OFFICES OF THE NAVAJO NATION
WASHINGTON, DC

Tahnazbah Begay frowned at the file in her hands. "This is all you have?" she asked.

Scully met the frown with one of her own and sighed heavily.

"Currently... yes."

Tahnazbah shook her head thoughtfully. Although nearly two dozen of her relatives had been involved in the Navajo Code Talker operation, including her father, she had only a limited understanding of the Navajo written language. It had long fallen out of usage amongst her people, something she regretted strongly. But, since he'd been killed in action at Okinawa, she could hardly telephone her father for assistance. Come to think of it, almost *all* the code talkers had died of old age several years previously.

"There are words I recognize," she admitted, "but you'll need an actual code talker to make any sense of this."

She sifted through her childhood memories, trying to think of someone who had been involved in the project who was still alive today.  A face jumped into her mind, followed slowly by a name, and she sighed softly with relief. There *was* someone still alive.

"I know a man who might help," she said. "I could have him contact you."

Scully smiled at her with obvious relief. "Yes. Thank you," she said eagerly, then nibbled her lower lip. While she knew she needed a full translation, it was possible that *anything* might help in the meantime.

"Can you tell me which words you do recognize?"

Tahnazbah shrugged prettily and pointed at the document. "This word, it means goods, merchandise. And this one means vaccination. They're both modern words which is why they stand out," she explained, her expression puzzled.

Again, Scully's expression matched the Navajo woman's.  

"Thank you," she said. "You've been very helpful."

~#~#~#~

MULDER'S APARTMENT
WASHINGTON, DC

He was feeling so sick that, at first, he assumed the loud ringing in his ears was just another symptom of his fever. So he burrowed his head into the couch, wrapped his arms around his sweat-drenched head, and groaned loudly in the hope the high-pitched ringing would fade back into the dull throbbing of his headache.

It was only when the sound persisted, separate and distinct from the pounding in his temples, that he gradually realized the noise was external. And, in understanding that, he identified the sound as that of a telephone.

He just lay there, trying to count the rings through the fuzzy-edged clouds that were making clear thought impossible, until he came to understand that the caller *wasn't* taking no for an answer. 

Cursing under his breath, he dragged himself into a sitting position then hauled himself unsteadily to his feet. He staggered, on cotton-wool legs, to the insistent phone and grabbed the receiver angrily.

"MULDER," he barked, then winced at the volume of his own voice.  His decision to give the caller a flood of vitriolic abuse for disturbing him faded, defeated by his own reluctance to raise his voice again, even before words emerged from the handset.

"Fox, this is your father, I need to see you right away."

Mulder almost dropped the phone. He stared at it in complete bemusement, wondering whether he was suffering an auditory hallucination.  He was going mad. *Really* mad.  Because the odds of his father ever bothering to pick up a phone and dial his number, let alone *ask* to see him, were so infinitesimally small that the call deserved to be recorded as an X-file.

"Fox?" Bill Mulder demanded, his tone somewhere between concerned and annoyed.

It was the annoyance that registered with Mulder, a tone so familiar from his father's mouth that it confirmed the unbelievable.  He still wasn't sure that this wasn't just some fever-dream, but he felt a compulsion to at least follow his fevered fantasy to its logical conclusion.

"Where are you?" he asked.

"I'm at home," his father replied. "How soon can you be here?"

Instead of answering, Mulder looked over at the X he'd taped on the window. The X that had apparently been ignored. No-one wanted him. No one cared. Even Alex had abandoned him...

He choked back a sob, forcing Alex out of his mind, refusing to accept the insidious voice that was insisting that Alex was with Skinner.  He *knew* that was a crazy thought.  

Yet, still, he could picture the two of them in his head, Skinner kneeling on the floor, howling in pain and passion, as the huge panther mounted him. He could visualize the sweat and tears flowing down Skinner's face as his ass was ripped apart by Alex's monstrous, barbed cock. He could hear Skinner sobbing and wailing, his cool AD image discarded on the floor with his underwear, as his pride and dignity were shredded with each brutal thrust of Alex's dick.

And the fingers of his gun hand twitched reflexively with the desire to blow Skinner's head off his shoulders for daring to steal what was his. 

HIS! 

"Fox, it's very important," Bill Mulder insisted.

Mulder rubbed a hand over his throbbing temples and sighed heavily. "Yeah, okay," he whispered. "I'm coming over."

He replaced the handset and stumbled into the kitchen, hurriedly mouthing a double-dose of Tylenol and swallowing it down with a couple of glasses of water. Then, still feeling light-headed but definitely less dehydrated, he grabbed his gun, collected the jacket he'd earlier thrown on the bed, and headed out of the apartment.

~#~#~#~

MULDER'S APARTMENT - A LITTLE LATER

Scully rapped twice on Mulder's door and, receiving no answer, sighed and used her key.

"Mulder?" she called out, surprised to see the couch empty and abandoned.  Considering the fever Mulder had been running when she left, she was surprised he'd even been able to rise by himself.

Mulder's bedroom door, which had been ajar earlier, was now closed. She blinked in confusion. She knew Mulder wouldn't have gone into the bedroom by himself and she couldn't imagine him leaving the apartment while feeling so unwell.

