Annapolis, Maryland
Oct 31, 4:30pm

The October moon rose slowly into the sky ahead of the car, retreating as the highway curved towards the outskirts of the city. A big gibbering yellow moon; a witch's moon: it was Halloween.

Scully checked her rearview mirror; as she had left the city limits and entered the suburbs, she'd had to watch the road more carefully. Her impulse was to drive fast, faster, fastest, feeling time like a ticking bomb that could go off at any instant. But the roads were scattered with starched ghosts and neon haired trolls, children skipping along the sidewalks on their way to toothache and indigestion, and she had to force herself to slow down and focus on safety.

She had not laid eyes on Fox Mulder for three years and four months. He had been convicted of arson and the deliberate destruction of evidence, blamed for burning down his own office to keep from revealing the whereabouts of Gibson Praise, and sentenced to serve ten years in a federal prison with no possibility of parole.

The best strings Skinner could pull and all the brilliant machinations of the Lone Gunmen couldn't keep Mulder from going to prison; the most they could manage was to see that he was sent to Nellis, at Lake Mead, under security conditions so minimal that prisoners occasionally walked out the front gate unimpeded. Which made it that much worse when he refused to see or speak to Scully.

"It's not you," Skinner told her. "He just doesn't want the same people who set him up to come after you, which they might, if they thought you were still doing his work on the outside."

"I won't quit," she had told him, even after Mulder had refused to so much as look at her as they took him from the courtroom. "Don't even think of asking me to quit."

"I wasn't," Skinner said. He had put his hand on her shoulder in a rare gesture of consolation, his knuckles bandaged and a finger in splints for reasons he wouldn't talk about.

Scully suspected he had been applying more than logic to his arguments for Mulder's innocence, but he had been tight-lipped as always, and brushed off her questions with a shake of the head.

Now he walked back to his desk and leaned his hips against it, stretching his long legs out and folding his arms over the broad front of his starched white shirt. He regarded her thoughtfully, his head tilted at a slight angle, and Scully waited until he was ready to speak.

"The truth is," he said,"They won't come after you, because they've never seen you as anything more than an accessory to Mulder's madness, a facilitator, at best."

"Yes, sir," she said, not without some bitterness. "I know that."

Suddenly he was looking at her, really looking at her: they made full eye contact, and Scully thought for a moment she could see a rare glimpse of the real man. His voice was quiet, genuine, for once not hidden behind the stone wall of authority.

"I know this is hard for you to believe," he said, "But I feel the same way you do, Scully."

"Furious?" She gave a half laugh. "Scared? Desperate?"

He shook his head. "Determined."

The word had such feeling in it, it seemed to hang in the air for a moment before fading.

"If whoever is behind all this thinks that taking Mulder out of the action won't fire up an anger, an indignation, a determination to learn the truth ten times as passionate as any motivation of Mulder's, then they're out of their fucking minds."

Scully had to swallow before speaking. "I guess you do know how I feel."

"Then let's put it to use," he said abruptly, walking back around his desk and sitting down.

"Put what to use?"

"The Consortium's one blind spot," he said. "Their one big oversight."

He paused a moment before adding, "You."

Then he smiled, not a great smile, but a real one, more with his eyes than with his lips, and said, "After all, what's the point of being invisible if you can't get some good out of it?"

*****

Those had been hard days, frightening days, when every step had been a venture into utterly unknown territories. But passion had led them all on then, the raging bitter impotence of the Lone Gunmen that caused them to rally around Scully and help her any way they could, the surface-cold, center-hot determination Skinner had to uncover whatever it was that the Consortium was so determined to keep Mulder from finding. And Scully had settled in like Penelope, prepared to wait out the ten years if necessary, until Odysseus was returned from the war.

Momentum sustained her for the first year, and most of the second. But time began to wear on her, and the things she learned on her fact-finding missions called out increasingly for context, for understanding.

For Mulder.

She was listed under the title of "Research Investigator," and no one had questioned it; no one had bothered her in her own small office with the slowly growing stacks of files. Only once had Spender stuck his head in the door, since he and Fowley had been given the X-Files. To his credit, he had never seemed to want to rub her nose in it, though his smug relief at Mulder's imprisonment was widely known. But if he ever suspected her of hating him for it--he was right.

