Mulder didn't say anything until he was fully in the
room. "You're just in time. I was thinking of ordering one of
these."
Alex handed him the phone, pushing him over on the
couch to make room to sit down.
"You're supposed to be stopping me. Neither of us can
iron worth a damn."
"I iron wonderfully. I just choose not to."
Mulder shook his head, dropping the phone on the
coffee table. "When I think of what we could be saving on
dry-cleaning bills—"
"Don't get any ideas. I'm not turning into June Cleaver."
Mulder leaned over and kissed Alex on the neck. "You
look lovely today, Mrs. Cleaver." Alex smiled at him. "I'm
sorry I woke you up."
"It wasn't you, it was the bed."
"The bed?"
"Uh-huh." Alex lay down in front of Mulder on the
couch, pulling one of Mulder's arms around his waist. "I was
hot. I'm not used to waking up in the middle of the night and
actually having any of the covers. Or a pillow, for that
matter."
"I do not steal all of the covers."
"Not anymore, but you used to."
"Alex—"
"I'm not nagging. This isn't a criticism, and I know it's
only been four weeks since she died, and I know how
difficult it's been for you—but I need my lover back. If not
now, then eventually, I need to know that I'm going to wake
up in the middle of the night freezing to death because
you've taken all the blankets again." Alex pulled his arms
tighter around him. "And if you have to sleep on this couch
for a while, I want to be here with you."
"I don't want to—"
"What? Be with me?"
"I don't want to burden you."
Alex snorted. "I hate to break this to you, Fox, but
being in love with you hasn't exactly been a walk in the park
before now. I don't think there's any possible thing you
could do that would either surprise me or push me away."
Hazel eyes narrowed at him. "Really?"
"That wasn't an invitation to try."
"Damn." He snuggled closer around Alex. "I love this
part," he said, nodding at the tv, "it's where they show you
how you can save thousands of dollars by hand-washing all
of your Italian wool suits and ironing them without a shine—"
"Are you okay?"
Walter Skinner was peeking around the corner of the
bathroom door, to where his wife was unceremoniously
perched by the toilet. The morning sickness, while never
actually striking her in the morning, had not lessened at all
once they'd learned what it really was.
"You can come in."
He shook his head. "The last time I tried that, you
threw a shampoo bottle at me." He grinned, "I appreciated
your sense of irony, if not your aim."
Dana wrinkled her nose. "Don't make a nauseous
woman laugh. It's cruel."
He came in and wet a washcloth in the sink, kneeling
down and wiping her brow with it. "Are you feeling at all
better?"
"I think I'll live," she said, dryly, then, after a moment
added, "dammit."
"Can you get up, or don't you want to risk it?"
She nodded, and held out her hand. "The walk in here
is practically the only exercise I'm getting."
"You're not going back to work until the doctor says
you're okay."
"I'm fine, Walter," she said, leaning heavily against
him. "I'm just pregnant, that's all. It happens all the time."
She smiled wearily. "My mother always promised me that
when I had children I'd pay for how rough she had it with us.
I guess she was right."
"So this runs in the family, then?"
She nodded. "I remember eavesdropping on her
trading pregnancy stories with my aunts. Whoever had the
most gruesome one won. I'd always assumed she was
making it up." She crawled back into bed, closing her eyes
for a moment. "I think a new champion is about to be
crowned."
"I'm sure she'll be very proud."
"It's the least that I could do."
"Well, just don't push it too far. I would think that you've
got the title well in hand by now." He sat down on the
opposite side of the bed. Dana's eyes were closed, and
she'd fallen asleep. He smiled, thankful that she was able to
have a little respite from her misery. Leaning over, he
whispered to the barely-there bulge in his wife's stomach,
"Give her a break, okay, Melissa? Let her sleep a little while
today. If you do, I'll get you a pony when you're six. Deal?"
Alex was watching Mulder stare at the wall of their office.