She shivered, wrestling a nervous smile, as she wondered whether the door concealed Alex and Mulder twisted in an embrace. Perhaps, if she pushed that door open, she'd see the two of them in the throes of passion; Krycek's magnificent tawny body wrapped around Mulder's pale flesh.

Recalling the way Alex had pinned her down, in her own bed, remembering the way her body had responded to his touch and his smell, the idea of seeing him similarly wrestling Mulder into passionate submission was enough to make her heart race a little. Though she didn't *know* her fantasy was the truth, it still was sufficient to make her hesitate about opening the door.  

And she refused to admit that the churning feeling in her lower stomach was arousal rather than embarrassment. Though, instead of walking directly to the bedroom, she wandered over to the window as she contemplated whether to knock on the door and announce her presence, or give in to her urge to catch them by surprise.

She didn't hear the shot, or even the splintering of glass as the bullet ripped through the window. All she heard was a roaring thunder in her own head, a sickening rush through her ears as though she had been savagely punched in the temple.

The glancing impact of the bullet spun her around and she staggered, too shocked in that moment to duck down out of the sniper's line of fire. Something tangled with her feet, sending her crashing heavily to the ground and, though blood was pooling into her eyes, making her vision blur, she had a clear, unobstructed view of black fur shimmering into human flesh.

"Alex..." she gasped.

"Stay down," he snapped, through teeth still more feline than human. Naked, he crawled on his hands and knees to Mulder's bathroom, returning with a damp towel that he pressed against the cut on Scully's head. It took all his self-control not to simply lick the wound clean. He doubted Scully would appreciate the gesture.

"Where's Fox?" he snarled.

Scully shook her head, confused. Why was Alex here if he wasn't with Mulder? And how and why had Mulder left the apartment alone?

"I don't know where Mulder is," Scully said, wincing as Alex cleaned her wound. "But I think that bullet was meant for him."

Alex growled, deep in his throat, and his features blurred for a moment as though he was warring with his instincts to simply race out of the apartment and wreck vengeance on the shooter.

"The shot could have come from anywhere," Scully pointed out quickly, sensing his urge for immediate vengeance. She understood and shared it, but it was more important that Alex helped her find Mulder. "By the time I get someone here to judge the angle and trajectory enough for us to pinpoint where the shot came from, the shooter's going to be long gone."

Alex shook himself and, somehow, regained control of his rippling features. When he looked at her again, his face was completely human except for the sheer bestiality of his feral smile.

"It doesn't matter," he purred. "He can wait.  I'll find him later ... in the 'nothing'."

"The what?"

"In his dreams," Alex clarified, with a vicious grin.  "He can run and he can hide but, eventually, he's going to have to sleep. And then I'll find him... in the 'nothing'."

Scully shivered. Although she didn't fully comprehend what Alex was saying, she'd lost the capacity to doubt the depths of his supernatural abilities. She'd experienced his ability to gate-crash dreams for herself. 

"Can you find *Mulder* in the 'nothing'?" she demanded urgently.

"He isn't sleeping," Alex replied, with an irritated shrug.  Then he sniffed the air.  "But I can follow his spoor anywhere."

"You can smell where he's gone?" 

"I can find my little Fox *anywhere*," he assured her, with a smirk that was a little too possessive to be truly comforting.

Scully opened her mouth to reply, but then her stomach lurched as Alex's form shimmered and liquefied, shrinking, darkening, changing, in a unbelievable swirl of mutating flesh. Her eyes barely had a chance to adjust to the almost sickeningly fast transformation, before the change was complete and, by the time she'd re-caught her breath, the only trace of Alex was a small black tail streaking out of the door.

BILL MULDER'S HOUSE

Bill Mulder opened the door and frowned with obvious distaste at his son's disheveled appearance. 

"Fox," he acknowledged, his tone curt.

Mulder flinched, knowing, as always, that his presence alone was enough to put that particular look of scorn on his father's face. Old hurt bubbled to the surface but he pushed it back down, unable to handle the feelings when his head was already pounding. He forced a sickly smile onto his face, and hated himself for doing it. For giving in, yet again, to the pointless desire for his father's approval when 36 years of experience had proven, conclusively, that his father was *never* going to find anything in him worthy of approval.

"Dad. What is it?"

Bill Mulder glanced over his son's shoulder, as though double-checking he hadn't been followed,  then stepped back and urged him inside. He locked the door firmly, then turned to meet Mulder's fever-bright eyes. 

Well-named, he thought, with distaste. Fox. Snoopy little Fox. Too damned smart for his own good. Too smart for *anyone's* good.

"It's... Its so clear now. Simple. It was so complicated then. The...the choices that needed to be made."

"What choices, Dad?"

/Wrong choices. Like the choice to keep you, instead of Samantha. The choice to keep the little Fox who was going to sniff around, rooting through the dirt, disturbing secrets that need to stay buried./

"You're a smart boy Fox. You're smarter than I ever was," he admitted grudgingly.

/Too damned smart/

"About what?" Mulder asked, confused yet clearly suspicious.

