Places That Scare You, The (part 1/3)

by Rose Campion

The Places that Scare You (part 1)

Warnings: This story has more warnings than I've had hot dinners. Male pregnancy and slash story. If you're squicked by that kind of story, don't complain to me about it, just don't read this! Go read something else. Very serious angst. DoggettTorture. MulderTorture. Main Character deaths. AU. This story may not be your cup of tea. My beta Jo says I have to give this story a three hanky warning. Very NC-17. No, really, I mean it. There were scenes that made me blush to write them. Includes some scenes that some readers may consider 'het' in nature. Negative feedback of any kind- I don't wanna hear it.

Special thanks to my beta Jo for daily doses of encouragement and generally going above and beyond the call of duty.

Disclaimer: I'm pretty sure CC and company would be very appalled by this story, but I'm not doing this for them. This is for the benefit of some of my like-minded fellow fans. Like most things I do well, I make no money from this.

Series: not part of a series. A stand-alone story. Don't ask for a sequel 'cause ya ain't gonna get one.

pairing: M/D, written for one of the challenges on the DTA website.

Archiving: Basement. SlashingMulder. Wherever. Just let me know. Diandra- you can't tell me you don't want to archive this.

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"Are you ready for the thing called love? it don't come from you and me
it comes from up above
I ain't no porcupine
take off your kid gloves.
Are you ready for the thing called love?

I ain't no icon, carved out of soap
sent here to clean up your reputation.
Baby, you know you ain't no prince charming.

We can live in fear or act out of hope
of some kind of peaceful situation. Baby, how come the cry of love is so alarming?"

Thing Called Love- John Hiatt

We were two days out from Dallas, heading north. We hadn't exactly made the fastest progress we could on this trip. Right now though we were pulled off the side of the road, standing on the shoulder of the road as no one, and I mean no one, drove by this back of the boonies, Godforsaken middle of nowhere state highway through the near desert of Oklahoma in a drought year. Which was a good thing considering I was holding a gun aimed directly at Fox Mulder's head.

"This is all your fault, Goddamn it!" I yelled at him.

"John, put the gun down, please," he pleaded at me.

Sweat dripped into my eyes and I used my right hand to wipe my brow clean, but my gun didn't waver. "Asshole!" I told him. "You did this to me."

"I know you feel that way. We've talked about this before. But I think it would be more productive to have a rational discussion about it," he said. His hands weren't held over his head like I'd told him, but they were held out to the side so I could see he wasn't going to pull any crap on me.

Somehow or another, the man was going to pay for what had happened to me. What was still in the middle of happening to me. For what would continue to affect me for the rest of my life.

"There's nothing fucking rational about what's happening to me," I said.

It was too goddamn hot for this BS, to be standing outside of the car by the side of the highway, gun trained on my only companion, wiping sweat from my forehead, but I really couldn't see what else I could do at the moment. It was Fox Mulder's fault. He'd ruined my life. You couldn't put the blame any place else. The search for him had sidetracked my career into the X-files. His rescue from that military base had put me securely on the losing side against forces that had the power to destroy all of humanity. Rushing out to warn him in that desert had torn me away from the last of my old life. I hadn't seen the east coast since then, much less my house. Or my truck. You know, I missed my truck. I really did.

This wasn't the first time I'd pulled my weapon on Mulder since we'd started this trip north. He'd talked me into putting it away the other two times it had happened. I suppose I was just a little emotional. And scared crapless. Sure, it's not a manly thing to admit. Fuck that. If you were in the situation I was, you'd be lying if you said you were anything but crap your pants scared. This kind of shit isn't supposed to happen, and if it hadn't been happening to me, I wouldn't have believed it for a minute.

You see, Fox Mulder's aliens had knocked me up.

They abducted me. It happened not long after I warned Mulder in that desert in New Mexico. One minute I was parked, taking a leak by the side of the road, Monica waiting in the truck. Next thing, bang, I wake up. It turns out it it's six months later. Mulder is rescuing me out of the hold of some alien space craft and not only do I have a newly installed set of female plumbing, I'm in my second trimester. I mean, it was obvious already that I've got a tadpole getting ready to hatch.

You can imagine that a man would be a little unsettled by this.

"Please, just put the gun away and we'll talk about it in the car," Mulder pleaded again. "I'm trying to help you as best I can, but I can't do that if you put a bullet in my head."

He looked just about as lost as I was feeling. I shook my head. I didn't care. Let him deal with his own damn feelings. He wasn't the one who had to take a leak every five minutes it seemed. He wasn't the one who had lost sight of his own dick. He wasn't the one with his body doing things that a man's body was just never meant to do. He wasn't the one with a full measure of hormones meant for a woman's body. He wasn't the one freaking out every time he felt some weird ass fluttering feeling inside his freaking body. He wasn't the one worried out of his mind by the fact that he could be carrying some kind of monster.

Or even worse. What if I weren't? What the hell was I going to do if this was a normal human child I was carrying?

And Mulder wasn't the one throwing up his guts at the least provocation. Hell, without provocation. I was suffering from so-called "morning" sickness like you wouldn't believe. I counted every instance of it against Mulder. And against my ex-wife. Ms. Perfect complained about the nausea in the mornings for maybe a few weeks during her first trimester, but I know she never once threw up, much less was reduced to helpless retching heaves so bad that she bust blood vessels in her eyes.

That was how we ended up here by the side of the road, with me holding my gun to the man's head. I'd had him stop the car so I could vomit by the side of the road, losing the saltines and ginger-ale that I'd been so hopeful about keeping down. Then Mulder said something. It probably was innocent sounding. But the way he said things made me want to kill him. I think it was, "Are you done yet?" A supposedly neutral question, but one that can be delivered with such impatience and snideness. How I made the leap from to being angry to being quite literally ready to kill him, I don't know. I suppose it lacked a certain logic, but it felt so right.

"You are a total bastard," I told him. Hardly my most original insult of the day, but I was rapidly running out of fresh invective. Old standards would have to do.

"I know you think this is somehow my fault," he said, "And I can appreciate that you might feel that way. But I really am trying to help you. Please. Just put the gun away and get back in the car."

I didn't have time to answer. I was racked by another wave of nausea, this was as debilitating as the last, but without anything more in my stomach to throw up, was just dry heaves. The dry heaves were the worst. I was helpless against them. A prisoner to my own body.

The bastard took advantage of my weakness. He danced close and had the gun out of my hand before I could protest. So I knelt there by the side of the road, humiliated, the sour taste of my own vomit filling my mouth, asphalt hard on my knees, feeling weak from heat so intense that it was a smell too. And I yelled, or at least I whined with feeling, "Give it back. You bastard. Give it back."

"No," he said softly. You could tell he was Mr. Rationality. He was obviously angry, but he was able to keep his fury reigned in well within bounds. "I'm sick of playing this game, John. You're not getting it back until you're more emotionally stable. I can't risk the chance that you might actually pull the trigger instead of just threatening me. So just get back in the fucking car and we'll talk about this like two rational human beings. We'll get to Sioux City, Iowa soon. I'm doing the best I can to get you some help. We'll be meeting people there. People who can help."

"Scully?" I asked. It would have to be Scully. Who else could take what had just happened to me in stride? And who else would have any chance of understanding how I felt? She too had gone through the doubt of not knowing if the child she carried was even human.

Mulder got a pained look in his face but smoothed it over in just a minute. "No, not Scully. We're going to meet Skinner. He has old friends in Iowa. There's a place out in the county where we can hide."

"No!" my reaction was as automatic as it was vehement. I'd have sooner ripped out my own guts with a dull spoon as let Skinner see me in this condition. I could have cried. Except John Doggett did not cry. Not unless someone was dead or dying. A man had to have whatever tattered rememnts of his pride were left to him. "No! Not Skinner."

"Well, then you figure it out! I'm trying to help you, John, but frankly, I don't have a lot of options left. Maybe you're forgetting the fact that I'm a convicted murderer with a pending death. It's the bald guy or nothing. The Gunmen are dead. Monica is still missing. Scully is...we just can't go to Scully. Our friends are kind of thin on the ground here. You'd rather I call Kersh?"

Shit. Double shit. I didn't know who the hell else besides Mulder I could go to. You can appreciate that this was a real delicate situation. With Mulder, I'd only lost the shame because he'd been around, he found me this way. I couldn't let anyone else I knew see me like this, as some kind of freak and monster. Mulder, he knew monsters, so it was almost okay. But where the hell was Scully?

"Get in the car John," Mulder snapped at me. He pulled the clip from my pistol and stuck it in his pocket. Then he stuck the unloaded weapon in the waistband of his jeans. I could have killed him for that. Not just that he had my weapon and was treating it so carelessly. Hell, I was angry that he had jeans. And a waist. I'd been wearing the same pair of sweats day and night for a long time now, since Phoenix and we hadn't exactly taken a direct route from Phoenix to Dallas. They were tight already, just barely covering me. I think they were Mulder's. I hated him for that. Next sign of civilization we came to, I was going to insist at stopping at a Wal-Mart and getting real pants.

I held my ground. Or rather, I held the ground. I was not getting into the car. I wasn't going to do a damn thing the bastard told me to. This was my bus ride and damned if I wasn't going to be in the driver's seat.

"Fine. Fucking walk to Sioux City for all I care. It's too hot for this. Bastard."

"No," I said nastily as I climbed to my feet again. "This will be a bastard." I pointed to my belly. "I'm a son of a bitch. A mean, nasty son of a bitch and I am not getting in the car."

He didn't say anything. He just stared at me, We waited at this impasse for a while, until I started to feel woozy. I kind of swayed and almost went down. Would have went down, except Mulder caught me. He half guided me, half shoved me into the car. He put a bottle of water in my hands.

"Rinse your mouth out first," he ordered. "Take a sip. Swish it around. Spit it out."

I did what he said only because I'd been planning to do it anyway. The water was warmer than lukewarm. Blood temperature. Body temperature. Hot. I felt a tinier bit better without the taste of acid in my mouth.

"Okay. Shit. You're dehydrated, John. Take small sips. Okay, let's buckle you in and get on the road. Skinner said there was a doctor he could trust. An old Marine buddy of his."

Fuck! I was not going to let a fellow Marine see me like this, no way, no how. Almost as if he could read my mind, Mulder said, "Look, I know this is difficult for you. You're going to have to swallow your pride, because you need more help than I can give you. Semper Fi. It means something, right? Always faithful. Well, loyalty's a two way street. You can trust Walter to stand by you. And if he says you can trust this doctor, then you can. We'll get you taken care of."

With that, he pulled the seatbelt over my body and clicked it into place, just like he'd buckle in a recalcitrant kid. He adjusted the belt so it sat under my big belly. He tapped the bottle of water I was still holding and said, "Try another sip. Small sips, every couple of minutes."

I could have just cried from the humiliation. Except John Doggett did not cry. I had to keep telling myself that. Mulder shut the door and walked around to the driver's side. He sat down behind the wheel but didn't start the car yet. He rummaged in the back seat until he found something. He handed me a little foil packet. One of those wet wipe things. As he started the car, buckled himself, then took off, I tore open the packet and wiped my face clean. It was comforting, the cool feel of the alcohol evaporating off my face, with the air conditioning blowing on me.

"You didn't tell Skinner..." I started.

"I only told him that you're very sick and that it's an extremely delicate situation for you. It's okay, John. Since the trial, he's seen things far stranger than your situation. And he understands the need for secrecy. One thing Skinner taught me is to remember who my friends are and who I can trust."

"Am I a fugitive? For helping you escape," for the first time I put words to suspicion that had been nagging me ever since I'd started on this road trip from hell with Mulder.

"No," Mulder said, then paused. He looked out at the landscape. Flat and brown as far as the eye could see, a sere landscape that matched what I felt at this moment. "I don't know how to put this except plainly. You're dead. They found an SUV. It had crashed and caught fire. There were two bodies in it, along with yours and Monica's FBI shields and Bureau issued firearms. And some other identification. I didn't go to your funeral. Skinner did. He said it was nice. All your buddies from the Bureau, the NYPD and the Marines were there. Your ex-wife even."

Shit. My old life really was gone. I tried to remember if I'd updated my will since after our divorce. If not, my house and truck were probably already sold. Gone. Not sure where the hell it was coming from, I started laughing. Somewhere in between my hysterical laughter, I found it in me to say, "Shit. Dead? I feel like hell. But I didn't think I was that bad off."

Mulder stared at me as if I'd gone off the deep edge, then he started laughing too. He kept driving though. I think probably I had. I wondered what I'd find on the way down. Finally our laughter trailed off and we kept an uneasy silence for a long time. I sipped warm water, slowly. A sip here, a sip there. Maybe I could trick my body into keeping some water down if I kept this up.

"You must have been surprised to find me then," I said eventually.

"No, not particularly. By your situation. But I knew you were alive," he said. He didn't explain why. I wasn't about to press either.

