next part of the conversation would be why _I_ don't
have anyone in _my_ life to cause me to lose sleep. And from
there, the whole discussion is right down the crapper. No way.
I wasn't about to fall into that trap this time.

But I'm getting that sickening feeling in the pit of my stomach.
Time to go on 'Mulder watch' again. The analogy of a suicide
watch isn't lost on this one, either. When he gets like this, I just
know it's only a matter of time before he runs off and does
something stupid. At least lately he's calling me before he runs off.
Even a minor improvement is appreciated. It means I spend the
time worried sick that he's getting himself killed and not wondering
where the hell he is. Oh, yeah, a real improvement there.

Mulder watch. I wonder if it's possible to get that item put on my
list of job responsibilities. It's apparent that I am the only member
of the Bureau who has that duty. It puts me in my own
classification, job-wise. I should be getting merit increases based
on my performance in that area. If I keep Mulder productive and
away from the hospital for an entire fiscal quarter, I should get a big
bump in pay.

As if.

Saturday, November 13, 1996

It was gorgeous outside. This was a perfect Indian Summer day. I
really wanted to go over to Mom's and help her put the garden to
bed for the winter. Last year we found a bunch of cherry tomatoes
that must have escaped the frost before Halloween and ripened in
the warm weather just like we've been having. We had chef salad
with fresh from the garden cherry tomatoes. But instead, I gave up
that wonderful possibility to stay in the basement and help Mulder
do the expense reports.

Ah yes, the joys of writing fiction.

He KNOWS he's going to get his ass chewed for those cell phones.
I know that he couldn't help losing the one, it was slippery as all
get out with that goopy substance on it. Thank God he got the
call through for backup before he dropped it in the storage tank.
Otherwise, I'd be writing a eulogy instead of an expense report.

But the other one was just plain Mulder clumsiness. No if, ands, or
buts. The same man who can make writing on a whiteboard look
like a chorographed ballet cannot keep hold of ANYTHING in his
hand for more than ten minutes.

I once threatened to velcro the damned phone to his wrist. That
idea is looking better all the time.

But this time, it's coming out of HIS pocket. I have MY cell
phone, thank you very much. And I had the foresight not to
_hand_ it to him to call the Sheriff. I called myself. Pissed
Mulder off, but at that moment, I couldn't have cared less.

He looked like death warmed over today. At one point, I was sure
that he was about to fall asleep right there at his desk. I even
offered to go up to my 'other' desk and give him some privacy. I
mean, if he can't sleep on his couch, maybe he can sleep at his desk.
My god, how long before he starts only sleeping when we're in
planes? I can see my life two years from now, going on airplane
trips every single night so the Mulder can get some sleep.

Well, it will take some time to get that image out of my head.

After we played 'phone, phone, who lost the phone' for the
majority of a beautiful day, I came home and felt guilty as hell.
I had wanted to call Mulder and see what he was up to, but I figured
he wanted to be alone for a while.

...Not true. *I* wanted to be alone for a while. After being joined
at the hip for five solid weeks, I wanted some downtime from Fox
Mulder and his amazing technicolor phobias. I just wanted to go
home and hide in my own little world for a while. So, I ignored
that gnawing feeling that I have to keep tabs on him every minute.
That awful feeling that if I don't keep him under strict surveillance,
he'll fall apart faster than one of those jigsaw puzzles that Grandma
Scully used to love to put together. I just decided that this
weekend, I am NOT my partner's keeper. Fox Mulder managed to
muddle through 31 years of his life on his own; I'm sure he can
make it through one weekend without me.

Not that I want to think that he's that capable. It's funny. I see
him working and all I can think about is 'God, will I ever get to be
_that_ good--that sure, that confident, that relentless, that steady in
my pursuits.' And then I watch him struggle to deal with all the
mundane stuff, like sleeping and eating and the most elemental of
living skills, and I can't help but want to cut up his steak and fork
it into his mouth. It's annoying. It's confusing. I makes me want
to scream at him to GROW UP AND ACT HIS AGE.

I know better. I know that sometimes, it's me that acts like I'm in
need of a keeper and he's the Rock of Gibraltar. But it's so easy to
forget those times when he acts like he's been acting lately.

If I thought it would do any good, I'd try to get him to talk about
it. But that's about as effective as nailing jam to a wall. Mulder
is at his slipperiest when he is avoiding an emotional meltdown. I
know; I've become expert at the signs.

I just have to be on hand with the broom and dustpan to pick up the
shards.

Sunday, November 14, 1996

Well, that didn't take long. Emotional meltdown. Established time
of arrival, approximately 5:05 am Eastern Standard Time. At least,
that's when he put in the call to the Bureau's forensics team to
come out to the middle of a park in Fairfax Co. and start looking
for a body that was buried almost 20 years ago.

When he called, I could _hear_ the manic sound that his voice gets
when he's tettering on the edge. Balancing that high wire of sanity
again. This time, it was just to get me out of bed and down to the
park to stay with him. I don't know if he expected me to be there
to comfort him if he was wrong or to stand witness for him if he
was right. Or vice versa. The really scary part was--he WAS
right.

They found a body, all right. A little girl. Oh, god. Not another
little girl. A little younger than 8. On some level, I think that fact
alone gave me some relief. But then I realized that Mulder hadn't
expected to find what I assumed he was looking for. He knew that
wasn't Samantha in that grave long before the forensics team
uncovered their first spoonful of dirt.

How did he know?

He told me about his dream. Mental note--since Russia, he has
been a lot more forthcoming about his dreams and his mental state.
I still get the requisite share of 'I'm fine, Scully', but interspersed
with them is quite a few 'I'm tired', 'My head hurts', and the more
revealing 'I had a bad dream'. Revelations like that make the Ten
Commandments on the Stone Tablets seem like the jokes on Laffy Taffy
wrappers.

So he told me his dream. Red lights. Little red lights. At first,
all I could think about was the little red dot of a laser sight.
The kind that you look down and see on your chest about 3 seconds
before some asshole shatters your sternum and blows your heart to
kingdom come. That sent some good shivers down my spine, let
me tell you.

But the red dots weren't on Mulder. They were on the wall of his
apartment. And they 'told' him to follow them. OK. As far as
dreams go, we are still working in the realms of sanity.

The little red dots lead him through some backyards, past an old
truck of some kind, up to Bosher's Run Park. Here's where I started
getting worried. Mulder told me that he 'didn't see the name on
the sign to the park the first two nights of the dream.' _First TWO
nights_? He's had this dream three nights in a row. But it gets
better.

He follows the red light and it lands on a tree. Then it slides down
the tree and rests on a little girl, lying on the ground. Even before
he could get to her, Mulder knew she was dead. He described her in
perfect detail. Small for her age, slight of build, blond hair, pug
nose.

By this time, the forensics team has uncovered the skull. I could
tell just by looking that it was a child. The body had been there a
long time, and I would have run the required tests to determine
exactly how long, but Mulder supplied me with the information.

Suddenly, everything on earth demanded that he see the chest area.
The team was doing the SOP: they had cordoned off the area and
run string markers. They usually work from one direction, north to
south, and were doing so this time. Unfortunately, that wasn't the
way Mulder wanted them to go. What he wanted was in the south
end of the area. Ignoring me and everyone else, he stooped down
and started digging in the dirt at the south end, just below the head.
The chest area, he kept wanting to see the chest area.

I couldn't help but wonder if the dream had triggered something a
lot more serious. Mulder, even though he thumbs his nose at the
'corporate ladder' and loves to circumvent procedure whenever it
suits him, doesn't mess with evidence. Not as a general rule. He
treats evidence as sacred. I've only seen him like that one other
time. In Iowa. When we found that shallow grave and we both
were certain we had found Ruby Morris' final resting place.

I know exactly how close to the edge he came with that case.

Mulder was looking at the ground and telling me exactly how the
little girl had died: strangled. How the killer took a souvenir, a
cloth heart cut from the child's pajamas after the death. It started
scaring me that he knew so much, and all from a dream.

But he told me that he knew all that, not from a dream, but from an
old case. An old case from 1990. John Lee Roche. Serial killer.
His victims were all little girls between the ages of 6 and 10.

Once he found the heart-shaped hole in the little nightgown, he
seemed satisfied. I was able to get him to go to the office, sit down
and tell me what was going on.

He had been asked in on this one by Reggie Purdue. Mulder was
the one to figure out that the killer was fairly ordinary, a traveling
salesman. His profile lead to the arrest and subsequent conviction
of Roche, who confessed to thirteen murders.

The look on his face was what really ate at me. Here he sat, having
successfully tracked and convicted a man capable of murdering
over a dozen little children, and goddamn him if Mulder didn't
look--guilty. That he should have known that there were others.
That he *did* know that there were others, and he hadn't looked
hard enough to prove that and find them. Like it was some kind of
sin for him to have gone on, gotten on with his life, when there
were other little girls left to find.

This dream is nothing. It's his unconscious mind, which has been working
non-stop for five weeks, breaking out and solving something that had been
bothering him for 6 years. He said it himself once: "Dreams are the
answers to questions we haven't yet learned how to ask." I always liked
that one-- well enough to note it down, well enough to remember it still.
It rings true. At any rate, I'm more concerned at his reaction to the dream
than at the dream itself. He was looking haunted, as only Mulder can look
haunted.

I wanted to wrap him in Grandma Scully's quilt, make him a strong
hot toddy (just like Ahab used to love when he was home for a few
days), and lock him in a room with just his couch and his bed for a
week.

Instead, I identified the body and we decided to go in the morning
to confirm the identification.

My clothes aren't out of the cleaners, yet. I'm letting him off the
hook this time. It's a good thing I lost weight on this last trip or
I really would have nothing to wear.




The Journals of Fox Mulder

Monday 15 November

We found the hearts.

The little girl's name was Addie Sparks. Scully identified
her in just a few hours, matching mainly on the clothes.

She had a little pocket on her pajama top, embroidered
with a dollar sign. Scully said the distinctive $ clinched the
match.

Addie went missing in 1975. John Lee Roche started killing
in '79. Or that's what we thought. It's what I told Scully, but
she had the database look for any girls of the right age from 1970
to 1982, because that's where the preliminary forensic evidence
placed the time she was buried. If she had limited the search from
1979, we wouldn't have IDed Addie Sparks so quickly. Scully
usually doesn't abide by preconceptions when she's dealing with
evidence. That's something I've always valued in her. She always
finds and follows the evidence.

Even if neither of us wants to go where it leads.

We've done this so many times-- questioned people, brought
bad news-- it never gets any easier. It probably shouldn't. The
day it doesn't hurt a little to deliver news of a person's death
is the day you should retire, Reggie used to tell us. "If you
don't care about people, how can you care about justice?" he'd
say.

Mr. Sparks... the moment Scully said, "We're from the FBI,"
he knew.

He said, "You found Addie."

I remember once the police came by our house, a few months
afterward. Dad had a glove compartment full of speeding tickets
from around the time when it happened that he hadn't paid off...
didn't care enough to pay off... enough tickets that, as per
routine, a warrant went out for him.

When she opened the door and saw the officers, Mom put her
hands over her eyes and said, "Samantha."

The cops looked at each other uncomfortably, and one of them
said, "No, ma'am."

I thought she'd never stop crying. I was so glad Dad wasn't
home. And that Mom knew where he kept the cashbox so we could pay
off the tickets. I don't know what would have happened if they had
come when he was there.

Scully gave Mr. Sparks a fragment of Addie's pajamas, the
little pocket with the dollar sign. "Her mother sewed it for the
Tooth Fairy," he told us. "I used to put a quarter in it."

Samantha had a special Tooth Fairy doll. We called it
Peaseblossom. It had a pocket for the tooth and it was made so that
its plastic hand would hold a coin. Once Dad was on a trip, and
Mom didn't have any change, and Sam lost her lower right canine. I
got to put the JFK half-dollar in Peaseblossom's hand that night.
Took it out of my coin collection. Dad jumped all over me later
for breaking up the set, but he didn't mind once Mom told him what
it was for.

"You say the man who did this, he's in jail already?" Mr.
Sparks asked.

I was so glad to be able to say, this time: "Yes sir. And he
won't get out."

He said, "I used to think that missing was worse than dead
because you never knew what happened." He was crying by then, and
if I hadn't been so careful to prepare for this I think I would
have lost it. "But now that I know, I'm glad my wife's not here.
She got it luckier..."

He's right. What could you imagine, what darkness could you
dream, worse than a death like this-- god, a little girl strangled
with an electrical cord by a frustrated vacuum-cleaner salesman,
desecrated... he never, he didn't touch them except to wind the
cord, but... shut the door, that case is solved, the signature is
irrelevant now. --And once he'd played through his fantasies, he cut
out those trophies.

It wasn't enough to kill them. He had to possess each one of
them; he had to take their hearts. Not _really_, because reality
would interfere with the saccharine facade of his dreams. So he
took a paper pattern and put it on her chest, and cut around it
with little manicure scissors. He stole their hearts, stole them
from their families, and hid them so no one would ever know. And
they'd be young forever. I hated this case. Oh, I hated it.

I'd work on the profile for an hour and have to get away
from it somehow, anyhow. I took off at lunch a few times and went
to a movie theater, the same theater, the same second-run movie
every time-- just to escape from it. I wanted to bathe in
battery acid. Anything to stop imagining the empty salesman's
patter and the scoping, watchful eyes.

Eight gauge electrical cord, cut off one of his vacuum
cleaners. Once we knew the kind of cord, I could tell them he had
taken it off the appliances he sold-- where else would he get it--
and the only electrical appliance that's really sold door to door
is a vacuum cleaner. Broke the case. Broke my back. Broke my
paper heart.

Mr. Sparks gave the evidence bag with the pocket back to
Scully. "How many more people like me are you going to see today?"
he asked me. "Were there other victims you didn't know about?"

Scully looked at me; she knew it was like a mandate, that
now I couldn't rest until I knew for sure. She nodded to me, just
a little. Good. Relief. Good.

As we went out to the car, I could see the image from my
dream again. The white car... I saw now it was Roche's white El
Camino... my red light spelling MAD HAT on the side.

"The unsub is playing out a terrible fantasy formed from the
story of Alice in Wonderland, wherein he is the Mad Hatter,
offering an escape from a cruel and unjust world to little Alice,
whoever she may be. His high intelligence prevents him from
maintaining this fantasy for long; the unsub recognizes that
behind this dream lie darker, psychosexual motivations. But for
the duration of each child's abduction, the unsub is able to
pretend that he is a kind, whimsical liberator leading the girl to
a wondrous place... until the dream comes to its violent end."

Roche smiled at me when I read that profile on the stand.

I told Scully that I had seen Roche's car in my dream, that
I thought he might have kept the cloth hearts there, where they'd
be close by.

Why now? Why not before? Patterson was right. I never
let myself quite see into his head, and every time I did, I ran.
I could have found those hearts six years ago and it would all
be done by now. But once he confessed and I testified at his
hearing... I scuttled back into my safe little basement, back
to my X-Files, as fast as my legs would carry me.

We made a few calls on the way back to HQ, and found out
that Roche's car was sold at an auction in '92. Before we got the
news, though, Scully went down to put the pocket back in the
evidence room. I followed her, my mind on that car-- they searched
his belongings in '90, and I made them go through all the vacuum
cleaners, thinking maybe they were stuck into one of the machines
where the filter usually goes. The lining of his suitcases, the
pockets of all his clothes... I'm not sure I ever even thought
about the car.

Scully looked at the pocket with its sewn dollar sign as she
put it away. "I used to always wonder how my parents got a quarter
under my pillow without waking me."

"You didn't believe in the Tooth Fairy?" I asked absently,
and then I had to smile. "Of course you didn't... When I lost my
front tooth my dad taught me how to whistle."

"I've never heard you whistle," she said.

"Once my teeth came back, I couldn't do it any more."

Scully whistled a little of that marching song from Bridge
Over the River Kwai. I demonstrated my disability by attempting to
whistle along, but all I can get is a hollow sound.

We'd left the evidence room by then, and suddenly I
registered all the weird looks we were getting from agents in the
check-in room. Scully blithely whistled her way out the door, and
I have to say I relished going past them, ineffectually puckering
my lips and trying to make a little music.

She tried to teach me-- I kept waiting for a Lauren Bacall
imitation, i.e., "Put your lips together and blow", but that
didn't happen, unfortunately-- you'd never guess we were on a
case, but you take your downtime where you can get it. We both
knew that once the call came through we'd be on our way to
wherever Roche's car ended up. I don't think Scully was wild about
the idea of going on the road again already. It's been a while
since she's worn that grey t-shirt, and I'm pretty sure that one
only comes out when her blouses are all at the cleaner's.

But the car hadn't gotten far. Hollysville, Delaware.
Not such an bad drive. The trip was okay, though aside from the
occasional bout of whistling, we were both pretty much lost in
thought. Late afternoon we found the address.

The kid that got the car led us out to his garage. He'd
painted flames up the sides, very chic, and taken off the camper
shell. "Honest to God serial killer owned my car?" he asked, all
eager, breathless, scandalized and proud.

For that, kid, you get a knife in the upholstery. Detail
that. You can tell your friends the serial killer did it with his
machete.

We searched the all over the inside, and Scully looked
underneath, before I remembered the dream: MAD HAT in red, across
the back of the car.

The camper shell had been taken off and stored out behind
the garage, mummified in plastic, covered by dead leaves. Everything
rustled when we pulled it out. I felt all over the blue plush
lining and found a ragged edge, and there it was. A 1968 edition
of Alice in Wonderland with the original John Tenniel
illustrations.

And pressed inside, like dried flowers, old money, dead
leaves... paper hearts.

Sixteen.

Sixteen cloth hearts. Fourteen victims.

The bastard. He said thirteen. He took a polygraph.
Thirteen. It shouldn't surprise me, enrage me-- a child
molester, a murderer, and we expected him to tell us the
truth about how many little girls he strangled?

Tomorrow we go to question Roche. Two victims unaccounted
for. Two families still wondering.

Two hearts...

Tuesday 16 November

"Bring me my hearts, give them to me, and maybe I'll tell
you more."

Like an awful inversion of the fairy tales where giants
would conceal their hearts far from their homes to keep them
safe, John Lee Roche kept the cloth hearts of all his victims
hidden. We have them now. It should give us power over him..

But somehow, he's managed to take control.

"Maybe I'll tell you more."

The trip to the prison was tough enough. Then two hours
of processing the paperwork needed to see a prisoner in federal
custody, arguments from prison officials who kept insisting we
tell them why we had to see him, a phone call to clear it with
Skinner and another to run it by the lawyer who handled Roche's
plea bargain. Who tried to get him ruled not guilty by reason
of insanity. Who failed.

In court, Roche paid careful, solicitous attention to each
witness. He consulted his lawyer during questioning. Seemed very
interested and reasonable. The attorney looked understandably
distraught. You don't want your client to act bright-eyed and
bushy-tailed while you're arguing that he's too deranged to
answer for his crimes.

Roche would summon the lawyer back and whisper
something; the lawyer would straighten, unable to hide a puzzled
expression, and approach the stand.

"Mr. Mulder, how were you able to determine the
connection between the crimes of which my client stands accused,
and the children's book Alice in Wonderland?"

I remember bullshitting my answer. "A copy of the book
had been moved from a pile of toys and carefully placed on the
bookshelf at one of the abduction scenes." Big deal. He got each
of the girls silently, but not always cleanly. At some of the sites,
the blankets were hurled all around the room, dolls scattered,
stuffed animals piled randomly like drifts of snow.

Like all the "leaps" I made in profiling... or come to now,
in investigations... it wasn't any single, simple thing. It was a
whole collection of nuances that led to one inevitable conclusion.

I made them go back and get a photo album from every
family with recent pictures of each child. Patterson called me out
on that one. "Is this necessary? Do you need this for the profile?
These people are grieving. I don't want to bother them unless it's
important."

Like hell. Bill always wanted to keep tabs on just how
I was getting my conclusions. "Someday I'll figure out how to
catch that lightning in a bottle," he told me once, steel-eyed.

"It's necessary," I said. "And the families will want to do
anything that might help. Anything at all. They want to be
bothered, Bill. They need to feel like they're contributing
something."

They had the albums for me within a week. And I learned
each of their faces. Each girl had long blonde hair, fair skin, blue
eyes. There were pictures of eight of them wearing a headband.
Eight of the ten. We only knew about ten, then.

In the case reports on the kidnappings, peculiar details
stuck out. A stuffed white rabbit was missing from Kelli
Rochelle's shelf. Rene Harbison's blue hair ribbons were gone
from her dresser. A letter from a new overseas penpal that
Yvonne McGruder was writing to had been torn in half. That
might have been the one that tipped me off: the letter from
England, with the insignia on back. The lion and the unicorn.

Little things. Inconsequential things, never examined at
the time. I called the families and looked further. No, Kelli never
slept with the rabbit, it was stiff-jointed. She slept with a favorite
teddy bear, which had been left behind. (So the killer took it.) No,
now that I mentioned it, Rene always took off those ribbons
before bed, and she hadn't worn them since Sunday anyway. (So
the killer took those as well.) Yvonne was so excited about
writing to a little girl in England that she kept the letter under her
pillow. (When he saw the symbol with the lion and the unicorn,
he tried to snatch the letter away, but she must have held on until
the paper tore... and when she fought him, it was harder to
pretend he was charming her away to a wonderful, magical place.
By then I knew the fantasy was paramount for him.)

In John Tenniel's original illustrations for Lewis Carroll's
books, Alice is a little girl, ten at most, with long blond hair.
Nearly all subsequent versions of Alice were modelled on
Tenniel's artwork. The 1951 Disney Alice is also blonde, in a blue
dress with a starched white apron, white stockings, black Mary
Janes, wide blue eyes and a blue headband holding back her
yellow hair.

There were mushrooms growing on trees near two of the
shallow graves. He gave six of them cake and ice cream before he
killed them. Mostly later in his career. He was better at it, and
managed to get them to trust him enough to eat with him. Did the
cakes say EAT ME? The bottle, DRINK ME? Did he recite poems to
make them smile?

"How doth the little crocodile improve his shining tail, and
pour the waters of the Nile on every golden scale!"

Look for the names Dodgson, Tenniel, Lewis, Liddell,
Pleasance, Carroll, and Charles, I added to my profile. Probably
Dodgson, the author's true last name. If you have suspects, check
for chess pieces and playing cards. They were already looking for
childrens' books. After the first assessment went out, they were
looking for a travelling salesman in his forties or early fifties, no
family, very intelligent, who had anything childlike with him.

After the profile went out, they were looking for Roche.

He came under suspicion because he had-- like a dare-- a
pair of little lacy socks on the rearview mirror of that damned El
Camino. Some blessedly diligent cop in Fairmont noticed it when
he was giving Roche a parking ticket. The locals made a few
inquiries... he seemed like a nice guy... as a matter of routine,
sir, could we check out the items in question just to clear up
this misunderstanding?

The socks were new, had never been worn by a child,
murdered or otherwise. The odd thing was that he wanted them
back. The cops found it perplexing that Roche actually extended
his stay in Fairmont to get those socks back. They filed a report.
They answered our FBI alert. Patterson put his name on the list
and routed the report to me along with traffic infractions, B&Es,
priors and possibly related kidnap cases. It took me a week to sift
Roche out of the mix, to send back instructions on further
inquiry.

On the hotel register in Fairmont, Roche had signed his
name as Dodgson.

I cracked the spine of my Annotated Alice, getting ready
to question him. Patterson drilled at him first. Roche was stone,
but Bill was patient. "Do you remember where you were, the
night of August twelfth, 1987?"

Roche answered distantly, "Echoes fade and memories die."

I knew we had him. "Autumn frosts have slain July," I
quoted back. He looked up. "Did you slay Laura Thibault?"

"Still she haunts me, phantomwise / Alice moving under
skies / never seen by waking eyes." Roche nodded to me. "Yes. I
took Laura away. I took them all away."

Patterson, gruff but triumphant, "How many?"

"Pick a number." Always so casual. The bastard.

"We've found--" Reggie began, then redirected himself,
"several victims."

"All right," Roche said. "Thirteen."

Today we walked down the high-security passages; we
had to check our weapons. I hate taking off the Beretta. The
ankle holster is a hassle to get undone. And there's just something
about it-- Scully and I both hand over our service weapons, and
then I have to kneel down and wrestle with the other gun. I'm not
sure about carrying it... it's come in handy a grand total of once.
Then again, probably the day I don't wear the Beretta will be the
day the Glock blows up in my face while I'm chasing the latest
killer mutant.

And after all these precautions, locks and bolts and bars,
where is Roche? On a basketball court, shooting hoops.
Sometimes I wonder if the bars are to keep the inmates from
getting out, or to keep the rest of America from checking in for
free cable.

"Mulder," he said. Scully glanced from him to me. I don't
want to talk about how we caught him. Even to, especially to,
Scully. She seems to believe that I worked on cases for the ISU
the way I investigate X-File cases, and I'd like to let her think that
always. The last time Patterson dragged me back... and nearly
dragged me down... she saw a slice of what it had been like for
me then, and she was ready to skin me or Bill or both of us for it.
It really bothered her. I don't want to drag her into that again.