Seeing that suspicion, Bill drew back a bit. He decided to throw Fox a few bones to gnaw on, enough to make the boy relax. It didn't matter what he admitted now. It wasn't as though Fox was going to be taking the knowledge anywhere. And a little truth would soften Fox up, would make him trusting enough to walk into the snare by himself.

"Your politics are yours, you've never thrown in. The minute you do that, their doctrines become yours and you can be held responsible."

"You're talking about your work in the state department?"

Bill nodded. "You're going to learn of things.  Fox, you're going to hear the words and they'll come to make sense to you."

"What words?" Fox demanded.

"The merchandise..." Bill replied, only to flinch at the look of enraptured attention on his son's face. He could practically see the thoughts whirling behind Fox's over bright eyes, the cogs and wheels of Fox's brain swirling into gear.

And, suddenly, he was too tired to play the game. Too heart-sick to face the inevitable accusations that would spew out of Fox's mouth. Earlier, he'd told himself he wanted the opportunity to justify his choices, a chance to validate his decisions even though he knew Fox would refuse to accept them. He'd wanted to at least say those reasons out loud...

But now the idea seemed childish, tiring, and perhaps even cruel.  Better Fox died in complete ignorance.

"Look," he said, rubbing his temples. " I... I've been taking some medication. You'll have to excuse me for a moment."

Fox unconsciously copied his gesture, rubbing his own aching forehead, as he nodded his understanding. He sank down on his father's couch, trying to clear his head.  Understanding, though hardly believing, that his father was finally going to give him some of the answers he'd been seeking for so long.  Wishing, fervently, that he didn't feel so damned disjointed and ill that he doubted he'd ever remember to ask all the right questions.

~#~#~#~

Sure-footed and swift, the black cat leapt from roof-top to roof-top, pausing only occasionally to sniff the air and twitch its whiskers to catch the illusive scent of its prey.

It crept through guttering, trotted blithely along fences so narrow that barely a claw-width of its pads made contact with the wood, raced fearlessly across busy intersections, its tiny frame darting between the wheels of cars.

It slipped through alleyways, scrambled over garbage, crawled under chain-link fences, powered itself over impossibly high walls.

In minutes it cut across the city, unhindered by anything natural or man-made, its path almost as direct as the flight of a bird. 

Unerringly, it found its quarry, in a small, detached suburban house.

And, though it was limping badly on pads scraped raw over roof-tiles and broken paving, its little cat mouth was stretched too wide in a smirk of satisfaction for it to be aware of its minor injuries.  It circled the house, looking for entrance, and found a high window that was propped open.

A tiny window. Little more than a vent.

More than large enough for a cat.

It leaped, its body gliding through the air, and it flowed silently through the tiny gap. Its tiny, bleeding feet slipped a little as it landed on the tiled floor of a bathroom, just a fraction of a second before the bathroom door began to open, but it corrected its balance and instinctively leapt again. Moving like a streak of black lightning, it dove into the bathtub and crept behind the cover of the shower-curtain.

Then it finally allowed itself to catch its breath as it idly licked its sore paws.

~#~#~#~

Bill frowned uncertainly. As he'd opened the door a black shadow had seemed to flow at the periphery of his vision.  Yet the bathroom was clearly vacant. He glanced up at the window over the toilet, then shook his head. Although it was possible that a bird could have come through the tiny opening, the creature would be flapping around the room in a blind-panic.  So he'd imagined the black shadow.

Guilt, he decided.  Just guilt.

He shook himself angrily and stepped over to the medicine cabinet.  He hesitated, listening carefully for any sound in the hallway. Then, satisfied that Fox was still in the living room, he reached into the cabinet, removed several bottles of pills, and retrieved the loaded gun he'd secreted behind the medicine.

He disengaged the safety, then closed the bathroom door and regarded his reflection for a moment.

The reflection of a man who was about to kill his son.

Except...

Well, even *that* wasn't strictly true, was it?

He closed his eyes, steadied his breath, and firmed his resolve. No one knew Fox was here. He'd have plenty of time to arrange for the disposal of the body before anyone even thought of knocking on his door. He'd never have a better opportunity. And time was running out.

Decision made, he opened his eyes and his mouth dropped open.

He was too terrified to even scream. All he could manage was a petrified whimper, as he stared into the mirror and saw the reflection of a thousand, gut-wrenching nightmares.

They'd come to get him.

Like he'd always known they would.

Fox had opened Pandora's box and now all the secrets had flown out.

They were standing in his bathroom.

Hundreds of them. Crowding him against the sink, Their rotting, tortured arms pointing at him in accusation, their putrid, gray flesh hanging in tatters off their skeletal bodies, their teeth snapping hungrily in oversized, skull-like heads.  And where their eyes should be, a thousand, slimy insects crawled through accusing sockets. Bugs and maggots, spilling down their faces, crawling over the floor towards his feet, as eager to devour his flesh as the zombiefied corpses that were crushing against him.

The dead had come to claim him for their own and even in his terror and despair, he couldn't find it in himself to deny their claim.

He'd always known they were waiting for him. That no matter how many people he killed to protect his secrets, eventually he was going to have to face the judgment of his victims.

In a moment of sudden clarity, he understood that if he killed his son then Fox would join this clamoring horde. That Fox would survive forever in his nightmares. That he would never, ever, escape from Fox's vengeance.