He'd been doing it—Alex and Mulder—for forty-five
minutes, chewing sunflower seeds and a pencil,
respectively, neither of them moving except to pick up
another seed and crack it, or shift the pencil.
Finally Alex put the pencil down and said, "You win."
Mulder looked at him as if he was only now realizing he
wasn't in the room alone. "What?"
"You win. The contest." Alex came over and perched
on Mulder's desk, thrusting his hand into the sunflower seed
bag. "I assumed we were having a contest." He popped a
few seeds in his mouth.
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"To see which one of us would drive each other insane
first. I give in. You won."
Mulder's eyes shifted at his partner, and he leaned
back in his chair. "What did I win?"
"The right to pick out my shrink." He paused, then
added, "no hypnosis, though. I just want someone who'll sit
me down on a nice couch and ask me about my mother."
Mulder laughed. "You're right, you are crazy."
"You've been staring at the wall for almost an hour,
and I'm crazy." His hand went back into the sunflower
seed bag. "Are you sure these haven't been treated with
anything?"
"I was thinking."
Alex made a show of being shocked, and Mulder
grimaced at him. "I assumed that. Thinking about what?"
"Life." Pause. "Death."
"Aliens?"
Mulder raised an eyebrow.
"Last time I looked, that's what we were paid to think
about." Alex picked up the folder that was opened on
Mulder's desk. "Apparently there's a beauty of one in
Wisconsin right now, tipping cows over."
Mulder groaned. "A bunch of college kids get drunk
and pull a stunt that drunk college kids have been pulling
since college was invented, and all of a sudden it's an
X-File? I'm offended."
Alex picked up another file. "Vampires in Los
Angeles?"
Mulder rolled his eyes. "Is anyone in Los Angeles not
a vampire?"
"You know, I think you're getting cynical, Mulder."
"I was born cynical."
"So tell me what you were thinking about. Tell me what
you want for lunch. Tell me to get off your desk. Tell me
something."
"Something."
Alex made a move to get off the desk, but Mulder
stopped him, wrapping his hands around his waist and
burying his face against Alex's stomach. "Sorry," was
muffled into his shirt. "Bad joke."
Alex sighed. "You're forgiven." He was about to lean
over and kiss Mulder on the top of the head when a cell
phone rang.
Mulder didn't miss a beat as he pulled the phone out of
his suit pocket. "Mulder."
Alex could hear the other person talking, but couldn't
make out what was said. Mulder was saying very little.
"Where? Okay, yeah. Twenty minutes."
When he was finished, Alex asked, "Who was that?"
"Frohicke. There may be something more to the
cow-case than we thought. You want to come?"
Alex shook his head. "Nah. You go ahead. I've got a
couple of calls to make, anyway." He smiled. "Don't eat too
many cheese steaks, okay?"
Mulder smiled. "Deal."
Alex gave Mulder a three-minute head start, before
opening his desk drawer and removing his back-up weapon
and sliding it into his ankle holster. As he pulled on his
overcoat he muttered, "Frohicke, my ass. Only if he's had
a sex-change."
The garage was damp and dark, several of the lights burned
out around the rendezvous point. Mulder had to drive like a
maniac just to make the appointment anywhere near the
time he'd been given by the contact on the phone.
Something about her voice had made him take her seriously
from her first words, and although it went against the
nagging voice of reason in his head, had made him lie to
Alex about what was going on. He sighed. Old patterns
were damn hard to break sometimes.
Anonymous tips were second nature to Mulder, so
much so that he could almost by rote tell the fake ones from
the 'truth'. But this one—while so compelling, had drawn him
in simply with her final word—"Believe".
"Dammit." It probably was a coincidence, it probably
didn't mean anything. Either that or you're going to get your
head blown off, and some teenagers are going to find you,
your picture plastered all over tomorrow's headlines—'FBI
Agent Gunned Down Like Idiot' -
A faint noise to one side made him stop, his hand
clenched reflexively around his gun. A whiff of a familiar
odour struck him, suddenly. "Oh, my god..." He pointed his
weapon towards the noise, and squinted his eyes, trying to
see in the darkness. A tiny flicker of red, a little glowing
circle in the dark, made him release the safety. "Come out
here, you bastard!"