Somewhere further down that lonesome road we were travelling, I fell asleep. Mulder had found a station on the radio and was tapping his fingers on the steering wheel in time to an old Bonnie Raitt song, kind of whistling tunelessly along with it as well. The man had many talents, but music was not one of them, not that I had much room to talk.

I was calmer for the sleep and for getting a little bit of fluid to stay down. I started to reach for the water bottle. I'd dropped it while I was sleeping. I couldn't quite reach it comfortably, not able to bend down like I used to. Without comment, Mulder grabbed another one from the back seat and handed it to me. I thought for a minute about how just a little while back, I'd been about ready to kill the guy. It seemed like it had been another person who'd been doing that, that I was removed from the fury, feeling it only as a distant annoyance now.

As I took the bottle of water from him, I said, "I don't understand why I'm doing the things I'm doing. It's like I'm someone else. I am not a violent man, Mulder." It was about all the apology I could offer at this moment. And even just that cost me a lot of pride.

"I know, John. Otherwise I would have disarmed you after the first time or not given you the gun in the first place."

Mulder drove. I sat, staring out at the landscape, thinking. Nothing else to do but think. I hated this fury of mine, coming out of nowhere like it did. Hormonal. It was probably hormonal. I remembered the oceans of tears that would appear from nowhere when my ex-wife was pregnant with our son. Except I was a guy. I remembered reading somewhere that too much female hormones could make a guy violent. Maybe that was it. They couldn't be good for me, that was for sure. I wasn't by nature a violent guy. I didn't hit people for the hell of it. I'd gone, first into the Marines, then the police and finally the FBI in hopes of making the world a better, more peaceful place. I would get a hold of myself, I promised silently.

I was still angry at Mulder. I still hated my situation. I hated being stuck in this car, headed only to more humiliation. I hated that the car was currently one big rolling garbage can, littered with the remnants of the fast food and snacks we'd been able to grab on the road. I hated that, with rare exceptions, most of the radio we'd been able to tune in was country music crap. I hated the fact that I was still alive and that I was too damn stubborn in my clinging to life to do anything about that fact. I hated the fact that I didn't have real pants. As shallow as it was, as shitty as my life was, I think probably that was the thing that bugged me the most. It's the little things that really worm their way under your skin and stick there, like burrs.

At least Mulder hadn't taken up with the damn sunflower seeds again. Not after I had, a couple of days ago, grabbed the damn package out of his hands, opened the window and thrown them out, letting them scatter on the breeze as I told him that he was driving me crazy with the damn crunching and that I'd kill him if he didn't stop. Thus far, no more seeds. Thank god for small mercies.

I wondered, as I watched him drive, if I had my choice in the matter, was there anyone else in the world I would have chosen to make this trip? Scully maybe, just because I know she would understand. But no, not Monica. I wouldn't subject her to this. Skinner? I thought of absent friends, family members, all of who thought I was dead. I couldn't think of a single one of them who would have understood. I suppose this situation of mine really wasn't that much stranger than having been buried for three months then come back to life. Perhaps Mulder was not such an inappropriate companion for me right now, that he was the right person to be taking this journey with. I still hated the bastard though.

I think his strange moments of solicitude were even worse than the times he was just cold. I wished that I knew for sure that he hated to be saddled with me just as much as I hated to be dependant on him. Instead, I got glimpses of a man who was truly concerned for me, who had it in him to act in pure tenderness. A man who, strangely, seemed to embody something I'd idealized for myself- that a man could be both strong and gentle at the same time. I didn't want to like Fox Mulder. I never had, yet the longer I knew him, the greater my grudging respect for him grew.

After we stopped by the side of the road for both of us to take a leak, I fell asleep again. That was one of the worst things about being knocked up. I was tired constantly. At least during the day. In the fleabag hotels we stayed at during the night, I tossed and turned, staring up at the ceiling in the dark, unable to sleep for the worry. I dozed easily in the car though.

I was woken by Mulder singing along badly with the radio. The song was the irresistible "Brown Eyed Girl," always one of my favorites. It was impossible to feel totally rotten so long as Brown Eyed Girl was playing. And so I found myself joining in on the chorus, both of us off-key and warbly and not caring damn about it, "Do you remember when we used to sing sha la la la la la la la la ti da? La ti da." and for a brief moment of perfect time, I was totally happy, everything else forgotten.

But when we got to the line about making love in the green grass behind the stadium, I thought suddenly about my own brown eyed girl. Monica. Mulder just called her missing. But if the car caught fire. And they'd found bodies. Monica, dead. I didn't like that thought, not one bit. Suddenly, I did lose it. I was crying.

Was Fox Mulder a fucking mind reader? He reached over and put a hand on my forearm. Then he said, "It's okay. Monica isn't dead. We just haven't found her yet. We will." Perhaps I just believed him because I had to, that if he wasn't telling the truth that was more terrible than I could cope with at the moment. Another one of the wet wipes was in my hand, and as I wiped my face clean, putting a stopper on the damn tears, Mulder said, "We crossed the border into Missouri while you were sleeping."

The landscape was changing, just slightly. It still seemed baked by the heat, but perhaps there were hints of green, trees here and there to break up the landscape, clustering around the occasional stream. There were farms now, pastures. We must have been headed slightly east too, because the land now rolled, foothills of the Ozarks, I thought. Eventually, after the sun crept down below the horizon, shrouding the hills and everything in black, Mulder found a truck stop area, one of the big ones. He found us a hotel room, perhaps a little nicer than the places we usually stayed. To conserve cash, we only ever got one room and shared it. A double room with two beds, one of us to a bed.

Tonight though, the only hotel around was completely booked, except for one room with only a single king-size bed in it. Mulder sighed but handed a small pile of cash over and took the room keys, without consulting me. I made my way to the bathroom first thing, to relieve a bladder that felt like so full that it hurt. As I could have predicted, it was only a weak trickle of piss though. But I'd gotten most of two bottles of water down without throwing them up, so that was progress. When I got out of the bathroom, Mulder and I stared at each other over the expanse of polyester bedspread covered bed.

"I'll take the floor," he offered. Maybe I was a greedy bastard, but I didn't disagree with him or offer to let him share the bed. "I'm going to go out and find us some dinner. You want to come? You up for trying any kind of food yet?"

I looked at the bed. The television, which probably had cable. The bathroom which had a shower. I was about ready to kill for a shower. The shower at last night's fleabag dive had been filthy and I'd skipped a shower rather than use it. The bathroom in this place looked moderately clean. And most importantly- some time without Mulder at my damn elbow.

"I think I'll risk the saltines again," I said. "You got quarters for a coke from the vending machine?"

"I'll get it for you," he said. I was surprised when he reached into a bag and got out my gun. He handed it to me butt first. Then he handed me the clip. "I don't want you to be vulnerable while I'm gone. Do me a favor though. Promise me that you'll give this back to me when I get back. Can you do that for me?"

I thought back to my earlier behavior. It'd be humiliating as all hell to give the gun back, but if I thought rationally about it, and I was mostly thinking clearly at the minute, no, I couldn't be trusted with a gun, could I? I wouldn't trust a person behaving like I had been with one. That thought scared me. That I wasn't myself so much that I didn't trust myself with my own weapon.

"Yeah, I can do that," I conceded. I didn't slide the clip home, but I set them both beside me as I sat down on the bed and reached for the remote. As I turned on the television and began the perpetual quest for something decent to watch, I said, "See you soon."

"Is an hour and a half long enough for you?" he asked. Of course. Fox Mulder, mind reader that he appears to be, seemed to understand my need to be alone for at least a little while. You know, he probably needed his space away from me. I'm more than convinced that I've been no prince charming to be with these couple of weeks.

It was long enough to take a shower, watch a little television while nibbling a few crackers and drinking a soda, then maybe possibly fall asleep before he got back. "Yeah, long enough."

Before long, Mulder had brought me a sleeve of saltines from the car, two more bottles of water and two Sprites from the vending machine. I still remembered the scene we'd had the first time he'd gotten me an actual coke, not realizing that what I'd meant by coke was just a regionalism for a soda. "Sorry, they didn't have ginger ale," Mulder said, cautiously, as if he was sure I was going to blow up on him. "Best I could do. Make sure you drink the water too. You're still dehydrated. We can't take you to a hospital if you collapse."

"Fine, I'll drink it. Get out," I said, brusquely.

Once I was certain he was gone, I stripped down for a shower. Off came the huge flannel shirt that I thought hid my condition a bit better than just a t-shirt. For a while I could still bend down and untie my shoes. I could tell that someday soon that wouldn't be the case any more. I'd have to switch to slip-ons. As I pulled off my socks, I noticed that my ankles were a bit swollen. Then the t-shirt, and finally the sweat pants. I didn't look in the mirror when I went into the bathroom, averting my eyes. I didn't need to know anything it would tell me. I knew already about how my face looked gaunt and haunted, my eyes had red patches from blown blood vessels and my belly was more swollen than you'd think, even considering how far along we guessed I was. I was always a slender guy, and it'd been hard work to put some muscles on my frame. They'd pretty much disappeared during my abduction. And there was no where but out for the tadpole to go, nowhere for it to hide.

The shower was claustrophobically small, but the water was hot and the water pressure generous. I scrubbed myself clean with one of those little bars of soap found only in hotels, washing away road grime. Then I just leaned back and let the water run over my body, comforting me. The little things can make your life hell, but they can make your life a moment of heaven too. I found myself singing the chorus to Brown Eyed Girl again in the shower, not knowing many other words besides the Sha la la part.

Then the tadpole moved.

Sometimes I forgot for whole minutes at a time that I was so screwed that there were no words strong enough to cover the whole snafubarness of my situation. That had been one of them. But when the invader in your body chooses to make itself known, you can't help but remember. It wasn't what I'd call a kick. Just a fluttery feeling in my belly, the strangest thing. I understood now what my ex-wife had said about how it was a sensation you couldn't entirely describe, that you had to experience it for yourself.

Now that I had, I wish I hadn't.

I shut the water off and pretended nothing had happened, even as the tadpole continued to flutter around inside me. I dried myself off and even though I was loathe to put on my dirty clothes, I did. Anything was better than that Mulder would come back to the room and still find me naked.

Still, the tadpole was using my gut for a lap pool. As I settled down in front of the TV to a fine meal experience of soda and crackers, I talked to it. I almost never talked to it. I usually tried not to think about it as an actual entity separate from me.

"Stop it," I told it. "I hate that. I hate you. Soon as I get a chance, you're coming out. Got that? Ripped right out. And don't you dare send these crackers back where they came from."

Yeah, it was hypocritical as hell of me. I'd been pro-life for forever. But yes, I was going to abort the tadpole. Don't tell me you'd do anything differently. I think, if I found out it was a normal human child, it'd be harder to do, but I was still going to do it. I knew my limits. This was a place I could not go.

I didn't make a decision to carry this child. Hell, I'd never even made the decision to have sex. Other than my own left hand, there hadn't been anyone since my divorce. Fantasies about various people. But nothing approaching actual sex. Yes, if I'd made the decision to have sex and been caught this way as an accident, then yes, I would have buckled down and carried the tadpole, until it became obviously too medically dangerous or until it was old enough to be born. But I hadn't. I don't even remember how or when this happened to me or anything between my abduction and my rescue by Mulder.

Would it be a different decision if I'd had longer to think about it? If I'd been awake and conscious of it from the very start? I don't know. All I know was I couldn't do this. And yes, I did hate the tadpole. For all I was suffering because of it. Because it was making me make a decision I wasn't one hundred percent sure I could live with either way. For making me scared. Crap in my pants scared. More scared then I'd ever been, even during the times I thought I was going to die. Death would have been simple compared to this.

Threatening the tadpole didn't work to stop its motion. It was still fluttering around, starting and stopping, when Mulder came back to the hotel room to find me lying curled up as best I could on the bed, cursing to myself and saying, "Stop. Stop it."

He dropped the couple of plastic bags he was carrying and rushed over to the bed. He dropped on his knees beside me and said, "John! What's the matter? Are you in pain?"

"No, it's moving again," I said.

"We're maybe a day from our rendezvous with Skinner," Fox said. He took in the room with that look of his. One look that missed nothing. He took in the fact that the package of crackers wasn't yet opened, that none of the liquids he'd gotten me had been touched. He subtly reclaimed the gun, sliding it out of my reach first, then back into the waist of his jeans, the back of them. I'd have to go around him to get to it. Then he reclaimed the clip.

"We'll get you taken care of. Soon," he promised. He knew of my decision. When he'd heard it, just hours after I took that first pregnancy test that he forced me to take, even though I thought he was insane, he'd just nodded grimly and said the same thing he was saying now.

Mulder cracked open one of the sodas, probably gone warm by now. "Just a few sips, okay, buddy?"