And, in that moment, he understood the only possible course of action.

He turned the gun against his own head and pulled the trigger.

~#~#~#~

As the noise of the shot reverberated in the tiny room, the cat flattened its ears against its head and thumped its tail furiously against the floor of the bath. Its nose was still twitching in distaste at the scene it had witnessed though, at some level, it understood that *it* had been responsible for the manifestation of Bill Mulder's worst nightmare and it felt a little uncomfortable about its part in releasing the cesspool of images that had been locked in the man's subconscious.

Its fury, on the other hand, wasn't tempered by any feeling of guilt.  

Bill Mulder had intended to kill his Fox.

Bill Mulder was, therefore, dead.

The cat leapt delicately out of the bathtub, paused long enough to spit contemptuously at what was left of the bastard's face, then powered its body out of the tiny window a fraction of a second before Fox burst through the door.

Although, in this form, it wasn't truly capable of complex emotions, the cat was still distracted enough by Fox's wail of horror that it almost got itself run over as it raced away from the house.

With Fox's howls of "Dad? Dad. Dad." resounding in its ears, it failed to see the car until a screech of tires warned it to leap for the safety of the sidewalk.

Heart thumping, it skidded to a halt in the middle of a neighbors lawn and briefly paused to wash itself. Then, composure restored, it stalked off into the approaching dusk.

~#~#~#~

SCULLY'S APARTMENT

As her phone rang, Scully hesitated momentarily before picking up.

Although she'd been pacing up and down her living room in increasing agitation as the day turned into night and neither Mulder nor Alex had yet contacted her,  she was aware that the call could just as likely be from Skinner, demanding to know why she hadn't returned to the Hoover to give her statement regarding Mulder's recent behavior.  She didn't want to talk to Skinner before she'd spoken to Mulder, but then she couldn't talk to Mulder if she refused to answer her phone...

She snatched the cell phone.  "Hello?"

"My father's dead, Scully."

She sank heavily into a chair, her heart thumping wildly.

"Where are you?" she asked carefully, keeping her tone professional, knowing from the sound of Mulder's voice that he was teetering on the edge and any emotional reaction from herself might push him over.

"They shot him and he's dead."

Scully closed her eyes for a moment. Mulder sounded like a scared little boy. She wondered whether he was going into shock. "Mulder where are you.? Just tell me where you are," she insisted firmly.

"My Dad's house."

Scully jumped to her feet, grabbed her coat and purse, and started rooting through her medical bag as they talked. 

"Who shot him Mulder?"

"I don't know," Mulder whimpered. "I think...I think he... oh, God, Scully. I think he killed himself."

Scully's gut clenched. 

"Mulder, listen to me. Stay there. I'm coming over. There's nothing to worry about. If he shot himself, there'll be evidence he pulled the trigger himself. Don't touch him. Don't move him. I'm on my way."

"It's too late," Mulder sobbed. "I...I picked him up. I carried him into the living room. He's... oh, God, his blood's all over me..."

"It's okay," she soothed. "There will still be gunpowder residue on his hand. You won't have contaminated all the evidence. We can sort this out. It'll just take a little longer. Let me call Skinner..."

"No," Mulder yelped. "You can't trust him. He wants Alex. He...he..."

Scully winced as a wail of anguish screamed out of her cell phone.

"What if there isn't a bullet?" Mulder demanded. "What if...if...oh shit, Scully. What if ALEX did this? He doesn't want me anymore, does he? He hates me now. He's with Skinner. Maybe he...he..."

"Mulder," she snapped. "Try and pull yourself together. Alex *doesn't* hate you. He was at your apartment this afternoon. He's trying to look for you right now. He's worried sick about you."

"He is?" Mulder whispered. Then his voice rose. "I'm going home. I need to find Alex."

"No, you shouldn't leave the scene and, anyway, you can't go home. Someone shot through your window tonight, they almost killed me, they might be trying to kill you."

BILL MULDER'S HOUSE

"I need to run some tests back at the lab,"  Leroy said, "but, all in all, I'd stake my rep that this was a straightforward suicide. Your partner's lucky."

Scully narrowed her eyes at the crime scene investigator and pugnaciously planted her hands on her hips. "What the hell do you mean 'lucky'?"

Leroy shrugged. "Look, I know his dad just died and he was in shock, but I gotta say he couldn't have fucked up the crime scene much more if he'd *tried* to. He's lucky because, one, despite all the blood on his sweatshirt it's all clearly smears rather than splatter. Not one drop of blood suggests he was in the bathroom at the time of the shooting. Two, he's also lucky that he managed to pick his father up without transferring any powder residue onto his skin."

"So the swabs of Mulder's hands came up clean?" Scully asked, as though she needed reassurance.

"I've got to do the lab work but I'm already 99% certain that he didn't fire the weapon. The only way he could have killed his father is if he stood there and forced the old man to pull the trigger and, like I said, there's absolutely no evidence that he was in the room."

"So I can take him home?"

"Well, you'd better check with Detective Sandoval, but, yeah, I don't see why not. As far as I'm concerned, he's in the clear." 