So I haven't really told her... Roche knows me. He's
familiar with me from the interrogation and the insanity hearings.
He knows I'm the one who made the Alice connections. I spent
hours trying to convince him to tell me where he hid those hearts.
Trying to gain his trust. Get him to confide in me. He knows me.

"You have a new partner," he observed. I wished I could
step in front of Scully then without pissing her off. I wished I
could make her stay away from him, from this.

I introduced her instead. And said, "We found Addie
Sparks."

Not a twitch. "Congratulations, I guess."

Scully dove in. "We also found your hearts. All sixteen of
them."

He paused-- and Roche is close to unflappable. I thought
maybe she'd struck just the right tone, or he was getting tired of
his games, or bored, and wanted to tell his story. But he went
back to shooting baskets.

I asked why he'd told us thirteen, and he said, "I dunno.
Thirteen sounds... more magical, you know...?"

"Who're the other two?" Scully asked. "You're in here for
life. You've got nothing to lose."

I winced; Roche is smart. I saw his answer coming.

"I've got nothing to gain," he replied, in that spacy,
offhand way he talks, like his mind is on something much more
interesting and these questions are merely bothersome, like bugs.

"You can gain one moment of decency in your life," I
said, though I know it's never a safe bet, gambling on a killer's
remorse. "You can let those families put their daughters to rest."
Scully would pummel me-- I was appealing to his sadistic side,
really. Think how they'll suffer, again, if you let us tell them their
girls are dead. I think Roche caught the gentle phrasing; his eyes
darted over Scully again as though he knew she was the cause. I
wanted to gouge his eyes out every time he looked at her.

"I understand you take this very personally, Mulder."

Scully telegraphed a look to me that said, I know. Hang on.
I know.

Then Roche turned. "Tell you what. Sink one from there--"
I was standing square on the free throw line; he tossed me the
basketball-- "and I'll tell you."

Easy shot. I made it.

He scooped up the ball. "Trust a child molester?"

I watched him treasure my reaction. Prison's only refined
his taste for pain.

"Bring my hearts and give them back to me, and I'll tell
you everything you want to know."

Trust a child molester? Enough to stop looking after he
named thirteen victims. Enough to believe for a second that our
answers would be as easy as a free throw. On the way out, Scully
observed, "If we go along with him, he could easily renege again.
He can use this to keep manipulating us as long as he likes."

"We've got nothing to lose," I reminded her. "And two
victims to identify."

"Let's see what forensics gets on the hearts first."

I considered it. "A couple of days?" At her nod, I agreed.
"If you want to wait, okay, we can wait. Roche isn't going
anywhere."

But dammit, neither am I. I'm tethered to the office,
cordoned in by those hearts. I can't leave. I mean, I really just
can't leave. There's nothing more I can do here, and as Scully was
so eager to remind me, it's been ages since I got an appreciable
quantity of sleep. I think she has a barometer that tells her how
much REM time I've gotten in any given night. She's right about
Roche. Everything I know about him affirms it. She's right.

But we have two hearts left. Two more shallow graves.

"In a Wonderland they lie / Dreaming as the days go by /
Dreaming as the summers die..."

No. Please. No.

Please no. Please not Sam.

It's not fair. She never hurt anyone. She doesn't fit his
victim profile. I love her so much. He can't take her away. The
timing is off... maybe... We thought he started in '79 but he killed
that other little girl in '75, but it couldn't have been Roche. He
can't be the one. We never found, we would have found-- no. No.
Please. He can't take Samantha.

It was a dream. It was a dream. But the red light led me to
her just like it took me to Addie Sparks. And the door opened on
the house in Chilmark, the living room, the Stratego game and
Samantha: "Fox, it's your move." Of course it is.

In the dream, it's always my move.

I've never been an adult in a dream about Samantha
before. Not about when she was taken. There's one, I'm grownup,
I'm at Sam's wedding, but that's a madeup dream not a memory
dream. I walked into the room and I was me. I was wearing this
suit and this tie, the Hermes one that Scully always threatens to
hang me with because she says it's hideous.

"Are you gonna move or not? Do we have to watch this,
Fox?"

On TV, Leon Jaworski said, "It would be very difficult to
reach the conclusion that it was an accident."

I said, "The Magician comes on at nine." How many times
has my mouth formed those words in dreams?

"Mom and Dad said I could watch the movie, buttmunch."
She always saved the choicest grade-school insults for moments
like this.

"They're next door at the Galbraiths--" it was like reciting
a passage from memory, and I looked around, marvelling at how
everything looked just the same. "They left me in charge."

I waited for her move-- she always changes the channel, I
change it back, she screams, I stand over her and tell her I'm
watching the Magician. There are several dreams, but each one is
consistent within itself. This one never changes.

Until now. The lights went out, half a minute early. The
game pieces, the things on the mantle, the picture all began to
shake. Out of control. I felt out of control. This wasn't the mental
movie of the dream. It was different. I'd been plucked out of the
present and cast in my own nightmare but I know how it ends and
it always ends alone.

"No. Not again," I said, and meant it. I went for the Glock
but my guns were gone. "Samantha, RUN!" and I knocked the
box with dad's gun off the shelf. Like always. This time I would
know how to use it, this time I would know what to do, this time
it would be different and I looked up expecting to see the alien in
the doorway, Samantha floating in midair calling my name...

Roche walked in the door. He looked directly at me. He
passed by me and he took my sister.

It's just like the dreams where I found Addie Sparks.
Found her body.

But this can't be real.

This can't be happening.

Please. No.

Please.




Dana Scully's Personal Log

Monday, November 15th

There are times when I really hate my job.

Today was one of those times.

It's the flip side of the coin, I guess. If there is a crime, there is
a victim. I never bought into all that 'victimless crime' crap that my
dorm friends used to preach about. If there was a law against, it's
because it hurt somebody.

I'm used to the victim. I get more than my share of interaction
with them, really. I see them, inside and out, every day. I have
to prepare myself for that. But I have worked hard to cushion
myself against the horror, the depressing knowledge that the
bits of flesh and bone under my knife was once a living, breathing
human being, who loved, liked, hated and received all those
emotions in return. I've become comfortable with the victim.

Today, I saw the other side. It's not very often that we meet with
the victim's family to tell them news. Usually we are there to learn,
and they are more than willing to give us all the help they can.
After all, they know what has happened, they know Bob or Jill or
Clarisse isn't ever coming home again. Usually, the funeral
arrangements have been made, the grieving process has been in full
swing for a while. We are there simply to try to bring some order
to their feelings of senselessness. To help them feel that there is
some justice in the world, however fleeting.

I don't remember feeling such a sense of dread as I did walking up
to that door in Norristown today.

Little Addie Sparks. I held the scrap of her nightgown in its
evidence bag all the way to her father's house. I couldn't get over
the irony. One day, almost twenty years ago, some woman happily
sewed a little pocket on her daughter's nightgown. A pocket with
a dollar sign on it. Must have been dreaming big--we only got
quarters for our teeth. But I could picture that woman, stitching
the dollar sign, folding the corners of the little pocket, sewing it in
place. I stared at the stitching. She must have been a quilter or a
seamstress. The stitches were handmade, not made by a machine,
but they were perfect, equal, done with a great care. And a lot of
love.

It was the description of that little pocket that led me to Addie
Sparks. Could that woman have imagined, all those years ago, that
one day that little pocket would be the one feature that would
identify her daughter's murdered body?

And Mulder. God, I couldn't look at him most of the ride. I knew
he was on autopilot. I let him drive. Sometimes he needs to do
something that mundane to keep his thoughts from straying to dark
places and engulfing him completely. But I dreaded his reaction to
this visit almost as much as I dreaded the visit itself.

I tried over and over again to convince myself that this was a
service. One of the Corporal Works of Mercy--visit the sick, bury
the dead. Father Sullivan taught us that sometimes the most
dreadful of jobs were the ones we needed to do the most. Who else
would come? Who else would tell this family that their daughter,
their Addie, had been found, but was never really coming home?

Corporal Works of Mercy gain us favor in heaven. I can sin for the
rest of my life, now, and not worry a minute about getting in the
Pearly Gates. I lived through Purgatory today.

And I watched Mulder walk calmly through the Gates of Hell.

I have to give him this. The man has incredible control--when he
needs to--and always for someone else. He was the picture of
professionalism today. Caring, compassionate, but strong. I think
he was drawing his strength from the air, from the sofa he sat on,
from me, from the lamp on the table--I know Mulder didn't have
that much strength left in him right then. Letting Mr. Sparks know
that Roche was NEVER getting out. It wasn't the death sentence
that I'm sure I would have required had that been my daughter, but
it was all we had to offer.

"Do you do this full time?" Mr. Sparks had asked. Oh, God, I
wanted to tell him no, but sometimes what we do, what we see . . .
but it's not worse. Just different. Awful, but not worse, not by a
long shot.

When we were in the house, listening to Mr. Sparks tell us that he
wife had died, I couldn't keep my eyes off Mulder. I knew that
however bad this was for me, it was battery acid on open wounds
to Mulder. Then Mr. Sparks rubbed some salt in for good measure.

Oh, he couldn't have known. He was a nice man, very gentle. My
heart broke for him. But I could have gagged him with the pillow
on the armchair if I could have stopped him from saying what he
said to Mulder. "I used to think it was better not to know." He
didn't know, couldn't have known what he was saying to my
partner. My partner, who for the last 23 years _hasn't known_.
Who lives for the day when he will learn, discover, _find_ her.
Mulder's personal Addie.

"Not knowing is better." He as much as told Mulder to stop looking.
The end, the discovery, might be worse than the void. He even said
that his deceased wife was the lucky one.

I know Mulder was thinking of his father right then. I remember
that night, the night his father was murdered. He came to my
apartment, blood soaked, raging with a fever. After he settled a
little, and I got some fluids and aspirin down him, he fell into a
restless sleep. He kept muttering. Kept saying over and over again
that 'He'll never see her, never see her when I find her'. It was
almost a mantra. I wanted to calm him, I wanted him to go into a
deeper sleep, but he hung stubbornly just on the edge. Saying those
words over and over again.

And when his mom was so sick, with the stroke. He came back
from Canada, covered in gasoline, in shock, enough bruises to look
like he'd been somebody's punching bag and all he wanted was to
tell his mother that he'd seen her. Samantha. He wanted to tell her
that he'd found Samantha.

Weeks later, he admitted to me that the little girl couldn't have been
Sam. For one thing, there were at least 20 of them, identical. We
have no way of knowing if the Gregor clones looked like
Samantha--they were adults. But Mulder believes they did.

Carbon copies everywhere, but not a sign of the original.

For Mulder, not knowing is killing him. But what would happen if
the truth, when we find it, is much, much worse...?

Then Mr. Sparks, that sweet, sweet man, threw the gauntlet down at
Mulder's feet. "How many others will you visit today? Were
there other victims you didn't know about?"

Up until that moment, I thought I was at the bottom of the barrel.
I didn't think it could possibly get any worse. Then I looked at
Mulder, and I knew, I knew by all that is holy that I could not hold
him back. He wasn't going to rest until he could answer that
question. Not just put it aside, like he feels he did 5 years ago.
No; this time, Mulder has to find the answer. Then he can rest.

What could I do? I didn't say a word, but he found my eyes and
with a look I let him know I'd back him up. I'm almost surprised
that he bothered to check with me. I don't want to think what he
would have done if I'd hesitated.

All I wanted to do when we left that house was put Mulder in the
passenger seat, turn the heat up in the car and hope to God that his
body would make him sleep. I have to stop living in a fantasy
world.

As we left the house, Mulder started staring at a car parked across
the street. At first, I thought he'd gone into a trance. I've read of
such things--similar to a waking coma. It frightened me at first.
But then he started talking.

The damned dream came up again. My partner needs to stop
relying so heavily on these dreams. I dreamt last night that
Harrison Ford decided to quit acting and joined the FBI and took
Skinner's place. And right after that, they dropped the prohibition
against personal involvment between agents and supervisors.
Mulder got to be Best Man at the wedding. But somehow, I'm
pretty sure it ain't gonna happen.

So how come my partner can remember, both from the dreams and
from his involvement in a case solved over 5 years ago, that Roche
had an El Camino, and deduce that was where he hid the cloth hearts
he took as trophies from the body of each murdered girl?

Maybe, if I can get him to have my Harrison Ford dream . . . nah,
with my luck, he'd screw it up and *I'd* end up being the maid of
honor at his wedding to Kelly McGinnis.

So off we went to find Roche's El Camino.

Found it in Delaware. In the hands of what I can only describe as a
'snotnosed kid'. "You mean a real serial killer used to own my
car?" I wonder if he would have been more excited if we could
have told him that the killer actually had _killed_ someone in it? I
really, really hate people like that. They go to accidents to watch
for the coroners wagon. They become television news reporters
who walk up to families after plane crashes and ask them how they
feel to have lost their loved one in such a tragic manner. Scum of
the earth.

Of course, Mulder feels pretty much the same way. So I wasn't too
surprised when he took out his pocket knife and got a little carried
away searching for the cloth heart collection. I thought about
stopping him--for about 3 seconds. Then I decided that I should
look _under_ the car and leave him to his own devices.

But the hearts weren't in the car. Suddenly, Mulder remembered
the cabtop. It was behind the garage, covered in plastic. Like
someone is ever going to *need* a cabtop to a late seventies El
Camino. It was pure luck that snotnosed's parents hadn't forced
him to haul the damned thing to the dump.

Mulder searched the crushed velvet ceiling cover. He stomped on
it, and finally found what he was looking for. A book. Alice in
Wonderland.

It all fit. In a really sick, demented way. Mulder said the dream
flashed 'Mad Hat' on the corner of the cabtop. When I read the
file, I saw in the profile yesterday that Roche had left clues that all
related to Alice in Wonderland. Took a stuffed rabbit at one house.
Little clues that led Mulder right to Roche in the first place.

We opened the book, . . . no, Mulder opened the book. Like it was
the only thing keeping him alive, like it was oxygen and he needed
it to breath. He opened the book and found the first heart and
knew he had what he was looking for.

Mulder talked yesterday about the cloth hearts. That he wanted to
find them, to count them. He knew that Roche had kept them near
him. Mulder knew that for every little girl now in heaven, there
was a cloth heart hidden where only John Roche knew about it.

One for one match. Find the cloth hearts and know exactly how
many children Roche had killed.

Mulder never really believed Roche when he confessed to just 13
murders. I could tell by the way he cited the polygraph. Mulder
knows as well as I do that if you ask the wrong question, you can
get a false answer on a polygraph. 'Did you murder 13 children?'
'Yes.'--and it would show that he was not lying. But go further,
ask the next logical question, 'Did you kill MORE than 13?' and
the answer can still be 'Yes' and be valid.

I get the impression that the second question was never asked.

And we found 16 hearts.

I counted them myself. Each was different. No two alike in any
way except shape. There could be no mistake. Roche had not lied,
he just hadn't told the WHOLE truth. He had killed 13 little girls.
Plus three more for good measure.

Mulder let me count the hearts once, and then wouldn't let loose of
the book again the whole ride home. He kept counting them.
Under his breath. He would get to 14 and then he would take a
deep breath, like he was going under water. Then he would count
the next two. Trace them with his fingers. Those last two. He had
no way of knowing if those last two were the two that were
unknown. At that point, I don't think it mattered. It was the
symbolism--what they represented that mattered.

As if the hearts themselves would tell him the names of the little
girls they belonged to. In all my life, I never wanted pieces of
evidence to sit up and speak quite as much as I did today. If
nothing else than to let Mulder have just a little bit of relief.

When we got back to the office, I wanted to take the book away to
put it in the Evidence room and I was afraid for a minute that
Mulder would object. It looked like he was thinking about it, but
then he changed his mind. He gave it to me without saying a word.
I took it down and he followed. We both stood there and he
watched the archivist process it and put it away. Each heart was
placed in a separate little bag, tagged, to be identified.

It didn't take long for them to match the hearts. The pictures in the
files of the bodies when they were uncovered were enough to make
the identifications. Before long, all that was left was two little
hearts. Orphans. Waiting for their owners to be found.

That's when Mulder decided we had to talk to Roche.

I've seen enough serial killers to know I don't like their company. I
remember back to Luther Lee Boggs and the way he manipulated
me--at a point where I was so easy to manipulate. I know how
tired Mulder is right now. How on the edge. How much this is the
absolutely LAST thing he needs. And so we are walking in that
prison with a big red target on my partner's chest and a sign
underneath that says 'shoot me'. This time I'm not just covering
his back. This time, I might have to be Mulder's shield, too.

I hope Mulder gets some sleep tonight. I'm not sure if I will.

Tuesday November 16

I got into the office early this morning. Mulder wanted to head out
to the prison about 8:30, hoping to avoid any long traffic lines by
going the 'wrong' direction. I got in at 7:30. I half expected him
to be there ahead of me--asleep at his desk.

He must have gone home to shower.

Anyway, I snuck a peek in the file cabinet. Not the X-Files, I can
dig through them to my hearts content and Mulder just smiles and
looks like he's gonna walk over and pat my head or something.
No, I was looking in the other file cabinets. The ones that're closer
to my desk, but that I've never felt brave enough to venture into in
front of him.

It's like his old high school yearbooks or something. He dragged
all those files from Quantico. The profiler gets a copy of every case
file he works on. Mulder's fill up two file cabinets--five drawer
jobs, too. I've seen him go through that drawer maybe three times
in our time together. It's like a security blanket--they're there if he
ever desparately needs to sink into a massive depression.

He doesn't know it, but I've read quite a few of them. I was all the
way through drawers A-G. I started right after the Boggs case,
when I almost lost my partner to a bullet from a madman. I
realized I better get up to speed on all of Fox Mulder's past
acquaintances. In case another of them happened to pop into our
lives.

I haven't had time to journey into the drawer marked R-S.

I'd only had a couple of minutes to look over the Roche file the
other day. And Mulder was watching me like a hawk the whole
time. He wanted me to look at the autopsy pictures, and the
autopsy report--see the section that told of death by strangulation.
He didn't really want me to read the profile, but he couldn't exactly
snatch it from my hand, so he started pulling out the pictures of the
recovered bodies and showing me where the cloth hearts had been
cut.

The man may be brilliant but I can read him like a book.

Mulder doesn't talk a lot about the time before I came around.
He's mentioned a few cases. I asked him once about Monty
Props--I was always fascinated with that case in the Academy. He
sort of smiled lopsidedly and said he'd have to save that for a really
boring stake out when I couldn't fall asleep in the car. He never
remembered--yeah, right. And I never brought it up again.

All those cases are like caged animals to Mulder. I could see it in
his eyes as he sat there and held the file folder from the Roche case.
It was like the lion tamer who never really got comfortable with the
idea of going into that cage with those lions. He's an excellent
trainer and knows how to do the right things. But he still wishes he
had gone to medical school like his mother wanted.

But, with Mulder out of the office, I could let the animals come out
and play.

I decided one thing immediately. There are no sicker bastards on
the face of the earth than those who prey upon and kill little
children. And if they all got together and held an election, they
probably would have made John Lee Roche their king.

The transcript of the interviews and his confession were like
something out of a Edgar Allen Poe novel. I kept hoping that I
would turn a page and see that it was from the fiction section of the
library. But it would disturb me almost as much to think that
somebody could have just imagined the way this man thinks.

He was an artist, in the strictest sense of the word. He was so cool.
So collected. And, like so many before him, he seemed to lead the
interviewer right to the subject he wanted most to talk about--the
kidnappings. He took such pride in his work. He was a master and
the rest, well, the rest didn't even hold a candle to him.

His ego was quite possibly taller than the man himself--no slouch at
6' 5" and a half.

And I was letting Mulder, oh he of little sleep, walk right in a put
his head in this bastard's mouth.

I should be the one to have my head examined.

Mulder showed at a quarter past eight. He had showered, he was
wearing a clean shirt, clean suit. Obviously either he has a faster
dry cleaners than I do or he pulled it out from the back of that
warehouse he calls a closet. I hadn't seen this one for a while; must
be a 'we're visiting the dregs of society today' suit. I know the tie
spoke to that activity.

But the Gentleman's Quarterly cover-boy looks didn't hide the dark
circles under the eyes or the way he held his hands--clenching them
into fist on occasion, almost like he was in pain. I thought about
calling this whole escapade off. Sure, Roche might give us some
insight. He has absolutely no reason to, but he might. He might do
it just to get the kicks of seeing Mulder squirm, too.

>From what I could read in the profile, there was a really skewed
relationship going on there. Mulder had Roche's number, that was
a fact. But reading the interviews, I got the sense that Roche had
Mulder's number on speed dial and his finger was on the pound symbol
ready to push at any moment.

The paperwork and rigamarole to get into see a federal prisoner is
somehow comforting to me. I don't want these sons a bitches
interacting with society any more than absolutely necessary. I
could almost hear Father Sullivan. Visiting those in prison is
another Corporal Work of Mercy. I always figured they were
referring to 'political' prisoners--not the jokers we put behind bars.

We had to check our guns and I almost laughed at how long it
takes Mulder to get out of that ankle holster. Bet it slows down the
old social life--but I know better. Mulder doesn't have a social life
to slow down. It's like mine--more like a social dead than a social
life. Or maybe just a social dormant.

I was expecting to meet with Roche in an interrogation room. Nice
cinder block walls. Nice one way glass mirror covering the wall.
Not to be. Roche only gets a half hour a day for exercise and
apparently the rest of the prison population likes him just about as
much as I do, because he takes it by himself.

I've heard what other inmates do to child molesters. I
wholeheartedly concur.

We walked into the basketball gym and it was so unreal. Here he
was, a man who had murdered 16 little girls, taken them out of their
beds at night, strangled them, buried them in shallow graves and he
was standing here shooting hoops like some fucking Michael Jordan
wannabe.

It was a good thing they took my gun.

Roche greeted Mulder like an old buddy. "Is that a new partner?"
I didn't miss the fact that Mulder stepped between Roche and me
when he answered. One of these days, I'm gonna pull his cuffs out
of his back pocket and hogtie him when he does that, but today
didn't seem like the right time. Mulder introduced me and got
straight to the point.

"We found Addie Sparks, John."

--And hey, wasn't that a great game last Sunday? My God, it was
like they really _were_ old buddies. Buddies who'd had a very big
falling out, but buddies at one time nonetheless. Is that why Mulder
won't talk about the old cases? He told me once, during that
horrible Patterson case, that he had to crawl into their minds.
Maybe, sometimes, it was just as hard to crawl back out again.

He was running from profiling as much as he was running to the
X-files.

Roche didn't miss a beat when Mulder told him about Addie. And
Mulder really didn't give him much time to make a comment
anyway. "Why did you tell us thirteen, John?"

And this is when the button got pushed. Ring, ring, calling Fox
Mulder--your haircloth shirt and bed of rusty nails are now ready.

Roche looked at Mulder calmly and smiled. "It sounded more
magical."

I felt like I was watching a cat play with a half-dead mouse. The
mouse was so punch drunk that it didn't even think of running. It
just lay there, and sort of watched the cat toy with it in some
kind of morbid fascination.

"Sink this shot and I'll tell you."

That's right. Play on something else Mulder loves. My partner, the
captain of the high school basketball team.

I doubt if he knows that I know. Actually, I found out in a strange
way. One of the clericals works in the computer room and saw
Mulder's old application to the Bureau. There's a section on
physical abilities and sports. He listed basketball first--captain for
two years. He was proud of that. Then he listed baseball, captain
for two years. Also rugby, one semester, and polo, three semesters
at Oxford. Swim team all four years. Not a captain. Must have
been slowing down.

It was taped to the mirror in the ladies' room for a week until I
took it down.

I was impressed with the shot. Swish. No rim. Damn. And in
leather wingtips and an expensive suit.

Roche just smiled. "You trust a child molester?"

I wish they hadn't taken my gun.

As Roche left, he said over his shoulder--"Bring my hearts and I'll
tell you all you want to know."

And I've got this bridge that's just too hot to keep, ready for the
first sucker that walks up.

Mulder sort of wilted on the ride back to town. I was hoping that
he was asleep, but he was doing that 'playing possum' shit he pulls
on me sometimes when he wants me to think he's sleeping. He
should know better. Like I can't tell the difference between a sigh
and a snore. Huh.

I wanted to drop him off at his apartment, barricade the door and
gas the place (nothing too harmful--just a little something to knock
him out), but he pointed out that his car was at the office. Damn. I
hate it when he's reasonable. So I left him there.

But not before we had a little discussion. Well, mostly I had a
discussion. He sort of listened.

"How much sleep did you get last night?" I think I even sounded
calm when I asked that.

"Enough," came the reply, followed by an enormous yawn. Yeah,
right. At least his body knows better than to try to lie to me.

"Obviously not enough, Mulder." I wasn't being bitchy. OK,
maybe I was, but damn it, this was bad enough, going out to see
Roche, looking for two little girls missing for 20 years or more
without Mulder being asleep at the switch. I decided to drop that
one and go to my next favorite topic to nag Mulder about.

"Did you eat breakfast?" It was past 2 in the afternoon. He came
in at quarter to eight. I knew that even if he had eaten, it was
through his system already.