He put the can into my hand and went to retrieve the bags he'd dropped. A couple of them had the familiar Wal-Mart logo on them. "I figure you'll only use them for a couple of days at most, but I thought you'd appreciate them," he explained as he pulled a huge pair of jeans out of the bag. Store brand. Who cared? They were real pants. And he brought out a belt for them too. He pulled out another flannel shirt, this one red and white plaid, with western style detailing. And then another pair of sweats. "I had to guess for size. I hope it's big enough."

I took a few slow sips of soda. It had gone warm but was not disgusting enough to trigger my gag reflex thankfully. Then I collected my new clothes from Mulder and went into the bathroom to change. Mulder had overestimated my size and I had to belt them up. The flannel shirt was similarly oversized. Who cared? Clean clothes and especially real pants were a real treat and I wasn't about to complain. When I got back out into the room, Mulder was already stretched out on the floor next to the bed. He'd claimed one of the bed's pillows and the bedspread. And the remote. He was flicking rapidly from station to station, not satisfied with anything he found. Just looking at the way the image was changing so fast made me kind of queasy. He sighed when I held my hand out for the remote but he handed it over without protest. We'd had this discussion a number of times before. Not only does he have crappy taste in TV shows when he does settle on one, he'll flip the channel on me just when I've actually got interested in something.

I flicked through the channels, looking for something. There was a limited number of things I could watch these days. Any kind of sport, with the exception of car racing, made me obsess about the fact that I was a freak and I'd lost a build that once had been nicely athletic. The news just plain made me uncomfortable and usually angry. Any kind of sitcom or drama that revolved around a family was out of the question too. They sometimes made me so irrationally angry that Mulder had once had to restrain me from bashing in the television. The TV talk tabloids seemed to hit the same emotional buttons for me as well.

The next channel I hit was that home decorating channel. Oddly, it was usually a fairly emotionally neutral choice for me. I could watch and make fun of Christopher Lowell or whoever was putting up a fuss over the color of some sofa or the walls. Perhaps it was because I'd never cared, never understood why anyone ever did. Still didn't. It was funny sometimes. Mulder did a wicked Christopher Lowell imitation. Tonight though, they were decorating a baby nursery. I stared like you might compulsively stare at a car wreck on the interstate, fascinated even as you feel sick to your very soul.

"Uh, John," Fox said, interrupting my downward spiral, "How about the history channel. I'm sure they'll be running that thing on the Civil war again. I didn't get a chance to watch the end."

"War of Northern aggression you mean," I said, grateful to have my attention pulled away from the emotional wreck that was about to start. Not that I believed the whole South will rise again crap, romanticizing a system that was horrible beyond comprehension, but a boy doesn't forget that he was born and raised in Georgia either. I changed the channel without looking back.

"Whatever. Never pictured you for the good ol' boy type," Mulder said. It was not the Civil War thing, but something on Pearl Harbor. Either way, it was far enough removed from present reality that it held no mood triggers for me and I could watch the old news clips and listen to the serious, studious narrator without feeling much of anything. Mulder shut up and listened as well.

Eventually, the tadpole quit with the synchronized swimming display and I had the illusion for the moment that my body was entirely my own. I reached for the crackers and opened the pack. One cracker at a time, small bites. That worked sometimes and I used the tactic again now. I washed the dry crackers down with the soda as ship after ship had destruction rained down from above on it. I couldn't have watched this if it had been in color, I decided. It would seem real. As it was, it seemed like a bad movie.

"So, how about you?" I asked during a commercial. "Did you ever picture that someday your life would be this much in the crapper?"

"I don't know. It's bad, sure, but not that bad. I'm a free man. I've got a roof over my head, a meal in my belly and a friend at my side. I'm not complaining."

"How much cash do we have left?" I asked, knowing that the room and then clothes and everything must have set him back quite a bit. I didn't know where he was being bankrolled from, but at my insistence, we were paying cash for everything, and I mean everything. We were moving without a trail as much as I could make us. I used to be a professional fugitive chaser and I know how people mess up and create a paper trail where they don't mean to.

"Enough. Don't worry on that front," Mulder said.

Some time or another, I drifted off to sleep, after a good portion of the crackers had disappeared. When I woke up again, the room was dark with only the bathroom light left on as a kind of nightlight, the TV turned off, though the remote was still in easy reach on the bedside table. And Mulder was talking to people who weren't there again. I'd caught him doing this a couple of times before and never mentioned it to him. He wasn't talking to himself. He'd say something, softly as if afraid of waking me. Then he'd wait, obviously listening to his imaginary friend's response. There was a definite conversation going on there, half of which existed only in Mulder's mind. It seemed natural somehow, fitting, that the only person around to help me should be so lucid most of the time and yet obviously completely insane. I usually tried not to listen when he did this but tonight he was talking about me to whoever it was he was imagining.

"I'm so worried about him, Scully. I think he's probably actually lost weight since I found him. He hasn't kept anything solid down at all hardly."

There was a pause of Mulder listening to his Scully of the imagination. Where the hell was Scully anyway? Why couldn't we go to her?

"Okay. I'll give it a try. Nothing else has worked. At least he seems to be sleeping well."

There was another pause. Then Mulder said, even more softly, with an edge of grief to his voice that I hadn't heard before, "I'd have given anything in the world to be there for you when you were going through this. You know that, don't you?"

I wanted to remain still. I wanted to fall back asleep. To pretend that I didn't hear Mulder talking to people that weren't there. But my bladder was demanding my full attention and I couldn't put off relieving it a second longer. I moved as if I was just then waking up. I made an immediate beeline for the toilet, sighing with relief as I finished draining the little lizard. My piss was no longer so dark, a good sign that I wasn't quite so dehydrated anymore.

When I went back to the room, Mulder had turned on one of the lamps and was sitting, leaning against the wall. He brushed at his face and I swore I saw tears being wiped away. For the first time, I noticed that he was wearing a necklace. The gold glinted in the light of the lamp. It was a small cross, familiar. I'd seen it before many times. Around Scully's neck.

I got a cold feeling in the pit of my stomach that had nothing to do with nausea, though I did feel sick. It was a soul sickness though. "Where's Scully, Mulder? What happened to Scully?"

"Don't ask me, John. I can't talk about it. Please." I was used by now to Mulder pleading with me about one thing or another but there was a definite edge to this plea.

Just how he said it confirmed the realization I'd had when I saw the necklace. It was like hitting a brick wall at fifty miles an hour. It was like somebody punched me right in the gut. I sat down heavily on the bed, remembering again how grief could feel just like physical pain. "She's dead," I whispered. "She's been killed. Hasn't she?"

"It's not the end, John," he said. "She's become a part of something far bigger than any of us. She's still fighting the good fight. She's not gone."

"Don't feed me any of that crap about Heaven. It's just stories that people make up to make themselves feel better about the inevitable. If you want to make yourself feel better by pretending to talk to her," There, I had it out. He knew that I'd heard him talking to himself. "Then fine. But don't expect me to believe that you're anything but crazy."

"If it makes me feel better, what skin off your nose is it?" he snapped nastily. I'd pressed a button or two of my own I could see. He continued to berate me. "You've never thought I was anything but crazy as a bedbug from the start, so why does it matter to you? People have thought I was fucking nuts since you were still tracking fugitives for the NYPD. I don't see why it should matter that you're telling me this now."

He stood up and invaded my space. He didn't hit me, though I could tell that he dearly wanted to. I almost wished he would. His face was deadly still in anger but his eyes flashed and his voice grew low and menacing. He did poke me in the chest with his forefinger. "And I was right about everything else, wasn't I? So maybe you might consider believing me when I say that the dead are here with us and that if you can listen right, you can hear them. Why does it matter to you if I believe that? That there is something bigger than us that has the power to save us?"

Why? Why should I care if he was insane, so long as he was functional? Because I was fucking dependant on him. That I probably wouldn't make it to the next town without his help.

What if it was worse than that? What if he was right, that if I listened in the right way, the dead would talk to me? What if they'd been trying to talk all along? What if my son had spent all these years desperate to say something to me? I had to believe, needed to believe, that there was nothing left of him to care what happened to him, that he had found the peace of oblivion. I had found some closure by finding his killer, knowing that the man was dead. But there was a huge jagged hole in me where he'd been, scarred over so I didn't bleed anymore, but still there. I was scared by the thought that he could still need me in some way, no matter how small and that I hadn't been there for him. I tried not to think about it.

"What happened to her, Mulder? What happened to Scully?"

"I was going to tell you as soon as you were in a better state of mind. We were trying to break into Mount Weather again. She was shot. She died in my arms." The words were delivered in the flat monotone of someone who has moved beyond grief. For a little while, I almost wished we weren't arguing. That I could say something to him. That I could find something in my scorched heart to offer him. I found nothing, though I looked.

"It's okay," he said finally. "She's happy. She doesn't hurt any more."

No, maybe not. But he did. I did. It wasn't okay.

Did I love Scully? Not carnally. But a little bit like you'd love your sister and a little bit like you'd love one of the guys in your unit. We'd been to hell together. I'd have done anything for her. Given my life for hers. I'd done a lot to protect her in the past and I should have been able to have protected her this time. God. I shivered and shook but for some reason, I was unable to cry. It felt too huge for that. I curled up on my side and just stared at the nubby beige pattern on the wallpaper. Mulder stood over me and stared. I could see him out of the corner of my eye though I didn't look directly at him.

A long time passed, Mulder in silent vigil over me, hours maybe even. Finally, he grabbed me by the shoulder and shook me. "Cry, damnit," he ordered. "Just cry already. I know you're a big man and you don't do that. But just cry already before you explode. Because I have to be able to trust you with a firearm. I can't leave you alone thinking that you might just leave me alone, with nothing a big mess to explain and clean up."

"Fuck you, Mulder," I grumbled. Did he really think I was going to shoot myself? He didn't know me, did he?

He pulled me up to a sitting position using a good bit of force. I wasn't exactly struggling against him, but I wasn't helping in the slightest. Then he wrapped his arms around me, pressing me into his chest. He was crying again. Maybe he needed this more than I did. If so, maybe I could let him hold me. I had literally nothing in the world left to offer him or anyone. Even the clothes on my back had been purchased by Mulder. I was a dead man with no identity, no official existence. My body only partially belonged to me, shared in joint tenancy at the moment with an invader.

When my own tears started falling, it was a surprise to me. And a relief. The grief was no longer so overwhelming, it was just ordinary, not a void of cosmic size. I could see, not the end of it, but how each day would happen. How I would get through the future in day-sized portions of despair.

Somewhere near dawn, I found myself asking Mulder, "Why? Why are you doing this for me?"

"Because other than Skinner, you're all I have left in this world. I can't do this alone. I need you. I need you whole to fight this fight with me."

I fell asleep again, exhausted by my sorrow, as I tried to think about this, that the great Fox Mulder, official bane of my existence, cause of all this trouble in the first place, should be ripping open his soul for me like this and admitting such vulnerability. And maybe, I might have to find it in me to be strong for him. Because some basic decency in me demanded it. Because he'd risked his life taking me out of that ship. Because he risked his freedom, being weighed down by me as deadweight. Because in the face of my anger and threats, he'd never been anything but decent to me.

Mulder was still in the bed when I woke up. He'd claimed a small corner of the huge space, all the way on the other side and was laying on top of the blanket. I don't remember inviting him to stay, but, whatever. I was too busy to fuss about it. My stomach and my bladder were calling for attention in equal measure, though the nausea wound up being the more compelling. I threw up the little fluid that was in my stomach and then spent a while just resting my head against the cold porcelain of the toilet tank. My mostly sleepless night had left me exhausted and feeling drained. I could have done without the wakeup call of morning sickness. Eventually my bladder forced me to stand and empty it. Mulder started stirring in the other room. I heard the exterior door to the room open then shut.

I gathered up the handful of things that I could call mine and shoved them back into one of the Wal-Mart bags, wondering where the hell Mulder had gone to. I looked out the window. Still fairly early in the morning, the dew just starting to burn off, it looked for now like it'd be a nice day, but would probably get wicked hot.

When I opened the exterior door, I found Mulder sitting on the concrete, bag of sunflower seeds in hand, busily cracking away. He looked up guiltily, like I'd caught out a secret smoker sneaking out for a butt. I thought for a moment about relenting and telling him he could eat the damn seeds in the car, if they were important enough to him that he was sneaking around to eat them. Then I heard him make that awful crunching noise, the full equivalent fingernails on the black board, if you ask me, and I decided I wouldn't.

"I'm ready to go when you are, Mulder," I said.

"Give me a few minutes, then we'll hit the road," he said, pouring himself another small handful. It appeared we were going to pretend that last night didn't happen, that we didn't cry ourselves to sleep in each others' arms. And that was just dandy by me. Except one thing he had to know.

"Mulder," I began. "No matter how bad it gets. No matter what happens. You ain't gonna find me with a gun in my hand and my brains splattered all over the place. Just not gonna happen. You can trust that much."

He nodded then said, "Thank you."

I shrugged. It had nothing to do with him. It wasn't for him. It just was something that wasn't in me.