~#~#~#~

SCULLY'S APARTMENT

It took more strength than she'd even realized she possessed to get Mulder out of her car and into her apartment.  He was listing badly on his feet, he was barely capable of putting one foot in front of the other, and, rather than being cold and shocky, he was burning up.

She managed, through sheer force of will, to manhandle him into her bedroom.

"Hey, I'm not that kind of guy," he quipped weakly, as she pushed him towards the bed.

"Look at you. You're sick."

"I'm okay," Mulder insisted, trying to pull away.

"No come on, I want you to lie down on...." She grabbed at him desperately, as his knees began to buckle. "Whoa, come on. I want you to lie down, let me take your coat off."

He sagged onto the bed, losing the energy to argue any longer, and allowed her to remove his coat and shoes. She pushed him until he lay down, then pulled up a sheet and tucked it tenderly around his shoulders. "Try and get some sleep."

"You gotta find them, Scully," Mulder pleaded, though he was already clearly struggling to stay awake.

"Find who?"

"We gotta find out who shot at you and killed my father."

"Mulder, your father committed suicide," she said, as gently as it was possible to say such a thing.

He shook his head fretfully. "No...no...someone killed him, Scully...I know they did."

Scully bit her lower lip and frowned.

"Right now you need to rest, okay. Just rest, Mulder. It's okay."

She waited with him until he slipped into a fitful sleep, then cursed herself for not thinking to take a blood sample while he was still awake. Even allowing for Mulder's obvious and understandable distress over his father's suicide, his feverish ranting was clearly due to something more serious than 'flu'. 

Scully used a digital thermometer to check Mulder's temperature.

102.

Nothing to call the ER over, but neither was it something she could casually dismiss.

She wasn't prepared to risk waking him, after it had taken so long to get him to sleep, but she decided that if he wasn't looking and feeling better the next morning, she was going to take a blood sample, whether he liked it or not, and find out exactly what was wrong with him.

She wished she had listened harder to Alex, when he'd told her Mulder was *wrong*.

It was becoming obvious that Alex hadn't been. 

THE 'NOTHING'

Like a cobweb, the threads were spun in intersecting, concentric circles, each strand connecting another consciousness into an ever-expanding net.

A net in which he'd trap his prey.

Circles within circles, lives overlapping lives, the threads ranged from gossamer-fine wisps that indicated little more than a friendly nod exchanged in a subway car to thick twisted ropes, gnarled and knotted like old tree trunks, suggestive of close, long-term associations.

He slipped along the strands, gliding over their silken surface, pausing now and then to poke and prod into the secrets each branching thread revealed.

Some of his snooping was necessary gathering of relevant information.

A fair portion of it was sheer curiosity.

He enjoyed knowing his Fox better than Fox knew himself.  It seemed fitting, somehow, that he should own his pet's deepest, darkest secrets. He would treasure them, as he treasured his Fox.

He paused once or twice, driven to enact some act of vengeance against acts long buried.

A woman, Phoebe, who had once held Fox's affection, yet had stupidly abused his love and trust.

Alex visited her dreams in the form of a huge boa constrictor and proceeded to devour her from the feet upwards. Of course, if the stupid bitch had known anything about snakes, she wouldn't have been so damned terrified. Boa constrictors always swallowed their prey head-first.  But he hadn't wanted to deprive himself of the pleasure of hearing her scream. Besides, she probably would have suffocated if he'd swallowed her head. Dying in the nothing meant dying in real life. And he'd only wanted to torture the bitch, rather than kill her.

It was much more fun to keep toys available for future torments.

He paid a little visit to the cigarette smoking man. He was damned certain he was an enemy of Fox so he always liked popping into his head and playing with him a little. He was pretty sure the day would come that he'd end up killing the bastard, but he was trying to put it off as long as possible. As many times as the smoker had harmed Fox, so he'd also protected him.  So there was a possibility Alex would come to regret killing him.

Anyway, the smoker was one of his most entertaining toys.  Once, the smoker's favorite dreams had been to become a famous author.  These days, it was his worst nightmare.  Alex always jumped in, at the moment the smoker was being handed the Booker prize, wearing the ghostly form of JFK.  He'd jump up on the podium, with half his brain showing through a hole in his skull, and start listing the smoker's many sins in front of the flashing camera lights of half the world's press. It was strange how a man without any conscience could be so terrified by nothing more than the fear of having his innermost secrets revealed in public.

Alex found and followed an old thread, worn almost transparent with time, and found a teacher who had once cruelly accused Fox of cheating in a test. Just an ignorant, conceited little shit who'd found it impossible to accept that the six-year-old Fox had been smart enough to make the test he'd set seem too childish. A tiny incident, yet one that must have wounded Fox deeply for the thread to remain over thirty years later.

Alex dropped into the teacher's dream. The old man was rowing down a river, his two grandchildren fishing from the stern of the boat.  Alex stole one of Fox's other memories and it was Big Blue who rammed and capsized the boat, tipping all three occupants into the water.  Bored already, he flipped onto the next thread, not even registering the old man's screams that he couldn't swim, and...

...stumbled unexpectedly on John Doggett.

Who was....ooooh....  dreaming of Dana Scully.

