Retrieval, an X Files story by Glacis. Follows my stories So Many Monsters and Any Weapon. While it can stand alone it'll make more sense if they're read first. Rated R for violence. Alternate take on the episode "This Is Not Happening" (a title with which the entire audience agreed).

As memories went, this one was a doozie. Didn't do half bad as a nightmare, either.

Deep in the dark shadows of his brain, John Doggett knew that he was dreaming. Further back in the even darker shadows, he also knew it had really happened. That knowledge gave the nightmare more immediacy and a higher level of pain than he could comfortably tolerate.

Always started the same, as it had in real life. Phone call from his wife, hysteria making it hard to understand what she was screaming at him. Trying to calm her down, finally shouting at her, beating her down to silence so she could start over and let him make sense of the insanity. For it had been insanity, and had driven him nearly there before it was nominally done.

Because it was never done.

Seven years old, the glue holding his world together, more pressure than any little kid should have to put up with, but he didn't know a way around it. His son was his life in a way his wife, the FBI, even the Corps could never be. The heart of his world. Disappeared one fine March afternoon on the way home from school.

Half a lifetime later, almost full two months, Doggett found his boy. What was left of him, anyway. What the animals hadn't chewed off and the rain hadn't battered away and the mud hadn't caved in. That's where purgatory ended and hell began.

He was still screaming no when he rolled out of bed. His gun was in his hand, but there was nobody to shoot. Except maybe himself, and hadn't he thought of that a time or two? When he'd taken the blame his now ex- was more than willing to give him for not getting there in time. When he hadn't been able to bring the sons of bitches to justice for what they'd done, not that any justice short of stringing them up and letting the dogs have them was justice enough. When he closed his eyes and all he could see were holes with maggots crawling in them where his little boy's eyes used to be.

Wearily, he unclenched his fingers from the butt of the pistol and put it back in the drawer. It was almost five AM. He'd gotten almost three hours sleep. It was almost time to go to work.

Almost.

Shrugging off the thought that it was just as well he was living in the basement of Headquarters now, because there weren't any nosy parkers around to ask why the hell he was coming in to work half a shift early, he rubbed his eyes clear of grit and stuck his head under the faucet. It didn't help much, but at least he looked alert when he glanced in the mirror.

Haunted, but alert.

Ignoring that thought, trying real hard not to think at all, he dressed mechanically and fought the Beltway and trudged into work. Too often in the weeks since he'd been assigned to the X Files he'd felt like he was banging his head against a brick wall. It wasn't what he was used to. He was damned good at his job. One would never know it based on what he'd accomplished, or not accomplished, since being banished to the basement.

Sighing inaudibly, he pulled a file off the top of his inbox and stared down at the same nebulous facts that had been driving him bananas for weeks. There had to be a clue in there somewhere. Mulder'd been dying. Knew it. Might have been caught up in some kind of conspiracy. Might have been overtaken by his own rampant paranoia. Doggett tallied up the things he knew about Mulder, turning facts and opinions and ideas over in his head.

Loyal. Obstinate. Brilliant. Possibly insane. Definitely protective. Open-minded to the point of things falling out. Ability to crawl into another person's skin and brain that was unparalleled in the history of the FBI. An attitude that had even his supporters scratching their heads and covering their asses. Why had he disappeared? The more Doggett dug into it, the more he came to believe that it had been a choice, not a crime.

A sound tickled his hearing and he looked up. Mulder was standing, leaning against the file cabinets, smiling at him. Chuckling. Doggett squinted. Yeah, he could see the filing cabinets through him. He sighed again. Great. Hallucinations. Wasn't just the case profiles, it must be the office. He couldn't help but smile back. The last time he'd seen Mulder's Ghost, he'd been right on target. He couldn't help but see this latest manifestation as a good sign.

He refused to believe that he could see a man's ghost when the man wasn't dead, and he refused to believe that Mulder was dead. He'd buy it when he saw the corpse. Not before. Given some of what he'd seen and experienced, maybe not even then.

Glancing back up from the file he'd tossed back to the desk, all he saw was the dust floating in the air in front of the cabinets. Then he cocked his head. One of the drawers was slightly open. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up and Doggett rose very slowly, walking over to the drawer, preternaturally alert. There was an electricity in the air he'd last felt in combat, as a Marine, when a sniper was targeting him. It had saved his life more than once. Something weird was going on.

Trusting his instincts, hoping they'd save him on this latest battlefield, he reached out to the drawer and slid it open. The files looked ruffled, and one tab was bent back slightly. He pulled the folder out and glanced through it.

The sound of the telephone ringing had him jumping a foot in the air and reaching for his gun.

Swearing at himself under his breath for being an asshole, he clutched the folder and headed back to his desk. Snatching the handset from the cradle, he took a deep breath and tried not to rip the head off the person on the other end for scaring the bejeezus out of him.

"Doggett," he barked. There was a pause from the other end, then a sheriff with a twang started talking. Doggett's eyebrows raised, and he reached for a pen. Very shortly afterward, he hung up the phone, staring at it for a moment. He glanced back at the open file he'd just pulled from the cabinet. The file about a woman and a kid from Oregon. A kid whose friend had just found the woman's body in a field in Montana.