I asked for, and got the car keys. I could do something about the rolling garbage can effect. I wasn't that helpless. I could control a little corner of my world to some extent. I gathered wrappers, empty bottles, bags and so forth from the back seat of the SUV. I retched a few times at the smell of some of the wrappers. They'd gotten kind of ripe sitting there. But I avoided another bout of nausea mostly. Eventually, I felt a presence behind me.

"I can take care of those," Mulder said, holding his hands out for the trash.

And so it went, the both of us saying no more than we had to, just enough to attend to the business of getting us on the road. Last night had been too much, too wrenching. We were busy covering up the raw, tender bits again, after having shown them to each other. I didn't like knowing the needy, all too human parts of Fox Mulder. I wished I hadn't seen them. He appeared embarrassed that he'd given so much away.

"Did you want to drive at all?" he asked as he put the last of our stuff back into the car.

I shook my head. Nausea was threatening again, and the effort of cleaning the car out had been a lot for me. I think maybe I still hadn't recovered from the abduction, beyond just the fact that this pregnancy was drawing on reserves I didn't really have. I think maybe if I'd been able to get some adequate nutrition down and staying down, it would have made a big difference. As it was, I was weak as a baby.

The landscape changed as we drove north and east. The rolling hills were now covered with farms, fields of corn mostly. My first impressions of Iowa were nothing but field after field of corn, as far as the eye could see, broken by the occasional farmhouse and dividing row of trees. The country no longer seemed so baked, though it was still seasonably warm. Gone was austere, dry Oklahoma and here was the land that fed the nation. Iowa. Though the corn was yellowed, most everything else was green, and despite the heat, it seemed so fresh compared to where we had been. You could almost get hopeful. It always seemed in Iowa that around the next curve of the road, the next rise of the hill, that there must be something new and wonderful coming. Some kind of redemption to this landscape of nothingness.

Hours of landscape passed us by. We stopped only for the bare necessities and then hurriedly. After weeks together in this car, I'm sure Mulder wanted to get this over with, get out of this confined space. Hand me off to Skinner. Wash his hands clean of me. And I'd be glad to get this over with. Find Skinner's doctor. Get this abortion. Pretend that my body hadn't been altered. Make a fresh start of it. I don't know what I would do, but I would put this behind me. I wanted to be done with this.

Day slipped into night and still we drove silently. I noticed that Mulder didn't turn on the radio at all. I wasn't going to break down and admit I needed music to fill the silence either. We didn't talk, the uncomfortable intimacy of the night before between us so palpable that it could be touched.

Finally, Mulder pulled into a grocery store parking lot. Hy-Vee was the name of the store. Mulder said, "This is the place."

I was relieved to have this trip be over and yet facing another round of dread. At the end of this trip was Skinner and I'd have to talk to him. See him. Have him see me like this. What made it worse wasn't just that he was a fellow Marine, a guy I looked up to, but that I once had a one of those crushes on the guy. The kind that make you act like an idiot. You find yourself doing anything in hopes of catching the guy's attention. You skulk around the office just hoping to catch sight of the guy. You get all butch and macho, putting on a display for him. Like I said, it made me act like an idiot.

I was over it now. Had been since sometime after we found Mulder. But yet it still flavored my interaction with the guy. He never knew a damn thing about it but I couldn't forget that I used to jerk off to fantasies of him at the gym. It was all about sex, nothing else. And then to have to come before this guy and have the horrible thing that had happened to me revealed to him. You can see how this might make me worried.

Mulder parked. He got out of the car. "Stay here. I'll take a look around."

"Mulder," I said. I couldn't do this. If nothing else, I'd never be able to say the words, to tell the truth about what had happened to me. Not to Skinner. "You find him, you tell him first before you bring him to me. If it's a problem with him, I don't want to know what he says. Don't tell me, we'll just go."

"It'll be okay, John. I promise. Skinner will stand by you."

Then he disappeared into the night, moving inconspicuously among the cars. I dozed in the seat.

I don't know what Mulder said to Skinner. I never will. I didn't ask and I don't ever intend to. All I know is that an hour later when Mulder came back he had Skinner in tow. And Skinner's face, though I could tell even in the dim parking lot lights was troubled, his voice was also soft with concern when he said, "It's okay, John. We'll do the best we can to get you taken care of. We'll meet my friend in Harlan."

And that was all I saw of Sioux City, Iowa.

Mulder climbed back in the car. He'd picked up a few things from the grocery store. As we pulled out of the parking lot, following Skinner, he pulled something out of the bag and handed it to me. It was a lumpy brown vegetable-like object. "It's ginger root," Mulder explained. "Scully suggested it. She says that it's very effective at calming stomachs as well as being totally safe. You chew on it."

I rolled down the window and chucked to object out. I wasn't going to humor him. I wasn't about to pretend that Mulder not only could talk to dead people, but that they might actually be helpful to him. Fuck that.

"Fine! Be miserable!" Mulder snapped. "I'm just trying to help."

"Go to hell," I muttered. I curled up in my seat again, miserable, feeling hateful. You know, I used to have an iron stomach. Nothing phased me, not MREs from my Marine days, not bad road food, not kabobs made from God knows what kind of meat bought from roadside vendors in Beirut, nothing. Didn't even get heartburn. I wondered if I would ever get it back.

I wondered how I would find the man I used to be- tough-assed, phased by nothing. This was not me, petty, pissy, scared, and weak. And a big jerk.

The next three hours were filled with a silence so icy and palpable you could have sliced it and served it for dinner. We'd come to another one of those limits of our ability to deal with each other and I didn't talk because I had no idea of what to say to the man next to me that would back us off this edge. Meanwhile, we drove down narrow state highways to this place called Harlan. The darkness was unrelieved, almost elemental. Only occasionally would the crest of one of the rolling hills reveal the headlight beams of a car going the other direction. Here and there farmhouses were lit up, but otherwise, nothing. A long time ago, we'd pulled off onto a gravel county road which crunched under our wheels and threw up rocks which pinged against the car. Here and there, I would gag slightly as we got a hint of the distinctive, acrid odors of a hog farm we were passing.

Sometime just before we pulled into the last turn, Mulder found it in him to talk to me. "Who'd have thought Skinner comes from the ends of the earth like this?"

"He's from here?"

"He's taking us to his late aunt's house, though the house he grew up in is just down the road a few miles."

With that, we passed a couple of mailboxes mounted crookedly on their posts, as if they'd been nearly knocked off. Then we turned down a driveway that looked like it was longer than my old block back in Falls Church. Finally, the cars were parked beside a big old farmhouse with the porch light left on.

"My sister's here," Skinner said, indicating a battered pickup truck parked in the drive just ahead of us. "She'll be fine. I had to tell her how I was going to be using the place. She lives here."

Before we could turn to the door even, it opened and a big woman swept out, targeted dead on for Skinner. "Wally!" she cried. "You're home!"

Even in the half darkness, I could tell that she looked just like Skinner, other than the chrome dome, even down to the glasses. It was, unfortunately not a real good look for a woman. Also, where his bulk came from muscles, she was just fat. She wasn't quite as tall, but she definitely weighed about the same. They had the same steel gray hair. Her hair was long and straight and pulled back from her face in a single braid. And whereas Skinner was all glares and scowls, she practically radiated warmth and smiles. It made me inclined to trust her. She hugged the big guy. I don't think I've ever seen anyone do that other than Scully clinging to him when we were burying the man who was now standing beside me. I wonder, did Mulder embrace Walt when they buried Scully. Hell, I didn't even know if they'd been able get her body back to her family or not. That hurt, knowing I might never be able to visit her grave.

Oddly, the inside of the space craft Mulder rescued me from seemed only marginally weirder than the sight of Walter Skinner, Assistant Director of the FBI and total hard-ass, getting the top of his chrome dome rubbed by a fat woman in floral print and suffering her to call him "Wally". He seemed to be lapping it up like a cat would cream though.

"Enough, Georgie," he said indulgently after a few minutes, pushing her aside reluctantly. "Georgeann, these are the men I told you about. Mulder and John, this is my sister Georgeann."

I hung back in the darkness as Mulder stepped forward. "Pleased to meet you, ma'am," he said, holding out his hand.

"Just Georgie. You boys must be hungry. I stocked the fridge. Won't be a problem to whip something up for you."

You could forget at times just how charming Fox Mulder can be when he sets his mind to it. Most of the time I was around him, I was so irritated with his singular ability to be a pain in the ass. As I watched how he smiled at Georgeann and generally had her eating out of his palm in a few short minutes, I wondered if part of it was me. If something in me brought out the worst in Mulder.

"Well, Georgie, I'd appreciate it. And I'm sure Walter would. But I think what John needs more than anything is some sleep," Mulder said.

She narrowed her eyes and looked at me as closely as she could where I stood in the shadows. Her jaw dropped slightly as if in shock, but then she closed it and decided not to notice that anything was amiss. I could definitely see signs of Skinner's famous iron will in her. It must be a family trait. She carried on like a trooper.

"Of course! Wally, you show John on up. I made up all of the beds. I'll take care of some supper for you boys."

And so, she led Mulder into the house, leaving me standing there with Skinner. I was grateful. It was well after midnight. I didn't think I could even contemplate food at the moment without feeling nauseous. It had been a bad day and I didn't even try the usual crackers, just had been sipping at ginger ale all day. Skinner and I stared at each other awkwardly, neither sure what to say to the other. Comparatively, my time with Mulder had been an easy, comfortable silence, companionable even. Finally, Skinner shrugged and reached for the door without saying anything. He walked inside and I followed, my legs aching from disuse.

The house still bore evidence of having been lived in by an old person for years, though mostly it smelled disused, dusty, rather than of that peculiar smell of old people. It was run down, never a fancy, proud house. Just a humble farm house that was filled with worn, cheap furniture. Linoleum was the preferred flooring material, a pattern in pink and green, much faded and worn now, looking like a remainder of the fifties. The living room had a huge wood burning stove, set on bricks. Though cold now, the lingering smell of wood smoke surrounded it. Houseplants on the windowsill. One bookshelf packed with reader's digests and a couple of bibles. The television was one of the big console types and it was going now, the color picture bilious green, the sound turned way down. Overall, though, it seemed comfortable, like someone's nest.

"There is central heat," Skinner said. "My aunt just never trusted it entirely."

"Your sister is nice," I said.

"She gave up a career in nursing to take care of my aunt. This house and the land should have gone to her instead of me."

One of the door's off the room opened up to a narrow staircase with painted wood steps. Skinner started up these. At the top was a narrow hallway, also covered in linoleum. Four doors led off it. "Bathroom through there," Skinner said, indicating one of the doors. He led me into another bedroom, this one with a simple iron bed, plain as could be. White sheets, plain blue blanket, white walls. "Your room."

Then we stared at each other, having nearly drained our supplies of words, as scarce as they were. Suddenly, I was angry that he couldn't find anything to say to me. All I had been through and he couldn't even say that he regretted it. I let myself fall down on the bed and started to get comfortable for another long night of staring at the ceiling in the darkness. I toed my shoes off and dropped them off the side of the bed.

"John...I," Skinner began. "I'm not often at a loss for words. I'm used to dealing with crisis situations. But be patient with me. This is so far outside my experience."

"Well, it isn't exactly something I've done before either," I said. "Or ever intended to do."

Shoes off, I laid down. The pillow was cool and comfortable on my face. I wanted to be left alone, not having to face these silences that told me everything I needed to know about how Skinner was feeling. That he was horrified. That he saw me as some kind of monster. That his view of me had been forever tainted. I didn't crawl under the blanket, because the night was too warm for it and the farmhouse didn't have air-conditioning, or even a fan in the window. But I curled up on my side and hid my face with my arm.

"Goodnight, sir," I said.

"Not sir," he said. "I quit right after Mulder's trial. I got sick of being a pawn, impotent to do anything. Walter. And I was pallbearer at your funeral. I think that puts us on a first name basis if nothing else."

He left me alone then. I thought it would be for the night, but he came back a little while later with one of those box fans. He put it in the window and plugged it in. He turned it on and a gentle breeze cooled the room, making it tolerable. Only then did he turn out the overhead light and go. I dozed but I did not fall deeply asleep.

Sometime, hours later, a figure appeared silhouetted in the doorway. Mulder, watching me sleep. I looked over at a clock on the bedside table. It was three in the morning, assuming the clock was correct.

"You don't sleep much, do you?" I asked. He'd gotten every bit as little sleep as I'd gotten the night before, but he'd then spent the day driving from Missouri to western Iowa. I'd have guessed three or four hours of sleep for him in the last twenty four. Maybe less.

"No, not when things are happening to people I care about. They call it situational insomnia. It's a kind of stress reaction. Sleep researchers think it might function as a mechanism to force a person to fully process their reactions to any kind of significant stressors, in this instance, the fact that my partner has died within the past few months and that someone I care about is going through an event so unusual and distressing that it doesn't exist on the standard life stressors scale."