Alex 's plan to track down the person who had tried to shoot Fox got temporarily shelved while he snuck into Doggett's dream and hovered in the shadows of the fantasy waiting for the entertainment to begin. Only to decide that Doggett obviously believed he was so inept at seduction that he'd have more luck with a blow-up doll than a hot chick like Scully. It seemed that Doggett couldn't even get his leg over in his own fucking dream.

Sad git.

Alex decided to help Doggett out.  He erased the dream Scully and dropped into her place. 

Naturally, he made a few cosmetic adjustments to help the dreaming Doggett overcome his natural shyness. He altered Dana's chest into a D-cup, added six inches to her legs (so they looked better in the thigh-length leather boots), gave her waist-length hair, inch-long scarlet nails, and provided a few good props like a bull-whip, a strap-on dildo and a cock-ring.

It took him a few minutes of 'persuasion' to get Doggett into the swing of things then, when he'd gotten Doggett down on his hands and knees, begging Scully to take him, he stepped back out of the dream and let Doggett's imagination take over again. He was amused that the dream Scully who immediately replaced him was back to her normal dimensions, but that the strap-on she was wearing was now twice the size.

He was tempted to drop into Scully's head and see if he could get her on the same wavelength. He enjoyed a bit of match-making now and then.

But he was wasting time....

He still had a would be assassin to track down and kill before dawn.

MULDER'S APARTMENT

She'd dropped off a sample with a friend at Georgetown University hospital, and a second one at the FBI  lab, just on the off-chance that Mulder's symptoms were due to a foreign substance rather than an illness (since she'd long since given up believing in mundane explanations for any apparent health-issues Mulder suffered) and had decided to spend the time waiting for the results more usefully than flipping through old magazines in a waiting room.  So she drove to Hegal Place, let herself into number 42, and carefully dug the bullet that had clipped her forehead out of the wall it had buried itself in.

Dropping the slug into an evidence bag, she cautiously approached the window and examined the hole left by the bullet's entrance.  Then she gazed out of the window, trying to imagine where the bullet had been fired from, and trying not to wonder what Alex had done to the shooter when he'd found him.

It never occurred to her to doubt he *had* found him.

She imagined that being hunted by Alex would feel like being targeted by a Terminator.

A line from the movie echoed in her head. "He cannot be stopped. He cannot be reasoned with. And he absolutely will not stop until you are dead."

She imagined that anyone threatening Mulder's life had best have fully paid-up life policies.

As an FBI Agent, she should have been horrified by the thought. Instead, she found it oddly comforting. Besides, Alex was like a force of nature. Trying to stop him doing what he wanted to do was as pointless and potentially fatal as jumping in the path of a tornado.

So, if Hurricane Alex had struck Mulder's would-be assassin last night, Scully was prepared to put the subject's demise down to an Act of God.

That decided, she headed for the door and walked to the elevator.  After waiting so long for it to arrive that she began seriously considering taking the stairs, despite her heels, the elevator doors swung open. Just as her cell-phone rang.

Swearing under her breath, she stepped back and allowed the door to close, then answered the call.

"Scully," she snapped.

"It's Daniel Simmons...um...from the toxicology sub-unit."

"You found something?" she demanded.

"Lot's of somethings," Simmons responded, his voice bright with enthusiasm. 

"Specifically?" Dana snapped.

"Well, first of all, your boy is so chock-full of LSD it's surprising he's not flapping his arms on top of a building in the belief he has wings."

"LSD?"

"Oh, yes. He's tripping so hard I doubt he's even on the same planet as us, at the moment. Though hallucinations aren't really the issue here. Truth is, with this much LSD in his blood stream he ought to be dead. Except..."

"Except what?

"Well, the main symptoms of LSD is that it dramatically increases the body's production of seratonin and dopamine. That's what causes the hallucinations. But this blood sample shows an abnormally *low* level of seratonin. It doesn't make any sense."

"You think the reduction in his seratonin level is what's keeping him alive?"

"It's certainly preventing him from falling into a hallucinogen persisting perception disorder. But, since I can't imagine *why* his seratonin levels are depleted, I can't explain why he's still functioning with any level of reality whatsoever."

Scully thanked him, and hung up.

She was pretty certain of why Mulder's seratonin levels were being depleted, even if she didn't understand the actual *how*.  Mulder was 'sleeping' with a man who suffered from severe seratonin deficiency.  A man capable of changing himself into a cat. A man who could invade other people's dreams. A man, in short, who was as supernatural a being as any creature of legend.  It wasn't much of a leap to conclude that Alex had the ability to take the seratonin he needed from another living being.

Alex was, in effect, extracting seratonin from his lover in the same way as a legendary vampire drank its lover's blood.

The difference, as far as Scully could see, was that stealing Mulder's blood would have put his life at risk.  While stealing his seratonin had apparently saved Mulder's life.

She dialed Skinner.

"Sir? It's Scully. Yes, he's at my place. His father died yesterday. Suicide....yes, of course I will. I'm sure he'll appreciate your concern....That's what I'm calling about.  I've found the explanation for Mulder's behavior. Someone's been drugging him. The toxicology unit have a sample of his bloodwork. He's pumped full of LSD...Yes...That was my first thought, too. Can you have a forensics team sent over to his apartment?... Because I just remembered a couple of things.  Mulder's fish all died a couple of days ago. No, Sir, he *didn't" forget to feed them. But he *did* change the water in the tank. And there was an unexplained murder here last week. One of his neighbors went crazy. So I'm thinking that the contamination is in the building's water supply."