He surprised me, or maybe just figured it would throw me off the
scent. "A bagel on the way out the door. Wanta grab something?"

I picked my jaw up off the floor, dusted it off and said yes.

'Something' turned out to be a greasy burger with soggy fries at
some little stand halfway to nowhere off the interstate. But the fat-
and calorie-laden milk shake looked like it almost made up for it. I
think he ordered it just to piss me off. I munched cow fodder and
patiently waited.

My partner, Mr. Manners, couldn't talk to me while eating. I'm
sure he was afraid the tobacco farmers in the booth next to us
would have been aghast at his lack of gentility. He even folded the
fucking paper napkin and smiled at me when he was done.

So many bullets, so little time.

I dropped him off at the office with my sternest command to go
home and get some sleep. I even told him that I was alerting the
security guard to check the basement and if he was there, to call me
ASAP.

He blinked at me and frowned.

"Don't give yourself a stroke, Scully. I'm fine." The subtle
reference to his mother wasn't lost on me either.

Sticking your head deeper in that old lion's mouth, Mulder. One of
these days, he's going to sneeze.




The Journals of Fox Mulder

17 Wednesday November

My hand hurts.

I don't care. I want him dead. I want to wring his neck
until he tells me the names for the last two hearts and neither
of them is my sister. And then I want to kill him.

I want to use a vacuum cleaner cord.

"I understand you take this very personally..."

Was that it? Did I pick up on that casual remark, when he
made it yesterday, and then fill in the blanks with my fears,
with my dreams...?

I shouldn't have hit him. But I'm so tired... god, I'm so
tired of being fucked with, I'm so sick of being knifed in the
heart.

Roche never said outright-- he implied-- what else could he
mean? But he didn't back it up. He didn't offer any proof. Not
really.

Scully's right. Oh, god, she's got to be...

She's got to be pissed at me right now, too. This morning I
went to the prison without her. I waited until I knew she was on
her way to work before I called and left the message on her
answering machine: I think he knows something about my sister.

She phoned ahead and checked with their records while she
was on her way to the prison, and found out that Roche had been
in the library both before and after we visited him, and he'd had
access to computers and the Internet... hell, I'm a federal
agent and I don't even have Net access from my apartment and some
fucking pedophile can log on whenever he wants. Find out whatever
he wants.

Scully's right. It's no secret that I lived on Martha's
Vineyard. And there's a police report of the abduction in the
federal database. Roche was more than ordinarily interested in me
back when we caught him-- he must have seen that the things he
did were getting to me. Now the opportunity has presented itself
to exploit that, have a little sick fun with it. I don't care,
I'm glad I hit him. I shouldn't have done it, I ought to regret
it, but to hell with that. I'm glad.

He must have seen it during that marathon session six
years ago. Three hours of going around and around... I tried,
but it wasn't enough.

"The case is closed. He confessed." Patterson folded his
arms like a martinet.

"We have to find those trophies--"

"He probably destroyed them before we brought him in, but
it doesn't matter anyway. We've got him on thirteen counts of
murder. He'll be in for life." Bill never saw victims. Just
convictions.

"Just let me question him one more time. I'll get him to
tell me where they are." He hesitated, so I kept pushing. "I'll
wring some more indicators out of him. His delusion's pretty
unique... it ought to be good for a monograph..."

Patterson arched his brows at me over his glasses. "You
would have walked away from this one after two days and a lame
summary if I hadn't pushed you, Mulder."

"Your monograph, Bill. Your case. Just let me talk to him."

I had to laugh when I saw his monograph, later. It was my
profile and my interview with Roche, dressed up in Bill's
textbook psych-speak. I could laugh, then, that much later. I had
given him the case and the credit, but I ended up getting called
to the stand during the insanity hearings. And the prosecution
had me read my profile. Got that commendation, even though on the
books, it was supposed to be Patterson's case. It was a good
thing I'd left the ISU by the time that was settled.

Three hours I talked with John Lee Roche. We discussed the
best highways to travel up and down the coast. Chatted about
Frank Baum's Oz books and C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia. I
remember Roche telling me that he always liked the book The
Wizard of Oz much better than the film, though everyone else seemed
to like the movie.

By that point, I was ready to pounce on anything and call
it a profound insight. "Why do you think that is?"

"I think," he said, as though he were really searching the
bottom of his soul to get the answer, "it's because I read the
book first. Most people see the movie first." He gave me a sneaky
sidelong look that said, I know what you're trying to do. Can't
catch me. "It's all about your preconceptions. Which did you see
first? The book? Or the film?"

"The film."

"And you liked it better, right?"

"I don't know. It was my--" and I caught myself before I
said, _my sister's_-- "my favorite movie. But I really liked the
Oz books when I was a kid. I couldn't say."

I must have given myself away with hitches like that,
fragments, pauses... nuances. He's had six years to think it
over. Hell, maybe he's been waiting for this-- another victim to
be found. Another round of questions. He may have been preparing
for this all along.

But I never would have considered the possibility that
Roche was the one who took her if I hadn't dreamed it last night.
If it hadn't seemed so real. Just like the dreams that led me to
Addie Sparks and let me find those hearts. That red will-o-the-
wisp light leading me right to the living room of our house in
Chilmark, Samantha sitting impatiently on the other side of the
Stratego board. She was so small. I've always been twelve in
those dreams, before. To see her, now, when I could easily have a
daughter of my own that age... And still to be as paralyzed as I
was then. It was like living through it all again for the first
time.

If it ever happened for a first time. Any of it.

There's no reason to believe him. The only detail he really
gave me was the place. He said he'd been on the Vineyard. He
didn't even have to come up with the date; I gave it all away
from the beginning. "Where were you in 1973?"

"What, the whole year?"

Scully's right. He's fucking with me. He found out where I
lived, he read the report about my sister, and he used it to get
his rocks off. Maybe he was planning this all along, to claim
that one of those hearts belonged to Samantha. Maybe he just took
the opportunity when I charged in this morning, frantic and still
dazed by that dream. But he's lying. He has to be.

I don't believe him, but the doubt's still there, poking an
elbow into my ribs and whispering, "Maybe it WAS him..."

There has to be a way to be sure. Think. He said he came to
the Vineyard. Visited our house. Sold Dad a vacuum cleaner for
Mom-- he named the model. "An ElectroVac Princess, or maybe it
was the Duchess model."

Scully unitarily banished me from the office for the day. I
don't think she'll report me for punching Roche, though it looked
like she was thinking about it for a minute there. She
understands. She doesn't approve, but she understands.

But once we were out of the prison-- we walked out to the
cars together, and she shook her head at me, and I knew she'd
never say anything, not now, but she's disappointed in me. For
running off half-cocked again, for circumventing her again, for
letting someone pull my strings again. Well, Scully, if you had
strings, you might know what it's like...

She told me to come home and get some sleep, but she's also
going to call me "this afternoon". I need to go the Greenwich and
look for that damned vacuum cleaner, prove to myself that Roche
was lying. It's two-thirty. She said she'd call. She didn't
explicitly say that she expected me to be here. I'll leave a
message on her answering machine. Another one.

That's a shitty thing to do. She has her cellphone with
her. She'd understand this. She might even agree, might offer
to come along and help me look. Or she might be disappointed
again... I can't deal with that right now.

I'll leave a message.

My hand hurts, my head hurts... the drive from Greenwich
never seemed so long. I pulled over more than once. Kept finding
myself drifting toward the center line, eyes too fogged to make
out the road signs.

Please. No. Not again. Not now. If I could just have some
time, if I could just get some distance... It's been a long, long
year. And I'm so tired.

He has to be lying. He has to be. John Lee Roche did not
take my sister. And oh, Sam, I want to be strong for you. I want
to be able to pierce through all these lies in a moment,
effortlessly. To say with pure and perfect certainty: No.
My sister is alive. I will find her.

But that sounds more and more like a fairy tale, concocted
to hide the terrible reality... Sam, I know you're out there. I've
never given up. Never. I've always been looking for you. Even when
I hardly knew it, I was looking for you.

I don't want to find you here.

--It's selfish to be this wrapped up in it. I have to think
of her, now, put myself aside and come to the truth.

But it hurts. It hurts and I'm so tired.

...Answering machine light is blinking. Sorry, Scully. I
don't think I'll treat myself to your tender ministrations
tonight. I never know the limits of your sympathy, and that's
scary. Sometimes I'll be prepared for you to dress me down for
being totally boneheaded, and instead, you say everything will be
okay and hold my hand. Then I'll do something I think is still
within the bounds of reason... my reasons, anyway... and suddenly
you lay into me with the scorched-earth treatment.

If there's anyone I'll chance it with, it's Scully. There's
no one I'd chance it with tonight.

So what are the odds that Roche could somehow guess the make
and model of a vacuum cleaner that my father bought my mother more
than twenty years ago? One in a hundred? A thousand?

ElectroVac Princess. Even Scully would have a hard time
coming up with a rational explanation for this. Maybe there's a
complete inventory of the contents of my mother's basement on the
Internet.

It was so hard to try to smile and reassure Mom, to come up
with some lame reason for tearing up her packrat nest looking for
that ancient vacuum cleaner. When I found it, I had the strongest
sense of deja vu, and I was reeling... Couldn't have been good for
Mom. I had to stay twenty minutes to calm her down, settle her in
with a cup of tea and tell her again and again, it's all right.
Everything's all right.

If Dad was still alive... I could tell him. He'd say I'm
being an idiot, he'd run me through the wringer for this, but I
could tell him. I could say: What if it's true?

He'd say, Find out.

It's not the answer that scares me. It's voicing the
question. I've already asked one that I'd managed to avoid for so
long... at the prison. Asked Scully if she had ever really thought
that my sister was abducted by aliens. My hard-won memories, my
holy grail. We both know that she never believed it. She just
looked away.

It's a little after eight. And what if I listened to my answering
machine, and what if I called... I could tell Scully. I only hesitate
because I don't know what she'd say. But I could tell her. She might
have an answer. Any answer.

I'd accept any answer, right now.

Nearly ended up in Scully's spare bedroom tonight. I
might even have wanted that if the place didn't have such lousy
memories for me-- last thing I need now is an acid flashback.

I did manage to knock her back a step or two when
she offered. Did my best Hannibal Lector (which is pretty
good, if I say so myself): "People will say we're in love."

She wasn't expecting a joke just then, and for once
I actually got a laugh out of Scully. Even in the midst of
everything... it was good to hear. "Yeah, well, people also
say Elvis is dead."

When I called, said I'd been to Mom's, she asked if
I wanted to talk about it, and after a second, said, "I'll
start some coffee." Simple as that.

Usually I try not to infringe on Scully's apartment.
Our work has taken over so much of her life... I owe it to
her to stay out of her home, keep it sacrosanct. Tonight
isn't "usually".

I don't know how she can stand that sofa-- it's so
soft and gooshy that when you sit in it, the cushions nearly
swallow you alive. There was a little ball with a bell on it
sitting in the corner... must've been a toy for that orange
tumbleweed she called a dog. Queequeg. I hadn't realized how
attached she was to it until the dog wound up as alligator
bait on one of our stranger cases. I guess I should've
insisted that we put it in a kennel, even if Scully did
have an ethical aversion to cooping animals up in tiny cages.
Conditions in the alligator were probably way more cramped
than any kennel.

I told her about the vacuum cleaner. (If I type or
even see the words "vacuum cleaner" one more time, I'm going
to lay siege on every housewares department in Virginia...)
Her face took on that resigned, patient look that means she
thinks I'm overlooking some small fact that provides a reasonable
explanation.

But whatever that small, vital fact is, neither of
us could find it tonight. Scully said, "When I got your
message, I went back and looked at the ElectroVac sales
records." She shook her head. "Those records only go back
to 1985." Then she ran through a variety of possibilies... none
of which were all that plausible-- even proposed an outside
accomplice who was fact-gathering for Roche, but she let that
one collapse under its own weight, admitting that the Princess
was too small and specific a detail for him to know.

Finally she offered, "I'm having ElectroVac run down
Roche's whereabouts in 1973. We should be able to find out
if he was really on the Vineyard."

"What if he was?" I could hardly hear my own voice.
"What if he did it?"

"Mulder, I don't think he did."

I just stared into my coffee. Decaf, of course. She'd
probably put Valium in it if she wasn't bound by the Hippocratic
oath. Confidentiality and consent. I think that's in there...
or maybe it's just "First do no harm".

Then she ventured, quietly, "What about everything
we've learned? About... the smallpox vaccinations, the tests..."

"What about it."

"We were told that they took Samantha. To keep your
father from talking about the tests."

"Sure. And who told us that? One of them. We can't
trust anything they say."

"You told me that you talked to your mother--"

"She'd say anything to get me to shut up and stop
asking her about it." I had to stare at my hands to keep them
from balling up into fists again, pounding them against the desk
until the knuckles split. "And she didn't say they took Sam."

Scully's voice tried hard to be gentle.. "She told you
that your father asked her to choose."

"It doesn't have to mean anything that he asked that.
It could have been rhetorical. Maybe he was reading _Sophie's
Choice_, maybe he was just-- you didn't know my father, he
read a lot of philosophy, he used to ask that question about
the sinking boat and who should you save, the doctor or the
priest or the pregnant woman--"

"Mulder," she insisted, then took a breath. "Is it
easier to believe it may have been Roche than to put the
blame on your father?"

I hate the way it sounds when I yell. It sounds like
Dad when I yell. It gets away from me so quickly and I can't
lower my voice, can't listen anymore. This time I managed
to stop after How could you even ask me that, but it made my
chest hurt to hold it in.

Scully didn't back away, though. She came over to
the chair and leaned against it. "I'm sorry," she said.

I sounded so calm, maybe even a little amused: "Yes,
Scully, it's much easier for me to think it was Roche. Strangulation
with a vacuum cleaner cord is far preferable to the alternatives...
let me review my options... either my father allowed Samantha
to be taken away by a bunch of powermongers who subjected her
to DNA experimentation, cloned her, who knows what they did to
her. Or she was abducted by aliens who likewise put her
through endless, probably painful tests. Or she's lying in
a shallow grave with a heart cut out of her nightgown. Yeah,
give me the most hopeless scenario, Scully, I'll take door
number three."

"I don't think it was him," she persisted, voice as
low and soft as mine was tight and harsh.

"I don't know." After twenty-three years and so much
searching, still no closer... "Scully, I was there and I don't
know."

She put her arms around my shoulders, just enough to
let me know she was there. I forget sometimes how little she
is, only remember when her hand's so small on mine.

Eventually we had to dump out the coffee and say
goodnight. And at least I managed to make her laugh before
I left.

Even now... _especially_ now... it's good to hear.



Dana Scully's Personal Log

Wednesday, November 17

I could tie him to a chair
I could tie him by the hair
I could suspend him in the air
I could growl at him like a bear
But I can't keep him anywhere

Haven't written poetry since Spanish class in undergrad. Only Fox
Mulder could upset me enough to force me to write poetry--basically
my poetry sucks.

I called him this morning but he wasn't home. It was after seven,
too late for him to be out for his run. He wasn't at the office.
I called the guard desk, nobody's seen him--and _everybody_
remembers when 'Spooky' passes by. His cell was 'out of service
area'--he turned it off AGAIN. On a whim, I called my answering
machine, just in case.

The bastard knows exactly when I leave for work in the morning
and when's the best time to call my apartment and juuuuust miss
me. Fucking son of a bitch memory!

He left a message. I have to give him some points for that. And
he's come a long way since his little road trip to Alaska. He didn't
give me some theoretical bullshit about drawing lines and that
protective malarky he dreams up. He told me exactly where he was
going. Though he didn't have to tell me. I knew exactly where
he went. He went back out to play with Roche. I envisioned the
two of them in a nice rousing game of one-on-one or twenty-one.
Probably let Roche go first.

Well, I knew about the where. I was just a little off on the why.

"I had another dream," he said on the machine.

I'm really beginning to hate that fucking phrase.

"He took Sam, Scully."

I listened to it three times, just to make sure I wasn't having a
nightmare myself.

Mulder's letting this bastard rip his guts out and make him eat them
and now he's going out there to *talk* to him? When I said Roche
had Mulder's number, I had no idea how true that really was. He's
got him right where he wants him and Roche doesn't really have to
do another goddamn thing. Mulder will torture himself from this
point on.

"Pinky, if I could reach you, I would hurt you", the Brain said last
Sunday morning. I know exactly how he felt.

Since it's a good 45 minutes out there, and he had a head start,
I did some calling--mostly to keep from speeding. I checked a lot
of things. For shits and grins I checked on Roche's activities for
the last couple of days. I mean, gee, it might be nice to know if
we're his only _best friends_ in the world, right?

Nobody else has been calling. Gosh, I would have thought a big
time serial killer would have a fan club or something. Maybe they
only meet monthly.

Nevertheless, he's managed to keep himself occupied. In a wave of
educational fury, the federal prison system has installed computers
resplendent with internet access in all prison libraries. So that all
those prisoners can get their law degrees and really become crooks
when they get out. And we musn't forget all the bank robbers
getting a second degree in metallurgy, now can we? Makes it so
much easier to blow up the safes when you know the alloy's tensile
strength.

Yeah, we're a really enlightened society, aren't we?

So, Roche has been surfing the net. And since it doesn't take a
rocket scientist to find all kinds of useless information that way, I'm
sure he managed to find some useful stuff, too. Useful to him.

If there's one thing the late Max Fenig taught me, it was how much
totally useless and very revealing information can be obtained with
a good laptop and a 14.4 modem. Our travel records. Our hotel
reservations. The number of guns, cell phones and flashlights
we've managed to lose in the course of our work. All available to
every taxpayer (and tax cheat) through the Freedom of Information
Act.

Mulder's birthplace? His family history? The fact that his sister
was kidnapped--it made all the Boston papers for weeks. Yeah,
that would be there, too, I'm sure.

Mulder can be so quintessentially blind sometimes. I can't believe
the way he gives me the jaundiced eye when I give him the most
reliable proven data I can find, and then smiles and nods and
practically licks the boots of any fucking psycho bastard who throws
him a bone of pure imagination.

And today was just another example of how easy it is for someone
like Roche to manipulate Mulder.

I know that's what he's doing. I could see it yesterday. And so I
figured, fine. All I have to do is keep Mulder away from Roche and
all will be well. There's that fantasy world, trying to creep into
my conscious life again.

But at the least, I could make damned sure that I'm with Mulder
when he goes to see Roche.

Where did I put that toddler leash I used on Bill Jr.'s youngest, the
last time they were home for a visit? No, better yet--I'm going to
the pet store and getting one of those choke chains. I almost got
one for poor little Queequeg, but I decided it was too cruel to use on
a dog. Should be just right to use on a partner.

When I got to the prison, Mulder was in the interrogation room
with Roche. The guard was more than happy to let me sit in the
observation room, but he didn't think it would be wise to let me in
the interrogation room itself. Apparently, Agent Mulder requested
to see Roche _alone_.

He is the agent of record. He is the one who caught the bastard.
He is an FBI agent, tried and true and supposedly sane.

If only they knew him like it do.

Roche is now claiming that he killed Samantha.

I love observations rooms. This one had a speaker, and it wasn't
scratchy and muffled like a lot of them are. I could hear every
word Roche said. He told Mulder that his father bought a vacuum
cleaner from him in '73. He claims that he was on the Vineyard
during November of that year. Right in the timeframe.

All I could see was Mulder's back, but I knew what those eyes
were saying. I could hear his breathing get faster and faster, and I
knew, I just knew that something was going to break. I couldn't
help but think of the book 'Rikki Tikki Tavi' by Rudyard Kipling.
I loved that book. The little mongoose that nobody really wanted
coming in and saving the child from the evil King Cobra. God, that
was a great book. I always wanted to be Rikki and I guess that
would make Mulder the boy. What was his name?

And while I was working through this whole analogy, the 'boy'
landed a really good right hook on the King Cobra's face and
knocked him flying against the back wall of the room.

Let's get one thing straight. What Mulder did was positively
inexcusable. He hit a handcuffed man. Regardless of the fact that
the man doesn't deserve to be alive in the first place, we are officers
of the court and that puts us squarely under its authority. Mulder
wasn't just out of line, he was off the field. There is no way I can
defend his actions. There was no way _he_ could defend his
actions, when the guard opened the door and Mulder realized I'd
been watching.

I can't condone him.

But I'm having a really hard time blaming him.

I knew he hurt his hand, but I was just a little beyond being the
caring partner at that moment. He knows how to apply an ice
pack.

My partner is NOT a violent man. He fears that in himself more
than anything else, I think. All those years in the ISU, getting
comfortable with psyches that would revolt any other sane person;
he fears becoming one of them. I saw the look on his face when
they took Bill Patterson away. It was one of his worst nightmares,
playing itself out before him in glorious technicolor.

I know that even he views hitting Roche as a totally irrational act.
I know how much that scares him to the bone.

And I wanted to smack him a good one for putting himself in the
situation to begin with.

This is what it's come to. Mulder keeps putting himself into
situations that sane people would never dare. 'Fools walk in where
Angels fear to tread'--Grandma Scully was always good with those
old cliches.

Well, Grandma, if that's really the case, Fox Mulder is the biggest
fool I know.

As soon as I got him out of that room, I told him that Roche is
playing him.

He seemed a little shocked that I had done the digging to find out
about the Internet. Still, something was going on, and it wasn't just
Mulder's revulsion toward a serial killer. I could see that this was
hitting him harder than most other cases, and almost all of our cases
hit Mulder hard.

I made the mistake once of telling Mulder that I thought he was
transferring his feelings to a suspect. That he looked at Lucy
Householder, but what he saw was Samantha. I was out of line
that day. I should have paid more attention. I wasn't listening;
I was too busy telling him to shut the fuck up.

And I really screwed up. Because I didn't realize that the day
would come when it really *did* come down to that. This one
really is, literally, about Samantha now.

He asked me the question.

He's never asked me directly before. He always seemed to know,
or maybe not want to know.

Did I _ever_ think Samantha was abducted by aliens?

I don't know. I've thought about it. I agree that _someone_ took
that little girl out of her home, in front of her older brother. I've
seen the medical history, and I know that Mulder went into
hysterical shock following the incident and was pretty fragile, health
wise, for several months afterward. I've been told, by men more
vile than any I thought walked the earth, that Bill Mulder himself
handed his child over to be taken--possibly experimented on. At the
very least, not allowed to return to her family.

But do I believe it was aliens from outer space that actually took
Mulder's sister?

I didn't answer. It seemed pointless. What I thought didn't matter
at that moment. I know Mulder was disappointed when I said
nothing. I'm sure he's filled in that blank and now thinks that
I've never believed him. Truth be told, I still just don't know.

But what scared me far more today was the look on his face when I
asked him what HE believed.

"I don't know anymore."

On some level, I suppose that was some kind of psychological
breakthrough. The psychotic acknowledging that his warped view
of the universe might just be wrong. But it gave me no comfort
and it sure as hell didn't look like Mulder was 'healing' by this
revelation.

Mr. Sparks was wrong.

But even if he's right, I know one thing above all else.

John Lee Roche did not kill Samantha Mulder.

But he might succeed in destroying her brother.

I went back to the office and did a little checking. The ElectroVac
Company, now a subsidiary of whoever bought out Black and
Decker or something like that, did have records. "Oh, my, yes,
Ms. Special Agent of the FBI, we HAVE to keep records. Internal
Revenue Service statutes require that we keep detailed records of
all product shipments back at least 7 years. We have them going
farther back, of course. Ours go back ten years."

Yeah, well, I was sort of wondering about 23 years ago...

I hope the woman didn't actually snort her diet coke through her
nose, but it sure as hell sounded like she did. She made it sound
like I was trying to track down the name of the caveperson who
invented fire.

She did have personnel records. She could tell me that John Lee
Roche was indeed an employee with the company for almost 20
years. "Of course, that was back in the days when we still sold
door to door."

Yeah, lady. I know.

She told me that any information from that far back was archived
and it would take her a while to find it. I guess B & D hasn't
upgraded to WIN95 yet. She said I would just have to wait a day
or two. I pulled my "Lady, I'm with the *F*B*I*, and you don't
want to mess with me" line, and she promised to get me the
information in the morning.

When I finally got off the phone with her, I was ready to throw up.
The ride home didn't help. Traffic was a bitch. Some dumbass in a
semi decided to jack-knife and tie up traffic for 5 or 6 miles. I
missed the helicopter traffic report on the radio, I was thinking
about Mulder.

Even if it turns I find out he wasn't lying about that, I still don't
think it means anything. So what if John Roche was on Martha's
Vineyard during October of 1973? So was Rose Kennedy, and Mulder
doesn't consider _her_ a suspect.

OK, Roche is probably a more likely suspect than Rose. I mean,
even then, she was pretty frail. But the fact that he was on the
island--a relatively BIG island, from what I've seen of it--does not
mean anything.

Yet.