Shit. He really hated this paranormal crap. Made him nuts. Sighing for the third time in twenty minutes, he picked the telephone back up and dialed.

"Skinner."

"Sir, this is Agent Doggett. I have a possible lead on Agent Mulder's whereabouts."

Half a second of pregnant silence, then Skinner asked, "Have you called Agent Scully?" His voice was carefully controlled. Doggett closed his eyes and pressed two fingers against the headache gathering behind the bridge of his nose.

"No, sir. I thought she might take it better coming from you."

"Where are you?"

In the background Doggett could hear material rustling. "At the office."

"I'll be there in fifteen minutes. Call her. Tell her to meet us there."

Doggett told the dial tone, "Yes, sir."

His conversation with Scully was even shorter than the one with Skinner. Doggett knew she didn't trust him. Probably didn't like him, much, either, and he couldn't say he blamed her. But he'd told her, and he meant it, that they were partners. He'd watch her back and he'd expect the same from her. And he'd do everything under the sun he could do to get Mulder back for her. He hadn't gotten there in time to save his son. He didn't want to lose this one, too. Even if it turned out he was a runner, not a kidnapping after all.

When she burst into the office she was on edge. Her whole body was vibrating like a tuning fork, and he had the notion that all it would take would be a single word and she'd shatter into a million pieces. Not wanting to be the one to say that word, he fumbled until Skinner showed up, then they headed toward the AD's office. There was as much dread as hope in her expression as she listened to the details, what few they had.

She wanted to find Mulder, yeah. She was also scared to death of what they'd find if they did. Doggett could relate. Too closely. He had to look away. Hurt to much to watch.

On the drive to the airport, he caught movement with his peripheral vision, and stared into the side mirror, trying to pinpoint it. He didn't see anything out of the ordinary, but that didn't reassure him. He had cottonmouth, and the nape of his neck was still prickling. He'd relied on his instincts too long not to pay attention to them now. But no matter how hard he looked, he didn't see a damned thing.

By the time they'd boarded, his shoulders were hunched up by his ears and his eyes were starting to hurt from trying to look every direction at once. Thankfully Skinner had his hands full with Scully, so Doggett's strange reaction wasn't noticed. Burrowing into his seat, strapping himself in with hands whose fingers were white at the knuckles from tension, he mentally berated himself. Combat nerves had their place. This wasn't it. Breathing deeply, he fell back on old habits, calming himself, conserving his energy for the battle that was to come. It didn't relax him much, but it was enough to keep from jumping out of his skin, or shooting somebody, every time he heard a noise.

When the plane touched down in Helena, he'd regained a measure of control. Just as well. Not ten feet into the parking lot, his radar went up again. He looked around carefully but didn't see anyone suspicious. This time Skinner did give him a sideways glance. Not willing to tell his AD that he had the suspicion he was being stalked by the ghost of his current partner's probably not dead ex-partner, Doggett kept his mouth shut and his mind on business.

Alex Krycek was not a man to panic without cause. Even with cause, he was amazingly resilient. He'd lived through too many life-threatening circumstances to lose his cool unless it was something major causing it.

This counted as major.

For three weeks in a row, his Resistance contact had walked right past him. No disk, no message. No indication that Mulder was still alive. Then today, even the contact had gone missing.

A very bad sign. It fit with other signs he'd been reading, too. Abductees going missing at an alarming rate. Spies, both human and alien, disappearing with no warning. Shifters, fighters and healers, being extracted and terminated everywhere. The Resistance was losing ground.

Now, they might have lost Mulder.

It was time to close shop on this operation. Time, if not past time, to pull Mulder from the Ship and get him back to Earth. They weren't going to get any more than they already had.

Krycek intensified his observation of Scully and her newly-assigned partner, Ironass Doggett. He knew the only reason Doggett had been given the X Files was so a tried and true company man would fail. Then Kersh and his collaborator superiors would have the excuse to finally legitimately close the X Files and thereby cut off any information conduit the Resistance had within the FBI. Krycek secretly found it amusing to watch Doggett re-evaluate his entire belief system in the space of a month in X Files land. He couldn't help but wonder what the man would think the first time he saw a Ship.

Or a Gray.

Hadn't been much reaction to his first Shifter. But it was early. If things went well, Doggett would never have to see the seamier side of the fight for humanity's continued existence. If not, well, Doggett was a decent fighter and almost as protective as Mulder was. He could be useful. If not, he'd be dead. Either way, he wouldn't be an obstacle.

Peering through night glasses, he wasn't surprised to see Doggett start up from a nightmare, fling himself from his bed, dig in a drawer and bring a gun up to face god-knew-what. Krycek watched and waited. Eventually Doggett put the gun away, wandered off to get dressed and headed for FBI headquarters. He looked at his watch. Five thirty in the morning. Maybe it was something endemic to the X Files made workaholics out of the agents trapped there.

Then again, maybe not. Krycek had read the man's file. While not as bizarre as Mulder's, it held its own share of tragedy. Probably dipping into Mulder's psychoses only made Doggett's existing trauma harder to handle. He put the Tercel into gear and followed at a distance.