"This isn't what you think—"
The voice was wrong, but Mulder was reacting too fast.
He rushed towards the figure, his brain sending thoughts
sluggishly, too short, too young, not him. But he was
fixated on the cigarette and struck at the man in the
darkness. "Who are you?" he demanded of the man, never
taking his finger off the trigger of his gun.
A cool familiar feeling struck at the back of Mulder's
head, accompanied by a female voice directly behind him.
"Please don't make me have to pull this trigger."
"Funny, I was just going to say the same thing."
The gun at his head moved away, and he turned,
dragging the cigarette-smoking man along with him. Alex
stood there, training his gun on the woman. It was dark in
the garage, and her face was further obscured by the bill of a
baseball cap.
"Are you all right?" Alex asked, not lowering his gun.
Mulder nodded. "What took you so long?"
"I was practicing my 'How to Tail Your Lover and Still
Remain Mysterious' skills. I lost track of the time." He
nodded to the man Mulder still had by the back of his shirt
collar. "Maybe you should handcuff him."
"Ooh—kinky." Mulder leered at him and pulled out his
handcuffs, securing the man to one of the pillars in the
garage. "Now, if we could find out who his friend is—" He
reached over and pulled the hat off the woman Alex was still
holding at bay.
"Jesus Christ," Alex gasped.
"Not quite," she said, dryly. "Whatever this may look
like, it isn't the Second Coming."
Mulder had lost his voice entirely, and was staring
open-mouthed at a woman who was the mirror image of the
late Samantha Mulder.
It took them ten minutes to decide that staying in the
underground parking garage probably wasn't the safest
place for any of them, and another ten to figure out where to
go from there. Finally they jumped in the car and went to a
motel outside Alexandria where Mulder rented them a room
for the day.
Samantha—Mulder's mind could not stop calling her
that, even to himself—said nothing until they were safely
locked inside the room. Alex and he were communicating
almost telepathically, Alex still managing to hold himself
together reasonably well—well enough to keep his eyes and
gun hand fixed on the unknown cigarette-smoking man. He
was completely ordinary, about forty, medium height,
medium build, nothing distinguishing about him except for
the yellow-stained fingers that drummed nervously on the
tabletop. Mulder had loosed the handcuffs, but he'd taken
the cigarettes away from what looked like a three-pack-a-day
regular.
Mulder didn't know what to say, what to ask first, his
mind wouldn't slow down for him. Finally, he managed,
"You're one of them—the clones."
She nodded.
"Why did you call me?"
"You have to stop what you're doing."
He grinned. "They've been telling me that for years.
What makes you think that I'll listen now?"
"Because you had her. Or as close as you're going to
get. If you keep looking, then all you'll do is drag out further
hurt, for yourself, your mother—the rest of them. You have
to stop." She was quietly emphatic.
He shook his head. "Who are 'the rest'?" His voice
belied his disbelief of the entire situation.
It was her turn to smile—the same full-lipped, broad
smile that made Alex shiver when he'd first seen it on Beth.
"The other Samantha Mulders." She leaned back in her
chair. "You don't honestly believe that she and I were the
only two?"
Mulder said nothing.
"What do you want me to tell you? About 'our'
childhood? About our parents? About the vacations we
went on, about the dreams I used to have, about the men
who came around our house late at night?" She stilled
slightly, her eyes softening. "About the arguments that we
used to overhear? How they used to make me cry, and
you'd come and—"
"Stop it." His voice was hard, brittle. "You can't know
this. It's not possible."
"Oh, but it is. Implanted memories, brainwashing. It's
not as if any of us were someone else at some time. The
only thing that we have to remember was what they told us—
we were totally blank slates."