It does mean that we need to investigate this case a little further.
Ordinarily, I would say we should just go out and talk to Roche
again. Simple. The bastard takes great pride in his work, he can
show us by telling who those last two little girls were and were he
buried them. The sadistic bastard can jack off for a week thinking
about those families when we show up at the door--I'm sure the
thought of poor Mr. Sparks must have floated his boat for a night
or two at least. I don't give a damn. I just want to find them,
I just want this over.

But then I consider Mulder in the mix.

He went to his mother's today. Poor woman, he probably scared
her to death. I saw her once before she left the hospital. Her
recovery is nothing short of a miracle, but not difficult to
explain. I told Mulder there was every chance she would come
out of it pretty much none the worse for wear. She's not able to
remember a lot of things, but she's more than capable of taking care
of herself. And her neighbor is a dear woman and is looking out for
her, too. But I'm sure the last thing she needed was to have her
sleep-deprived, half-crazed son come busting in and go digging through
her basement. If he really wanted to _do_ something, the two of us
should go up there sometime and clean the basement out for the
woman!

Mulder called me when he got back. He found the vacuum. An
ElectroVac Princess. His mom had kept it all these years, in
a box in the basement.

Mom wanted one of those really bad. Ahab had wanted to get it for
her, too, as I remember, but, as always, money was too tight. In
the end, she got a Hoover upright that they sold at the PX and she
never said another word about it. God, I'm glad she never bought
one of those fucking Princesses.

Mulder was nothing short of a basketcase on the phone. I could tell
he was exhausted. He wanted someone to understand. Not to talk,
just to understand. I told him I was putting coffee on. He knows I
don't drink coffee in the evening unless he's somewhere in the
room. I think he broke the land speed record getting over here.
Probably caused another semi to jack-knife when he zipped past it.

We talked for a long time. I still can't get over how he's letting
Roche do this complete mind game on him. The man who sat there
and called Luther Lee Boggs a fake to his face, who didn't blink an
eye when he tricked Luther into 'channeling' from a piece of
Mulder's only-washed-once-in-recorded-history Knicks shirt, the
same man who all but screamed at me for believing in Boggs, who
begged me with what little strength he had left in ICU not to
believe Boggs--this man is buying anything Roche says, hook, line
and sinker.

Don't get me wrong. Luther Lee Boggs was a psychopath and a
sociopath of the worst order. He deserved to die in that gas
chamber. But in his last days, in some small manner, Boggs
tried to redeem himself.

I will never forget his warning to me. I will never forget that we
got to that abandoned brewery just in time to save Jim Sommers' life.
Five seconds later . . .

So, in that respect, at least, Boggs and Roche are on different
planes. If there are levels in hell, I'm hoping Roche gets assigned
to the REALLY shitty section.

I tried to get Mulder to think about what he was saying. All we've
seen. I've heard him say that phrase to me so often, especially in
our first year together, that I can even do it in _his_ voice. "After
all we've seen, Scully." Well, I pulled it out, dusted it off and used
it on him tonight.

The mountain full of files. What does this mean in relation to all
that? Were all those files, my file, Samantha's file, Mulder's label
on Sam's file, was all that just make believe? Did some really bored
government agency just decide to put a whole lot of file folders in
that mountain just to piss us off??

He yelled tonight. And it broke my heart. Not that he yelled, but
what it meant. Mulder would rather believe that Roche is to blame
for Samantha's disappearance than to accept the fact that his father
might have had anything to do with it.

I can't buy that. I've seen too much. Aliens or Axis, it doesn't
matter to me. Men experimented on people. Men experimented on
ME, goddamnit. Roche had nothing to do with that--he was already
in jail. We don't know for certain what happened, but we've been
told that someone took Samantha to keep Mulder's father quiet
about those experiments. And we KNOW that those experiments
exist. We've both seen the proof.

Mulder hasn't yelled at me very often. He gets exasperated and he
rolls his hazel eyes at me _all the time_, sure, but a real
I'm-at-the-end-of-my-rope-and-you-just-pulled-it yell? I can count
the times. The Householder case. When I took his gun after his
father died and he thought I was the enemy. He yelled those times
and I knew it.

I know why he yelled tonight. I love my father. He was my Ahab,
and I adored him with the same heartfelt emotion that every little
girl reserves for her daddy. And even though I could never see it,
knowing what I know about the man--Mulder loved his father, too.

At some point in time, Bill Mulder was 'Daddy' to my partner. No
matter what else happened, no matter how much pain there may
have been, that relationship would always be there first. It would
sometimes cloud and sometimes clarify everything else they did to
each other.

So, while I can't believe what Mulder seems to want to believe
now--that we'll find Samantha's eight-year-old body, still in her
nightgown, buried in a shallow grave in a park somewhere on the
eastern seaboard--I can't blame him for wanting to believe it.

He started crying at one point and I almost drove him to the doctor.
For Mulder to break down like that is a perfect example of just how
far he is at the end of that rope. He needs sleep--about 72 hours
of it, by my count. I wanted him to stay here tonight, in the spare
room. I would have been here if any more of those little dreams
popped up again. But I knew he couldn't take the hovering. There
are times I can hover and times I can't. So he told me another of
his classically horrid jokes and I let him go. He did remember to
call me when he got to his apartment.

I wished him sweet dreams. I hope it worked.




The Journals of Fox Mulder

Thursday 18 November

It isn't... it wasn't her.

But he knows everything. Everything.

I gave Roche the two hearts. I wouldn't let him
touch them, but he stroked the plastic while he recited
every detail of that night in 1973.

Everything.

And then it was the longest trip of my life to the
Forks of Cacapon. West Virginia. Roche always buried them
in another state. He liked to drive... with the body in the
trunk of the car... he always tried to tag the next victim
before he buried the last one.

That came out in the profile before we caught him.
One of the nuances I can't really trace back to anything
in the case files-- it was pure speculation. Back in the
early days of interviews and profiles, Brewster and Johnson
logged a lot of hours talking with Ed Van Kemper. California's
Co-Ed killer. Kemper would dismember his victims and drive around
with various parts in the trunk of his car. It turned him on to
navigate through traffic, pull into a parking lot, visit his
parole officer-- all the time with parts of his victims in
the trunk.

There's no particular similarity between Kemper
and Roche. I just referred to Kemper's precedent in my profile
to justify an otherwise unfounded theory. The idea wasn't based
on forensic evidence, a compilation of clues, or behavioral
indicators. I still don't know where I got it.

Roche's breathing got shallow when we asked him about
visiting houses, doing business... with the body in the trunk.
He admitted to that. And to calling the homes of the bereaved
families. He'd dial their number on their little girl's birthday.
Or on the anniversary of her disappearance. Sometimes he'd get
a fire in his gut and just call one of the families, hoping to hit
them on a bad night. It got him off to hear the catch in their
voices, the fear, the quickly muffled sobs.

I think that's what I couldn't face before. I could
deal with Roche's delusions, his garish fantasy world. I could
understand that these were crimes of manipulation and power.

I couldn't stand to see the perverse joy he took in
the grief of those families. It was too much then... it's
too much now.

It was never really the victims he was trying to
dominate. It was the families. He kept track of all the
searches for the missing girls. I remember that from our
conversation back in '90. I remember that like nails on
a chalkboard.

It wasn't her. It wasn't Sam.

We got calls. Hangups, mostly. Dad changed the number
again and again, but somehow the calls kept coming. I wasn't
supposed to let Mom answer the phone. Not ever. It wasn't always
hangups. All those hissed accusations from anonymous voices
on the line. Some days there was no way to choose... stay home
and chance getting one of those calls. Or leave and maybe Mom
or Dad would hear it. That was worse. I read the complete works
of Shakespeare in eighth grade, trapped in my room, waiting
for the phone to ring.

The thrill he got from the suffering of those families,
from their turmoil and their pain. In the haze of awakened
memories, fresh scars, back in '90-- I couldn't let myself
see it. And if I could blind myself to that... it's possible
that I kept myself from seeing that it was him...

But how, how could I study this man's crimes, how could
I imagine myself in his place, how could I interview him for
three hours without the slightest suspicion, the faintest hint
of the memory that he took my sister from me?

He knows every detail. He knows _every_ detail-- "You
wanted to watch a television show. The one with Bill Bixby.
What the heck was the name of that thing?"-- he couldn't know
unless he'd been there.

"Pick her out. Pick out the one that's your sister
and I'll tell you where she is. Hey, it's a fifty-fifty chance.
Either way, I'm giving you a victim."

Those two hearts. I've looked at them so long, tried
so hard to remember every one of Samantha's flannel nightgowns...
it's all a smudge of pastel bows and flowers. I can't recall
either of the fabrics, but I can't pretend to know for certain
that neither of those hearts belonged to Sam.

I picked the one on the right.

"Are you sure you want that one?" Roche played at
concern, his voice softly solicitous. I could almost hear
him continuing: 'Because we do have a nice model very similar
to that one with added features for just a few dollars more...'

Then the directions to that fifteenth shallow grave. "I
wrote a name on a stone there. It was early... in a way, I kind
of wanted someone to find her. But--" He stared at me and
measured out the words. "No one ever did."

It wasn't Sam. My fingers scraped across those tiny
fragile bones when we found her, and I thought-- I thought, no.
This isn't my sister. In the examining room, even when I
checked the slender yoke of the collarbone... it couldn't
be her.

Denial? Maybe. But it wasn't Sam.

The day she fell off the rope swing-- I remember how
she shimmied up trees, and once up the downspout on the side of
the house. Sam was fearless about heights. Spiders terrified
her, but heights... something that really could hurt her...
she wasn't afraid.

She made it all the way up to the branch, grabbed
for the knot of the rope, called down to me. I turned around
just in time to see the neighbor's dog grab the bottom of
the rope and shake it, and Sam lost her balance, almost in
slow motion. The awful sound when she hit the ground, like
the thump of an overripe melon.

I was supposed to be watching her that day, too.

We'll have to go back again. Face Roche again. Find out
who this lost little girl was. She's been in the ground so long.
Even Scully couldn't get enough to make a quick ID. There's only
the remains and a tattered shroud that used to be a flannel
nightgown.

Scully drove to West Virginia. Just under two hours.
Once we hit the highway the speedometer never wavered below
eighty. She turned on a classical music station to fill the
silence, and her hand was on my sleeve most of the way there.
I looked at her once or twice-- her eyes straight ahead on the
road, expression set and braced. Steeling herself. Waiting to
catch me if I fall.

When I fall. I always fall.

I agreed to Scully's spare room tonight. Once we got here,
though, I couldn't even go inside without thinking of the night
Dad died. Scully saw me hesitate in the doorway, went in and
bundled up the blankets and put them on the sofa. It was good
for a couple hours of sleep, but the foam cushions are like
quicksand.

Sam used to love her Mouse Trap game. Little plastic
boots, plastic chicken, plastic eggs. Not to mention, plastic
mice. The object of the game was to create the most ingenious,
complicated trap. Once, we took every single polyurethane piece
and constructed a tremendous Goldberg device that ended up
including Legos and most of my Erector set. Took up half
of our room. We'd set it off, and about ten minutes later,
it would finally run through all the stages and kick the
door shut.

We spent almost the whole Christmas break making that thing.

Roche has had six years.

Scully told me, "Even if he was on the Vineyard around
that time... it still doesn't mean he had anything to do with
what happened to your sister."

A fifty-fifty chance, he said. Pick out your sister,
and I'll tell you where she is. Either way, I'm giving you a
victim.

One heart left.

Tomorrow we'll confront him again. He'll stonewall.
He'll string me along. He'll drag this out for as long as I
keep coming back. This is his compulsion. This is his thrill.

I can't keep from coming back.

There's got to be an answer. There's got to be a way
out of Roche's trap.

If I can drown myself in this swamp of a sofa again...
maybe the answer will come the way this all began. In dreams.

Friday 19 November

I received no convenient revelations in my sleep
last night. But as I reviewed my previous journal entry
this afternoon, the last lines sparked a thought. An idea
that coalesces from a dozen hitches, fragments, pauses...
nuances.

Roche has offered to show me everything. To reveal
precisely what happened the night of November 27th, 1973.

Mephistopheles as a vacuum cleaner salesman. He
wants to leave prison long enough to give me a guided tour
of my nightmares. And, as he said, "It's more than that;
I can't wait to see your face."

And if, like Faust, I strike this dark bargain--
he'll demonstrate his familiarity with the events of that
night, stopping only short of proving it. He'll never let
me know for sure...

I can see each delicately placed hinge and valve
of the trap I'm in. It's an elegant piece of work. Clockwork.
But what wound the clock? What sprung the trap?

Dreams. My dreams. They led me to Addie Sparks. They
let me find the cloth hearts. In dreams, I saw Roche take my
sister.

Dreams that felt strange from the start-- foreign.
Like I was tuned into a different frequency. Like someone
else was in control.

Roche's crimes had two aspects... the pedophilic
delusions of himself as each child's liberator. And the
sadistic glee he took from the despair of the families
who were left behind. Two sides of the same coin. After
picking his victim, he'd invent reasons why she had to
be "rescued".

When we questioned him about the thirteen deaths
he confessed to in '90, he let details slip. Sharon's
mother, he claimed, was jealous of her daughter, and treated
her badly. Kelli wasn't appreciated; her family was trying
to squelch her imaginative mind. Yvonne's father shut her
up in her room for the least infraction.

He justified his actions, not by blaming his victims,
as killers commonly do, but by blaming their families. They
deserved to lose their daughters, their... sisters.

Push through it, just get past it, think, dammit.

He punished the families by taking the girls. By
hiding the bodies so they never knew for sure what had
happened. The primary release came from the deaths of
his victims, and he kept the trophies to relive the
thrill. The secondary kick came from the suffering
he savored in those families.

For six years, he's known that the first little
girl he killed was-- if he took Samantha, and he's known
all along she was my sister, why wait until _now_ to use
that knowledge? Why wait six years?

If his pattern held true, Roche would have begun
these games with me in '90. He'd be playing them still.

Roche knows every detail of what happened that
night. IF that's how it happened. I recovered vague memories
of my sister's abduction, which have since evolved into
complete accounts of that night. Sometimes we're in
our room, and all I see are lights; I can't move my head,
but I hear her calling my name. Sometimes I'm going up
the stairs, and I think Samantha's following, but when
I turn around, she's gone.

Sometimes... most often, over the past few years...
Watergate is on TV while we play Stratego. We argue, the
room goes dark, the windows flare with colored light, I
knock Dad's gun off the cabinet, look up and watch as the
door opens on an elongated grey figure; I hear Samantha
call for me and turn to see her suspended in midair.

Sometimes that's how I remember it. Usually
that's how I remember it. But not always. And the other
versions are no less vivid than the Stratego memory.

The window. Roche said he was listening at the
window. Across the room from where we sat in front of
the television. He heard us talking over the sound of
the TV, from across the room, through the window, and
remembered an argument from twenty-three years ago that
I'm not sure ever even happened.

I dreamed this version of Sam's abduction again
just a few days before the dreams began that led me to
Addie Sparks. That was the night we came back from Montana;
the dream-paralysis was so strong that I woke up choking.
I'd stopped breathing in my sleep.

Roche didn't look surprised to see me, after we found
Addie Sparks. After all this time, it was as though he
expected me. And when I returned the next day-- bright and
early, the images of Roche coming into the house in Chilmark
still burning in my mind-- he strolled out, nodding pleasantly.
As though he expected me.

Maybe he did.

Maybe Roche steered me toward Addie-- showed me how
to find her. So I'd come back. Maybe he led me to those hearts
because he had a plan to use the last two for this, to make me
pay for bringing him in. Or maybe just because he enjoys it.

Maybe Roche has been leading me in my dreams.

And maybe that's just what I want to believe.

There's only one way to find out. Skinner would
never approve it. He called us in yesterday morning and
he didn't even want to let me talk to Roche again. He told
Scully make sure I keep to the straight and narrow path.
She said we couldn't give Roche his way on this, or he'd
string us along forever-- an echo of my own thoughts. But
if we DON'T give him his way on this, he'll STILL string us
along forever. And I need to know.

Scully said, "There has to be some other way to
come to the truth."

I notice she wasn't quick to follow up with any
suggestions.

Instead she tried to park me at her place again--
insisted I still need to sleep, and when I balked at the
thought of either the sofa or the spare room she closed
her eyes and said, "Fine. Take my room, then."

"I can't do that... look, I just want to sprawl
out on my own couch and turn on the Sci-Fi Channel and
try to get out from under this for a while."

"Will you take something?"

"Do you really think I need to?"

"Medically... no. Personally... yes."

So she came up, and I dug out the prescription
I got when Mom was in the hospital, after the stroke.
Scully knows I hate this stuff; she watched like a
hawk while I took out the pills and swallowed two.

Before I could even decide whether I wanted
to try to escape Dr. Scully's all-seeing eyes, she
got a phone call. Came into the living room agitated
and exhausted. "Will you be okay?"

Nodded, thinking, must be fate...

She checked the prescription four times-- I
counted-- heaved a shaky sigh, slid into the easy
chair and stared at the television, looked at her
watch every eight seconds.

"Take off, Scully. I'll be fine." I've learned
that I usually can't fake being asleep; she knows. But
I can pull off sounding drowsy. That usually works.

Scully gave me her favorite doubtful expression.

"Go ahead. You hate this part anyway. I'm just
gonna stare off into space and wallow for a while. I'd
kind of like to be alone."

She swept her stuff together and prattled about
being back in three hours, call her if anything happens,
et cetera. I think she told me where she was going, but
I was trying so hard to seem like I was falling asleep
that I almost did.

So what happens if I carry out the idea I've
got in mind, and Scully suspects that I never refilled
that prescription? Maybe she'll realize those pills
were shaped an awful lot like generic aspirin tablets.

Sorry, Scully.

I wanted to think it through. And I have. Scully
said there had to be another way.

There is another way.

It's now almost four-thirty pm on a Friday. Judge
Rehnquist will be wrapping things up in her office right
now. She heard the case against Virgil Incanto; she spoke
to me afterward, remarking on the strangeness of the man
and his crimes. She presided over the routine hearings
after Scully and I apprehended, and I had to shoot, Bill
Patterson. Rehnquist approved the search warrant on Robert
Modell's apartment.

She's as open-minded a federal judge as I've
ever dealt with. And it's late on a Friday; she'll hear
me out, and she'll make her decision right away so that
she can go home for the weekend.

A removal order for a prisoner in federal custody
is no small matter. I'll need to fax her my file on John
Lee Roche, and the report we logged on the discovery of
Addie Sparks a few days ago. A lifetime ago.

And then...

And then I'm ending this.

I'm taking John Roche to the Vineyard.

I'm taking him home.




Dana Scully's Personal Log

Thursday, Nov. 18th

I could use fewer days like this one.

Yeah, like maybe--no more, ever!

I got to the office early. Mulder had been there for a while.
He's still dragging, but at least he got a couple of hours of sleep.
I know now that nothing short of temazepam will put him out. He's
obsessing. It's always bad when we get to the part of the case
where he starts identifying with everyone--the victim, the victim's
family, the killer. So take that and multiply it a few times since this
time Mulder believes he IS the victim's family--no wonder he's
hanging on by his fingernails.

But it doesn't have to be like this!

The nice lady from ElectroVac returned my calls (six in the span of
30 minutes) and told me that she'd tracked down Roche's travel
records. They keep them for IRS purposes. Non-reimbursable
business expenses. "Of course, working for the government, I'm
sure you don't have to worry about those," she said in this really
catty little jealous voice. Yeah, lady, well, look at my _shoe_ repair
bill! Or drycleaning. Ever tried to get banana cream pie filling off
silk? Not to mention blood, since Mulder can't bleed on his _own_
shirt--only mine, for some bizarre reason.

Roche was on the Vineyard, all right. During October and
November of 1973. By December he was off again--into Rhodes
Island and New York. South for the winter, I suppose.

Shit.

I wanted to tell Mulder when we were alone. Well, I should have
known we'd never be that lucky.

Mulder and I had agreed that we needed to go see Roche again. But
especially after what happened yesterday, there was no way I was
going to let him go out there alone. For once, and to my total
amazement, he agreed with me.

I was on the phone with the the ElectroVac lady when he made the
phone call to make arrangements. I wasn't listening real closely to
his conversation, but it's hard not to notice a slammed phone and a
pencil soaring through the air. He was out of the room in a shot.
I finished up with the soon-to-be-audited Personnel Manager and
followed him up to Skinner's office.

Got there just in time for Mulder to flash me a 'how could you'
look before Skinner informed us both that he knew all about the
incident at the prison--it was on tape. I was pissed as hell that
Mulder thought I would rat on him. Haven't I taken the heat
enough times for him to know I don't do that? Forget for a minute
that I SHOULD have done that--I should have told Skinner the
whole episode, and maybe added that I thought Mulder should take
a couple of days off--a cooling down period, like the book says.
Forget for a minute that I'm always tap-dancing around procedure
for him, like the Tooms stakeout or that fucking DAT tape or any
of a thousand other times when I've put our partnership before
everything else, even my own job. Forget all that. He should have
known I wouldn't do it.

Skinner cut off Mulder's access to Roche. Any other time, I think I
might have laid a kiss on that old shiny head of his for thinking of
that! I wish I could have thought of that about four days ago and
all of this would have been over. But that was before I knew about
Roche and the Vineyard.

Right now cutting Mulder off from Roche is like feeding him cherry
bombs and handing him a lighted match. He's gonna blow; the only
variable is how close you are when it happens. I knew right then
that until we saw Roche again, and I convinced my partner that he's
_making this up_, Mulder would continue to obsess over this and
eventually . . .

I refuse to flush four years of my life down a toilet on something
so stupid. And I will not go back to teaching. And I will not let
Mulder do that to himself.

I was joking the other day when I mentioned that I should get paid
for watching Mulder. Apparently, it's not a joke anymore. Skinner
made it official. I'm to watch him like a hawk, keep him in line.

To be perfectly honest, it's a dirty job, but who's going to do it?
Not Skinner himself. He can't exactly assign someone else. I guess
I'm the most likely candidate. And, at times, Mulder has listened to
me.

Yeah, right.

BUT, at least Skinner agreed to let us see Roche one more time.

In retrospect, I know it was a bad idea. Even though it did come to
some good. We found another body because of this little visit and
chat. Mulder almost sacrificed his mind on an altar of guilt because
of it, but we put another little girl to rest. Another family can
grieve and go on, without the questions, without the false hope.

That family was not my partner's.

I've seen evil. I've had evil touch me and call me 'Girly girl' and
ask me if my hair is dry or normal. I've seen it covered in slime
and crawling through and around the escalator of a shopping mall,
waiting to attack and kill and eat. I've seen it many many times and
I was totally repulsed by it. Today, I was almost fascinated by it.

Mulder took the last two hearts. Little tiny pieces of fabric. If
those little girls had lived, had grown up, I wonder what would
have happened to those little snatches of fabric. Mom took a bunch
of the flannel pajamas we'd all outgrown, the ones with worn out
knees that weren't fit for any other kids to use as hand-me-downs,
and made a quilt from them. We all fought over it. I was in high
school, and Bill was in the service and Missy was about to go out
to California and even Charlie wanted that quilt. It was warm and
soft and felt so good to sleep under.

Mom wouldn't let any of us have it. She called it her 'hope quilt'.
She informed us that one day, when our kids were over to stay at
Grandma and Grandpa's house, they could sleep under that quilt. It
was for the next generation. The little ones to come.

Bill and Karen's kids sleep under it every time they come visit.

Roche wanted to take those hearts out of the plastic bags. I almost
cheered when Mulder wouldn't let him. The bastard will just have
to imagine the thrill. I'm glad we didn't give it to him.

We handed him other thrills, though. We walked right into a setup.
A perfect little mind game that could only come from someone
with that much evil in him.

Roche recited the night of Samantha's abduction. It sounded almost
as though he had heard the tapes of Mulder's hypnosis. He knew it
all. He taunted Mulder, glaring at him with his cold eyes. And
Mulder sat there, paralyzed. Caught in the cobra's gaze.

"Pick one."

I remember doing that. I even had a flash, just for a second of
saying 'Eeny, meany, miney moe, catch a tiger by the toe'.

He was making Mulder pick which heart belonged to Samantha.

Had that night not held so much terror for him, I have no doubt that
Mulder would have picked the right heart. Or politely told Roche
to go fuck himself sideways, because neither heart belonged to
anything Samantha owned. Mulder remembers blouses I wore
during the first few months we worked together. He comments
occasionally when I borrow something from Mom's wardrobe.
Hell, he can keep his own huge closet straight.

But I could tell that he didn't recognize either heart. And worse
than that, he wasn't sure that he _didn't_ recognize either of them.
He just didn't know. It wasn't in his head. That thought was
killing him and Roche was grinning like the fool he is while Mulder
was slicing himself to ribbons choosing between two little cloth
hearts.

I'm skipping Valentine's Day next year. Maybe the year after, too.

Mulder chose.

I've never been to the Forks of Cacapon, West Virginia. It's a nice
park. Campgrounds were well cared for. It was a little muddy, but
the covering of leaves helped out there.

When we found the rock, with the words 'MAD HAT' scratched
into it, I almost chickened out. I thought about hitting Mulder in
the back of the head, just enough to knock him out, and dragging
him back to the car.