An hour and ten minutes later, his patience was rewarded. Scully came flying in like a bat out of hell, hot on the heels of Skinner, looking more pressed and alert than a man should be at that hour in the morning. Half an hour after that, they were on the way to Dulles.

Doggett was sharp. He nearly caught Krycek three times, once en route and twice at the airport. A judicious application of money and pathos got him a seat on the same plane the agents were flying, and Doggett nearly caught him again when they deplaned in Montana. When they stopped at the motel, Krycek waited until they left again before he checked in.

Once inside his room, he powered up his laptop and opened up a window to the Gunmen. Frohicke had the usual disgruntled expression on his face when he saw who it was, until Krycek mentioned where he was at. Then his beady little eyes gleamed. Langly nearly knocked him out of the picture.

"Helena? Oh, too cool, dude. Of course!"

"Why?" Krycek asked patiently.

Three minutes of geek-babble later, Byers actually answered him. "There have been reports of unidentified flying objects of immense size and speed, centered on the outskirts of Helena, Montana."

"Gotta love those wide open spaces," Langley tossed in from his seat at another computer.

Byers plowed on. "People who have previously reported themselves as the subjects of alien abduction and experimentation have been going missing -"

"At increasing rates," interjected Frohicke.

" -and one of the missing women,"

"Theresa Hoese, from Bellefleur, Oregon," Langley inserted helpfully.

" - has been admitted to a local hospital in Helena with severe injuries," Byers finished serenely, ignoring all the interruptions with the ease of long practice.

Krycek was doing some mental collation of his own. "What hospital?" he asked, peering back at Frohicke as suspiciously as Frohicke was peering at him. If the Grays and the Oil Aliens were returning the breeders, they might be finishing with that phase of the experimentation. And if that was the case, they might well be deep into the next phase, experimenting on those abductees who had suffered electro-encephalitic trauma. Which meant that Mulder's head was on the chopping block. Maybe literally.

Byers gave him the name of the hospital and Krycek nodded. A second window was opened and he began to run a coded program through the line. The Gunmen's picture began to break up.

"Is this the one?" Frohicke asked, more demand than question.

Krycek took a deep breath. "Yes." It was all he needed to say. All three Gunmen went quiet, staring at him. "I'll call you when I need you." When, not if.

Frohicke nodded then cut the connection. The flow of data sped up considerably as the first window closed. Within moments, Krycek had hacked through the pitiful firewall of the hospital's administrative computer. He noted grimly that one Theresa Hoese had been transferred out on her physician's instructions half an hour earlier. Transfer destination unknown. Standard M.O.

Cutting the connection before the damage could be noted and backing out as carefully as he hacked in, Krycek initiated a second connection. This one poked through the cracks in the local police department's secured computer. Within eleven minutes, Krycek had the name of the man Doggett would look too next for his answers. Along with the name came a location.

He was at Absalom's compound an hour before all hell broke loose. It gave him enough time to see a familiar Shifter speaking urgently with Absalom.

Jeremiah Smith.

The question was, which Jeremiah Smith? One of the legions on the side of the Oil Aliens, or one of the few on the side of the Resistance? Melting into the shadows, Krycek waited for the raid and kept his eye on both the raiders and the ones being raided. His patience was partially rewarded.

Mulder wasn't at the compound.

After his argument with Absalom, Smith left the rest of the milling crowd and headed for the woods. The Shifter paused beside a battered pick-up truck and hauled a blanket-wrapped bundle from the bed. Grunting silently, he heaved it over his shoulder and staggered away. Krycek moved soundlessly after him.

Less than a mile into the cover of the trees, Smith dropped his burden in the undergrowth. Pushing the blanket away from the body's face and shoulders, he arranged the limbs carefully. Krycek crept as close as he could. Smith froze, and he froze in response. Smith's head scanned slowly, side to side, and Krycek held his breath along with his position. After a few moments of hyper-alertness, the tension in the thin shoulders relaxed fractionally and Smith began to move his hands over the body in front of him.

Krycek bit back a frustrated curse. He recognized the blocky features of a Shifter's standard form, but he wasn't close enough to see if the eyes and lips had been sewn shut, and he didn't dare move closer without giving himself away. Then the air began to shimmer over the unmoving body, and Smith's back arched in strain. His hands hovered a few inches above the other's flesh, caught in the light bending over the body.

Abruptly, all the strain evaporated, and Smith bent double, panting lightly. Krycek squinted through the darkness and felt his own breath catch.

Mulder.

Yet not. Because he'd seen the body as it had originally been, and it had been the corpse of a Shifter.

His eyes closed briefly. He could see where this was going, and it wasn't going to be pretty.

Motion behind and in front of him brought him back to the present in a flash, and he practically levitated behind a large tree. Smith melted into the darkness to his left just as a group of three commandos, led by Doggett, came up on his right. He had time to see the stricken expression on Doggett's face before he fell back the way he'd come, intent on following Smith.

He'd been right. It hadn't been pretty, and it was going to get uglier.

By the time he got back to the compound, Smith had assumed another face and was among the group of rescued abductees clustered in the largest room of the main building. Most of the abductees were breeders, adolescents or children. He watched with interest as Scully picked Smith out from the crowd, undeterred by the new face he wore, and isolated him in a room at the back of the log building.