SCULLY'S APARTMENT

Scully stared sadly at the man curled up in her bed. He looked so defenseless asleep and yet curiously at peace, despite the still feverish heat radiating off his brow. She hated to wake him up, but he was badly dehydrated. So she shook his shoulder gently, until he groaned and flickered his eyes open.

"Mulder, Mulder it's me. Here drink some of this."

Mulder took a gulp, then choked and pulled a face. "Gatorade?" he whined.

"Be a good boy, drink it up, and I'll get you some iced tea."

"I'd rather have coffee."

"Not a chance. You're not touching caffeine until the acid's out of your system."

"What acid?"

"Lysergic acid diethylamide. More commonly known as L.S.D.  You're so high you're apparently in orbit, Mulder."

"I don't take drugs, and I don't feel high. I just feel sick," Mulder groaned.

"Thanks to Alex."

"Alex drugged me?" Mulder spluttered, sitting up in bed so fast that he nearly spilt his drink.

Scully chuckled, and took advantage of Mulder's sitting position to take his temperature. "Alex is the reason you aren't tripping," she corrected. "!01. That's better."

"So who drugged me?"

"I don't know who, but I do know *how*. See this?" she dangled something in front of his face.

"What is it?"

"It's a dialysis filter. It's a device used in the transmission of substance to solution, considering the level of psychosis you were experiencing, it was probably LSD, amphetamines of some kind of exotic dopamine agonist. We found it in your building's water supply."

"Oh my God. There was a murder in my building." Mulder gasped. Then frowned and bit his lower lip. "And my fish..."

"Well it wasn't an exercise in subtlety. Mulder, these men are quite possibly the same ones who tried to shoot you.  I think they systematically tried to destroy you by turning everyone you could trust against you. I don't think I have to tell you why."

"I'd gotten too close to the truth," he agreed.  "How many people have I pissed off?"

"Do you remember punching AD Skinner?"

"Oh, god," Mulder groaned, burying his head in his arms. 

"Because you thought he was having an affair with Alex?" she couldn't resist adding, since watching Mulder squirm was such a rare pleasure that it had to be drawn out and savored.

"I didn't," Mulder moaned, his eyes panicked. "Tell me I didn't betray Alex."

She felt immediately guilty and rushed to reassure him. "It's okay, you didn't give Alex away to anyone. You only told *me* why you attacked Skinner. And, now it's obvious that you were under the influence of drugs, they've dropped the hearing into your behavior. You've been fully exonerated."

"Where's Alex?"

"I haven't seen him since yesterday. I thought he was looking for you, but maybe he just couldn't resist going after the shooter immediately. He was definitely pissed that someone tried to shoot you."

Mulder reached out and caressed the scab on her forehead. "They nearly killed *you*, Scully," he pointed out.

"I know," she laughed, "but I don't think my safety is one of Alex's main priorities."

"You're important to him," he corrected, "because you're important to *me*."

She hid a smile at his typical unconscious arrogance, and nodded her agreement.

"What did you mean when you said Alex was the reason I wasn't tripping?" Mulder demanded suddenly.

"You had enough LSD in your blood stream to refloat the Titanic. It seems that although you experienced *some* of the paranoia and hallucinations that would be expected from extended acid usage, you were far less affected than other people in your building with far lower dosages.  You developed a high fever, almost like an allergic reaction to the drug. Unfortunately that made you drink more, as though your body was trying to flush the drug out, except the water supply was contaminated so it became a vicious circle. The drug takes about 12 hours to clear through your system. Staying here last night was long enough for you to regain lucidity and it's obvious that you're almost 100% again now."

"You haven't explained what Alex had to do with it."

Scully squirmed awkwardly. "Did you...um...did you realize Alex was extracting your seratonin?"

"WHAT?"

"Well, it isn't necessarily deliberately. It could just be a side-effect of the way you...um...exchange bodily fluids."

"Is it harming me?"

"I wouldn't say so. Your body is fully capable of replenishing the seratonin he takes. And, since LSD dangerously increases seratonin, the fact that he was extracting it as fast as you were producing it is probably the only reason you survived. Come to think of it, it's probably the reason you settled for punching Skinner instead of shooting him. You retained a surprising grasp of reality, despite the drug."

"Thank god for Alex then."

"Amen," Scully muttered.

"So does that mean you approve of our relationship now?" he teased.

She was glad to see a smile on his face. "He's growing on me," she admitted. "Slowly," she warned, when his smile threatened to transform into a smirk. "I'll fetch you that iced tea."

When she returned, his smile had faded again and he looked lost and impossibly young once more.

"Scully?"

"Yeah?"

"Is my dad *really* dead?"

Scully blinked furiously to prevent tears escaping as she reached for his hands and held them tightly. "I'm sorry, Mulder."

He stared at her, wide-eyed and disbelieving, then a sob rose in his throat and escaped like a harsh bark.

"I'm so sorry," she repeated.