I didn't want to be wrong. I didn't want to find the body and then
have to identify it and have to tell Mulder that we'd found
Samantha.

I didn't want to deal with it when he heard the news.

Thank God, it didn't come to that.

Instead, it took hours of me holding my breath, Mulder holding his
breath, while the forensics team finished the work that Mulder
and I started. Well, Mulder started it. I just followed blindly along,
like I always do. One day, it might even be off a cliff. Procedure?
What procedure? Mulder started clawing through the dirt with his
fingernails and I happily joined him. We work in the basement, we
don't need no stinking pro-CE-dure!

I made him sit in the break room while I ran the computer match.
There wasn't enough left of the nightgown to identify from the
descriptions of all the missing children from 1973 on. So many
children. Some taken by their 'estranged' parents, some runaways
now hookers on the streets. Some still out there. In other shallow
graves. Waiting for us or somebody like us to find them and bring
them home.

I checked Samantha's description first. I have it memorized by
now. Samantha was taller at the time of her disappearance. And
she'd had a cavity filled in her lower right bicuspid.

This little girl was not Samantha.

I went to the break room and wasn't too surprised to find he wasn't
there. He was in the autopsy room. The way he was standing,
hunched over that skeleton. I don't know what I wanted. I could
understand why he might wish it was all over. Just over. Not for
good, God knows it'll never be over for good, but just over. So she
could rest. So he could rest.

But when he started talking, I knew that wasn't what he wanted
now.

"It's not her. Am I right? Samantha broke her collarbone. We
had a rope swing in the back..."

We had one, too.

I was relieved that he had figured it out on his own. That way, he
truly believed it. He had his proof. He'd touched it, with his own
hands. For a moment, I could tell he was truly relieved, too.

And then the curtain dropped again.

"It's not her. But it's somebody."

And my heart went out to some unknown family, still wondering where
she is. And then my heart went out to _him_... still wondering where
she is...

I got him back to the apartment. This time I didn't ask if he wanted
to stay the night. I just drove him there and he didn't argue. I
would have liked him to stretch out on the bed, but there's still no
TV in my spare room. Budget constraints. So when he balked at
the thought of going in there, I gathered up enough blankets and he
curled up on the sofa. Good thing he was hunched up in a little
ball, or his feet would have been propped up on the arm. I really
need to get a longer sofa.

I just checked him a minute ago. The TV is on. He heard my
footsteps and slammed his eyes shut, tried that 'possum' trick
where he slows his breathing. He thinks he's got me fooled. I
decided this time not to call him on it. Maybe, if he tries hard
enough to fool me, he'll fall asleep on his own.

Friday, November 20

I cannot believe this whole day.

I cannot believe that I'm in the Assistant Director's car, going just
over the speed limit at 70 mph, typing on my damned laptop to keep
from engaging in a conversation that would in all likelihood range
from my own suspension for dereliction of duty to my partner's
subsequent dismissal for gross and reckless misconduct.

I was asleep for a while, but that was another lousy idea.

I cannot believe what a rat bastard he was.

I'm talking about Roche, now. I'll deal with the other 'rat bastard'
in my life in a minute.

We had to go out to the prison again.

It was the only way to find out who that little girl was. I knew
Roche would tell us. For one thing, he would want to prove that he
knew who it was, and for another, he'd want to rub it in that
Mulder had picked the wrong heart.

I was right, on both counts.

He's so fucking cool about it all. No remorse, no regret. The
prison system is supposedly 'rehabilitating' this man. Regardless
of the fact that he will never be let back into society--

At least, that was the plan.

He played Mulder like a goddamned violin. But we found out the
little girl's name. Karen Ann Phileponte. I remembered the name
from the data search--there were a total of 17 possibilities for a
child that size and description, gone missing around that time on the
Eastern seaboard. Karen will be taken off that list now. Only 16
more to go.

After Roche's little show yesterday, I should have been prepared
for anything. I mean, if the guy can come up with a recount of
Mulder's own repressed memories, well, this is a guy who shoots
for the moon, right? I'm still wondering how he did that. It
would be a gross violation of patient confidentiality for Mulder's
hypnotherapist to leak that information to anyone. Mulder has
always trusted the man explicitly. But how else could Roche have
known?

All that aside, the bastard must think we are the dumbest things
walking because he told Mulder he would tell him everything.
"That's all that will satisfy you, right?" Provided, of course,
that we let him out for a day.

"I'm realistic," he said. "Besides, I can't wait to see the look on
your face."

That clinched it. Capital punishment is too good for that man. I
want him to starve to death in that fucking prison cell. They
can throw his remains out with the other environmental hazards.
There was no way anyone with any intelligence would ever let that
man out of that cell.

I wasn't counting on how monumentally stupid my partner can be.
It's one thing to endure ruthless manipulation. It's another
thing to succumb when you KNOW you're being played.

When we left Roche, I knew Mulder was not 'all right'. I could see
it in his eyes, his stance, his facial expression. Even his hair looked
like he was about to fall apart. Or do something really stupid.

I'm not blind. But damn it all, I'm his partner! I'm not his fucking
nursemaid, no matter what Skinner thinks.

I did everything I could reasonably have been expected to do. I
wanted to take him back to my apartment, but he nixed that idea
right out of the gate. He wanted to be on his own lumpy couch.
Fine. I knew better than to let him go there and then turn my back.
I drove him over. And made him get out the prescription sleeping
pills the doctor gave him when his mom was in the hospital.
They're nice and strong and would last the night, at least they had
when he'd taken them before.

He hates them. I know he feels out of control when he's drugged.
I guess that's a good sign, because as obsessive as he is, Mulder
would be a prime candidate for drug addiction if that weren't the
case. I'm sure he sees that in himself and that's why he fights it so
much. But sometimes, he just needs to let go. He was not going to
go to sleep tonight without some chemical assistance. Better those
pills than a bottle of something else.

I watched him take them. I watched very closely because I've seen
him palming pain pills at the ER and I know how he does it. He thinks
it's cute, I want to strangle him. But this time, he put them in his
mouth and swallowed. God, I felt like a fucking pediatrician,
treating a four year old.

Thinking back, temazepam is smaller than the pills he swallowed.

The bastard changed the fucking pills.

I'll kill him! The fucking choke chain will have spikes on the
INSIDE of the collar! He is TOAST!

And that drowsy act. All a big put-on. He sort of slumped on the
couch. . . I bet he thanked his lucky stars when my phone rang. I
wonder if he managed to arrange _that_, too?

Nah, Ellen hates him. He'd never get her to go along with it. It
was just sheer dumb Mulder luck again. The kind that's going to
help him right into an early grave.

Shit, I have got to stop thinking of that stupid dream. My dream,
this time, not his.

So, I haven't heard from Ellen for months. Last time we talked,
and I feel guilty as hell about this, she was telling me that David
was gone all the time and she was really beginning to hate all the
business trips that his new job required. I was superficially
sympathetic. I mean, my God, the man makes in the middle six
figures and she's bitching because he's not home three nights a
week. I couldn't help thinking that Ellen needs to get out of that
little 'Longenberger'-basket-display kitchen of hers and do a little
charity work or find a job. So what if they don't need the
money--she needs a life.

Well, now she needs the money. She left David. He's been
sleeping with his secretary. His male secretary. And about half the
rest of the office for good measure.

Ten years is a long time to be in a 'cover' marriage.

She was scared shitless, kept crying about how could she get hold
of an AIDS test--this woman used to be intelligent. But with her
crying in my ear, and Mulder looking suitably drugged on his couch,
I did what I thought was the best thing at the time.

I went over to talk to Ellen. And left Mulder, whom I firmly
believed was sawing logs, by himself.

Big mistake of the evening number one.

I got Ellen calmed down. She's going to her doctor for the test.
I told her that there's a good chance she'll be fine. I can
understand her concern. She thought she was safe, in a
monogamous relationship. I expressly avoided telling her that these
days, nobody's that safe. I really didn't think it would do anything
but add to the fear she was already displaying.

Three hours later, I begged off to go check on my other little charge.
The one who's going to be First Degree Murder when I get hold of
him.

Mulder's car was gone. I couldn't remember where it had been
parked when we got back to his apartment, but I knew it had been
on the street somewhere. It wasn't on the street when I was there
the second time tonight.

I went upstairs, hand on my gun, praying that he'd be snoring on
the couch with the TV blaring, like I left him.

He was gone. The rat bastard was gone. He'd even turned the
fucking TV off.

That gave me an idea. Mulder only turns the TV off when he's on
the phone. Especially when the phone call is important.

I hit redial on his cordless and got really lucky.

I like Judge Rehnquist. She's no relation to the Supreme Court
Justice and I've heard she gets a lot of ribbing for the name, but
she's always been there when we needed her. She's there for us
basically because when we call her, we have a really good reason.
Whatever it's for--a warrant, some order, an injunction, even a
release--before this, it's always been for a good reason.

I don't think I'll be able to look the woman in the face again after
tonight. She immediately wondered why I was calling. I mean, she
had assumed that I would be with my partner, escorting a federal
prisoner to Martha's Vineyard to find an unmarked grave.

"Oh, _that's_ where he went." I can't believe I actually said that to
the woman. She must think I'm completely nuts now.

But that hardly mattered. I then had to answer my cellphone--and
got the call to report IMMEDIETELY to A.D. Skinner.

I knew he'd be angry. Skinner gets this little vein on his neck
that stands out when he's really pissed, and it was out there so far
I was sure the man was going to have a stroke.

Suddenly, it was MY fault. *I* was supposed to make sure
something like this didn't happen. I guess I was supposed to keep
Mulder occupied this evening so he didn't go out and do something
stupid. Strip poker, maybe. Yeah, that'd go over REAL well.

Well fuck the both of them, Skinner and Mulder. Skinner can kiss
my ass if he couldn't see earlier that Mulder needed to be tied to
the office, put in restraints, drugged into a coma, pick one, any one.
I don't know when I became my partner's official keeper, but I
better get paid accordingly. I wonder what a 24-hour psychiatrist
goes for these days?

And Mulder, oooooh, Mulder. Skinner decided that we'd wasted
enough of the good taxpayers' money already, letting Roche out of
jail, so we are driving to the Vineyard. I guess it was just my
body's way of shutting everything out. I fell asleep in the car.

And dreamed. I dreamed we got to the motel where I'd tracked
Mulder down. Stupid shit used his company AMEX; I certainly hope
he wasn't trying to hide from me, because if he was, he's getting
really rusty at it.

In the dream, my dream, we pull up to the motel. Skinner gets
out first and bangs on the door. Not all that surprisingly, there is
no answer, so he kicks the son of a bitch in. And stops. And turns
around and the look on his face is pure horror. I run forward and
try to get in, but he grabs me and tries to stop me. I get out of his
grip and go through the door.

I can't even describe how many ways Roche used to kill Mulder in
my dream. All I can remember, the part that woke me up with a
jolt, was Mulder's eyes. Staring at me. Lifeless.

If this fucking car can't go any faster, why the hell didn't we take
the damned plane?

We'll be there in another half hour. I just hope Mulder's still alive,
so I can kill him when I get there.





The Journals of Fox Mulder

Saturday 20 November

Finally. I thought John would never fall asleep.

It worked. I can't believe it fucking worked. If
he'd just admit, just break down and SAY that he's lying,
then I know I could kill the last, gasping vestige of doubt
that's still tucked just inside my jacket, poking a long
fingernail into my side and wheezing, "But what if he DID
do it?"

But no. I don't think so. Not any more. Scully was
right. He's been playing me all along.

Scully... Scully... Scully's going to kill me for
ditching her again. I'm gambling that she'll understand--
she won't like it, but she knows that when it comes down
to it, I didn't really have a choice.

After all, if I'd run this past her, she never would've
let me do it. But it worked. Against all odds, my god, it
actually worked. I feel like I've just run a marathon.

I thought no trip could ever last as long as the car
ride to the Forks of Cacapon, but I was wrong. The plane trip
to the Vineyard today... that was longer. Not merely because
I was on the edge of my seat wondering whether Roche was being
honest, not merely agonizing over whether this plan was going
to work... Travelling with John Lee Roche gives a whole new
meaning to the term "motion sickness".

For one thing, he would not shut up. I guess the other
prisoners don't care to engage in conversation with a child
molester and serial murderer. Or maybe it was just his old
salesman's instincts kicking in-- if he could keep me talking,
I wouldn't think about his story and find any inconsistencies
that might mar his carefully constructed illusion.

For another, I was escorting around a handcuffed man
while trying desperately to conceal the fact that I, the
Lone Federal Agent, was transporting a prisoner without the
team of officers who customarily accompany an expedition like
this. I managed to badge my way around the metal detectors so
that I didn't have to uncuff him there, and with my overcoat
hanging over his hands, Roche looked normal most of the time.

_I_ was the one people were giving suspicious looks--
one hand constantly on my hip and the other on Roche's arm, sweat
pouring down my face, anxiety tripping my words up and making
my hands shake. I saw some teenager look at me and Roche and
then flip his wrist at his buddy, so apparently I must've
looked like a gay man... fresh from a diagnosis of HIV-positive,
clinging to the guy who passed it to him in the first place.

No, kid, see, I'm really an FBI agent, absconding to
my childhood home with an erstwhile child molester and killer
in an attempt to find out once and for all if he murdered my
little sister.

Never mind.

Not to mention debating over whether to call Scully's
answering machine and leave a message. Again. Third time's
a charm, right? But there was a slim chance she'd gone home
after she left my apartment, so I passed on that one.

Maybe I should call her right now. Sure, it's one in
the morning, but if I go ahead and call now, she'll be awake
in plenty of time to watch Saturday morning cartoons.

Nah. She's probably already in trouble for not reporting
me when I slugged Roche. If I tell her what I've done now, she'll
have to report me for this. And the hell of it is-- she might not.
She might jet out here to help me bring him in without incident,
then write one of her razzle-dazzle reports where she somehow
makes every crazy-ass thing we do on a case sound utterly sane
and sensible.

But with the way Skinner was raving yesterday morning--
no, I guess that was two days ago-- whatever. He looked ready
to take a chunk out of anyone unlucky enough to get close to his
teeth. Not even one of Scully's reports would be enough to pacify
him if I dragged her into this.

No. I started this, I'll finish it myself and take the
fall. I'll unceremoniously dump Roche back at the prison this
morning, turn myself in to Scully and let her haul me in to get
cited for misconduct. That won't look too bad. It'll appear that
Scully's doing her job, keeping me in line and going to Skinner
when I stick my neck out. Skinner can tear me up all he wants;
I'll survive. Hell, I made it through this week. One of the A.D.'s
reaming sessions'll seem like tender loving care after the shit
I've dealt with from Roche.

Forewarned was not forarmed, in this case. I knew exactly
what he was doing and why he was doing it-- primarily to have a
little fun, secondarily to distract me from thinking too closely
about his tales of 1973. All the way from the prison, through the
airport, onto the plane-- he kept at me. I knew what he was doing.

It didn't help.

"The investigation was really pretty sloppy," he told
me mildly, like he was talking about the Redskins game. "I read
about it in the papers, and there were a lot of ways they could
have caught me, if they'd just kept at it. Even now, you could've
traced it to me, if you were really diligent."

"How?" I demanded.

He just said airily, "Plenty of ways. Tons. I wasn't
even wearing gloves."

"Then you didn't touch anything, because they never found
anyone's prints..."

"I didn't need to touch anything else."

On a fucking airplane, in the middle of coach, while the
stewardess was passing out those goddamned bags of honey-roasted
peanuts-- and my fingers ached, I wanted to hurt him so bad.

Finally I realized he wouldn't quit unless I played ball
with him, so I tried to catch him in contradictions, or get him
to venture knowledge that he'd get wrong. "You said you sold this
vacuum cleaner to my father. What was he like, then?"

"I don't remember," Roche said, then a sly glance. "I wasn't
really paying attention to _him_."

And I meant to be objective, but I just couldn't. "My sister
didn't fit your pattern. She doesn't look like Alice, John."

"Samantha was the first... I wasn't sure what I wanted,
then. She had such clear blue eyes. When I came to your house,
her hair was pulled back with blue ribbons, and she was laughing.
The whole time I was there, she was laughing."

"She still didn't look like Alice."

"Have you ever seen a picture of the real little girl
the reverend wrote those books for? Alice Liddell?" he asked
dreamily. "Blue eyes... and such lovely dark hair."

I set my jaw. And wanted to vomit. "Where was _I_?"

"Baseball practice, I think." Roche smiled abstractly.
"Your dad pointed out the pictures on the wall of you and your
sister." He focussed on me, eyes sharpening. "You know, I thought
I recognized you... when you and those other men asked me
questions. Your eyes are the same as they were then. But I
thought, no, it's too much of a coincidence. Then I found out
that yeah, you're Fox. I remembered your name from when I talked
to your father. It's a memorable name." --Lies. It was all lies.

But I didn't know that, then. "Why would he mention us
to you? You were just selling him a vacuum cleaner. He wouldn't
give you the story of his life."

"I always asked, of course." That husk of a smile. "And it's
suspicious, only asking about... Samantha... so I asked about
you, too. It was okay. I didn't have to listen to much about you.
He went on and on about her, though... which was what I wanted,
after all."

And I had to suppress a shiver, because that did sound like
Dad; the potholder Samantha crocheted was always infinitely more
interesting than the score of my last basketball game. The doubts
kept gathering, worse and worse. And still Roche wore that
vacant salesman's smile.

"But all this can wait," he said, all empty geniality. "We
can't start until we get there."

"Fine." I tried to ignore him. Ran through some trial
apologies for Scully. At times like this, it's good to have
plenty of grovelling worked out ahead of time.

Then Roche started in again, proclaiming, "The time has
come, the Walrus said, to talk of many things."

"Yeah, and a very merry un-birthday to you too, John. Now
shut up. You'll get your chance to talk."

He made an exagerrated `hrumph'ing sound. "If that's how
you're going to be, maybe I won't say anything after all."

I stared him down. At least I can say that much for myself.
On one small point, I stared him down. "You need to tell me as much
as I need to know."

"And how many states can I send you and your pretty partner
running to? How many times can you stand to dig for your sister's
shallow grave?"

I could hear the other passengers chatting, hear someone's
hands takking on the keys of a laptop computer. The rustling of
cellophane packages, munching of teeth on gummy peanuts. I tried to
imagine the plane soaring over the Atlantic, tried to visualise how
it would look to someone on the ground... a tiny silver dot in
the sky, a thread of white smoke among the clouds. So small and
inconsequential.

It hurts to hate this much. I'm exhausted with the effort
it takes to despise him.

No, what's wearing me down is the effort it takes to keep
from putting a pillow over his face right now. He's snoring,
the bastard, five feet from where I'm sitting. I cuffed him to
the bed. He said, "Kinky." And then, in plying tones, "This
isn't how I'd choose to spend my last few hours of freedom..."

"Good."

When we took his testimony... god, it was yesterday, it
was less than twenty-four hours ago... when we got him to tell
us who the fifteenth little girl was, I saw the look on Scully's
face.

She hates him, and it was glorious to see. It's not a
muddled, frustrated feeling that ties her up and tires her
out. It's almost biblical, the hate she harbors for him-- pure
and cold and monumental. She has no compulsion to decipher his
behavior; she's not interested in what made him this way. He's
a predator to be studied, caged and classified, and then forgotten.

I want that. Oh how I want that.

"She lived in Green Ranch, New York," Roche told her. "Mint
grew outside her window; I stood outside her window atop sprigs of
mint. Smelled wonderful." He drifted off for a moment. Gave Scully
a date-- July 1974-- nine months after Sam went missing.

But he didn't take Sam.

"Her name was Karen Ann Phileponte," he said, freeing that
fifteenth cloth heart at last. And then, in an absolutely textbook
sociopathic display, he burst out, "I had her mother on the hook
for an ElectroVac Argasy-- but at the last minute, she said Thanks
but no thanks--" He fairly sizzled with indignation. Then he lapsed
into his dissociative state again, murmuring, "Oh well."

I remember. I remember the patterns of his speech,
the currents of his delusions. Too well.

"Why'd you do it, John?" Reggie Pardue's low voice; I
remember how he always sounded so sure, so ordered and composed.
That was the last case we worked on together, six years ago,
and now he's gone.

"They deserved better," Roche answered distantly.

"Better than what?" Bill Patterson demanded, pushing his
glasses up his nose-- whenever he was stymied, he'd always start
messing with his glasses.

"Than this," Roche replied.

"So you took them away," Bill interpreted.

Reggie-- and it's one of the reasons I miss him-- couldn't
contain his disgust. "How?" he asked. "How could you do that
to those little girls? Didn't they ask for their mommies, didn't
they cry and beg to go home? Weren't they fighting when you
held them down?"

John Lee Roche squirmed. For the first time in the session
he lost that far-off look and cast his eyes around the room like
reality mattered. He blurted, "And if he left off dreaming about
you, where do you suppose you'd be? You'd be nowhere. Why, you're
only a sort of thing in his dream! If he was to wake, you'd go
out-- bang!-- just like a candle!"

I put myself into his line of sight and asked, "If those
girls were only a sort of thing in a dream, then what are you,
John?"

"A dreamer," he whispered. Then, with a wry twist to his
smile, "A daydream believer."

I was glad he didn't quote from Lennon's "Imagine": "You
may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one..." John Roche's
fixation on the works of Lewis Carroll already ruined the Alice
books for me. Charles Manson's fascination with "Helter Skelter"
put me off the Beatles and his endorsement of Heinlein's _Stranger
in a Strange Land_ made me move my copy to a back shelf. The Aum
Supreme Truth cult in Japan touts Asimov's Foundation series as
the basis for their apocalyptic beliefs, so I took those books
right off the bottom of the coffee table, where I keep all my
insomnia reading material. With all of these killers laying
claim to so many icons of popular culture, I'm running out of
things I can safely enjoy.

At least my video collection remains unprofaned.

"Why those girls, John?" Bill asked, as always scouting
for indicators. "What about them made you decide they deserved
better than this? You must have seen a lot of children, travelling
like you did. Why them?"

"The dream-child, moving through a land of wonders wild
and new..." Roche quoted at him; his posture arched. Playing,
now. He made me think of a kid with a magnifying glass and a
few trapped ants.

I lost my patience. "And something, something, something
else, and half believe it true," I tossed back at him.

Bill actually laughed at my mangled citing of Carroll's
poetry. "That's pretty good, John," he confided in Roche,
"stumping Mulder, here. That's better than any of us have
managed with him." He sat next to Roche at the table, trying
to encourage identification. Bill Patterson never saw victims; he
saw convictions and killers. It served him well until it dragged
him down. He was always so eager to find a kinship with the
killer, to "look at the art" and know the artist through and
through.

Roche focussed on me. "The question is," he said, "which
is to be master... that's all."

I'd never be able to read those books again. "Impenetrability,
that's what I say."

"By impenetrablity, you mean we've had enough of this
subject," Roche grinned. "For now."

"Tell us where they are, John."

He looked to Reggie and to Bill, hoping for an opportunity
to manipulate his way into another line of questioning. But they
both backed me up. "Tell us where they are."

And he did.

Terrible as it seems, I have to say-- that was a good
interrogation. Bill and Reggie and I managed to act as a trinity
that day; each of us took on the burden of sympathy for one of
the three points of view. Perpetrator, victim, and survivor.

Christ... that's how we ended up in the end... Reggie,
murdered. Bill, a murderer. And me. So far. Survivor.

So far. If I can just make it through this night. It's
2:54. Plane leaves at six. A few more hours. I can make it a
few more hours.

I'll... practice what to say to Scully. I never
got the chance to come up with anything much on the way
here.

Hell of an awkward production, keeping close tabs
on Roche. I cuffed him to the seat and went to the restroom,
and when I came back he'd already talked to the elderly lady
behind him long enough to borrow a pack of playing cards from
her. He asked if I was up for a game of poker, shuffling the
cards slowly. I took the deck away.

"I could make this pretty difficult for you," he said.
"I'm being very cooperative, you have to admit. It'd be a
real hassle if I rattled these cuffs in the stewardess's
face. Started shouting at all these nice people. Might even
cause a panic."

...I let him keep the cards.

Eventually he gave them back to the owner and told
me he needed to use the men's room-- I always forget to
figure biology into my otherwise so perfectly orchestrated
plans. Decided to leave him cuffed and if things got
messy for him, well, fine. Of course, the minute I let
him up, the flight attendant barricaded the aisle with
the drink cart. Roche headed down the rows with my jacket
slung over his hands, and I had to watch as he crouched and
spoke to a mother and her little girl.

Finally the attendant let me through and I grabbed
his arm and urged him down the aisle. "Three minutes," I
told him as I shoved him in. "After three minutes, I'm
pulling you out and bringing you back to your seat no
matter how I find you."

"You only encourage bad behavior by expecting the
worst, Mulder," he told me serenely. "My therapist is
confident that's one of the root causes for my condition."

And then he ducked into the restroom. Lucky for
me, because I didn't have a glib reply to that one. Just
rage.

Later, he wanted to know if I thought Lewis Carroll--
or rather, Charles Dodgson, the clergyman and mathemetician
who wrote as Carroll-- was a pedophile.