One of the black-clad FBI special agents nearly caught him as he was slipping around to the back of the building to follow the action. It was the work of a moment to slit the man's throat. He hauled the body far enough into the woods to keep it out of sight then hurried back to the compound. By the time they found it, hopefully he'd be long gone. If not, they could always blame Absalom or one of his loonies.

Not that Krycek believed they were loony. He knew otherwise. But it helped that the majority of the FBI did.

Scully was in Smith's face by the time Krycek got back, peeking in from the corner of a side window. He wasn't surprised to see her emotions so near to the surface. She was close to cracking. Before she got very far, Skinner knocked on the door. Krycek ducked out of sight, then kept ducking as something oozed out through the cracks between the logs. From his cover in the bushes, he watched as Smith re-formed, shifted to take on the appearance of Doggett, and walked into the maze of plastic draping the buildings. Krycek glanced back once at the building, then settled deeper in the bushes to wait.

It wasn't long. Within minutes, he felt the ground beneath him begin to shake. Lights flashed above him and he threw himself to the ground, rolling out of the way of stampeding feet as the abductees scrambled around in a panic. The light concentrated on the room where Smith had been held.

Deep inside Krycek, the remnants of the Black Oil stirred. The vaccine he had taken bound it at the cellular level, and so he was able to control it, but he could do nothing about the voices he heard. It sang, shrill and demanding, making his skull vibrate in sympathy. He was almost compelled to go to that light, return to his comrades, go home.

Almost.

With a final shriek of frustration at prey barely missed, the light flashed out, the voices ripped to a stop, and the ship lurched away. Krycek unclenched his teeth, certain this time he'd cracked at least one tooth grinding them together against that infernal noise, then looked up to see a dark-eyed woman in an FBI jacket staring at him with a combination of fascination and horror. He looked back, and for a moment everything he had been, everything he had done, all he carried within him shone from his eyes.

She was still throwing up when he slipped away from the mayhem and back into the shadows of the forest.

It had been a hell of a day, and a hell of a long one. Doggett stared blearily at the numbers ticking over on the clock beside the motel bed and realized he'd been up for twenty three hours straight. The last several had been the toughest.

Scully refused a sedative. She hadn't wanted to go to the hospital for observation either, but given the fact that they'd found her on her knees screaming her head off with tears running down her face, and the fact that she hadn't exactly had an easy pregnancy so far, he and Skinner together managed to get her in a hospital bed and sleeping. It hadn't been an easy sleep, but it was better than hysterics.

Better than facing a truth none of them wanted to face.

He stripped off numbly, draping his tie, jacket, trousers and shirt automatically over the back of the chair, toeing off his shoes and socks, tossing his wallet and laying his gun in the seat. He scrubbed a hand over his face and hair, trying to wipe the chill away, but his skin felt like rubber, and his hand felt dead.

Falling into bed in his shorts, he closed his eyes and prayed that he'd be tired enough that the nightmares would leave him alone, if only for a couple hours. His head barely hit the pillow before he was out for the count.

No luck on the nightmare front. He'd no sooner gone under before he was back at the gully where they'd found the remains of his son. Wrapped in the tattered rags of his clothes, blood at his mouth and his ears and the sockets where his eyes had been. Leaves stuck to the sticky red trails along his pale soft skin. He'd looked tiny there against the blackness of the dirt and the green brown of the underbrush. His bare feet looked cold. His fingers and toes were curled.

As Doggett stood, stone-still on the outside, screaming and crying on the inside, staring at the innocent pink sole of his son's foot, it elongated. The toes were still curled, the foot still looked strangely defenseless and oddly innocent, but it was a man's foot, not a boy's, and it wasn't his son. It was Mulder. His eyes were closed, but there was blood all over his arms, along his legs, bruises everywhere, holes in his skin, cuts too precise to be random violence, evidence of a malevolent intelligence that made the bile rise in Doggett's throat. Mulder's face was as lost as his son's had been. He tried to raise his hands. Tried to back away. Tried to scream.

Nearly choked on the hard round metal barrel of a gun digging into the soft skin below his chin. The gun moved when he did and dug into the top of his windpipe. He stopped moving. Opened his eyes. Stopped breathing.

He'd never seen the man sitting on top of him before in his life.

"Shut up and listen or I'll blow your head off."

Staring up into blue eyes that looked about a thousand years old, Doggett believed him. Unable to reach his own gun, unable to cry out for help, and being at heart a pragmatist, he did what he had to do. He shut up and listened.

His submission must have pleased his captor, because the man nodded shortly and eased up enough with the barrel of his gun so that Doggett could breath. Then he made an awkward-looking incredibly fast movement that ended with his left arm lying across Doggett's throat in place of the gun. He nearly choked again. The arm was hard as a plank. It also wasn't real. Some kind of prosthetic. Heavier than hell.

"I need your help. We have to extract an undercover agent from an assignment that has gone wrong before he's lost to us."

The man stared intently down at Doggett. Doggett stared right back up at him. The weight increased over his Adam's apple for a moment, then eased off. Doggett got the message and lightened up on the kill-threat he could feel shining out of his own eyes. Working his throat to get enough spit in his mouth to speak, he forced out, "You CIA? DOD? FBI?" Not that he thought the guy was, but anything could and had happened so far since he'd been in the X Files. It was a strange way to request interagency assistance but not unheard of.