She saw him struggling to retain his composure, saw his monumental effort to rein in his emotions but, like a wall crumbling, his expression sagged into a mask of grief and he turned away from her, pulling his hands out of her grasp, and burrowed his face into the pillow to drown his tears.

~#~#~#~

She didn't hear him enter.

She was flicking through the TV stations trying, but failing, to find something that would catch her interest. Anything that would take her mind off the grieving man in her bedroom.

She nearly jumped out of her skin when a file dropped into her lap from over her shoulder. She leapt to her feet, almost tripping over her coffee table, and spun around to meet a pair of amused, emerald eyes. Taking a couple of deep breaths to regain her composure, she wrinkled her nose in an expression of disgust.

"Didn't your mother ever tell you it's impolite to sneak into a lady's apartment buck naked?" she sniffed.

"I didn't," Alex purred. "I snuck in wearing a nice fur coat. Only, since you don't speak 'cat' I thought it was appropriate to get changed."

"Know what I think?" Scully retorted. "I think you're *perfectly* capable of morphing into a 'clothed' human form. You just *enjoy* prancing around naked."

"Oh?" Alex said, his eyes twinkling. "And how did you come to that scientific conclusion, Dr. Scully?"

Averting her eyes from the considerable distraction of his cock, she reached down and picked up the file. She examined it carefully, then waved it in his face like exhibit no.1.

"No teeth marks," she said, with a triumphant smirk. "You didn't carry it in your mouth. So somehow you brought it with you, despite being in cat form. And if you can bring a file, you can bring clothes."

"Shit," Alex groaned, his face falling. "Don't tell Fox, okay?"

She continued to glare at him for a moment, then her lips twitched. "There's a robe on the back of the bathroom door. Put it on. It's one thing to ask me to turn a blind eye to the kinky games you play with Mulder, it's another thing entirely for you to expect me to concentrate with *that* in my line of vision."

Alex snorted, and glided noiselessly to retrieve the robe while Scully began flicking through the file.

"Where did you get this?" she demanded.

"I retrieved it last night after paying a little visit to the man who'd stolen it."

"I gave this to a woman at the Offices of the Navajo Nation."

"Tahnazbah Begay," Alex agreed tonelessly. "Deceased."

"WHAT?"

"He killed her and stole the file. Then he tried to shoot Fox."

"You found the shooter? Did you kill him?" Scully asked, still reeling from the news of the young woman's murder.

"Let's just say, he had an interesting dream.," Alex purred. "Oh, and I also found *this* at his apartment. It *felt* important, although I don't know what it is."

Out of nowhere, he produced a twin of the dialysis filter she'd retrieved from Mulder's building.

Scully quickly filled him in on the details of why Mulder had been *wrong* and although her spine was shivering at his palpable rage as he heard how close Mulder had come to dying, she was enormously relieved that he was completely stunned to hear he had been somehow 'stealing' seratonin from Mulder's body.

"Maybe *that's* why it always feels so good," he said weakly, looking crest-fallen at the idea that his response to Mulder was chemical rather than emotional.

Scully frowned. She already had *one* man in her apartment feeling sorry for himself. She didn't feel up to dealing with two.

"It feels *good* because you two fuck like a pair of rampant bunnies," she snapped impatiently.  "So, what are we going to do next?" Scully continued, enjoying the way Alex's mouth had dropped open in shock. "Tahnazbah was going to put me in touch with a Navajo Code Talker, but I don't know his name or where to start looking for him now."

"His name's Albert Hosteen, and he's in Farmington, New Mexico," Alex announced, his composure restored somewhat by his satisfaction in being able to supply the answer.

"How do you know?"

"Because his name was on a bullet."

Scully decided he meant figuratively. Obviously the man who had killed Tahnazbah had extracted the information from her before killing her.

"How did she die?" she demanded, needing to know the fate of the woman she had inadvertently sentenced to death.

"Quicker than her killer did," Alex snapped, his expression feral.

Which was enough to convince Scully she didn't need a better explanation.

"Here," Alex said, inexplicably producing yet *another* thing from the folds of 'her' bathrobe.

She stared at the plastic card and blinked her incomprehension.

"What the hell's this?" she demanded.

"Suite at the Intercontinental," Alex purred. "You'll like it there. We'll pick you up in the morning on the way to the airport."

"You expect me to leave my own apartment, and stay the night in an hotel just because..."

"Because I'm planning on fucking Fox like a rampant bunny as you so nicely put it," Alex sniggered. "Or, if you want to think of it another way, I want to extract a bit more of his seratonin, just to be on the safe side. Can't have Fox trying to fly down to New Mexico without a plane."

"The LSD is almost completely purged out of his system," Scully countered.

"Better safe than sorry. Well, there's the keycard. It's up to you whether you use it or stay here on the couch. But don't expect to get much rest. I don't need sleep and Fox is a screamer."

Scully blushed furiously. "TMI," she spat, reaching for her coat and purse. "I'm not going to forget this, Alex Krycek."

"You definitely won't if you stay," Alex said, with a complacent grin.

Scully glared at him, opened her mouth to utter a withering reply, decided words just wouldn't do the situation justice, and stormed out of her apartment, slamming the front door loudly behind her.

TBC