"I mean, you've done the reading," he said cloyingly,
"you're an educated man, a psychologist... do you see that in
his work?"

"I didn't until we started tracking you." It's the
biggest reason that I can't recapture my former affection
for Carroll's books-- and "The Jabberwocky" was one of the
first poems I ever knew by heart. I loved those books. But
when I was profiling Roche and getting ready to interview
him, some elements of Dodgson's biography took on a sinister
cast. Never married-- big deal, he was a clergyman. Tutored
children in math and told them stories which would later
become the events of the Alice books. So far, pretty innocent.
Dodgson was one of England's first photographers... and
his favorite subjects were little girls. When possible,
nude.

Gets worse from there. The Annotated Alice had a
Freudian reading of Carroll's works, and while I'm not much
for Freud, the dissection of the semiotics of Alice's
adventures seemed sound enough... the concentration on and
confusion about body size, the way Alice grows and shrinks
in imitation of tumescence... and a selection of Dodgson's
diary entries seems to indicate a fixation on very young
girls. It's a compulsion expressed, it seems, only in the
most oblique way in his writings-- but a sexual compulsion
nonetheless.

Really ruins the books.

"If Dodgson did have pedophilic urges," I told Roche,
"it seems as though he probably sublimated them in his
fiction." I suppose it shouldn't matter whether Dodgson
was a pedophile or not. Dante Alighieri was known to be
smitten with a prepubescent girl, and we still read his
_Inferno_. Then again, we don't read _Inferno_ to our
kids.

Roche said, "If I were Reverend Dodgson, I'd
be insulted."

"If you were Dodgson, Alice Liddel would've
been strangled to death and dumped in a ditch."

He chuckled, "You have a point." And finally,
after that, he was quiet.

Until we got to the house. The house in West
Tisbury.

I thought it would be easy. I've lived through that
night so many times. I'd stretch out and do the deep breathing
exercises Dad taught me and go over everything that happened
up until the blank place.

And I'd remember: Mom got Samantha into her nightgown
and told me to be sure she got to bed by nine. Dad put his hand
on my shoulder and said, "You're in charge while we're next
door, Fox. It's your responsibility if anything happens, so
keep an eye on your sister." I tell myself that he only meant
that if Sam broke something, I'd get in trouble too. That's
what I tell myself. Then he thumped my arm and said, "We'll
be back around ten."

"We're right next door if you need us," Mom added
anxiously, fussing with Sam's hair while Sam fidgeted and
made a face at me. "There's some deli salads in the fridge
if you want anything, but stay out of the cold cuts, I'm
making sandwiches with those for the Ladies' Auxiliary
tomorrow."

"We'll call and check on you at eight," Dad said.

"Listen to Fox, now, Samantha," Mom told her.

"I will," she chirped, in the voice she only used
when she wanted me to know that she was lying.

"G'night, sweetie," and they gave Sam her good-night
kisses, because the world would end if Samantha had to go
to bed without getting kissed goodnight by everyone on the
planet.

The door was hardly shut when Sam ran to me, whapped
my hand and said, "Tag, you're it, no tagbacks, count to ten--"
and ran for the stairs.

"Aren't you a little old for hide-and-seek?"

"No!"

"Well, I am." I turned on the television.

"Pleeeeeeease?" Sam looked down from the bannister,
leaning out too far over it as usual. Her feet lifted off
the stairs and she dipped forward.

"Showoff. I used to do that all the time. It's not
really scary."

"You're too tall now," she said, and stuck out her
tongue.

"And I'm too old for hide-and-seek."

Sam stomped down the stairs and pushed her lower
lip out. Scully has accused me of picturesque pouting on
occasion-- well, I learned from the master. Samantha could
pout anyone down for the count. "All right," she sighed,
"let's play an _old people_ game."

We played checkers and chess, but she got sick
of both of those in a hurry. Then she wanted to watch
_Rhoda_, so we quit for a while. I did my geometry homework
while she watched TV.

"Can't you just come find me _once_?" she said,
when her show was over. "You don't even have to count to
ten. You can just count to five. I won't even hide very
good."

"I'm not playing hide-and-seek, Sam."

That pout again. "You never play with me anymore."

"I'll play any of this other stuff..." I remember
being angry and embarrassed; hide-and-seek was really just
Sam's excuse to have me chase her screaming all around the
house. But I was twelve, and suddenly about six inches
taller than I had been the day before, and things kept
tipping over and spilling and breaking every time I turned
around.

She said, "Stratego. Sometimes I win at that."

We set it up in front of the television. The news
came on. Something about Watergate-- again, and I was really
sick of hearing about it by then. "You can go first," I told
her.

And for twenty years, that was where it ended. Time
stopped. It began again a few days later; slow awareness of
white, the smell of alcohol, my father's voice growling in
the periphery, Mom putting her hand on my arm and calling,
"Bill, he's waking up."

Then, late in '89, the hypnoregression sessions.
And regardless of what anyone thinks, I didn't just blindly
accept the memories of a mysterious light, a voice in my
head, my sister calling my name as she was taken from me.
When Dr. Verber and I recovered those memories, I checked
them against the missing persons reports and the investigations.
I examined those memories, played them over and over, trying
to learn more about what happened. I've revisited that night
so many times, waking, sleeping... in a way, that night never
ended.

I thought it would be easy to listen to John Lee
Roche tell me how he parked down the street... watched
the house... saw Mom and Dad go to the neighbors'. Came
to the window and saw us inside, listened to us talking.

It wasn't. It... it wasn't easy.

"You were playing a board game," Roche said. Yes.
He gestured to the window. "I was listening..." He pointed
to the television. "You were right there," he said.

The door was unlocked, he recalled. Yes. "I came
in and-- you went for your father's gun. I give you credit
for that. But then you sort of... froze..." Yes.

"Then I took your sister away from all this."

No.

"Wrong house."

I saw panic in his eyes. "Huh?"

"Wrong house." Sweeter words were never spoken.
"This house is in West Tisbury. The house Samantha was
taken from was in Chilmark."

He argued. "Geography, this is geography, it was
twenty years ago." He insinuated. "I hear you go after
aliens from space. Like your world would be okay if you
could just believe in flying saucers." He insisted. "I
took your sister."

He lied.

He was lying. But this was the only way to be
sure. And to learn the extent of the details he gleaned,
I think, from my own dreams.

I know. It's a long way to go to prove a point.
I'll be suspended for this. The way Skinner was ranting
the other day, it might be weeks. Enough to show up on
my jacket. The FBI version of the "permanent record"
that haunted us through school.

It was worth it. Now I know. And if this last
fucking doubt isn't dead yet, well, I can live with
doubt. I've got lots of practice.

It was the certainty I couldn't face.

...Can't face.

Maybe I'm fooling myself-- seeing what I want
to see. What I _have_ to see. It can't be true, therefore
it is not true. Even though he gave me every detail and
how the hell could Roche see into my dreams? I don't even
have the faintest scintilla of science to back it up, no
theories. He HAS TO have seen my dreams because otherwise,
he's telling the truth and he CAN'T be telling the truth
because Sam can't be dead, so damn science, to hell with
the facts, John Lee Roche got into my dreams and saw my
memories of Sam's abduction.

He started laughing in the car on the way from
my father's house in West Tisbury to this hotel. Roche
chuckled at first, then doubled over, howling.

"What's so funny?"

Finally he gasped and heaved and managed to
say, "I got into your dreams-- I just realized where
you got that, Mulder-- it's the plot from _Nightmare
on Elm Street_--"

Had to brake hard at the next stoplight. And
you know, with the handcuffs and all, John had a hard
time keeping his balance. Hope the dash didn't hurt his
forehead too much.

God know I'm in enough trouble already, let
alone if he goes back to the prison with a bruise.
Might interfere with his basketball games.

He was lying... he was. He didn't take Samantha.

3:39. Almost dawn. Well, another hour and a half.
That's not too long. Just a few more hours.

Just a few more hours. And it'll all be over.



Saturday, November 20th

It's late.

I'm exhausted. Maybe not as tired as Mulder, who's sleeping on
the sofa again for the night. And probably most of tomorrow, if my
suspicions are correct. He was a little shocky coming home, pale,
shaking. He was sure I didn't notice, or else, he thought I didn't
care. Frankly, I was too upset/worried/tired to do much more than
throw a blanket and pillow at him and leave him alone.

I think that's what he wanted anyway.

Assistant Director His Highness Walter S. Skinner made it clear
that I'm to have Mulder in the office no later than 8:30 day after
tomorrow. I had to do a double take on that one. Even Skinner
realized Mulder would be no good to anyone for at least 36 hours.
Guess he figures it's not as much fun to skewer an unconscious
man. The first intelligent assessment our revered Assistant Director
has made in the last week, by my count.

Bastard. But that list is getting awfully long and I'm too tired to
even give it a glance right now. Soon, though. Very soon.

I would be sleeping, too, if it weren't for the images playing pong
in my brain. There were so many times today when I wished with
everything in me that I would wake up and find it all a dream. I
might be a little shaken, might have to turn on the light and read
awhile, but it would all be a fantasy, gone with the morning.

No such luck. Again.

It started when we got to the motel. I was holding my breath as we
pulled up to the door the manager had told was Mulder's. I was
tense, I had every reason to be tense, but scared shitless, that was
pretty irrational. All this talk of dreams coming true is starting to
affect me. I hate when Mulder does that. He sort of acid-trips his
way into my psyche and gives me his fears. I have enough of my
own to deal with, thank you very much! As we walked up to
that door, I was hoping that my dream had been just a normal,
sorting out the day kind of dream, and not--well, the kind Mulder
loves to tell me about. We knocked on the door and no one
answered. I never felt so cold as when Skinner was kicking in that
door.

But Mulder was okay. In a manner of speaking, anyway. As a matter
of fact, he was standing, with a table knocked over on its side in
front of him. In his own handcuffs.

Had it not been so terrifying, I would have laughed myself silly.

Roche was gone. He took off in the night, taking Mulder's gun,
badge and cell phone. My partner had fallen asleep. Roche
handcuffed Mulder before he left.

On the ride home, I had a nice, long, quiet time to reflect on that.
Here we have a man who thinks killing little girls and burying their
bodies in state parks is the way to make them happy. Here we have
my partner, not the most happy-go-lucky of personalities to begin
with. So what if he isn't a little blond haired girl. Roche had made
it clear on each of our visits that he 'likes' Mulder. He was always
friendly to him, in a serial killer sort of way. So it's not his MO
to kill grown men. Usually grown men are pretty powerful. Not
defenseless, like little girls. But what if he found an adult male
in a defenseless position--

Sleeping tonight is not going to be easy. I keep seeing these images
in my head. Roche coming over to Mulder, asleep at the table.
Touching his hip to get the gun out. He's still leaning over him; he
could have easily put a bullet in his brain. Just like in my dream.

Or maybe Roche didn't like all the blood; maybe that's why he
strangled those girls. One of Mulder's "I hate the world" ties would
do the job just as well as 8 gauge electrical cord. I can see Roche,
reaching for the tie, grabbing hold of the short end while holding
the knot in place. I imagine he would have handcuffed Mulder by
this time. Keep him defenseless. And very slowly, taking all the
time in the world because it would feel so goddamned good to him,
squeeze the life out of my partner while I was sitting in the front
passenger seat of another fucking bureau pool car when I should
have been on a plane.

Next time, I don't call Skinner. I bring my own cavalry.

When we busted in the room, Mulder was disoriented at first, but
came around rather quickly. Skinner demanded an explanation.
Mulder, of course, decided to lay on the altar and commit career
suicide. He had no explanation.

At least he didn't try to tell Skinner about another of those
goddamned dreams. And then in a flash, he was Mulder, the
Mulder I've relyed on, trusted, watched in awe. I could see the
little hamsters turning somersaults on the gears and wheels in his
mind. Sometimes, most times, he is a piece of work, my partner.

We had to find Roche, and God only knew where he had gone. Well,
God and Mulder. In seconds, Mulder was on the phone, calling the
airline he'd been on the night before. There had been a little girl
on the plane. Roche had talked to her for just a few seconds.
My blood went cold in my veins as he said the words. Roche had
targeted that little girl--in front of God, Mulder and the world.

By this time, the airlines rep was answering. Mulder's face went
white. Another FBI agent, also named Mulder, had just called 10
minutes before and asked the same questions. What was the last
name of the little girl named Caitlin, where did she live? I could see
Mulder take up the blanket of guilt and wrap it around him like a
shroud. But he pushed it aside, or rather, girded it about him so
that he could still move, and then we were in Skinner's car, chasing
Roche.

Roche took her from her daycare center. These images just won't
stop. I can see Roche walking up to the teacher, flashing the badge
(it impresses people so much, very few look closely at the picture)
and telling some lie about how Caitlin's mother had been injured.
He had to take Caitlin to her mother.

I felt so sorry for that teacher. She thought she was doing the right
thing. No matter how many times the story is told, you never think
it can happen to you, or someone you know. If I had gone to her
day care, and related the same story, she would have told me that
they have policies and procedures to avoid that kind of thing. I'm
sure they do. Procedures are easy to write when you don't have a
nicely dressed man with a badge and a gun right there, telling you
that he has to take a child to her injured mother.

Mulder could see how horrified the woman was and in his state, he
couldn't stand to have her shoulder his blame. That's one thing
about Mulder: he always hates to share. He's very jealous with his
guilt. It's his, and damn anyone who tries to take any of it from
him. He told her not to blame herself. He was to blame. Don't
touch that, lady, it's mine, all mine.

For a moment, I was afraid I was going to lose him right there and
then in the parking lot. He was struggling, losing confidence in
himself. The guilt was strangling him, almost as effectively as
Roche could have the night before. I had to bring him back to the
case, get him thinking.

My first thought was that Roche would follow his MO. He'd take
her out of state, kill her. I said it out loud, thinking with my
mouth. I was figuring logistics when Mulder snapped back. He was
positive Roche would never leave Boston. Once again, he was
thinking right in step with Roche. He knew where he was, where
he'd taken Caitlin.

Roche lived on Alice Street all the years before he'd been in prison.
I really really hate how some people play out obsessions. And
sociopaths are the worst. Once you find the puzzle piece with the
church steeple, the rest is easy. But it took some work to make this
piece fit, and we had run out of time.

The apartment on Alice Street was a long way from Wonderland. It
was a trash heap. As we walked in, I had a vivid flashback to the
apartment at 66 Exeter Street in Baltimore. Evil had once lived in
this Boston apartment, too. But from the dust, leaves, and decay
around us, it was obvious that Roche had not been here for a very
long time.

My heart was somewhere on the first floor. If he wasn't there,
Mulder was off the scent. Maybe I had just wanted too much for
him to be right, for him to be _all right_, that I was willing to
go along with this fantasy of a connection. I've never really
understood it, how Mulder could think like the killers he tracked.
I got a glimpse of it once, in a dirty RV with a delusional man
who spoke perfect German. I felt sorry for Jerry Schnauz. I
could even understand why Jerry would want to help people he thought
were hurting as much as he hurt. But to say I got into his mind?
God, I hope not. Not ever.

Mulder was staring out the window. Not hard; there was no glass
to stop the view. Across a field, there was a metal fence and an old
Mass Transit graveyard of old buses. The MTA, more than likely.

"Will he ever return? No, he'll never return . . ." I think sometimes
my mind throws things like that at me just to fuck me up. Charlie
and the MTA-- a Boston commuter who can't find his stop, the
song set to an old Irish drinking song. I've sung that song so many
times in Irish-American bars on St. Patrick's Day. It doesn't sound
so humorous now.

Mulder was gone like a shot and we were still searching the
apartment building. It was a few minutes before I caught sight of
him, climbing over the fence. He disappeared from view and I
hunted Skinner down and the two of us ran to find the entrance to
the bus lot.

I had no idea how we would find them. At that point, all I could
think was that soon we'd hear the gunshot. Mulder only had the
Berreta now, but he's good with it. Roche had Mulder's Glock. . .
well, I'm glad the prison educational system hasn't extended to
small arms training--yet. I figured, in an even fight, Mulder would
come out on top. But Roche had a hostage. And Mulder would give
his life for that little girl without batting an eye. The odds
were too close to call.

I have to give Skinner this much: he was probably a good agent
before he started flying a desk. He stopped dead at the end of each
row, watched the little metal antennae that connect with the electric
wires for the buses. After what seemed like hours, we heard a
small voice, counting loudly. One. . . two. . .

It was Caitlin. We both hit the door of the bus at the same time,
Skinner high, me low. Our guns were trained--but when we saw
the scene, I think we both knew that we'd never get off a shot.

Roche was sitting in the back of the bus, on one of the long benches
that hug the wall. Little Caitlin, blond hair, face out of a story
book, looking just a little bewildered and scared, was sitting in the
front-facing seat, right in front of Roche. I couldn't see Roche's
hand, but it didn't take a degree from MIT to figure out that he had
Mulder's Glock aimed at Caitlin and at that range, the bullet would
cut through the seat like a hot knife through butter. Mulder stood
over Roche, talking.

I couldn't make out what he was saying. Caitlin was doing a pretty
good job of counting. Loud. Clear. Like she was reciting for her
nursery school class. She had her eyes closed in concentration and
seemed almost unaware of the two men behind her. Playing poker
for her life.

As I said before, I knew that neither Skinner nor I would get off a
shot in this bizarre little game. Because there were only two ways
it would end. Either we would walk away, with Caitlin in our arms,
crying, probably, but safe. Or Roche would kill Caitlin, Mulder
would kill Roche, and then while the AD and I were fighting each
other to get up the steps of the bus, Mulder would put the gun to
his head and blow his own brains out. Simple as that. I might not
have been in Roche's mind, but I had no doubt that I was in perfect
tune with Mulder.

He was still talking to Roche. "Don't let this end badly, John."
Still with the 'John' bit. Still on a buddy level. It gave me
chills to hear him.

Caitlin was just passing 17, heading toward 18 and I sort of got the
feeling that at 20, all bets were off. I was staring right at the
three of them and it looked as if time had stopped. There was no
movement, save for Caitlin's little bow mouth, saying the numbers
she'd probably only learned a few months before.

Then, just as she hit 19, there was a shot fired. Roche slammed
back against the seat, I saw Mulder's hand jerk with the recoil from
his Berreta. Caitlin screamed and ran and I had her in my arms.
She was crying. But she was safe.

Suddenly I had an armful of terrified five-year-old and all I could
do was hold her and keep telling her I'd take her to her mom. I
looked over her shoulder and could see Mulder. He hadn't moved
a muscle, hadn't twitched since the gun went off. He just stood
there, staring more holes into John Roche's body.

Skinner was pushing past me and I wanted to grab his arm, make
sure he left Mulder alone, but my hands were busy with Caitlin,
wiping her eyes and nose. All I could do was give him a look and
hope he understood. He walked up to Mulder, took the gun out of
his hand and silently led him off the bus.

I sat down on the steps of the bus next to that one and rocked
Caitlin until the rest of the force arrived. Paramedics took her
out of my arms and I saw them taking her to a blond-haired woman
who was pretty close to hysterical. Caitlin's mom. Thankfully, she
stayed by the ambulance. I didn't think it would be a good idea for
her and Mulder to meet right then.

By this time, Mulder was leaning against the outside of the bus, his
eyes closed. I watched Skinner talk to the men from the coroner's
office and then start toward Mulder. I headed him off.

"I need to speak with Agent Mulder, Agent Scully," he said in that
'don't mess with me' voice of his.

"But I don't think he needs to speak with you, sir," I told him.
I knew better than to go over right then. The last thing on earth
Mulder needed was to be berated, yelled at or even spoken to. He
needed to be alone, to have a minute to figure out where the hell he
was, where the hell he's been for the past week. OK, maybe a
minute wouldn't do it, but it was damned certain he needed to be
left alone.

"Take him home," Skinner said, handing me his keys. "I want to
see him day after tomorrow. If he's not there by 8:30, you're both
suspended. Got that, Agent Scully?"

I wasn't in the mood to argue. I was in the mood to punch him in
the face, but not to argue. And he was giving us the car. I
swallowed every bit of my Irish heritage and said "Thank you, sir."

Mulder didn't open his eyes when I walked up. I tugged at his
sleeve and he still kept his eyes closed. "Is she OK?" he did
manage to ask.

"She's fine. A little scared. The paramedics are taking her to the
hospital, just to check her out. From all appearances, he didn't hurt
her at all."

"He didn't have a chance. Not that easy getting 8 gauge electrical
wire in the middle of the MTA bus lot," my partner replied, and the
words were like broken glass.

"You got here in time, Mulder," I reminded him.

"She wouldn't have been in danger if I hadn't been so gung-ho to
prove him wrong, Scully."

"Was he wrong, Mulder?" I was almost afraid of the answer; we
hadn't had a chance to talk about what had happened. "You went
to your house last night."

"No, Scully. I couldn't take him to that house. They sold it
a few years after she disappeared. When my parents divorced.
Dad moved to the house in West Tisbury and Mom and I went to
Greenwich. Then I left for Oxford. So I couldn't take him to the
house where she was abducted." By now his eyes were opened and
I could see the faint hint of triumph in them.

I must have shown my confusion because he smiled, just a flash.
"The wrong house, Scully. I took him to the wrong house. But he
didn't recognize it. He thought it was the house we'd always lived
in. He tried to point out specifics, but by that time, I knew he was
lying. The dreams, Scully. He was connecting to me, setting me up
in my dreams. I don't know how . . ."

He stopped and looked at me. "You don't believe it could be the
dreams."

I was too tired to have this conversation. "Mulder, did you get
good grades in your psych classes? Because the profs at U of M
would have kicked your ass out of school for some of the twisted
theories you purport."

He laughed at that. "I regurgitate really well when something like
grades are involved, Scully." He sighed so long I thought he would
die from lack of oxygen.

"Skinner wants my ass." Simply a statement of the facts as
presented.

"Not till day after tomorrow."

He laughed a little at that. "Patch the prisoner up so he can be
standing at the execution, huh?"

I recognized Mulder's gallows humor immediately. I was almost
relieved. If he hadn't come up with something that outrageous,
I would have been worried about him. "Something like that. And
we'll be there on time, Mulder. I can't afford any lengthy
suspensions. I got docked for the time I spent in lock-up
when I held Congress in contempt."

He smiled again at that. He has a lot of contempt for Congress
lately.

"Come on. I'm taking you home," I told him, and we made our way
to the car.

I know he wasn't sleeping in the car. He had his head against the
glass of the window, I think it was to ease the tension headache he
had. It would have done wonders on mine. Every muscle in my
body ached. All I wanted in the world was a nice hot tub of soapy
water to soak in, and then to wrap up in the way-too-expensive
down comforter that I finally bought myself. If you gotta sleep
alone, at least you can be warm.

I keep forgetting how long a ride it is. I drank about a gallon of
coffee at various rest stops. Mulder sat in the car, not moving. His
eyes were open, he was staring. Pale, like I said. Every once in a
while he'd get the shakes, but I tried not to notice. It's fairly
common to have a little residual shock after an ordeal like today.
He was warm enough in the car. When we arrived at my
apartment, he more or less collapsed on the sofa. He'll sleep
tonight and into tomorrow. Maybe wake up around noon,
complaining of a headache and being sore. Some aspirin and fluids
will set him straight. He'll be fine.

I hope.

If nothing else, at least he's now back where we started. It's not
the best place, but I still feel that there are a lot of possibilities
we haven't even considered. I don't like the idea that there's so much
information on my partner out there, available. He seems to think
Roche just hotwired into his dreams, and that there's no need to
worry.

I looked it up: worrying is part of my job description.

But right now, the best I can do for both of us is to get some sleep.
At least tonight, I know he'll stay put.

I locked his shoes and slacks in my cedar chest.




The Journals of Fox Mulder

Sunday 21 November

Where the hell are my clothes?

I'm in Scully's apartment. She's not here-- there
was a note tented on the table that said "I'll be right
back". And my shoes and slacks are nowhere in this entire
place. Found the shirt, the jacket, the tie-- no shoes,
no slacks-- no service--

So now I'm stuck on the couch with the afghan
tucked demurely around me, since there's a nice window
here and somehow I don't think it's a great idea for
Scully's neighbors to see her partner searching through
her apartment in a button-down shirt and boxers.

I wish I knew more about Zen Buddhism. Existing
only in the moment. I don't want to remember yesterday.
I don't want to think about tomorrow. Just think about
now. Just right now.

Right now I'm cold. Why do afghans always have
little airholes in them? Defeats the purpose of a blanket.
And Scully always keeps this place at about 10 degrees.
She must've gotten so used to the temperature at the morgue
that now she has to refrigerate her apartment...

Where is she?

My clothes are missing. Scully is missing. That's
an interesting mental image. Scully either carrying around
my shoes and slacks, or-- better yet. Wearing them. I don't
think those size thirteens would stay on her little feet
for more than a step or two. To say nothing of the slacks.

Yeah, definitely say nothing of the slacks.

Living in the moment. This isn't so bad. I can do
this. Scully will come back and I will say, "The past does
not exist. The future is undetermined. Now is the only thing
that matters."