A nasty little smile played across the man's face before disappearing. "FBI. Once."

Doggett wondered what that meant, but didn't ask. He had a feeling the man wouldn't tell him anyway, and he didn't have the air to waste on useless questions. "Who's this agent? What assignment?"

"Mulder," the man answered calmly, shocking the shit out of Doggett. "He was my partner. Once." He stopped and Doggett stared up at him for another little while, putting the pieces together from the background files he'd memorized.

"Krycek." It wasn't a question. The man nodded anyway. The weight against his windpipe eased further when Doggett didn't try to move.

"Are you in?" Krycek was staring at him hard enough to scorch him. Doggett had the strangest feeling that if he said no, not only would he miss the best chance he'd had so far at retrieving Mulder, but he wouldn't live past getting his mouth closed over the word. Then another thought struck him.

"Mulder's dead." He knew. He'd seen the body. He'd been having a nightmare about seeing that very body when Krycek had woken him up.

Krycek was shaking his head. "Not Mulder."

"I saw him," Doggett insisted, glaring up at him. Krycek shrugged, cutting off Doggett's air for a moment then courteously lifting his prosthetic up before oxygen deprivation caused Doggett to black out.

"You know there are shape shifters out there. You've seen one pass for Scully. You've seen one pass as yourself. This one was passing as Mulder."

Doggett thought it over. Stranger things had actually happened. He swallowed. Krycek pressed down.

"You in, or out?"

This time Doggett had no doubt just what 'out' meant. He nodded as best he could with the obstruction under his chin.

"In," he croaked.

The plan that followed sounded like something out of one of those sixties science fiction stories Asimov used to print that Doggett read as a kid. Beam up to the hostile spacecraft, infiltrate the hidden laboratory, rescue the fair princess. Of course it was Mulder, so it'd be a fair prince this time. If they pulled it off. If he wasn't sitting in his shorts in his bed with a gun in his face being fed a fairy tale by a one-armed raving lunatic. When Krycek finished his calm recitation of measured insanity, Doggett asked, "When?"

"Now," Krycek told him. Then he climbed off Doggett and put the gun in a holster at the small of his back.

Doggett rubbed his throat, then climbed out of bed. He looked at the fine wool blend material of his suit, then tossed it back on the chair and reached into his bag for a sweatshirt and jeans. While he was dressing, Krycek dug through a small black bag beside the bed. He pulled out two semi-automatic machine pistols, extra clips of ammunition, four Glocks, several knives, and what looked like a couple of ice picks on steroids.

Tucking his feet into his shoes, Doggett didn't ask. He just reached over and helped himself to some of the armament. Krycek didn’t say anything. He didn't try to stop him, either. "What I wouldn't give for some phasers," Doggett muttered. He didn't realize he'd said it out loud until Krycek agreed with him.

"Transporter'd be nice right about now, too. As it is, we'll have to do the next best thing."

Doggett looked askance at him. Krycek gave him a disconcertingly toothy grin, looking more like a shark than a human being.

"Sneak in the back door."

Something about the way he said it made Doggett think it was Krycek's preferred means of ingress. Trudging back into the woods for the umpteenth time since he'd gotten there the previous night, Doggett grimly fought back his fatigue and kept his eyes peeled. What they reported nearly had him heading back to the motel to stick his head under the pillow. The men, if they could be called that, who met him and Krycek deep in the woods looked like something out of one of Grimm's scarier tales.

They were five big guys, built like linebackers, all of them blond-headed and broad-shouldered. They also all had their mouths and eyes sewn shut. It made Doggett's skin crawl. Another man stepped out from behind them, and Krycek brought his gun up. Instinctively Doggett backed him up, covering as many of the sewn-up men as he could. On second glance, he recognized the man as the one Scully had identified as Jeremiah Smith, some kind of healer, or so Mulder claimed. He was also able to look like Doggett. The thought made his skin crawl as much as the sewn-up guys did, if not more.

"You ours or theirs?" Krycek asked.

Didn't make any sense to Doggett, but Smith seemed to know what the hell Krycek was talking about, because he smiled and replied, "I live to resist."

Hell of a code phrase. Whatever that meant, Krycek relaxed, and grinned that death's head grin of his again. Smith smiled back, looking like a benign grandfather. Doggett didn't trust that grin any more than Krycek's.

"Moving out," Krycek said quietly, and they did just that. The sewn-up guys fanned out and took positions behind Krycek.

Doggett wondered how in God's name they could see with their eyelids stitched together like that, and flashed on a memory of his son's face. The shudder that gave him nearly knocked him over. Krycek glanced over at him, but he studiously ignored the curiosity there and headed determinedly onward to who-knew-what.

He didn't see anything but dirt and rocks and a little scrub grass, but the sewn-up guys paused and seemed to crouch without actually bending their knees. Smith hunched his shoulders up and inched closer to Krycek. Doggett looked over at Krycek and nearly shot him from sheer surprise.