He sounded impersonal, as if talking about someone else entirely in a clinical kind of voice, like giving a briefing for a case. Not like he was talking about himself and me.

"Do you need anything?" he asked when I didn't respond. Like Walt, I was caught out speechless.

"Starving," I said. I was. Over the hours, my nausea had calmed completely. I wasn't sure if my stomach was going to tolerate anything, but I certainly was going to try. I might spend the next several hours bent over the toilet, but for now, my stomach was rumbling and I actually had an appetite. I levered myself upwards and prepared for a trip to the kitchen.

"Want me to come with you? I'm up for a post-midnight refrigerator raid." Mulder said.

I shrugged. I made my way downstairs again, Mulder following close behind. The steps, I decided, were dangerous. Steep and with painted treads that felt slick under my stocking feet, I could see someone slipping and falling their straight descent right down to the door that closed them off from the living room. I made it down safely though.

The kitchen was still softly lit with one light over the range hood. We didn't turn on the overhead. There was a screened porch just off the kitchen and a kitchen window open to the porch. Skinner and his sister were sitting out on the porch, talking. I listened for a minute, because they were talking about me.

"What's wrong with the boy, Wally? Really. I know you don't want to tell me. But if I didn't know better, I'd say he was pregnant. He certainly looks it. Is it some kind of cancer?"

Skinner's struggle with himself was so obvious I could almost hear it. Finally, he broke down and said, "There are things I've never told you about, things about the government. Things that no decent person should have to worry about. Cover ups. Conspiracies. Secret medical tests and tortures that the government has conducted on its own citizens without their consent. Or even informing them. Things that you wouldn't believe possible. I have seen things that I can neither explain nor deny."

"You're saying that the man is a victim of some kind of tortured medical experiment?" she asked. Her voice was softly outraged. And I knew that I had an ally in her. "He is pregnant, isn't he? I've read some things. That they thought it might be possible some day to do it."

"Yes, if I am to believe Mulder," Skinner said, his sister's outrage echoed in his voice. He seemed choked with a kind of fury. I didn't like the way it sounded in his voice though, as if he were talking about me as if I were already lost. As if I were as dead as whatever body they'd buried in my place. "He's a good man, Georgie. For them to have done this to him...I just can't even say."

I turned away from their conversation, towards the refrigerator which Mulder had already poked his head into. "Turkey sandwich maybe?" he asked. "She made a peach pie that was pretty good. There's still some left. You want a ginger ale?"

Before I knew it, Mulder had set me up with plain turkey sandwich and a ginger ale. I ate it slowly and sipped at the soda. If I'd learned anything, it was that my best chance at keeping something down was to take it in small bites. I was doing pretty good.

Until the last couple of bites. Something changed. The turkey suddenly felt slimy in my mouth and I started to gag. I dropped the remainder of the sandwich and bolted. I almost didn't make it all the way through the downstairs, up those steps, then to the room Skinner had indicated earlier. Up came chunks of mostly undigested turkey sandwich. The worst part about throwing, I'd decided long ago, was that between bouts, you were left with plenty of time to contemplate just how humiliating it is.

I also had time to contemplate the pattern on the sheet vinyl and the sickly pink of the fixtures. The room probably had last been redone in the fifties.

I felt a presence in the doorway and I prepared some blistering comment for Mulder.

I looked up. It wasn't Mulder. It was Georgeann, looking at me with concern. "You must feel terrible, sweetie."

"Let me guess, you know just how I'm feeling," I was sarcastic, even cruel in my discomfort, nothing but a wounded animal lashing out at the hands trying to comfort me. I hated this person I'd become.

"No, I can't imagine half of what you're going through, but I have been pregnant and I remember sitting exactly where you're sitting and puking my guts out. Right into that exact same toilet."

"How old is your child now?" I asked aware only after I asked it that it wasn't a good question to ask.

"Back then it wasn't like it is now with all these girls keeping their babies. That was thirty-something years ago. I didn't see I had a choice. It wasn't legal, but that didn't stop me. Back then, they didn't call it rape when you knew the boy and he had your parents' permission to take you out."

Perhaps she did understand at least part of what I was going through. She had been made pregnant against her will, though by more conventional, earthly means than I had. And she had the abortion I was planning. Her words were plain, not quite harsh, not ornamented with dramatics but not exactly forgiving either. They were the words of someone who has seen reality and is compelled to tell it like it is. No sugarcoating would be forthcoming from her. I could trust that.

Shamed by her words, I hid my face, not finding it in me just yet to make an apology. She bustled around the bathroom for a while. I felt a cold cloth on the back of my neck. It was comforting. So was the light weight of her hand on the back of my neck. I thought maybe I might be able to accept this from her like I couldn't from Mulder.

"August is an absolutely miserable month to be pregnant in," she said. "I did ob/gyn nursing a while before I did ICU. You must be beside yourself."

"Words can hardly express," I said.

"All done for the moment?" she asked.

I let her help me to my feet. She got me water to rinse out my mouth. I didn't try and brush my teeth. The feeling of the toothbrush in my mouth kept setting off my gag reflex. She wanted to put me to bed, but I protested that I wouldn't be able to sleep again. So we ended up heading downstairs again, to the living room.

The TV had a VCR that I hadn't noticed my first couple of times through the room. "Not much to watch at this time of morning unless you're interested in preaching on the religious channel or infomercials. Or my aunt's tapes. Probably not much to interest a guy like you."

Whatever they were, it had to be better than a particularly virulent form of a religion that at best I couldn't believe in and that I suspected was nothing but lies of the worst kind. Either way, Georgeann settled on the sofa in an indentation that seemed to be her exact shape and I took the recliner directly across from the television. We ended up watching tapes of George Burns and Gracie Allen from the golden age of television. I found that the part of me that knew how to laugh wasn't frozen entirely. That, creakily at first, but more robustly as the show went on, I could laugh at the jokes and even have a good time.

When we got to the end of a show and the classic lines came on, "Say goodnight, Gracie." and then, "Goodnight, Gracie," I got a little misty in the eyes, just because.

"My Gram's name was Grace," I explained as I wiped these inexplicable tears off my face. "Gracie. She used to think that joke was the funniest thing ever. She passed while I was in country in Lebanon."

"It's such a pretty name. Better than Georgeann by far."

I just noticed that someone wasn't around. "Have you seen Mulder? Did he go to bed or something?"

"He went for a drive. You know, your friend Fox feels terribly that there's nothing he can do to make you feel any better," Georgeann said. "How's your tea?"

Georgeann had taken some time to make me a cup of tea. It was kind of spicy and peppery, not exactly unpleasant, but nothing I would have picked either. I'd sipped most of it down because she gave me baleful looks anytime I looked like I was going to abandon it. I decided that Skinner must have learned his AD glare from his older sister. She was a pro, could have stepped into his place in a minute.

"It's fine," I said. "What is it?"

"Secret Skinner family recipe. I'm sworn never to tell," she said, mock solemnly, making the motions to cross her heart and hope to die.

Sometime around dawn, after another cup of the secret recipe tea, I found my way to bed again.

Mulder:

The universe is irrational. And perverse.

There can be no other explanation for the fact that at six thirty in the morning, I was passing through Omaha, Nebraska and arguing about John Doggett with my old, now dead, boyfriend, Alex Krycek.

You would think that death would be merciful enough to keep the living fully separated from the dead. Not so in my case. Once I had loved this man dearly, then hated him with a rage that could be borne only of betrayal. Now? Who knew exactly how to describe what he meant to me other than that he now was one of my beloved dead. In Mexico, once a year, they celebrate a Day of the Dead, where they honor the dead, bring them sweets and decorate their graves. Every day, I spoke with the dead, whether I walked in their world or they walked in mine, I did not know. Suffice it to say that somewhere between us was an intersection, a moment of time where we interacted.

"Skinner and his sister will take good care of him," I said. "He's safe now."

"You really think that, do you, Mulder?" Krycek said. "You know these people. They'll stop at nothing."

"There's nothing more I can do for him. He won't accept my help. He hates me," I protested.

There was no answer. All of my beloved dead, but especially Alex Krycek, are intensely disturbing in their casual comings and goings. They appear with no warnings and disappear again with even less. I was alone in the car once more with nothing more than my cowardice for company. I was running away. Not permanently, I told myself. Headed to points west again, digging for clues, any kind information that might help us in the struggle against the inevitable. The date of humanity's doom had been set even before I was born, yet only the burning hope that I might change it somehow kept me going, now that everything I once valued had been stripped from me. My family, my home, the woman I loved dearly, my profession, my son, good friends- all gone.

I would never have called John Doggett my friend. Once, I had called him interloper, accused him trying to discredit the X-files. I had grown to respect him quickly, because his sheer competency and straightforwardness demanded it. If I could use such an old-fashioned, and mostly meaningless these days, word the man was honorable. Of course, he was also a closed-minded, tight-assed son of a bitch, so closed off to the same strange possibilities that I accepted naturally that he could hardly believe the evidence of his own eyes at times. We'd had something approaching mutual respect and co-operation at one point. Until I'd done the inexcuseable.

I'd found the man at a moment of profound weakness. And I had shown him, again and again, that I was not afraid to admit to my own weaknesses. For this, I was sure he would never forgive me. All those untidy, messy emotions like fear and sorrow that can never truly be contained, blocked off by walls of thought, he covered them with anger. I had seen through his defenses for brief, blinding moments, to find a man quaking to his very soul. He hated me for it. I think I could have faced anything besides his hate, which was all he was letting me see.

Worse was my impotence in the face of the very real crisis facing the man. I was sure that it was no monster, not in the conventional sense, that he carried in his belly. Such a creature would have eaten through his internal organs and burst out of his chest long ago. No, whatever he carried, it was bound to be something so close to human as to be hardly discernible. I could see no solution though than to encourage him into the abortion he professed to want. Yet, I could also see that it would have the power to destroy him.

I intended to what? Stay away until such a time as the medical procedure could be performed and it was seen how the dice had fallen, whether or not he survived it with his mind and sanity fully intact. What would I do if he fell apart? Hope that destroyed like that he was of no more use or interest to the forces that ripped him apart in the first place and settle him someplace where he could be cared for with some of the money from the bank accounts Krycek had given me numbers to.

The only face that Doggett had let me see before his abduction was that of a strong man, a warrior. A man who would be hero given the appropriate circumstances. Now, the man I had gotten to know after finding him in that hold was merely human, and a suffering human at that. These were not Doggett's finest hours, which we both knew. I could forgive him, but he could not forgive himself.

Made uncertain of my plans by the naggings of Krycek and my own mind, I pulled into parking lot of a Denny's. A few moments later, I was settled in a booth, mind given fully over to the task of decided which of the fat-laden, feasts of eventual death by coronary artery disease I wanted. I wanted, for the moment, no decision more difficult than cream with my coffee or not. The restaurant was quiet, even considering the hour. I could hear myself think far too loudly for comfort.

The waitress could have been any waitress in a diner, working the morning shift in Nowheresville, Midwest, USA. She seemed an archetype more than a person, with her permed hair and rotund figure. She took my order with little comment, leaving me alone again having to face the far bigger issues like where I was going to go next, and could I continue to live with myself.

As she set down the combination of eggs, bacon and fried potatoes that I'd ordered, she said, "You look like you have the weight of the world on your shoulders."

Time for Atlas to shrug? Not likely. Still, she seemed like a sweet and anonymous confessor that could absorb some of my troubles. And she was out and out asking me to unburden myself. "I'm just thinking about someone I know," I said. I changed the sex of the person in question, to make it more understandable. I'd been thrown out of enough bars and other places by people who thought I was drunk to have learned my lesson on that front. "This woman. Some guy, not me, I swear, got her pregnant. I suppose you can only call it rape, I don't know how else you'd describe it. She's not exactly what you would call a friend of mine, because she hates me. One time she threw a full soda can at me just because it wasn't the right kind."

"She hit you?"

"Beaned me right in the gut."

"I don't think she was aiming for your gut. She was just a little high, probably. I know what I'd be aiming for if I were her," the waitress said. "So, why are you abandoning her?"

"I'm not. I just dropped her off at her aunt and uncle's house," I suppose that was a good enough way to describe Skinner and his sister. "She's safe now."

"You care for her at all?"

"Of course. I love her...like a sister I suppose. I'm furious about what happened to her," I said.

The waitress picked up my plate before I'd even taken a bite and she said, "I'll go wrap this up to go. When I'm done, if you know what's good for you and your Jesus-loving soul, you'll get your skinny ass back in your car and drive right back to her uncle and aunt's and stay by her side all the way through this. Be strong for her."

"But, she doesn't want me there. She hates me."

"Don't mistake her pain for hate, sweetie."

With that, the waitress took my plate and left me alone. Well, alone for just a minute.