Then she'll throw my clothes at me and tell me to
get the hell out of her apartment... no, I've lost it; I'm
thinking about the future. I'm out of "now". I'm out of
the moment.

And back to that moment... I thought I wanted him
dead so badly... that I was curbing violence the entire
time. But when it came down to it, I didn't-- I didn't want
to shoot. I didn't want to kill him.

But I did. I killed him.

The last cloth heart. It was still in my inside
jacket pocket. Scully didn't search through my clothes,
apparently... just ran off with some of them. Why on earth
would she take my pants and shoes? I can't exactly stroll
out without my--

Oh.

Okay. I guess I asked for this. The thing with the
pills, that was over the line. I didn't precisely plan that,
though looking back I suppose I knew that was the only real
reason to fill the prescription bottle with aspirin. So my
partner took off with half my clothes. Fair enough. But if
she's gone much longer, that's sadism. And if she comes back
and doesn't return my errant wardrobe, that's harassment.

I should tell her that one. Scully could probably
use a laugh.

But probably not from me.

Our partnership has survived worse than this. Scully
tells me that she's here to stay, and I believe her. This is
her fight too.

But that doesn't change the fact that I blew it this
time. I could have found another way to get Roche out of
prison and take him to the West Tisbury house and prove he
was lying. It wouldn't have been easy-- it would have taken
a lot of fighting and a lot of bowing and scraping in the
Bureau and a lot of time. But I could have done this some
other way.

And a little girl named Caitlin would never have
to know what it's like to be a victim.

Roche didn't touch her. He didn't have time. Not
that he touched any of them. Not directly. But he took her
from her school and made her come with him to that lot filled
with old streetcars. And though she never saw the danger she
was in, he pointed a gun at her back...

My gun.

I can't... there's no reparation for that.

Here I am, trapped in this moment. There's yesterday
and all the mistakes I've made. There's tomorrow, when I have
to face up to them.

What can I do today?

What the hell can I do now?

Monday 22 November

My head hurts. Fuck. I used to be able to take this
shit. I used to be able to go home and crank up the stereo,
put on some headphones and let Steve Vai's guitar chase
everything else out of my brain.

Skinner _gets_ to me. Of all the people I've ever
had to report to-- Reggie, Patterson, Blevins, to name just
a few-- no one could ever fucking tear me up one side and
down the other like that. Skinner crosses his arms and puts
on this "I'm only thinking about what's best for everybody"
routine and suddenly I'm not in the FBI anymore, I'm in the
principal's office, and if I tell the jerk what I _really_
think of his stupid regulations, he's going to call my
dad and send me home.

Well, the last half, anyway. I'm benched. For a
month. A _month_. The maximum time off with pay after an
agent fires his weapon in the line of duty. Of course,
it's not enough to deliver the sentence; he had to recite
the entire litany of my sins. And even I have to admit
that this time, I'd committed plenty of sins to recite.

Somehow, it's not as hard to take the browbeating
when I know it's justified.

I think I said "Yes sir" so many times the words
must be reflexive now-- I wonder if I can open my mouth
and say something _other_ than "Yes sir".

Well, what do you know. "Fuck you, sir," comes
just as naturally.

A month off. Not just out of the office. I have to
turn all the "work-related material" I have at home over to
my jailer-- Scully.

The A.D. dragged her up after a half-hour of ranting
at me, and proceeded to repeat most of his lecture. I almost
thought he'd just run out of things to say and brought her up
so he'd have an excuse to repeat himself. Wishful thinking.
After reeling off my punishment, he proceeded to sentence
Scully. She gets to collect all the files from my apartment.
She gets my keys to the basement office. Then she gets to
spend the month cooling her heels in the autopsy bay.

Somehow, the fucker figured out that I'd be able to
take whatever he felt like throwing at me. So he dragged my
partner in and starting laying shit on her for _my_ mistakes.
And I wanted to say something and I couldn't say anything--
I waived the right to protest when I got the release order
for John Lee Roche.

Finally, satisfied I'd been worked over enough, he
tossed me out and kept Scully in there for a while.

Almost forgot. In the course of his remarks, Skinner
put a lot of emphasis on the "mandatory counseling" we all
have to sit through after a violent incident. "I want you
to know that particularly in this case, I take the required
counseling sessions very seriously. I'll be checking up
on your attendance."

No problem. I'll attend. I love FBI psychologists.
The last few times I had to go in for stuff like this, I
talked to Larry Collins. I tell him a colorful story about
the incident of the month, he assumes I'm making most of
it up, chuckles, lobs a couple of softball questions: "Do
you think your reaction was appropriate to the situtation?
If you had to do it again, what would you change? Can you
still perform your duties as an agent of the FBI?" A few
smooth answers and a couple of jokes, and Larry signs me
off with a clean bill of health.

The price I have to pay is twenty minutes of Larry
prodding around, trying to find out if I'm sleeping with
Scully. I know he's supposed to keep an eye on male-female
partnerships, but he's so goddamned heavy-handed and usually
uses it as an excuse to drool over my partner for the entire
session. Actually, I got Scully to drop by his office before
the session was over sometimes-- funny how Larry's always
willing to let me leave early if it'll give him a chance to
talk to her.

So, thanks for the warning, Skinner. I won't try to
weasel out of sessions early this time around. Larry can catch
me up on basketball stats. I've been too busy lately to follow
the games.

Mom called. That was hard. She's worried. I haven't
talked to her since I went looking for the vacuum cleaner,
and she saw the news reports about Boston. They didn't give
any names, but she gets jumpy whenever the news talks about
the FBI. The PR guys must have put in some overtime to cover
for this one-- Mom told me the news stories reported that
John Lee Roche, convicted serial killer, agreed to lead
"federal officers" to the grave of one of his victims, then
"assaulted one officer" and escaped into Boston, where he
abducted a little girl; Roche was shot and killed by "FBI
agents" an hour later and the girl was returned to her family
unharmed. Public relations. Suddenly unspecified "federal officers"
who fucked up become "FBI agents" who saved the day.

Mom didn't quite ask if I'd been there, but it was in
her voice. I hate lying to her... I told her I was involved,
that I'd worked on that case before. She doesn't know I used
to profile. She doesn't know what I do now, except that I have
to travel a lot. I try to keep it that way. She knows I'm still
looking for Samantha. Sometimes she says she wishes I could let
it go. Sometimes she says she's proud of me for never giving up.
Mostly she just sighs and doesn't say anything at all.

I told her that I'm taking some time off. She got
nervous. "Are you all right? Are you sick, is something going
on?"

"No, Mom, I'm just tired and it's been a while since
I had a vacation." Scully came back in time to hear that, and
her smirk looked vaguely dangerous. Then Mom put me on hold
while she took the kettle off the stove, so I asked Scully
how she fared.

The smirk deepened. Not a good sign. "If you really
wanted to do something for your mother, we should go through
all the junk in that basement and clean the place out for her."

Which sounded good, even if she was avoiding talking
about Skinner, so when Mom came back to the phone I offered to
sort through everything in the basement. She said, "Is that
what that was all about, the other night?"

"Yeah, Mom. Would you like me to do that?"

And she said sure, but tonight she and her neighbor
were going Xmas shopping with friends. I told her that'd be
great, I'd have the basement straightened up for her by the
time she got back.

We said our goodbyes and then it was time to face my
partner.

But the backlash didn't come. She just gave me her
chilliest stare and said, "I need your keys."

Yes ma'am. I threaded them off my keyring and gave
them up reluctantly. Asked, "Do you want to go toss my apartment
and get all those files now? Or just tell me when and I'll
be there."

Scully looked at the keys to the office and pursed
her lips. "I'll make a deal with you," she said. "I won't go
through your apartment-- I'll just trust you to get all the
files together and hand them over to me. You do that, and I'll
help you clear up that basement tonight."

Sounded more like a plan to keep tabs on me than a
bargain, but it's a better deal than the ones I've made lately.
So I agreed.

So I'm supposed to pick her up and drive to Greenwich
in another hour. I've got most of the files stacked on the coffee
table. The pile's high enough to block the TV. The files are the
only things I'm giving up, though. Scully knows as well as I do
that if I really gave her all my "work-related material", I'd
spend the next month in an empty apartment.

She'll probably let me work on the budget or plow through
some of the endless forms the paper-pushers toss at us to ensure
they'll always have jobs. We both know it's bullshit to make her
do all the paperwork because I flew off the handle. And by now
every agent in Washington knows what an amazing pathologist she
is, so everyone's going to try to get her to work on their cases.
She'll be too busy to deal with the paperwork.

I doubt I see much of her over this month. She'll log
in frequent phone calls, but neither of us wants her to be my
warden, as Skinner seems to be demanding.

...I always tell her that I know she's not going to
leave the X-files. We've been through too much together. What
else can we do? And if I have doubts-- she takes it as a vote
of no confidence in her. In her commitment. In her trust.

But I-- I trust her, utterly, yes. God, yes. But I've
always known how this was going to end. I've always known that
some day, some way, I'd push it too far.. And it'd be over. And
there'd be no one to blame but myself for that.

This was close.

I won't know how close until tonight.




Dana Scully's Personal Log

Sunday, November 21

Ugh!

Here I was, sniggering at Mulder's groans and creaks as he got off
the sofa this morning, and I have them in spades now myself. I
should never try to nap in the afternoon. Bad mistake, very very
bad.

But it seemed like such a great idea at the time.

Mulder woke up about noon today. I wasn't that much earlier; I
got up around ten and promptly realized there was no food in the
cupboard--I go shopping on Saturdays. Well, any Saturday when
I'm not chasing down aliens, mutants or escaped serial killers that
my partner has let out of prison. No wonder I eat out so much. I
ran down to the store to pick up juice and some lunchmeat and
bread. When I got back he was awake, wrapped in my afghan and
looking a bit flushed. I forgot I had his clothes locked up safe.
Well, forget isn't really the right word. I remembered, but wanted
to make sure he didn't sneak off before I got back. Not that I'd
ever admit that to him. I released the prisoner and his clothes--he
made a beeline for my bathroom (forgot to close the drapes last
night, too) and got dressed.

As I predicted, he moaned and groaned and I caught some muttered
complaint that my sofa was lumpier than a rock garden, but after I
plied him with three glasses of juice and two extra strength Tylenol,
he lapsed into 'Mulder Silent Running' mode. The submarine is
running deep and no sounds are to be made at any time. I did manage
to bully him into eating a sandwich and then I took him back to his
apartment. He wasn't going to talk to me today, and I've already
got a potted plant to stare at, so I took him where he wanted to
be--alone. He could have used some more sleep, but I didn't push.
I was being nice. I can do that, occasionally.

When I got back, I just could not face the television, I didn't want
to read--I just wanted to escape. The pillow and blankets were still
laying on the sofa, all a tangle, but looking awfully inviting. I
admit it, I'm a sucker for a good silk-edged blanket.

I woke up about a half hour ago and realized that I should have
either slept through the night or not slept at all. Now the only
recourse I have is a good soak in the tub.

It's a dirty job, but hey--

Maybe, if I sit in the tub long enough, I really will shrink to the size
of a pea like Missy used to threaten. And when I pull the plug, I'll
just float down the drain and off to sea.

Somehow, after this week, that's not such a bad thought at all.

Monday, November 22

I can not believe how much shit I've taken over this case.

I avoided being a bitch again this morning and didn't call him to
make sure he got in on time. I know Mulder--he might not want
the chewing out, but he's never late for it. I was right. He
was there when I got there at 8:20. He had on his 'gallows tie'--a
really intricate design that when you get it in the light the right way,
you see that it's all hangman's nooses. I have no idea where he got
it, but he's been sporting it on days he knows Skinner is going to
chew him out. So, at least I have my partner back, if only on the
surface. I even felt sorry for him as he headed up to take his
his beating like a man.

I was somewhat surprised when I got a call from Kimberly before
Mulder had even returned, telling me that my presence was
requested upstairs, too. Not exactly what I expected. Usually,
these little meetings are private. But I naively went upstairs. I
remember a brief flash in the elevator, thinking about lambs to the
slaughter.

Skinner was in rare form, having sharpened his claws on Mulder
already. He was waiting for me in the outer office when I arrived.
Ushered me into his office like Mother Mary St. George used to do
when we got caught with our skirts too short for regulation. I
almost got down on my knees to prove my skirt hit the back of my
legs. Now that would have been REALLY embarrassing.

Mulder was still there, looking more than slightly ruffled by this
point. I think he expected to be roughed up, but it's never pleasant,
and every once in a while I think he just wishes that he could say
something, anything, that would stem the tide of insults and threats.
Not today, however. And this time the threats sounded real.

Skinner got a great deal of pleasure reciting for me exactly what
punishment he had meted out to my partner. He's out for a month.
Procedure states that an agent can be suspended with or without
pay for a period of up to a month in any case involving the shooting
of another individual. I've never seen anyone get the full month.
In the case of Lucas Jackson Henry, I got the minimum--a week. I
ended up sitting in the office doing paperwork for that week, and
since Mulder was still on medical leave, it was almost like nothing
had happened. Of course, Lucas Henry didn't die of the wound I
inflicted, but it's indicative of how arbitrary the time really is. To
give Mulder the full month, knowing that the shooting was justified,
was like giving life imprisonment to a kid that stole some candy.
OK, if the kid broke the store window, jimmied the lock and
THEN only took some candy.

Silently, I was overjoyed. It was a little, hell, it was a LOT long
for a cooling-off period, but hopefully, he would take the time and
make good use of it. Or I could hold him at gunpoint and MAKE him
make good use of it. I shot Mulder my best 'Gosh, darn, ain't it a
shame' look and then started listening again. According to the AD,
I'm _supposed_ to play warden in this little imprisonment. Mulder
is supposed to hand over ALL of the cases he has at home, and I'm
to make a complete inventory of them. Then, while he's watching
The Price is Right and Rosie O'Donnell, I'm at the beck and call of
any department in the Bureau AND covering for people at the Academy
AND making sure that Mulder isn't off somewhere getting into
trouble again. Apparently, at least in my opinion, I got the
shittier end of the deal.

Mulder was dismissed so that the Assistant Director could 'talk'
to me. The little vein in his neck was sticking out real far this
morning. I'm fairly confident that if I have any little telltale
veins, they were out there pretty far, too.

"Do you realize how close you came to losing a partner?"

I think that was my favorite. No, Walt, just how close was I? How
many close calls were there this week? Which was the closest?
Couldn't have been when he started having dreams about cases that
have been closed for 5 years, and the dreams have laser sights in
them. Or maybe it was when he decided to play mind games and
basketball with a convicted serial killer. No, wait, I remember.
It was when I turned my back for TWO FUCKING SECONDS and
the ASSHOLE ran off on me, when he should have been floating on
some life raft with Bambi the Bug Lady in glorious Dreamland!

"It is _your_ responsiblity to keep Agent Mulder in line, Agent
Scully. If that responsiblity has gotten to be too much for you, I
suggest you tell me now, so we can avoid further incidents like this
one."

Well, FUCK YOU, Walter! Where the hell were you, Mr.
Supervisor, when Mulder should have been benched after he socked
Roche in the jaw? Where have you ever been when he's taken off?
Sure, you gave me some coordinates, once. Sure, you sat there
behind me in Congress. But you know what, Walt? I don't seem
to remember you in that ER at Eisenhower Field when Mulder
flatlined and I sure as hell don't remember you sharing a jail cell
with me when I wouldn't rat on his location to a bunch of self
righteous old fat white guys who would turn that information over
to liars, thieves and murderers.

"We almost had a real tragedy this time, Scully. I hold you at least
partly responsible for that."

Yeah, that's just ducky, Walt, because I hold you almost _totally_
responsible for it! I have a medical degree. I have a certificate that
says I am qualified to use all guns and firearms issued to a Special
Agent. Nowhere in my licenses, degrees and certificates is one
that says I am a qualified wet nurse for a 35-year-old insomniac
with suicidal tendencies! I don't lay this at Mulder's door, Walt, I
lay it at yours. You know him as well as I do. I at least try to keep
him out of trouble. You, you seem to be pushing him into to it. All
the time. So who's really at fault here? There's more than enough
blame to go around.

Of course, I didn't say any of this. I stood there like a good little
sailor and took it up the ass, as Mulder so affectionately calls it.
But I think my stance might have conveyed a little of my feelings
because he sort of ran out of steam. After I flashed him a
particularly hateful 'Yes sir' he cleared his throat and just stood
there for a minute.

"Scully, I know this is hard. And I'm also aware that you did
attempt to do what was required of you. But this has got to stop.
Mulder wasn't just out of line this time, he put others in jeapordy
and I can't have that. Now, I have a choice and I think you know
what that choice is. There's enough hard evidence on this one to
go straight for dismissal without hope of reinstatement."

It's really hard to keep still when your blood just turned to ice and
all you want to do is shiver--but I managed.

"You don't want that, and frankly, neither do I."

Well, at least I got the bastard to admit that.

"But Scully, I don't care how you do it, just make sure he gets
some help and make doubly sure this never, never happens again.
Are we straight on this?"

What could I say? I knew he was right. I was mad as hell that he
wasn't accepting any of the responsibility, but there was no way to
fault the logic. If little Caitlin had died--no, I'm better off not
walking through that minefield. But if she had died and we
managed to get to Mulder before he did what he wanted to
do--then there would have been no choice involved. Psych disability,
involuntary committal . . . It really had been that close. One way
or another, it would have been over.

So now, my goal in life, besides keeping a really low profile so that
the guys in bank fraud don't figure out a way to have me autopsy
safety deposit boxes, is to make Mulder get some help. Any help.
Anything that will work.

When I stopped by to see if Mulder was gathering up all the files--I
think he was contemplating the enormity of that task, and it scared
him to death-- I suggested that if he did that, I'd go with him later
this afternoon and help him clean out his mom's basement. Maybe
I can get him talking, thinking, realizing . . .

It's a long shot.

It's been a shitty two days and I'm ready to go find some 8 guage
electrical cord of my own, but if I can use all this guilt Mulder's
carrying around to get him some help, it might be worth it.




The Journals of Fox Mulder

Tuesday 23 November

Technically it's Tuesday. 12:18 Tuesday morning.
I don't want to write this. I don't want to write about
this. But it looks like I'm going to have to get it down
and get it out of my head or I'll never be able to wind
down and get some rest.

And I _have_ to sleep tonight. May have to embark
on a complete crash self-improvement course over the next
month. Scully made it clear that she's going to be keeping
track of me, and she won't be inclined to cast a forgiving
eye my way. I knew I'd come close to the edge this time. Now
I know how close.

Too close.

I don't remember the last time we had a real knock-down
drag-out fight. We've had a few-- we could hardly work this
closely together for three years without the occasional blowout.
But only a few. Disagreements, constantly; debates, all the time;
arguments, sure, every now and then.

This was a fight. Voices raised, fists waved, threats made.
And that was just Scully. She knew she had the advantage and she
leapt for it, all engines go. I'm tempted to check the back of my
head. I still feel like I've been bludgeoned.

Stormclouds were definitely on the horizon for the entire
drive to Greenwich. I came down with an armful of papers and
vouchers to meet her when she picked me up, and when silence
reigned, plunged into the fray. I offered to take on all the
paperwork that needs catching up. Nothing. No response. I began
sorting through the stuff that I _can't_ do myself, like her
personal expense report.

Which I still have. No wonder she's mad at me; I ruined
that white silk blouse she loved when we were at the construction
site in Philadelphia. I thought blood came out of silk with cold
water-- maybe that's wool and chewing gum. Suede and vomit?
Leather and... yeah, that was it. --But it's not like I bled
on her on purpose. I was paralyzed. I wasn't doing _anything_
on purpose at that point. Besides, I can't figure out how she
managed to get my blood on her blouse; I didn't find any
bloodstains on _my_ clothes...

I managed to mark up my trusty Redskins jersey tonight.
I won't be surprised if I find a few bloodstains on it, after
what we went through.

Scully dressed sensibly enough in sweats and flannels,
looking for all the world like a freshman getting ready to move
into the dorms for the first time. Except for the expression
on her face. Set and locked and "a whiter shade of pale", like
the Procul Harem song. That particular shade of white that makes
her freckles visible at a hundred yards. By now I should have
learned that when she gets that look about her, it's time to
run for cover. I never learn.

Mom was in full "You kids have fun" denial mode tonight,
and for once I was grateful for her ability to be totally oblivious.
Scully tried to be pleasant, but she sounded like she was talking
around a brick. Soon enough Mrs. Bascombe from next door came to
pick up Mom, and we began our decent into Dante's _Inferno_...
and never mind whether the guy was a pedophile or not.

Down the stairs and into the basement, the stalagmites
of junk rising up like spires of memory. The tennis racket that
Dad never got around to restringing. Great-Aunt Maddy's dresser,
which never seems to fit anywhere. A science fair trophy from
eighth grade. Actually, just about everything from 1973 onward
was archived down there. Mom wasn't really present for a lot of
those years. I always thought she must be saving everything so
that she could catch up on it later, when she finally stepped back
into herself. When she did wake up, the summer before I left for
Oxford, she only looked at these things long enough to box them
up and take them with her when she moved out and served Dad with
the divorce papers.

We started excavating, and Scully still maintained
a stony (make that alabaster) silence, so I tried to reassure
her that this little detention isn't going to change anything.

As it turned out, that was just what she was afraid of.

She wants me to "talk to somebody". A therapist. A shrink.
Whatever. Actually, she INSISTS that I talk to somebody. "I'm not
backing down on this, Mulder," as though she could just drive me
into it... which eventually I suppose she did.

I agreed to talk to someone. It might even have sounded
sincere. Well, I meant it at the _time_...

She was shouting at me, fists clenched, her entire body bowed
like a parenthesis-- she was standing on her toes, just aiming all
that hurt at me. Right then I would have done just about anything...
frontal lobotomy? Sure! Here, Scully, have a screwdriver, you can
perform the procedure yourself.

At one point I did say something a lot like that. "What am I
supposed to do? Go to a psychologist with my hat in my hand and say,
`Gee, mister, I think my sister may have been abducted by aliens;
could you cure me, please?' I won't have to worry about being suspended
for a month-- I'll be in an institution for the next year or two. You
can prescribe the Thorazine! Is that what you want?"

And then she really tore into me. "I want my partner back! I
want to know that when you tell me you're going to go home to sleep,
you'll do that! I want to know that when you take two white tablets
that're supposed to be sleeping pills, that you haven't switched them
with aspirin and then waited until I leave to run out the door and
release a dangerous criminal from federal custody and put an entire
city, not to mention one very little girl, in danger! THAT'S what I
want! That's what I want, Mulder. I want to know that you're leveling
with me. And right now, I just don't think that's happening."

If there's a good way to answer to that, I haven't thought
of it yet.

I know I screwed up. I know I acted without thinking things
through. I know that I was in the wrong. I know that my mistakes put
innocent people in jeopardy. I know that if Roche had pulled the
trigger, I would have been just as guilty of Caitlin's murder as
him.

I was wrong. But...

Rewind to four days ago, knowing what I know now, and
I don't know if I could change any of it. The idea of waiting
through interminable _procedures_ to find out if Roche was
lying-- even now, just the thought of that makes me feel out
of balance, thrown off. Out of control. Because if he was
mainlining my dreams, maybe he'd sense the trap coming before
it could be set. Because if I went through official channels,
I'd have to keep explaining why this was so important over and
over again until every bureaucrat in Washington was familiar
with my sister's abduction. Because if I told anyone what I
was planning... and it turned out Roche was telling the truth...

If Roche had taken one look around the house in West
Tisbury, clucked at me and said, "That wasn't very nice. You're
trying to trick me. This isn't the right place...."

If he'd taken me to the house in Chilmark, and told me
how he took her-- if he'd led me to her shallow grave...

I suppose it was always in the back of my mind. If it
was him. If it was him, I'll kill him.

Dismissal without hope of reinstatement, criminal neglect
of duty, criminal misconduct and murder one.

Bring it on.

Just before he died, Roche pulled the last cloth heart
out of his pocket. "One left," he said, breath coming fast.
"How sure are you it's not your sister?"

I'm not...

But then his finger tensed on the trigger and-- so
did mine. I can't understand it; why? Why shoot Caitlin?
Shooting her wouldn't have satisfied his compulsions; he
needed to strangle them for his release. Unless he'd really
gotten the taste for sadism... my god, that must be it. I
said it before: prison's only refined his taste for pain.
He knew he'd never get a chance to go through his ritual with
Caitlin. So he used her to strike at me. I let him down the
night before. He thought he'd take me back to the abduction
site and convince me that he'd killed Sam. He thought he'd get
to watch me suffer. I let him down, so John decided to get
his fix another way. One dead little girl was much the same
as any other, as far as he was concerned.

Until now I wasn't sure. I wasn't convinced that he
would have shot her. I killed him because I couldn't take
the chance. But I didn't think he'd do it.

He would have done it. Like he said: "I can't wait
to see the look on your face."

I don't think I'm going to get any sleep tonight.