The clear blue eyes that had been inches from his, so he knew they were blue, were now a strange inky black. They looked truly unearthly. Doggett bit down on his lip to keep from babbling stupid questions, and clenched his fist to keep from drawing his gun and shooting Krycek. He didn't know what it was that was showing in the other man's eyes, but he knew instinctively that it was bad business, and he wanted to eradicate it. His instincts were screaming at him full-bore, and it took every one of his years of experience to keep hold of the shreds of his self control.

Life was weird and getting weirder all the time.

The air shimmered around him, and suddenly the night was brighter than daylight. Doggett squinted but couldn't see where the light was coming from, then looked up and gaped when he realized it was coming from above them.

Way above them.

From a ship.

Krycek hadn't been kidding.

He also wasn't insane. At least not about this.

The ship was goddamned massive. Football fields long. Stories tall. Tons heavy, or at least that's what the air felt like around him, pressure building beneath it where they were standing until his eardrums ached. He glanced over and saw the same dirt and rocks he'd seen before, but now they were shimmering, like the flight line seen through jet exhaust. He blinked.

His stomach lurched.

They moved.

"Beam me up, Scotty," he heard Krycek crack very quietly, and he looked over to see the striations of black swirling through the blue eyes. It made his stomach lurch all over again. Then Krycek was moving, and so were the sewn-up guys, and so was Smith, and so was he. Training snapped into place, and he stalked forward on the balls of his feet, one hand going to the trigger of the semi-automatic strapped around his neck, the other to the hilt of the knife at his waist.

A little wrinkled gray guy who looked like an extra in a Spielberg film came around the corner. One of the sewn-up guys had a knife in his hand and the gray being's head was severed with a single stroke. Doggett blinked again.

The second gray man who came along got the same treatment. From Doggett.

The third person they saw was a woman, and Krycek reacted to her before the rest of them even saw her. Her eyes were completely black, not swirling like Krycek's. She opened her mouth, and it looked like her eyes started to glow, then Krycek's knife took her at the top of the throat right below the chin, right where he'd been aiming his gun at Doggett when Doggett woke up. Krycek lowered her corpse silently to the deck. Something that looked like forty weight motor oil started to seep out of her. One of the sewn-up guys stepped forward and thumbed the trigger on a tube-shaped weapon.

It was a miniature flame thrower. The oil burned fast. Krycek reeled. Doggett caught him and held him up, wondering what the hell'd just happened. Krycek's eyes were sparkling, a thin red-gold line running over the surface of them. Then the flames on the oil burnt out, leaving a stain on the floor, and the shimmer died from Krycek's eyes. He took a shaky breath and pulled away from Doggett.

"You're welcome," Doggett whispered to his back. If Krycek heard him, he ignored him.

Faster than he expected, subjectively several hours later, they made it to what looked like an autopsy bay. There were four stations in it, with chairs that resembled modified dentists' chairs, if the dentists were the kind they talked about in Little Shop of Horrors. Because that was what it was -- a horror shop. Three of the four chairs were occupied. There was blood dripping off the hands and feet of each of the three bodies. One was a woman and two were men.

The second man was Mulder.

For a heartbeat, Doggett knew they were too late. Nobody could go through what these people had gone through and survive. He'd seen tortured prisoners before, but nothing like this. It was truly inhuman.

Two of the sewn-up men had moved forward and were flanking the chair in a defensive position. Krycek walked to the head of the chair behind Mulder and leaned over him. The black swirls in his eyes were moving frantically. His body was shaking. He was biting his bottom lip so hard there was a thin line of blood trickling down over his chin.

He looked like he wanted to scream or kill something. Maybe both.

Reaching a hand out to the apparatus stretching the left side of Mulder's face, Krycek got a look of intense concentration on his face. The concentration twisted into agony as he laid his fingers against the metal spikes. Doggett leaned closer.

Krycek was sweating oil. At least, that's what it looked like. The fluid on his skin looked like the stuff that had come out of the woman he'd killed, but diluted and adhering to the surface of his skin. It touched the framework around Mulder's face, and with a metallic whirring sound, the spikes retracted. Mulder's face smoothed out, and blood flowed from the puncture wounds the spikes left behind.

Not for the first time that night, Doggett wanted to vomit. His training and self discipline held, barely, and he swallowed hard. Several times.

Then a miracle happened. He didn't know how else to describe it. Smith stepped forward beside Krycek, and reached out his hands to cradle Mulder's head in them. A look of intense concentration passed over his face, then he smiled that grandfather's smile again. When he took his hands away, the bleeding had stopped. A lot of the bruising was gone.

The puncture wounds had healed.

Doggett stared, unable to help himself. Smith walked a little unsteadily from Mulder's head to his side and laid his hands gently on Mulder's belly. Doggett could actually see the parched gray surface of the skin flush with blood. For the first time since they caught sight of him, Doggett believed that it was Mulder on that chair, and not Mulder's corpse.

Krycek suddenly swayed on his feet. His eyes were all black, then striped again. "Hurry. They're coming."

He gritted his teeth and touched what looked like the control panel of the device, attached to the side of the chair. There was a rending noise, and Mulder's body sagged. Doggett reacted by rushing forward and catching Mulder before the man slid in an unconscious heap to the ground. Lifting him as gently as he could into a fireman's carry, he headed back the way they'd come in.