I was confronted by a new face in my standard repertoire of ghosts. The one that I had hoped so much not to see ever since I'd found Doggett. I'd so hoped that someday soon I'd be able to find her for him.

"Monica," I whispered softly. I was learning not to talk too much in public to people that most would agree weren't there. Passing over to the other side, even if it was just my imagination filling in the details, always agreed with people. As a ghost, Monica was radiantly beautiful. Her pale complexion glowed under her silky dark hair. I was struck by the serenity in her eyes. She and the rest of the dead were at peace, even if I was not. I wondered how she had died. I'd learned not to talk about that with my beloved dead. They never seemed to remember how it happened. Most pain in their lives was forgotten. Only love seemed to remain.

"That waitress is right," she said with a little half-smile. "Go take care of him for me. Would you want to be stuck with no one but Skinner for company for this one?"

Monica disappeared. I dropped a twenty on the table and was out the door even before the waitress could get back with my breakfast packaged to go. I wondered sometimes at my singular ability to be blind to what was going on in those closest to me, especially myself. I drove around Omaha for a while, ostensibly in random directions, not entirely certain of my decision. I found myself heading further and further east every moment. On the eastern edge of town, I came across a big shopping center. The typical huge parking lot surrounded by big box stores. On an impulse, I pulled in and parked in front of one of the electronics store.

Doggett:

Sometime long after noon, I drifted to consciousness again. I was alone in my new room. Drawn curtains revealed an utterly perfect blue sky, not a cloud in sight. The fan blew in a smell was distinctly rural. I'm not a farm boy myself, but cousins of mine were farmers. I'd spent summers with my uncle and aunt on their farm. I knew the smells intimately. They brought to mind long, hot days of hard work at chores and sneaking away from those chores whenever possible for the sweetness of a cool skinny dip in the nearby river. Not exactly unpleasant, but with obvious undertones of animal shit. The smell of dirt over that was more pleasant.

I almost missed the obvious. That the distant scent of pig shit in the air wasn't making me nauseous. I should be making my morning race for the porcelain right now. My bladder was nagging though. That was the thing that had gotten me up in the first place.

Downstairs, Skinner and Georgie were sitting at the kitchen table, talking quietly to themselves, a conversation which ended the minute I came into sight, probably they were talking about what to do about me. "Put the kettle on, Wally," Georgie said, getting up from the table. She guided me by the elbow to sit down.

"It seemed like you needed the rest more than anything, so I asked my friend not to come until tomorrow," Skinner said as he filled the kettle from the sink.

"Where's Mulder?" I asked, not having seen any evidence of the man yet today. I guess I was concerned, that having dropped me off safely into Skinner's care, that Mulder was going to take off. And I was starting to be pissed that he hadn't had the decency to say goodbye even.

The back door opened. Mulder bounded into the kitchen. The man had the damndest sense of timing. He was carrying a couple of bags. "I went to Omaha. Bought a present for you. I figured you're going to be laid up for a while, recovering," he said. He dropped one of the plastic bags onto the table in front of me. I peek inside. About two dozen DVDs and box sets. It was one of the oddest lot of entertainment I'd ever seen gathered in one bag. I sorted through it: the Marx brothers, highlights of the 2002 NFL season, Dirty Harry, Ken Burn's Civil War, Iron Chef, a couple of bad chopsocky flicks, Ed Wood movies. And something called "Queer as Folk."

As I looked in puzzlement at that one, Mulder tore it out of my hands. "Sorry," he said, ears turning pink. "I forgot to sort it out. I got that one for myself."

"Hey, you left it in the bag, seems like it's my present after all," I said, more to embarrass him further, especially in front of Skinner, than any interest in the box set. I figured it had to be porn or just as good for him to be so furtively trying to cover up what it was. I was able to reclaim the box set from his grabbing hands.

"My aunt didn't have a DVD player, Mulder," Skinner said.

"I know. Help me get some more stuff out of the car, Walter."

They went out and a few moments later, they reappeared. Walt was struggling with a big TV box, Mulder hefting a couple of smaller boxes and bags. "Living room okay for now, John?" Mulder asked. "I figure if you end up confined to bed for a while, after the procedure, we can move it upstairs then."

"Fine," I said. By this point, Georgie had finished making a cup of tea. She set it front of me and looked at me with purpose. I got the point and took a cautious sip, blowing on it first. The same spicy tea as she'd made me drink last night. In the other room, Mulder and Skinner wrestled with boxes and wires, setting up the new TV and DVD player. I wanted to get up and go help them with it. I suppose a typically male reaction when confronted with the sounds of something that has the instructions, 'some assembly required.'

"You might as well wait here," Georgie told me. "Knowing Walter, two of them is about one too many, as is."

She was right. Immediately I heard a muffled "Mulder!" coming from the direction of the living room.

"Did I tell you or did I tell you? Drink your tea, sweetie," she said.

At Georgie's insistence, I parked my ass in front of the television more or less the whole day. While Skinner and Mulder finished arguing over the TV setup, she permitted me one brief stroll around the property, a short tour that skirted the cornfields, with her at my elbow. I'd activated the mother hen instinct in her.

"The land belongs to Walter," she said. She seemed not at all bitter about the fact that her brother was the one with the inheritance, not her. "Came with the farmhouse. But it's been leased out ever since my Uncle died in the seventies. I don't think he ever gave up hope that Walter would come back to the land and take up farming again."

I ventured too close to the cornfield itself for her comfort and she put a restraining hand on my shoulder. "I don't think you want to go that close. I don't trust all the chemicals the farmer uses."

We turned back to the house after that, passing the chicken coops. We came across Skinner, dressed in what I thought of as full country regalia. Jeans, a flannel shirt and somewhere or another he'd dug up an old John Deere gimme cap. He'd been busy in the coops, pitching out old bedding.

"How's the great TV setup project going?" Georgie asked.

"I left Mulder to it. I thought you said you hired a boy from the town to come out here and take care of the hens," he said to Georgie.

"I did. He's taken care of them. Just not to your standards I guess. Walter, it's a hen house, not a kitchen. Doesn't have to be spotless. They're laying just fine."

Skinner grumbled under his breath, but retreated back to the chicken coop instead of standing up to his big sister again. I don't think I've ever seen Skinner so meek as he was when his sister spoke to him.

The strangest looking cat I ever saw came limping across my path as we started for the house. She was a calico, but missing one of her eyes, only a fold of scar tissue where it should have been. She was a skinny little, tiny thing, but with a swollen middle. I've been around barn cats enough to know when one is with kittens. And this one was, nearly ready to drop. She wove herself around my ankles, mewling, but when I knelt down to pet her, she bolted away.

"Poor thing," Georgie said. "I've been trying to catch her and take her to the vets for weeks, but she's too clever for any of the traps I've set. I call her Sadie. She obviously craves human company, but she's so scared of us. I think she was a pet for a while before she was dumped out here."

Ignored, Sadie reappeared, sitting on the porch railing, still acrobatic despite her burden and her missing eye. "She's hardly more than a kitten herself," I said. She seemed scrappy, a survivor and a fighter. I could admire that in a creature. There'd been a while before my abduction where I'd seriously thought about getting a cat and never had. Monica had always said I was a dog person, but I disagreed.

Sadie leaped off the railing and twirled herself around my ankles again, rubbing frantically. I didn't reach down for her this time and she stayed there for a while, happy to have made my acquaintance. I didn't mind. She was a sweet thing and I felt sorry for her, so burdened down with kittens and so hurt already. A moment later, she reached the limit of her courage and retreated back in the direction of the outbuildings.

I shrugged and headed back inside the house. Mulder had set himself up in front of the TV, remote clutched in hand, in what I already thought of as my chair. I stared at him and then cleared my throat in a way that clearly suggested mayhem if he didn't move.

Georgie had followed me into the house and as he said, "oh," softly and got out of my chair, she shook her head. She went into the kitchen. I held my hand out for the remote and got it with only a roll of Mulder's eyes. The bastard could be so infuriating and I nearly whipped the remote at him, aiming right for between his eyes. I probably would have hit him too. I've got good aim and how could I miss at such close range? But it might have meant Mulder reclaiming the remote. I settled into the recliner and stopped the video he'd been watching. It was the NFL highlights.

"Between being in prison and on the run last year, there wasn't much chance to keep up with sports," Mulder said as he settled onto the well-worn sofa. "Which one did you want?"

"Marx Brothers," I said. Laughter seemed to be the easiest thing these days to get me out of myself.

So began one of the longest TV marathons I'd engaged in for a long time. Georgie brought out snacks. A plate of crackers and cheese which she set on a battered TV tray right at my elbow. Oddly, I found myself hungry and willing to risk some food again. I started with just the crackers. Though my stomach felt a little unsettled, nothing seemed on the verge of coming back up. A while later, I tried a few nibbles of cheese. Georgie kept me well supplied with that darn tea and made noises if I didn't drink it. She'd started adding honey to it and that made it taste a bit better. Walt eventually joined us in the TV marathon and we spent the hours laughing to the Marx brothers, having found other movies by them in Skinner's aunts stash of videos. I noticed that I was the only one that Georgie catered to. Indeed, Skinner was deferential to his sister, asking her if there was anything she wanted when he got up.

When the afternoon slipped into evening, Mulder slipped into the kitchen. He spent a while in there and eventually came out with a carton of ice cream and some bowls. "Anyone else want some? John?"

"What flavor?"

"Vanilla."

What I really wanted was peach, like Gramma Garnet used to make as soon as the peaches were ripe, but I realized that any store bought peach would be a pale imitation of that. Chocolate would have been good. Coffee maybe. I must have made a face or something at Mulder.

Mulder put the vanilla down on the coffee table and reached for his car keys. "What flavor did you want, John? I'll go get some."

"Fox, sit down. Nothing closer than Omaha is going to be open at eight on a Sunday evening," Georgie said, firmly, "It's all I bought, John. You want something different, put it on the list next time I go shopping, but don't give me any crap right now. You want ice cream or not?"

She dished out and I accepted a small bowl without further complaint. It was just plain vanilla, but the mere fact that I didn't immediately feel like tasting it a second time, on the way back out, was a real treat. It was smooth, creamy, and sweet and I savored every drop slowly, not wanting to push things, even as I celebrated a little bit of freedom from the nausea that had haunted me constantly for weeks. I was satisfied with another moment where I could forget that everything was all wrong and never would be right again.

I was almost happy, until the tadpole decided to move again. The flutters seemed to grow stronger all the time. I thought I put a good face on it. I didn't want Skinner to see me freak out. I put the footrest on the recliner down and stood up. I announced, "I think I've had enough. I'm going to bed."

The other occupants of the room were immersed in the Dirty Harry movie they were watching and hardly looked up. Mulder nodded but turned back to the TV. I made my way through the room, which by now was lit only with the bluish light of the TV. I ascended the stairs silently, shutting the door that separated them from the living room. When I got to my room, I turned the window fan up to the highest setting, not just because it was warm, but for the noise. I laid down on my bed and pounded a pillow as hard as I could as the tadpole continued its dance in my belly. "Stop it," I muttered again and again through clenched teeth.

A substantial silhouette appeared in the doorway. Georgie left the room light off but entered my room, leaving only the yellow light of the hall fixture to illuminate this little scene. She sat down next to me on the bed, a weight that caused the whole mattress to slope to her. A gentle, but authoritative hand was placed on my fist, ending my assault of the pillow. She asked in a tone that would brook no evasion, "What's the matter, John?"

"It's moving. I can feel it. Why can't it let me forget that this is a living creature I've got inside me?"

Georgie placed one of her big hands on my swollen belly and closed her eyes for a moment. I had never let anyone else touch me there, not since the first time Mulder had done so in the hold of the alien ship. Even then I'd brushed him off weakly.

When she spoke, there was some ghost of comfort in those words, but mainly it was that steel in her voice, the plain talk that made me trust her. "Because it is a living creature, John. Make no doubt about that. You aren't going to want to hear this, but you need to understand this. You are going to be killing something. We don't know if it's a human or something else, but I suspect that doesn't matter as much as you think. You were a Marine. You understand that sometimes there has to be death to defend something important."

"Are you trying to talk me out of this?" I asked, more troubled than when she'd first spoken. She made sense, but it was harder than I could anticipate to hear her describe my situation with such unvarnished truths. Not that she was bringing doubts to me and my decision, but merely making me look at the ones I already had, that I'd been so steadfastly, willfully blind to. Would I be better off if she'd never said those thing? No. I would hate to be lied to. I would rather have truth than comfort.

"No, nor trying to talk you into it. You'll be the one sitting by yourself at two in the morning, wondering if you did the right thing, no matter what your decision is. John, you need to defend your own life and your sanity, but there will be a cost. The rest of us can only be sorry that you were put in the situation where you had to pay the cost. I made the decision. I have no regrets. I know what I had to do to save my life. I would do it again in a minute. But I still wonder sometimes."

"Georgie, did Walter know? About yours?"