It was indecent, it was unChristian, to hate someone so deeply, so persistently. But she did. She hated the very sight of him. To her, he looked so much like Mulder without the strength or passion or the... the magic. There was just so much about him that reminded her he *wasn't* Mulder, just a shell with all the Mulder subtracted, a sort of poor imitation following Fowley around and doing field reports and trying to scoff convincingly while he was doing it.

One day Spender and Fowley were glancing up at her as she passed by their office, no contempt, no arrogance--she was Scully the Invisible, after all, not even pitied--and the next day in Memphis she learned that Mulder had received a full pardon after Gibson Praise resurfaced in Florida, having been all this time in Thailand with relatives who claimed to have abducted him because they still believed the assassins who had killed his chess opponent and shot Fowley were out to kill him. Four hours of deposition later, Mulder had been vindicated.

Just like that.

******

They had come to her in the night, three shy, strange men, tapping on her door at two a.m. on a Sunday when the rain in Georgetown had been so intense it had flooded the street, and afterwards she wondered how the hell they had managed to get across town to her apartment in that awful weather.

"He doesn't want to come back," Frohicke told her. "He said he's just lost all interest in the X-Files."

"The dude's a lying son of a bitch," Langly said bitterly. "He's just afraid he'll take us all down with him next time."

Scully fussed unnecessarily over the cups of coffee, the cream, the little packets of artificial sweetener Byers insisted upon. Her eyes were huge and glowing blue and her white robe looked two sizes too big for her. None of the men made direct eye contact with her, though after they said what they had to say, they still seemed reluctant to leave.

Outside, the storm center moved directly over Scully's apartment, with a noise like an angry woman putting away silverware in drawers.

"Are you okay?" Byers asked her. "You seem...tired."

"I'm fine," she said. "I've been having a lot of nightmares lately."

He nodded. "Understandable."

Frohicke said suddenly, "Look, Scully, it's like this. We all know Gibson Praise didn't just show up and come clean out of the blue. You know it, we know it, Mulder knows it. Whoever put him in the slammer decided they needed him out of it. They want him to do something. And he doesn't want to do whatever that something is. He thinks the only way to keep from playing their game is to just stay the hell away from you and us and the X- Files altogether."

"Did he say that?"

"Well, no..."

Scully shrugged. She sat down, huddling over a cup of tea. "Maybe he's right," she said.

"NO!" Langly banged his fist down on the table so hard the lid jumped off of the ceramic creamer and clattered onto the table. "No, dammit! No, he's not! They must have been really scared when you guys were so close to figuring out what the hell they were up to. So scared they had to take Mulder out the only way they could without killing him. So however scared they were then, they must be twice as scared now, to risk letting him out again. Something big must be going on. Something fucking HUGE."

Frohicke nodded. "Something so big that freaky kid couldn't help them with it, so they used him to get Mulder back in the fight."

"And Mulder won't do their dirty work for them," Scully said.

"I don't think that's it," Byers said, "So much as the fact that he's really afraid of endangering the people he... values most."

All three of them looked at her then, and Scully flushed and looked down into the swirling omens of her tea leaves,gold with flecks of brown, the color of his eyes. "You want me to talk to him, is that it?"

She raised her head and studied them in turn, the thickset little man with the big glasses, the long haired blond who looked like a lost demi-god searching for Odin, the small tidy man with the intense gaze...

"No," she said, overcome by horror at the thought of rejection, after all this time. Better to hold onto the dream...

"No," she repeated, more calmly. "No. Absolutely not."

*******

So here she was, dodging the chasing moon, alternately hot in the airless car with the windows rolled up, and cold when she rolled them down to the late October chill. Rushing on a fool's errand to a man who had made it clear enough by his actions he didn't want to see her, risking everything for what in the end might come to nothing.

The only thing she was sure of was that time was following her down these curving suburban roads, three years and four months of it, and she could feel it gaining on her fast. The point at which she and Mulder intersected again would be the end of one life and the beginning of the next, and although a part of her felt a deep urgency to rush to this crossroads, the greatest part of her was simply, deeply afraid.

******

tomorrow: Reunion