"What about the rest of these people?" he asked as he passed by the woman's chair. She looked as dead as Mulder had.

"No time," Krycek told him through clenched teeth. He looked like he was in a lot of pain, and might pass out at any time.

"We can't leave them," Smith protested. He was rocking on his feet even worse than Krycek.

"We have no choice," Krycek gasped out, then grabbed hold of Doggett's arm with his right hand and yanked him toward the door.

The trip back to the door, or the portal, or whatever the hell it was they'd come through, was a worse nightmare than the trip in had been. They made no attempt at stealth, just speed. Doggett kept his head down and his burden balanced. Krycek took the lead, Smith staggered along in their wake. The five-man team of sewn-up guys took out their little portable flame-throwers and proceeded to toast every living being that got in their way.

The other side had them, too.

Finally Krycek sagged against a wall and placed his hand over what looked like a bubble in the metal. The light passed through them again. The last thing Doggett saw of the ship was two of the sewn-up men, caught in the blast of the aliens' fire. Going up in flames.

They didn't need mouths to scream.

Doggett knew that sound would haunt his nightmares for the rest of his life. Which, if they didn't get their asses in gear, would be very short. Then the light flashed brighter than his eyes could stand. They shut involuntarily, and when they opened again, he was standing in the middle of a field in Montana, an alien healer on one side of him, an alien human on the other, and the naked deadweight of Fox Mulder draped over his shoulder. There was only one thing he could do.

Run.

He knew it would hurt. After the peasants had chopped his arm off in the middle of the forest in Siberia, Krycek had thought he knew what pain was. Hell, before that, stranded in the middle of Nowhere, North Dakota, puking black fire from his eyes and his gut and his nose, he'd known what pain was.

He'd had no idea what pain could be until he harnessed the alien within him and forced it to kill its brethren.

The Oil Aliens were a true conscious collective, something he'd known in the abstract before he'd forced the remnants of it within himself to get them aboard that Ship. When the woman had died it hadn't hurt. It had disoriented him, as he suddenly saw through two sets of eyes. Himself, seeing her, as he killed her. Her, seeing him, as she died. But it hadn't hurt.

When the Resistance fighter torched the escaping Oil Alien, every atom of it inside him howled in agony. Fire had raced through his blood, along his bones, melted his eyes. The world had tilted and crashed, and if it hadn't been for Doggett he'd have passed out cold. Then the fire had died out, leaving only the echo of pain behind, and he'd been able to go on with the mission.

Find Mulder.

If it hadn't been for the whisper of knowing that he felt when he saw Mulder, he'd've thought the man was dead. But there was a residual tinge of the Oil Alien's presence in Mulder, too, and it sang of a thin thread of life barely sustained. Krycek had moved forward instinctively, fighting the demand of the alien in his mind that he surrender, and stared down at Mulder. Demanded, in turn, that it show him how to release his ally.

The pain flared anew, but it obeyed him. He'd felt like he was sweating blood as he forced it to his will. The machinery responded to the resonant command of the Oil Alien, and withdrew from Mulder. By the time it did, Krycek was nearly unconscious from strain. He barely had strength to beckon Smith over. As the Shifter healed Mulder enough to get him mobile and keep him from dying during the escape, Krycek felt an echo of that healing touching him as well. The remnants of the Oil Alien, held in place at the molecular level by the inoculation and barely contained by Krycek's will, wailed a crescendo of denial as they lurched back through the ship, killing everything that got in their way. Every host body that died he inhabited; every Oil Alien that was incinerated was another firestorm to survive.

By the time they made it back through the transference beam to the field, he was an inch from keeling over unconscious. He threw a pie-eyed look at the tattered remains of his rescue party. Three of the Resistance fighters hadn't made it. The other two were fading back into the anonymity of the forest. They would look after themselves. Smith was so gray with exhaustion he resembled a Gray, only taller, with hair. Doggett looked like he was in shock. Mulder was unconscious. Krycek's brain refused to function.

Thankfully, Doggett's instincts took over. He settled Mulder firmly on his shoulder, gave a grunt like a shot-putter and started running. It was closer to a controlled stagger than an actual run, but the intent was crystal clear. It sparked the self-preservation instinct that was never far from the surface in Krycek and he began a weaving run in Doggett's wake.

At the edge of the woods, he caught up with Doggett and managed to grab hold of the back of his shirt, pulling him to a stop. They nearly overbalanced. Krycek looked around.

Smith had disappeared.

Muttering curses in Russian under his breath, Krycek consigned the Shifter to the devil and got back to the problem at hand. Namely, Doggett, in full-on Marine rescue mode of 'run until you drop and pray the choppers make it in time'; Mulder, not dead, which was the best that could be expected; and himself, so far gone he was practically having an out of body experience. The way his body felt, that might not be a bad idea. He shook his head and concentrated harder.

"Gotta get away from here."

Doggett opened his mouth to protest. Before he could say a word they were distracted by a car pulling up in front of the compound, joining the rental Taurus that was already there.

Scully. Driving herself. Krycek grinned despite himself. The sedative must have worn off. Doctor Scully wasn't one to stay in a hospital a minute longer than absolutely necessary. Sometimes even when it was necessary it took restraining straps to keep her down.