Normally, if my thoughts veered in this direction, I'd
turn on the television and let the white noise distract me just
enough to pry my brain out of the danger zone and on to other
things. Watch the Sci-Fi Channel. Try to find the chinks in
Scully's latest scientific explanation. Speculate on the case
du jour. Try to construct a theory Scully wouldn't be able to
poke holes in. Sometimes I just think about her. Imagine sitting
in the office and hearing her type. Driving some dark highway
knowing she's in the passenger seat. I think about the sound
her heels make on the marble floor of the Hoover building, or
that incredulous sidelong look she gives me when she realizes
the unbelievable theories that we're working on might just be
right after all. Normally, that's enough to move my thoughts
out of any vicious circle.

This fight, tonight... I know she was right. I made
mistakes, and I'll continue to make the same mistakes. I
told her I'd try to find a therapist.

"After all, Mulder," she said as we were ordering
pizza, once things settled down, "I can always talk to you
about work, and I can talk to my mother or some friends
about everything else. You've cut yourself off from anyone
you could talk to."

"I talk to you."

"Sometimes."

"When do I not talk to you?" I tried not to sound
accusing. There've been plenty of times that Scully has
refused to talk to _me_.

"Sometimes you don't. Like this time." She was paying
an awful lot of attention to washing her hands and scrubbing
her fingernails. "Besides, you can't talk to me about me."

"Are you encouraging me to talk about you behind your
back?" I was trying to bait her, but I couldn't get the tone
right.

"You can always see Larry Collins for that," she shot
back, with a knowing look. So she's on to me. Shit.

No, I don't talk to her about her. Things would go
downhill pretty fast if I did. "You know, Scully, you seem
to still have a lot of Catholic-imposed repression that
you're not working through. Don't you think it's about time
you quit sublimating and tried to connect your inner state
of mind to your environment, rather than submerging yourself
constantly in your work?" If Scully ever went into therapy,
I'd probably be out of a partner in two sessions. Any shrink
worth his diploma would convince her that it's unhealthy to
derive _all_ your satisfaction in life from your occupation.
Then he'd convince her to vacation with him in the Bahamas,
and I'd be left with a letter of resignation while my brilliant
partner started her new life as Mrs. Dr. Larry Collins.

Now I'm just venting frustration. I had to stop myself
from fighting back tonight. It wasn't as tough as it might have
been. Scully was in the right, for one thing. And we were in
the midst of that basement full of my past... it wasn't hard
to remember other fights like this one. Where I am at fault
and without defense and nothing I say will make any difference.

I told her I would try to find a therapist. I _will_
try to find a therapist. I don't intend to try very hard.
If I find a therapist, I may book a session. Or not. I know
Scully's right. But I also know some things that she doesn't.
"God forbid you should ever be normal," she told me sarcastically.
But I don't view that sarcastically at all. I know there's
such a thing as being too normal. I know that normal consists
of plunking down to watch _Friends_ and _ER_ every week. Normal
means having "interests and acquaintances outside the workplace".
It means trusting people until they give you reason to do
otherwise, and believing what you read in the newspaper.
Normal means presenting a cheerful facade that looks like
a family from the outside.

Any shrink worth his diploma would look at the PTSD
delayed-onset diagnosis that Verber gave me and prepare a
few prescriptions and book me for once a week sessions until
I got over this crazy fixation on a trauma that occurred
over twenty years ago.

They'd cure me of myself.

Any living creature fights against the prospect
of its own destruction.

It's late and I'm tired and my thoughts are turning
toward dark avenues; I could be reacting on old instincts,
running on emotion and compulsion. I may change my mind....

A month is a decent length of time. I could try to
change things myself. Try to recognize when actions borne
of compulsion are helpful-- "trusting my instincts"-- and
when they're likely to get someone hurt.

The trouble is that damn it, I can rationalize
anything when I have to. Just like I'm doing now.

I could run this vicious circle forever.

Scully had me bring the prescription bottle with
me tonight. On the way back from Mom's she stopped at a
pharmacy and got it refilled. I promised her that I'd take
one of those temazepam pills every night for the next
week, to get my circadian patterns straightened out.
I wasn't going to start tonight, but... maybe half of
one. I need to sleep tonight. There's a pill cutter around
here somewhere. Half a pill. All right, that's one choice
made. I'll take the temazepam tonight.

Decisions. All right. Step one. I will look for a
therapist who won't have me committed the first time I
step through the door. And then I'll decide what to do
next.

In the meantime, I need to use this month to
practice pretending to be normal. Both Scully and the
A.D. are going to be watching when I get back. With
some work and a little luck... but I'm not likely to
get any luck, am I? No. So with a LOT of work, maybe
I can find a way to change. I've managed to change
some things. Eventually I got it into my head that
Scully worries more when I split up and don't call
her. I call her now. Usually. Maybe not always, but
usually. I can work on that this month. Catch up on
some reading, do some journal-writing, work a few
things out.

Constructive goals and realistic expectations.
The patient is getting better already.

Tuesday 23 November

Now it's really Tuesday. 8 pm Tuesday evening.
Things seem a lot clearer and a whole lot brighter now
than they did this morning.

Scully called me this morning and offered to
let me back into the office today to return the files
I had here, and to collect whatever I want to bring
home from my desk. She told me to bring the last cloth
heart, and we'd have Forensics check it out.

So I made the morning commute a little late,
gave Scully the heart and a lame joke ("Too bad it's
not Valentine's Day"). She left the keys with me in
the basement and went to work.

She let me stay all day. I put all my files
from home into the cabinets, made out a rudimentary
key to my filing style (which, as Scully is always
pointing out, makes no sense to anyone but me), and
collected a lot of stuff that probably shouldn't have
been in the office in the first place and put it in
my briefcase. I forgot I _had_ a copy of _Fritz the
Cat_. A classic. The first full-length X-rated cartoon.
Scully really has no idea of the depths of my depravity.

I took Roche's file back to the office with the
others. Looked it over one last time and put it away. I
also took my copy of _Alice In Wonderland and Through the
Looking Glass_. Not the Annotated version-- the old cloth-
bound book I had when I was a kid. I used to read from that
book to Sam sometimes, when Dad was out of town.

So I read the Alice books today. I kicked back
at my desk and opened the cover of a version that has
no footnotes, no foreword explaining the identity of
the author, no appendices dissecting the "fictional
construction" of his "sublimated neuroses". I just read
the books, turning the pages too quickly to scrutinize
them for indicators or clues.

"Curiouser and curiouser! ... I've often seen a
cat without a grin, but never a grin without a cat...
It was a treacle-well.... Off with his head! ... We
called him tortoise because he taught us... Will you,
won't you, will you, won't you, won't you join the
dance? ... Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre
and gimble in the wabe... Are you animal, vegetable,
or mineral? ... What does it matter where my body happens
to be? My mind goes on working all the same... Life, what
is it but a dream?"

Soon enough I could take my time, look at the
John Tenniel pictures, and relax into the story without
thinking of anything else at all. I took Alice back from
John Lee Roche.

Scully came in after five with the heart. "They
were able to tell that the fabric dye was manufactured
between 1968 and 1974, but beyond that, they couldn't
get anything." She came around the desk and gave me the
evidence bag. "It isn't her, Mulder. And whoever that
little girl is... we'll find her."

I was so tired by then. So tired, and the case
seemed so far away. "How?"

"I don't know," she admitted. "But I know you."

She does. And we will.

"Why don't you go home and get some sleep?"

Suddenly the absurdity of the past week and a
half hit me full force. I've been chasing red lights
that appear to me in dreams. Scully has trouble with
that? And I'm surprised? Even I have to admit that the
entire enterprise has been a shaky proposition from
the start.

Did Roche somehow tune into my dreams? I have
no proof. Only a strong conviction that we haven't even
begun to understand the way the human mind works. It's
a highly subjective, elusive interpretation of the events
of the past few days. Did John Lee Roche get into my head?

I don't know. But whatever the answer may be, it's
over now.

The other question... the doubt that's still
prodding me weakly in the ribs... Did Roche take my sister?

I believe the answer is No. That has to be enough.
It's over.

There is one thing about this entire ordeal that
I've kept to myself. One moment I couldn't put on the
report. Someday, when all this is far behind us, I'll
tell Scully.

After I'd taken him to the house in West Tisbury
and proved he was lying, I took Roche to the hotel, cuffed
him to the bed, took a seat and waited. I fell asleep.

And I heard her voice. Samantha. She was calling
my name. Over and over. I looked around the hotel room
and realized that this time, I could move. This time I
could change it. This time I could save her.

That red will-o-the-wisp light appeared on the wall
and I followed, listening to my sister's voice. She seemed
so close.

In the parking lot was Roche's white El Camino. Sam
was inside. She saw me; she pounded on the window and called
for help. "Fox, help me! Fox, unlock me, let me out, Fox--"

And I did. I fumbled my keys out and found the
right one and unlocked the door and Samantha spilled out,
alive and well and whole, into my arms. And I lifted her
up and carried her away from there. She was safe. Everything
was all right. I held her up and looked into her face and
she smiled at me and everything was all right. Samantha
was right there in my arms and everything was all right.

Then I saw the red light spell a word on the pavement.

"BYE"

And then I woke up.

But whether he knew it or not, John Lee Roche gave
me one moment when I truly believed that I had my sister
back. That one moment in my dream was more vivid, more
important... more _real_ to me than scores of normal days
that have come and gone. One moment of joy.

In dreams, in reality, in my own mind-- the only
arena that matters, in the end-- I took Samantha back from
John Lee Roche.

Someday, I'll find her again and it won't be a trick,
a plot, a clone, a mistake. Someday I'll find my sister and
it won't be a dream.

I'll find her. Someday.




Monday, November 22

I HATE SPIDERS!

It's one of those little quirks that never wanted to let Mulder know.
I mean, I can see him, in one of his shithead moods, searching
through the files for some case of ghostly spiders or spiders with
psychic abilities or--whatever, and then gleefully staring holes
through me during the entire case, waiting for me to break into a
screaming fit. I did not want him to be equipped with that piece of
information.

Too late now. I don't think he bought that story about the spiders
in my high school. I mean, he didn't use it against me immediately,
but I know he will. It's just a matter of time.

But for now, I have this really itchy feeling on the back of my neck
that I am sure comes from being in contact with spider silk and it
will NOT GO AWAY.

Just like the sort of left over tired/angry/frustrated feeling that I
have after the fight we just tore through.

But it's settled. At least for tonight. I should be happy. I won, on
all counts. Not exactly a knock out. More like a technical, because
I had the poor guy on the ropes and he couldn't get any punches at
me. Just a lot of defensive moves. Nothing that touched me. But,
hey, I'm never above kicking a guy when I have him on the ropes,
now am I?

Shit.

It was for his own damned good. I know that, he knows that, hell,
Kiss My Ass Skinner knows that.

It's for his own good.

So why do I feel like I just hurt my best friend's feelings and I
really need to apologize to him?

We got to his mom's after that long drive which alternated between
talk of paperwork (him) and total silence (me), and I was still so
wound up from my little session with the Assistant Director that I
really didn't mind having something constructive to do. Building a
house, roofing a garage, brain surgery, anything to keep my mind
off the events of the last week. I figured we'd dig in, get a good
portion of it out of the way and then we'd take a break and I'd be
ready to talk rationally to Mulder about getting the help he needs to
get over this one.

No such luck. I NEVER have that kind of luck. I have to quit
looking for it; it ain't gonna happen..

Right off the bat, the door hadn't even closed behind his mother's
back, and he starts in on me. Well, not really me, on cases. What
cases he intends to dig into the minute he can get back in the office.

This is not the musing of someone who is seeking to get better. This
is the ranting of an addict. And at that moment, I was not in my
most compassionate frame of mind.

It was almost funny, really. We were schlepping paint cans and
swinging dust mops and brooms and ducking spiders and screaming
at the tops of our lungs. Would have made a great sitcom. My
life as a horror movie/sitcom. Yeah, I love it.

I made it clear that there would be no discussion of future work,
that we were going to talk about the here and now. What he was
going to do NOW.

"I'm gonna stack these boxes over in that corner." Ooooh, I
KNEW I was in for it then. He knew exactly what I meant and he
wasn't going to play nicely. He wanted to fight about it and he
was pushing all the right buttons.

Why is it when someone knows you well enough to just glance at
you and know that you're hurting, they also have the ability to rip
your heart out with one simple flippant quip? Maybe that's the real
crux of friendship--the power to destroy that we keep under
control.

Not that Mulder was going to destroy me tonight. No, tonight I
had the upper hand all the way. I was the destroyer tonight. Dana
the Terminator.

I told him that I didn't want him to just go to the Bureau shrink on
this one. I know what he does. He and Larry Collins sit there and
bullshit each other for a half an hour, probably with Mulder telling
Larry all kinds of neat things like the color of my blouses and that
I prefer to wear no stockings on hot days--he thinks I don't know
these things, but I do and one day I will seek my revenge. So after
the time has drawn out long enough to CURE Ted Bundy, I drop
by to see if he's ever coming back down to the basement to actually
WORK for a while and it's over, because Larry is falling all over
himself drooling at me and lets Mulder off with 'I'm glad we had
this chance to talk, let me know if you need to talk again'. Yeah,
right, when hell freezes over.

"I've fired in the line of duty before, I can handle it." You betcha,
if that was all that was entailed here, I would be the first to agree.
But this wasn't about shooting Roche. That was a minor footnote
to this whole ordeal. Hardly worth mentioning.

This wasn't about Roche. He just got to play center stage in this
little tragedy. Sort of like the three witches who always steal the
show in productions of MacBeth. No, the real story was
elsewhere. The real drama was Mulder and his reactions to these
cases.

It's usually not this bad. Most times, we get these cases, he
comes up with some totally outlandish theory that is only faintly
connected with a solid fact, I go in, rip that one to shreds, come up
with some of my own that he finds totally unacceptable, we tug at it
like two puppies and a piece of old bath towel between us and after
some brilliant insights from my partner and a lot of hard work from
both of us, we come up with the solution. Ta Da. It was there all
along, right in front of our noses, but if we didn't go through the
process, we would have never seen it.

It's exhausting, often depressing--an occupational hazard when
working with violent crimes as a rule. In the end, we're a little
battered, but not really the worse for wear. We kick back on the
weekend, rent some movies, drink some exotic beer that Mulder
always seems to find that gives me a tremendous headache in the
morning, and all's right with the world.

He doesn't run off on me. He doesn't switch pills on me. He
doesn't NEED pills to begin with. And he doesn't put himself and
others at great physical danger for the sole purpose of proving
something he should have known all along.

He doesn't risk everything over some damned dream. No matter
how scary the cases are, no matter how horrifying the crimes,
Mulder is a cautious person. He takes risks, true, but never
with other people. Never with me--and that pisses the hell out
of me sometimes, because that's an occupational hazard too--but
never never never with others and never never never with a little
girl.

He didn't mean to do that. I know that. But even if he had known
how it would have ended, I can't say with certainty that it would
have stopped him from doing everything exactly the same way.

Oh, he might be able to kid himself with hindsight. If I'd done this
differently, if I'd done that differently. Yeah, been there, done that,
flunked the test and moved on. But that requires rational thought
processes, and that was the one element that my partner was sorely
lacking in the past couple of days. He was running on pure instinct
and emotion. He was so high on the two combined that it's no
wonder his body refused to sleep.

The fight wasn't over by a long shot. I still had all my ammunition
and he was shooting blanks.

I started rattling off the obvious: his lack of sleep, his inability to
deal with his emotions in any reasonable manner, the fact that all of
this seemed to be going back to his sister.

I didn't really want to do this. I didn't really want to have a fight
over this. I wanted to sit down over a pizza and some drinks, and
simply point out that I think he needs some help here. That this is
just too much for one person, however strong and able to deal with
problems, to handle. That it doesn't mean I think less of him or
that I feel he's lost it forever and will never be fit to return to the
field--far from it. But I didn't get that chance. He wouldn't let me
have that chance. He threw up his damned defense mechanisms,
the ones that he's learned so well and perfected against the likes of
Skinner and Patterson and Blevins and Bill Mulder. And he used
them against me. That hurt.

He threw back in my face the fact that I never went to get help
when I've had problems. What the bastard didn't know, and what I
sure wasn't going to tell him, was that I *have* gotten help. And
maybe I should have told him right then, but damn it, I still don't
want him to know. He would never use it against me, I know that.
But he would hesitate sometimes, he would push me back behind
him sometimes, he would decide not to take a case because of how
it might affect me--I couldn't stand for that. That's everything
I despise and more. I'd end up hating him for that, and I never
want to do that. I never want to lose what we have that
way--because he can't trust me to be there when he needs me.

I reminded him that Roche could have found out anything he
wanted to know about him, or even us for that matter, the same
way Max Fenig did--through the Internet. I could see right then
that I was starting to draw blood by the way he rattled off all the
ways he had to ensure that wasn't the case. He even went so far as
to invoke the Lone Gunmen--I had really cut deeply for him to dig
that far down in the barrel.. That's what he does on cases when he's
desparate to convince me: he starts hammering me with all sorts of
real and imagined 'evidence' and 'data' to support his claims. Little
Band-Aids of his own construction to stop the flow of blood. But
you know what? I learned very early in medical school that
sometimes the only way to help someone is to draw blood. You
can't perform surgery (at least not yet) without making that first
incision. So, even though I knew he was bleeding, I didn't stop.
I couldn't. I had to get to the tumor, get it out and close up
the wound. Then and only then could I back off.

We yelled back and forth. Somewhere in there I backed into a
spider's web and almost let slip that I have an unnatural dread of
the little beasties, but I covered, marginally. When he started
handing me cleaning equipment and giving me grief, I lost it.

I remember so clearly when Charlie used to do that. We'd all be
doing a job, cleaning the garage or the backyard after the dog got
into the garbage cans or something. Charlie would be goofing off,
not really working, just 'supervising' and I'd get mad and call him
on it. And he'd start handing me stuff--the shovel, the trash bags,
the rakes, anything handy, just piling the shit on me to get me to
cry. Didn't work then, didn't work tonight, either.

I snapped. I told him I wanted my partner back. I told him I
wanted my partner who I could rely on, who I could trust to leave
alone, who didn't put innocent lives, himself, little Caitlin, in
danger.

Scalpel slipped a little there, I could tell. That cut was a little
too deep. I almost had a bleeder I couldn't handle.

He deflated. Like a balloon that has a slow leak. It hurt a lot
to watch. I didn't want to do that to him. But he left me no
choice.

He's afraid. He's afraid that if he goes to someone, someone who
doesn't, couldn't understand. . . they would see problems much
deeper than what actually exists. He would be trapped into
revealing some of the things that we both know are real, but seem
so very very unreal and imagined to the rest of the world. And that
nice, caring psychologist, whoever they might be, would calmly
pick up the phone and have my partner led away and drugged. He
even suggested, in a voice that could cut glass, that *I* could
prescribe the Thorazine. My mind slipped back to Kevin Kryder's
father. The second time we went to see him, when we, *I* really
needed to talk to him and find out everything he knew. But it was
too late. They had come and gone. They had taken that man's
mind, and there was nothing either of us, Mulder or I, could do to
give it back to him. That was what Mulder fears the most. That
someday, they'll steal his mind.

I was hurting so damned bad by this point, both from what he was
saying and from the images my mind wouldn't quit supplying, but I
had to fix things. I assured him that I didn't want that, I would
never accept that. I just want him to get some help with this.
Overall, as much as I worry, Mulder is a pretty tough cookie. He
gets banged and bumped and he'd definitely be in the 'scratch and
dent' aisle of the appliance store, but he still gets by. He manages
to get by better than I do, I think. He's had more practice. I just
want him to get a little help right now. Just a tune-up, maybe.
Change the spark plugs, rotate the tires. I'm not ready to trade him
in on a new model.

It finally came to a consensus of sorts. He wasn't happy. As a
matter of fact, I think, given any other circumstances, things would
have gotten completely out of control. But he held back. It took
tremendous effort of his part, but I think he finally realized that
there might be a grain of truth in what I was saying. He agreed to
look for a therapist. He respects me enough to at least make the
effort, if not for himself, then because I asked it of him.

Sometimes. . . sometimes I think he needs me, not for who I am,
but for what I represent--this icon he's made, St. Scully,
who will always be there no matter what, who will catch him
whenever he falls-- or when he jumps.

But it's not true. I think Mulder may be the only person
in my life who _does_ need me for who I am, and for no
other reason.

To my family, all my life, I've always been "Dana, honey",
the honor student, the bright baby girl. To my friends
I was "DAYna", DAYna, what are you still doing at the lab,
DAYna, you're too short to wear your hair like that, DAYna,
that guy was cute, why didn't you ask him out? Teachers
and instructors were an endless succession of "Miss Scully";
Scully, is that Irish? Ah, I thought so. Well, this is a
very impressive track record, Miss Scully, I'm sure you'll
have no trouble with our curriculum. Then I started acquiring
titles, and I wore each label with pride. Doctor. Trainee.
Agent.

None of that mattered when I walked into that basement
office. At first I thought he called me "Scully" to avoid
according me any kind of credit, even by acknowledging that
I'm of Agent status, same as him. But it went beyond that.
He never asked me all the bland getting-to-know-you questions:
where're you from, brothers and sisters, colleges, why'd
you join the Bureau. Only weeks later, when it came up
in conversation on a stakeout, did we talk about something
as basic as our home towns.

He never spoke the words, but he might as well have said
it to me that first day: "I don't care who you are, or who
you think you are. Tell me what you really think-- or get
out of my way."

So I told him what I really thought. I worked harder
than I'd ever worked before in my life. And found that for
the first time, I was being... judged... not by my titles,
my name, my education, my choice of shoes-- but by thought
and action alone. My identity, to him, began and ended with
the work I did.

Where I had always strived for confidence, suddenly
I _was_ confident. Where I had always hoped to be strong,
now I _was_ strong. Because I behaved with strength and
confidence, it became part of who I am. This new identity
has nothing to do with my background, my family, my
schooling-- only with who those experiences have made
me. Scully.

In a way, I suppose I'm glad he rarely calls me by my first
name. The one thing Mulder has always demanded from me is
honesty. The name-- my last name-- asks for honesty within
the bounds of work. The few times he's called me Dana, there
was just as much of that need for truth, and it didn't end
at the office. And I'm not sure I can be that honest. Not
yet. Maybe someday. But not now.

Sometimes I think he needs me so much that I could
never walk away. But it's not true. Because if I were as
honest with myself as he expects me to be with him, I'd
admit that I need him, too. I need to be Scully. He's the
only one who ever saw that in me. If I walked away, I'd
have to leave them both behind: Mulder and Scully. And I'd
go back to "Dana, honey", "DAYna", Miss Scully, Dr. Scully,
Agent Scully... and I'd never be myself again. I'll never
leave. I'll never leave him. I don't want to. I can't.

. . .Right now, I want him to get some sleep. If just so I can.

He agreed to that. He'll get the temazepam refilled tomorrow. He
promised to take them this week, just to get his sleep cycle back in
order. And he'll seek some help. If it gets too close, if it starts
looking like it's not working out, I'll be there to back him up when
he quits going. I trust him enough to know when he's being helped
and when's it's just not working.

But more than anything, I think he needs the time. Time to heal.
Time to put it all in perspective. Time to put a little cloth
heart to rest.

I hope. . . I hope that someday, we can bring that little heart home.
That we can find that little girl and let a family start to grieve
their loss and put an end to their suffering.

Someday, I hope Mulder's hurt will end, too. Sometimes, it's all I
hope for.

Tuesday, November 23

I let the Prisoner of Zelda in the office today. If it pisses Skinner
off, so what? I'll tell him Mulder needed the names of some shrinks
that he might talk to. Once in the basement, I left him alone. He
needs time there, sometimes. It's a little sanctuary for him. My
partner is a very religious man--he just hasn't figured out the
religion, yet.

Later, I came back to the office to let him know that Forensics
couldn't come up with anything useful on the analysis of the fabric
of the last cloth heart. He was sitting there, in the almost dark,
when I brought it back to him, still in its evidence bag.

He smiled at me. It was a 'God, Scully this hurts so much, but I'll
get by, I know it' smile. Even so, it was good to see. Another
dent--this one a little deeper than some before, but everything
still works. Mom would take one look at him and say 'You can't
keep a good man down'. Yeah, I've noticed.

And then I got a little bonus for all the hell I've been put through
with him over this. I told him he should go home and get some
sleep. Pretty ironic, considering all the trouble he thinks sleep has
caused us. Plus the fact that he slept until 11 this morning, thanks
to an all-night drug store we found when we finally got back to
town.

He tilted back his head and laughed. It was good to hear. I don't
hear it nearly often enough to suit me. But when it comes, it's like
a cool shower on a hot summer day.

Then he reached over and gave me a hug. He's not mad at me. He
knows I'm only looking out for his back, like I'm supposed to do.
I'm glad he sees this for what it really is.

I left him alone, to put the heart away, gather up his stuff--no files,
of course, just some of the non-existent videos from the drawer that
has nothing in it.

I wasn't surprised to see that he didn't put the heart into the
cabinet with the case file. This one came too close for that.
He put it into his desk drawer. I told him that I knew we would
find that last little girl. And I do. I know we'll find her.
I know my partner. We'll find her.

One day, we'll put that little heart away for good.

The End.