"He paid for it. Gave me every penny of money he'd been saving up for his first car without question. Borrowed a buddy's car to drive me to Des Moines. Held my hand. And I don't really know exactly what happened, but Walter had words with the boy that did it. And the boy moved out of town in the middle of the night.

She slid down until she was lying on the bed with me. She held me close against her big, soft body. I laid my head on her chest, perhaps the only time I've ever done that with a woman and not thought of her sexually. It was definitely sisterly, or motherly perhaps. Only sweet comfort without an iota of sex. She held me as I shook, an anchor in my storm.

"You know," she said after a while, "You might want to stop being as mean as piss to Fox. I don't think you realize it, but he's willing to do for you what Walter did for me, even down to beating the crap out of the boy that did it. Even if in your case, the 'boy' is this conspiracy in the government Walter's telling me about."

Well, this 'boy' was a long time enemy of Mulder's to start with, surely that had more than anything to do with it. I thought about the futility of one man on a crusade against vicious forces that had penetrated even the highest levels of law enforcement, perhaps even the highest levels of government in this country. I wondered whether to admire the burning belief I saw in the man or just laugh in hollow, humorless mirth at the vast stupidity of it all. As I tried to decide, I eventually fell asleep.

I woke alone, my nightmares forgotten except for the weight of cold terror that sat heavily on my chest and chilled me to my core despite the muggy August night. I was out of bed in an instant, sleep an impossibility. I headed first to the bathroom, thinking that my churning stomach might mean that I need to throw up. I did, a little, just a few retches. But I got myself under control before long. I was a little more awake, but the unspecified feeling of horror I'd woken with still clung to me. I thought I vaguely remembered killing Luke in my dream, but truth was, the terrors were even greater, more nameless than that. Surprisingly, this was the first nightmare I'd had since Mulder had found me. I certainly hoped it would be my last. I couldn't stand waking in a cold sweat like this all the time. The tadpole was doing the shimmy again, perhaps disturbed because I was.

Back in the hall again, I planned to go downstairs to watch some TV, but one of the doors was open and the room light was on. I looked in. Mulder was sprawled out on top of a made bed, clothes still on, not even attempting to sleep, though it was about three in the morning. He was reading a fantasy football magazine. He looked up from his magazine at me, "Are you all right, John?" he asked, setting his magazine down when I didn't answer. "Nightmare?"

I shivered but didn't answer. What could I say? Was there anything anyone could say that would make it all better? I didn't protest though as Mulder got up from his bed and put an arm around my shoulder. I let him lead me to the bed. We laid down together and he held me. I was so soul empty, so defeated that nothing, not even Fox Mulder cuddling me, mattered to me at the moment. A mean-spirited part of me wanted to hate him for it, but most of me couldn't find the will to do so. Slowly, his warmth leached from him to me, calming me with simple body to body comfort and I stopped shivering. "I killed him," I whispered so softly I wasn't even sure I'd said it. "In my dream I killed my son."

"John, it's okay," he said as he stroked my hair, my face pressed into his shoulder. "It may have seemed real, believe me. I know nightmares. But it wasn't. You didn't kill your son."

"No, but I'm going to kill this...whatever it is in my belly," I said. The way we were laying, side by side, belly to belly, I know he could feel the movements of the tadpole, which was still kicking up a tempest in its teacup. If he was surprised by this, he hid it very well. "Why isn't any of you trying to talk me out of this? This...thing. It didn't ask to be put here anymore than I chose to put it there. It's an innocent. And I want to murder it."

"Innocents die in war all the time, John. No one's going to try and talk you out of it because you're so obviously traumatized by having this...thing inside you."

"Just having it gone won't mean that it was never there. I hate it, Mulder. I hate this thing in me. It would be easier if I didn't feel anything at all."

I don't know what I wanted from Mulder. I don't know what I wanted him to say to me. Did I want the sugarcoated reassurances from him that everything would be all right? I certainly didn't expect what he said next.

"That's because the opposite of love isn't hate. It's indifference. There are some, both religious writers and psychologists, who say that hate is love seen through a mirror of fear. And what you're going through is one of the most legitimately frightening things that could happen to a person."

Mulder stopped talking for a minute, as if hearing what he'd just said to me. Then he started again, "Shit. I'm sorry. I shouldn't be saying things like this to you. You didn't need to hear that."

I was angry. He was right. He shouldn't be saying anything like that to me, especially because it was total BS. Total psychobabble crap and I didn't want to hear it. "Get out!" I snapped, forgetting in my fury this was his room.

Mulder leaped out of the bed, away from me. "Fuck. I'm sorry, John. I'm an idiot."

"Just get out!"

He did.

Mulder:

I bolted from the room, a strategic retreat, furious, not with Doggett in the slightest, but with myself. I stormed through the house, downstairs and out the front door of the dumpy little farmhouse. I think I intended to head for the car and get in and drive again. The miles pounding under my wheels could only be soothing.

But Scully was waiting for me. She was leaning against the car, arms crossed. She raised an eyebrow at me and said, sardonically, "It's good to see that despite everything that's happened, you're still the same old Mulder. You weren't going to run away again, were you?"

"I'm an idiot, Scully," I told her. No doubt she knew what happened. She knew me inside and out, far better than I knew myself. Only Scully seemed to have the power to save me from myself at times when I was danger to myself, too clever for my own good. She had the power to make me believe in myself again when I could see only the shattered failures I left in my wake. She was still my one in five billion.

"I know John better than you do. He'd rather hear the plain truth than anything. Even if he is uncomfortable and angry with the answers, he wants them," she said. Archetypal mythology tells us that angels are winged creatures of fire and awesome power. Mythology is wrong. My angel is short and red-haired. She still watches over me.

"So, what do I do now?" Out of frustration, I picked up pieces of the gravel that paved the driveway. I flung piece after piece of it into the endless cornfields that surrounded this desolate hell we'd hidden ourselves away in. I think it was good for John to have this stable location, something that could become something like home for him, but for myself, I felt trapped. Even though I had been here less than two full days, part of which had been spent on the road to and from Omaha, I was a pacing animal in a cage. Ever since my time in prison, the road had meant freedom.

"Give him time. Mulder, think of how hard it was for me. And I wanted a child more than I ever wanted anything in my life, even to the point where I made decisions that weren't wise."

I'd wanted that child too and when I thought about him, there was an ache that ran through me. I understood what Scully had to do, but I think there would always feel like a piece of me was missing. One of the things I'd taken time to do was track down the family he'd been adopted into, I even spied on them a little. I could rest assured, I'd thought, that he'd gone to a family who wanted a child as much as Scully and I had. I would not be so cruel as to take him away, even if I had been in a position where I could.

Before I could think of an answer to her, Scully was gone. So tantalizingly brief were all of the visits of my beloved dead. I wanted more than anything to just sit down and be with her, with any of them, to watch a movie with them, to talk for hours about nothing. Instead of their company, I had their help.

Feeling lost, old and defeated, I looked to the car again. No, I wouldn't take off, not now. Maybe later. I was too tired. Yet sleep still seemed elusive. The front porch had a swing on it and I took up vigil on the swing, watching the sky for, I don't know, some sign of activity. There was nothing, just the ordered patterns of the stars, their relative motion so slow and ponderous that it seemed hardly motion at all. There was once where I could trust the stars, their stability a constant in a life that seemed in chaos. Yet, as I knew more and more of the truth, every time I looked at them, it was a reminder of the betrayal- from them came only death and peril.

I fell asleep on the swing, for a few brief hours. When I opened my eyes again, stiff from sleeping sitting up and disoriented for having done it at all, the dawn was approaching, a rosy glow tinting the gray. It was quiet, a peace that felt not entirely earthly. I felt a small body nestling against mine. My rarest visitor out of my beloved dead. I didn't look directly at her. It seemed if I did, she went away that much sooner. I felt small, girlish arms wrap around them, a sensation difficult to describe. It was not as if it were faint. Or a weaker version of what physical arms would have felt like. No, it was feeling entirely removed from normal, physical reality, though no less strong or real for being so. It always felt good, sweet and safe to be with her.

"Fox," I heard Samantha say softly. "Tell John that she forgives him. That if he's not ready for her now, she'll wait until he is."

"Who?"

"John's baby. One of them."

"One of them?"

"He has two."

Twins. That would explain why John was so huge. Simply lovely. That would make it even harder for John to do what he needed to do, knowing there were two souls on his head, not just one. Surely any doctor we could find to do this abortion would insist on an ultrasound. I wondered about the possibilities of keeping the image from him. Would he want to know, insist on seeing it?

Sam's presence slipped away from me. I didn't reach out for her, knowing the futility of it. And these moments, as rare and brief as they were, were enough. I was assured that she was at peace. When I knew I was alone on the porch again, I stood and went into the house. It was quiet, no one but me up for the moment. I went up to the guest room that had been given over to my use.

John was still in it. He'd fallen asleep again, face pressed into the pillow, on his side, belly held protectively with one hand. The furrows in his brow, even more prominent these days, failed to fade away while he slept. I wondered. If one of the babies forgave John for what he was about to do, what about the other one? Was it angry? Was that the one seemed intent on beating John up from the inside out. I could never let him know, not that he would believe my source in the slightest.

I was tired. I thought perhaps I might be able to steal another short while of sleep, a few winks of it. I climbed back into bed, with John. Keeping as much as possible to the other side of it, I laid my head down on the pillow and let myself drift.

Doggett:

I woke in Mulder's arms. Had I dreamed that I yelled at him to get out of the bedroom? Sometime during my sleep, he had spooned himself against my back and draped a arm over my belly, his other arm forming a pillow for my head. His knees were pressed against the back of my own knees. The most disturbing portion of this whole scenario is just how comfortable it felt to be held by him. This was, in no way, good. I did not want to feel comfortable about Mulder. I tried to remember how angry I had been at him when I'd thrown him out of the room and it wasn't working.

"What the hell are you doing in here?" I snapped, trying to pull myself out of his arms. It's one thing to let yourself be held in the middle of the night, haunted by dreams. It's another thing entirely in the bright light of morning to let yourself be snuggled by another man, no matter the situation. He wasn't letting me go easily though. He was tenacious and I just wasn't as strong as I used to be.

"It's my room. You don't want me around you, go to your own room. But first I have to ask you something."

"Then you'll let me go?" I asked. I laid back into the spoon again, no longer protesting Mulder's arms around me.

"So, what kind of ice cream did you really want yesterday?" Mulder asked when I stopped struggling.

He wanted to know what kind of ice cream I wanted?

"No point in saying. Can't get it any more," I told him. I might as well tell him the truth. No harm in that. "Gramma Garnet died in '87 and nobody can make peach ice cream like her."

"Okay, was there something a bit more obtainable that you'd rather have than vanilla?"

"Coffee," I told him. "Plain coffee ice cream. None of that java chip jamocha cappuccino swirl Starbucks crap."

"Okay. I was thinking of heading back to Omaha later today after Skinner's doctor friend has seen you. I'm going to look into maybe getting internet service for the laptop I bought for you. It'll depend on how much of a false paper trail I can throw up if I can do it or not. I'll stop on the way home and pick up some for you."

The room's door was open, and at this point, Georgie looked through it. If she thought there was anything unusual about me being held so intimately by Mulder, she certainly didn't say a thing or even look surprised. "There you are. I worried for a minute when I saw your empty bed. Doctor Jensen is here. Are you ready?"

Was I ready? Strange, how the moment I'd been waiting for weeks impatiently, seemed suddenly a terrifying thing. I knew that it would just be an exam, that probably this doctor friend couldn't perform the procedure himself, that he would have to line up some kind of specialist somehow, but still, this would be the start of the process to rid myself of my burden. Mulder sensed my fear and impulsively, he kissed me on the back of my head. It was the oddest sensation, so tender, the feeling of lips brushing my hair softly. I found it impossible to take exception to this strange act of affection. One of his hands found mine and squeezed gently. Then he let me go. "Brave heart, John," he said.

Yesterday, I had changed into sweats again, but now I decided I wanted to get dressed in my real pants again, to put on what little armor, what little dignity I had at my disposal. "I'll be down in a minute, Georgie," I told her, getting up and walking out of Mulder's room. "I want to get dressed."

She just pressed a mug of tea into my hand and said, "We'll be waiting downstairs."

The nausea was nagging again, just slightly. As I got dressed, I sipped at the tea. Slowly, I'd been making the connection. Whatever was in the tea, it helped. I wondered if it was ginger. Had Mulder told her about it? Or was he just right and it was something a lot of people knew? Eventually, my mug was emptied and the encounter could be delayed no longer. I went downstairs.

Georgie, Mulder, Skinner and this Dr. Jensen were waiting, sitting all around the kitchen table. Dr. Jensen was not exactly what I'd been expecting. One of "Skinner's old Marine buddies" does not bring to mind a ruddy-cheeked woman with close cropped curly hair like a gray scrub pad. Her eyes widened a moment when she got her first good look at me, but otherwise she just rose from the table and held out her hand to me. "Mr. Doggett, Arlene Jensen. Sorry we couldn't meet under more normal circumstances."