She continued on, for hours, telling increasingly
impossible-to-believe stories, dropping names of covert
government agencies easier than the Lone Gunman. A few
times, Alex thought of how those three would have loved to
be flies on the wall in this very room, soaking up all of the
knowledge that was being revealed. She told of growing up
on a farm, with the 'others'—other clones of Samantha, of
other people, all memories suppressed before the operations
were on the brink of discovery and she and the others were
shoved out into the unsuspecting world to fend for
themselves. She explained how her memories were once
again triggered by a chance meeting with 'herself' one day.
She talked, always in the same low, calm voice, almost as if
she was reciting a litany of a life that had happened to
someone else, instead of herself. It was too much to be
fake, to intense to be unreal. Alex knew that Mulder was
struggling to fight against her words.
"This is unbelievable."
She smiled at him. "Sometimes you just have to
believe in the unbelievable, Agent Mulder."
Even before he asked, Mulder had the feeling that he
didn't want to know the answer. "How many?"
"That I know of? Six, so far."
"And how many are left?"
She shook her head. "I have no reason to believe that
they ever stopped creating her, not unless they were forced
to."
"I want to see them."
"You can't, at least not the ones that I've found.
They're all dead."
"How do you know that?"
"Most of them, I found too late. There were only
records—adoption papers, photos, family memories. Beth
was the only one who was alive." She shook her head. "It's
almost ironic that I found her so late—on the brink of life and
death. I'm only glad that I was able to help her."
Mulder's eyes widened. "What do you mean, 'help
her'?"
She was utterly calm. "I helped her to die."
Alex thought that Mulder was going to scream, but
when he opened his mouth, no sound came out. He shut it
again, unable to speak. Finally, he said, "You killed her." It
wasn't a question.
"I assisted her death. It was more humane for me to do
it than it would have been to wait for the brain tumor to kill
her."
Mulder was in shock. "And you just killed her? That's
illegal, inhumane, and psychotic!"
"She was suffering when she didn't need to. She would
have died whether I'd done anything or not."
"You can't know that!"
"I can. I know exactly what her condition was, and her
prognosis. Ask any doctor in this country—any cancer
specialist in the world, and they'd tell you the same thing:
she had a death sentence, with no possibility of parole."
"Why should I believe you?"
"I can't give you one reason, other than the fact that I'm
telling the truth. I don't have any reason to hide it, or lie.
You want to call the police and tell them that I killed your
sister? I'll make it easier for you and confess. You'll
probably get a conviction. It doesn't matter."
Mulder shook his head. "I don't understand how you
can do this. How you can be so matter-of-fact about any of
it."
Her face softened a little, and she sighed. "I know you
don't. You think that they—that I, even, with all that you
know now, with everything that I've told you—you still think
that they were your sister. They weren't. For all intents and
purposes, your sister died twenty-four years ago. The rest of
us are just vessels, just empty things. Unreal things.
Fantasy."
"But they're people! How can you justify eliminating
people?"
"It's the same problem that Prometheus had, F—" she
barely stopped herself "—Agent Mulder. They created none
of us perfect. There were inherent imperfections involved,
and all of us are dying. Various degrees of death, mind you,
but still dying." She folded her hands on the table in front of
her. "Beth Locke had a bout of childhood cancer after she
was placed in the orphanage. That's a common occurrence
for all of us. And even if we survived then, the adult
recurrence of the cancer would come to finish the job. It's as
if we were built with ticking time bombs inside. I have files
on all of the women that I found—I can send them to you, if
you want to read them. The similarities are quite eerie.
Even the woman that you shot in the farmhouse had it. She
would have been dead within six months."
He looked shaken at that statement. "She was one of
you?"
She nodded. "She didn't know it. Most don't, never
found out."
"How did you?"
She smiled. "It wasn't until I turned a corner one day
and ran into myself. I had never known anything about who I
was—my 'adoption' records were sealed, then destroyed,
before I could get my hands on them. As much as I can
remember, I was about sixteen when I left the farm and was
placed with a family. I had a form of induced amnesia. I was
told by my 'adoptive parents' that I was their daughter, that
I'd been theirs for years, lived with them all my life, and that
I'd lost my memory in a car accident the summer before my
senior year in high school. I had no reason not to believe
them."