I let her take my hand. Her grip was firm, strong for a woman. "I could say the same," I said.

Georgie pulled out the empty chair next to her and motioned for me to sit down. I did.

"So, Walter has told me that you're possibly pregnant," she said, dryly, as if she didn't quite believe this. I knew that tone. I'd been the skeptic myself. Hell, I wouldn't believe it myself except for I've felt the tadpole myself, swimming around inside me.

"There's no possibly about it. I've gotten positives on four different brands of those home pregnancy tests. Something is alive in there. Feel that," I said. Then I reached out and grabbed her hand. For the first time I willingly put someone's hand on my belly. The tadpole had been kicking up a storm ever since I'd entered the kitchen.

Her eyes widened again, "I'm also given to understand your plans are, if possible, to terminate this...pregnancy as soon as possible."

"Yes," I said flatly.

"Well, I can tell right off the bat that this will be no simple procedure. I'm a simple GP. Usually I treat strep throat, tell moms I can't pass out antibiotics for colds and do school physicals. Occasionally, I do a bit of baby catching, for low risk cases. This is something beyond my experience. You're looking at possibly major abdominal surgery, definitely beyond a simple D and C for sure. I suppose the first step would be a basic physical examination. Mister Mulder tells me that you haven't had any medical care since your abduction experience."

She looked at me as if I'd committed some unpardonable crime. Of course, you know doctors, convinced that they are essential to every aspect of life. I, in turn, tried to convey just how crazy I thought she was with my returning look. Like we could have trusted just any doctor with this thing. Honestly, right now the only thing keeping me in the same room as her was that Skinner seemed to trust her.

"Maybe if there's someplace we could go for a bit of privacy?" she asked.

Skinner and Mulder got up to go. There was one thing I wanted to tell this doctor, before the exam began, so she wouldn't be shocked by it's discovery later. Not that in my current condition it didn't seem somewhat logical that I would have one, but you never know. I knew from the troubled look on her fact that she must be picturing some very complicated internal arrangement, that might very well kill me should the tadpole be dislodged.

"There's something you should know. I have a vagina," I said, flatly. Mulder wasn't surprised. He'd seen me naked, getting me out of the ship. But Skinner's jaw literally dropped in surprise. I don't know what he expected. Then he fled out the back door, just shocked maybe, though possibly grossed out by the thought.

Not that I'd made a very close acquaintance with this new orifice I had of my own. It made me feel queasy just to think about it. I'd made one preliminary, uh, investigation into it, feeling around and deciding it was the most disturbing thing I'd ever felt, to be able to stick my own fingers inside of me like that, touching slick, moist, somewhat spongy tissues. I hadn't done it again and I wasn't planning to. Since then, I'd ignored it as much as possible, pretended it didn't exist. "I have what felt like a cervix. As far as I'm concerned, I have no reason to believe I don't have the rest of the equipment."

The doctor seemed almost relieved, but she still said, "Well, that may or may not make things less complicated. We'll take you upstairs and get a better look at you."

Mulder started heading for the back door. I suddenly took a mind to make him just as uncomfortable as I was going to be. I'm a bastard. But it would make me feel better to have him feel worse. "Where do you think you're going?" I asked him.

"I thought you'd want some privacy," he said, hand hovering on the door handle.

"I want you there with me."

"I thought you'd rather have Georgie."

I liked Georgie. I really did. I trusted her far more than I could have thought possible to trust someone in such a short time. But Georgie was a girl. She'd never seen me naked. I wanted to keep it that way. Mulder had seen me naked already. And while there were times where I just wanted to kill him, fate or whatever you want to call it had seen fit to throw us together into this mess that had taken over my life. I could trust him to watch my back for me.

Mulder wasn't looking at me, but at some point behind me, watching intensely. He was doing it again, I was certain, having one of his little conversations with someone who wasn't there. I saw him mouth something that might have been 'fine', then his expression changed, from his frown to a resignation. "Fine, whatever you want, John," he said.

We went upstairs, the three of us, Mulder, me and the doctor with a black bag. To fill the awkward silence, Dr. Jensen talked, "When I first met Walter, I was just a nurse, Walter one of the patients on my ward. I'd always dreamed of being a doctor, but had settled on being a nurse as being an obtainable goal. We got talking, Walter and I. We had a lot in common, two kids from the middle of corn country Iowa. Became pen pals when he was shipped back to the states. He was the one who convinced me that I could make it through medical school."

I let her into my room and sat down on the bed. She stood beside me and Mulder closed the door after us. Mulder stood, leaning against the door, arms crossed, watching the proceedings with guarded interest. Dr. Jensen started out with just asking questions. All the usual ones that they ask you when you go to a doctor. You know, heart problems, diabetes, this that and the other conditions. Anyone in your family, etc. She asked about any problems I'd been having. I told her about the morning sickness, about how it was letting up on me finally I thought. She did some of the basic poking and prodding around, looking down my ears, my throat, etc. Then she got out the blood pressure cuff. I thought I might have to worry about that. The last time I'd been to the doctor for my yearly, sometime I'd gotten back from that weird experience in Mexico, the doctor had warned me that my blood pressure was creeping up and we might have to start thinking about watching it closely. After a minute, she announced the numbers. They didn't really register with me nor could I even remember what was dangerously high.

When Dr. Jensen noticed my blank look she said, "I'd say that's pretty good for a guy of your age, especially considering. Okay, let's take a listen."

She got a regular stethoscope first and gave my lungs a listen. "Sounds good and clear," she pronounced. Then she got out a doptone stethoscope. I remembered them from my ex-wife's pregnancy with Luke. I didn't get the chance to go to many of her appointments, but I did a few. Even got to listen to Luke's heartbeat once before he was born. Back then, they didn't do ultrasounds routinely, so I never got to see him that way. Dr. Jensen held the end piece in her hands a moment. "It's pretty cold, let me warm it up for you," she explained. Then she put it on and asked me to pull up my shirt. I unbuttoned it from the bottom up, exposing the taut, pale skin. I hated the sight of my own belly these days, not that I could avoid it these days. She pressed the end piece to my belly and listened for a while, frowning. She shifted it around several times, still frowning.

I wished she would say something. A guy might get to worrying with his doctor looking like that and not saying anything. I was convinced that she'd somehow found evidence that this tadpole was a monster just by listening to the heartbeat.

Finally, she said something. "I'm not going to draw a conclusion until we get a good look with an ultrasound, but I did hear two distinct heartbeats. The simplest explanation is that you're carrying twins."

Twins? Two of them? I sputtered and choked on nothing. "Jesus Christ! Twins?! Tell me you did not just say twins," I said, standing and starting to pace around the room. Mulder didn't even have the decency to act surprised. He just watched me pace, shaking his head, arms still crossed.

"Mr. Doggett, would you come with me to my office, so we can do an ultrasound?" Dr. Jensen asked. "It's only about two hours from here."

Suddenly, the last thing I wanted was another trip through the emptiness of Iowa farm country, up and down the rolling hills that might just activate my nausea again for all I knew. I hated Iowa, I decided. I hated it as if it were to blame for everything, for this unexpected trip out to the world, for the, not one, but apparently two tadpoles swimming around in me, for being stuck with Mulder, Skinner and this weirdo doctor with brillo pad hair.

Mulder spoke up before I could protest that I wasn't budging an inch from this farmhouse. "Sure, I'll get the car started. Sooner we get this over the better, right, John?"

"Right," I muttered. I wondered if it were possible for things to get any worse. I buttoned myself up again. It looked like I wouldn't be required to get naked just yet. "You're coming with me," I said pointedly at Mulder. "You drive."

We went downstairs. Georgie was nowhere to be seen. Skinner hadn't slunk back from his retreat either. When we went outside, I caught sight of both of them. They were up on ladders, scraping at the peeling paint on the farmhouse. Skinner was up high, perched right under the eaves, Georgie down lower just on a step stool. Skinner didn't pause in his work, seeming not to notice us, but Georgie got down from her stepstool and put down her scraper.

"You take good care of him, Arlene," Georgie told Dr. Jensen.

"No worries there, Georgeann," Dr. Jensen said. Then she went to put her black bag into the back of her old truck. It was a nice one. If I believed my eyes, it was an International Harvester Travelall. One of the rarest of the rare. Not so much because it was ever a luxury car or rare to start with. But it'd been a hard working country kind of car and most of them had rusted to death long ago. This one was obviously a pampered toy, polished to within an inch of its life. My fingers were just about itching to look under the hood. Just to see what it had.

"That's a Travelall," I said, dumbly. She had to know what she had. It wouldn't have been taken care of so well if she didn't.

"Nice, huh? It was my uncle's. He always loved it. Didn't drive it in the winter ever. I discovered it in his barn when he died. Want a ride in it?"

Maybe Dr. Brillopad wasn't so bad after all, but I looked to Mulder. Mulder had already started the engine on his car. It was one of the smaller Ford SUVs, he'd traded down from the big ass Excursion he'd driven away from the ruins in. It might not have been as fun as the Travelall, but it would ride like a car. The Travelall would have the distinctly hard ride of a truck. "Some other time, I'll go with Mulder," I said.

Mulder:

Dr. Jensen's office was in one of the few buildings in the minor conglomeration of humanity that passed for a town this far away from the city. The biggest, most prominent building was the Casey's convenience store and gas station. I thought about ducking in and seeing if they had coffee ice cream. John would need a bit of cold comfort after today and as the hours rolled away, it was looking more and more like Omaha wasn't on the agenda.

We hadn't said much on the way to this two horse town. Just every now and then, John would sputter, "Two, there's two of them." He didn't seem to want a response, more perhaps gradually trying to accustom himself to this new reality. Once though he did ask, "You weren't surprised at all, were you?"

To this direct question I answered something wasn't quite a lie, and yet it bore my usual hallmarks of evasive rearrangement of the known facts in such a way that the truth was safely concealed, "You seem particularly, well, huge. It occurred to me as one possibility."

The good Dr. Jensen's office was in the front of a small ranch house, with only a shingle hung out front to announce her services and a slightly larger than average gravel parking pad out front. The building was closed and dark. She led us into an empty waiting room in what must have been a living room once. There were plenty of toys heaped in a chest in the corner and furniture that could have been any living room furniture. Only the Formica intake counter in one corner distinguished it from a house's living room. That and the brightly colored posters pushing the importance of immunizing your child for chicken pox and hepatitis. I had memories about immunizations, from someplace that seemed very far away and long ago- small pox, Tunguska, all distant terrors with little power over me now.

The exam room was a standard enough set up. As she weighed John on one of those scales with the balance beam, she said, "I never see patients on Monday, unless it's an emergency. Okay, what's your usual average weight?"

"One-ninety," John said.

She frowned. I caught a look at the numbers on the balance bar. He was at one seventy-two. I wasn't surprised. He'd lost a lot of muscle during his abduction. And being able to keep little down besides water was bound to take its toll on a person. John frowned at the numbers as well, the furrows in his forehead becoming more prominent. I know that he knew he'd lost some weight, but this was the first time he'd been confronted with proof of it.

Definitely the man was getting ice cream as soon as I could provide it. As much as he wanted. Whatever flavor. I thought for a moment that it was a shame I could only speak with my own beloved dead. If I could have, I would have tracked down his grandmother, interrogated her until she yielded up the recipe for that peach ice cream and made it myself if I had to.

"Height?" the doctor asked.

"Six-foot even," John said. She measured him, and he was, indeed, six feet tall. At least that hadn't changed. Then he said, "I gotta use the little boys room. Where is it?"

"For the ultrasound, ideally you should have a full bladder. I know there's a lot of pressure on your bladder, but do you think you can wait a while? I was also thinking you should take on another couple of glasses of water."

He frowned then said, "Trust me, doc. That's not necessary. I'm at capacity here."

From a cabinet, she found one of those lovely hospital style gowns without the backs to them. With his belly poking out like it was, it would leave John even less covered than usual in that crucial backseat area. Poor guy. "I'm going to ask you to change into this gown," she said, "You might want to keep your socks on. Sit up on the edge of the table. We'll be back in a few minutes."

With that, the doctor led me out of the room, to give John the privacy to change. "Can you tell just what he means when he says he has a vagina?" she asked me as soon as the door was shut.

I paused a moment to sort through my words and the memory of the very brief moment I'd gotten a close look at the man's new anatomy. "It's very definitely an orifice. My sample group is very small when it comes to natural born women I've see naked and in person," I said. Well, in person it was small. I would say I've seen a larger than average sample when it comes to pictures. "But it appears exactly like a woman's would in some aspects. There are labia minora, but not majora. No separate clitoris. He still retains his male genitalia, unaltered as far as I know. I obviously never saw him before this happened, so I have no baseline for comparison. I didn't get a very close look or a very long one. You can imagine that he objected when he