"Where are they now?" Alex asked.
She shook her head. "I don't know. They disappeared.
Sometimes I think that I dreamed them, and not the rest of
it. Sometimes I don't know what's real, and what isn't." She
sighed. "Sometimes I wonder if any of it matters." Her gaze
turned to the man who might have been her brother, in
another life. "What I do know, and believe, is that if you
continue on this crusade, more people will die, and
disappear, and lose their only grasp on who they think they
are."
"The people who did this to you—they can't be allowed
to get away with it."
"They've already gotten away with it. There is no way
to turn the hands back on this clock, Fox." She didn't even
seem to realize what she'd said, reaching across the table
that separated them to grasp his hands in hers. "No matter
what you do, you're never going to be that young boy again.
And if you do find her, she's not going to be the little girl that
you lost. You have to let it go."
"I don't know if I can," Mulder said, his eyes shimmering
with tears.
Her smile was gentle. "You must." She laid his hands
back down on the table. "You can't possibly imagine what
it's like to watch yourself dying—to know what will happen.
To see the future as it will occur, to me. I will die. That is
certain. I may have six months. I may have one month. But
you—you have a life. You can stop letting them take it
away from you. You can live. For all of us, if you can't do it
for yourself."
Darkness had fallen when Alex looked out the window of the
motel. They'd been sitting mostly in silence for long minutes,
all trying to absorb what had been said. The man in the
corner was nearly asleep, he thought—he was the one
unknown factor, still, the one of them who'd yet to say a
word.
"Who is he?"
Reading my mind again, Mulder?
"A friend. Someone who's been helping me. Someone
who knows what it's like to be an unknown quantity."
"That isn't much of an answer."
She smiled. "It's as much as I can give."
Mulder nodded.
"I should go." She reached again for his hand across
the table, and gave it a final squeeze. "Keep her, Agent
Mulder. Keep Beth Locke. Let her be your sister. Leave the
rest of them alone—if there are others." She stood, the man
in the corner rising simultaneously. "You found her, and you
got your answers. Let that be enough." She made her way
to the door of the apartment.
"Where are you going? I don't know anything."
"I can't tell you anything. I can't tell you the answers
that you want to know—the whys, the bigger whos. I don't
know. I just know what is. Nothing else." She paused. "I'm
assuming that you're not going to call the police?"
He shook his head. "No."
"Then I'll go."
He reached out, handed her a card. "Call me. My cell
phone number is on the back. Call me anytime."
"It's not going to help anything."
He continued to hold it out. She paused for another
second, then took the card. "Okay," she said, ducking her
head.
She'd almost reached the door when he called out, "I
don't even know your name."
She looked back, a tiny smile almost on her lips, miles
away from her eyes. "Oh, I think you do." And then she was
gone.
It felt like years had passed instead of hours when they
stumbled, exhausted, back into their apartment. Alex
checked the place out, while Mulder collapsed on the couch,
disbelief and sorrow warring for precedence in his eyes.
When he'd swept everything clean and came back to
the living room, he dropped down onto a chair opposite the
couch. Mulder was lying on his back, his eyes closed.
"Do you believe her?"
Alex thought for a moment. "Yes."
"So do I." Mulder's eyes opened. "I don't know why I
do, but I do." He held his hands open. "Hold me?"
Alex smiled, shrugging his jacket off. He eased his
body gently on top of Mulder's and wrapped his arms around
him. "Forever."
Eight
by Mona Ramsey
Alex turned over in the bed, something unfamiliar about the
way that he was sleeping rousing him. He looked around,
trying to realize what it was, then sighed. He could faintly
hear the television from the living room. A check of the
bedside clock showed it to be 2:16 a.m. Just about time for
the IronSaver infomercial.