"Our job just got a lot easier," he whispered to Doggett, who still had his mouth hanging open. Krycek sighed. At least Doggett wasn't balking. Even when he was in so far over his head he'd drowned and hadn't realized it yet. "C'mon."

Doggett gave him a dirty look, and Krycek wondered for a split second if he'd said his thoughts out loud. Then he played back what he'd said and the way he'd said it. His grin widened. So he'd sounded like he was calling the dog. Wasn't his fault the guy was sensitive.

Keeping an eye out for anyone who might be watching, Krycek led the way across the clearing between the forest and the cars. Slipping into the main room, he saw Skinner, standing at parade rest between Scully and the records room. He cleared his throat.

"Brought you something," he said sweetly.

Scully turned on her heel. Skinner stepped forward, just in time to catch Mulder as Doggett tried to lower him to the ground and lost his grip. Tough being a short guy carrying six foot plus of deadweight, even for a short guy in good condition.

"My god," Scully whispered, dropping to her knees beside him and touching his face.

Skinner looked at Doggett, then over at Krycek. Before he could ask any of the thousand questions that were jostling for position on the tip of his tongue, Krycek raised a hand.

"We've got to get out of here. It's not safe."

For once, nobody argued.

Several hours down the 15 and the 90 with one break in Three Forks for bottled water and they were in Billings. Krycek slept through most of it. Scully had taken up two thirds of the back seat with Mulder's head in her lap, assessing damage and providing triage as best she could. She kept muttering under her breath about miracles. Doggett took the passenger seat and stared out the window. Krycek watched his face in the reflection in the glass for awhile, and saw him fall asleep less than half an hour into the drive. Skinner hunched over the steering wheel like a man possessed, eyes on every mirror, foot steady on the peddle. Before he went to sleep, Krycek wormed his hand along the back of the seat between himself and Mulder until his fingers met Mulder's. He refused to admit that he was holding hands halfway across the state of Montana. But he did sleep better when they were touching.

For once, it was one of Doggett's friends who turned out to be a doctor who had a clinic, instead of one of Scully's. Nobody protested. In the face of Scully's determination, nobody would have the guts, not to mention the fact that no one wanted to lose Mulder again now that they had finally found him.

As they were moving Mulder from the back seat to the stretcher at the emergency entrance, Scully noticed that Krycek was holding his hand. It was a little tough to miss. Mulder wouldn't let go.

Neither would Krycek.

She stared at him for a second, then reached over and took Mulder's other hand. Mulder didn't let go of her, either.

They masked the fact that they were holding on for dear life by flanking the stretcher as the doctor and his intern wheeled it into the small emergency bay. Then the opportunity was taken away from them as a four-person team converged on Mulder, shifting him from stretcher to examination table. Scully and Krycek were pushed away from the bustle around the table.

Scully hovered in the background as the team worked, expression intent as she followed the rapidly flying medicalese. Krycek stepped back and found himself next to Skinner. The AD was looking at him as if he didn't know whether to arrest him, shoot him, or pat him on the head. With a hammer. Krycek shrugged off the attitude and stepped away to look through the window at Mulder.

He was alive. He was safe, for the moment at least. There was still a fight ahead of them, but there would be another way to win it. Mulder wouldn't survive another round with the Grays.

Krycek wasn't sure he would, either.

Glancing over his shoulder, he noted that Skinner and Doggett were deep in conversation. Well, Skinner was deep in conversation; Doggett looked like he was in a coma with his eyes open. Scully had her head buried in a chart along with the doctor. Mulder was blessedly alone.

Krycek slipped into the room. Keeping a weather eye on the door, he turned his back to the window, placing himself between any watching eyes and Mulder. Unable to resist, taking his chance where he found it as he always did, Krycek leaned down and placed a single kiss against Mulder's mouth. It was supposed to be soft. After all, the man's lips were cracked and he'd just been rescued from hell.

It was hard. Deep, open lips and desperate tongue, and over much too fast. Krycek opened eyes he hadn't realized he'd closed to see clear hazel eyes staring right back at him. He managed a crooked smile.

"Good work," he whispered. The corner of Mulder's mouth turned up in a shadow of his usual snide smirk.

"Not my best, but I'm workin' on it." His voice sounded like rusty nails and broken glass. Krycek managed not to wince. Then he looked more closely.

Mulder was sleeping like a baby. Not unconscious this time. Simply sleeping.

Krycek couldn't have stopped the grin that spread over his face on pain of death. Leave it to Mulder. He usually passed out after sex, but if a kiss was good enough, who was he to argue? He laid a finger gently against the center of Mulder's lower lip, then ran it over the places where Smith had healed the puncture marks on his cheek. It was enough. For now.

Turning to leave the room, he almost tripped over Scully. She completely ignored him, all her attention focused on Mulder. As it should be. Krycek managed to mute the beam on his face to a more neutral expression and walked over to where Skinner now stood, standing in the doorway, staring at Scully fussing over Mulder.

"I know you have only Mulder's best interests at heart," Krycek said in a conversational tone. "And if any pressure might happen to be put upon you to give him up," his hand dipped into his pocket and drew out a small metal box. He made sure Skinner saw it. "Death is always an option."

Skinner growled at him. "I won't do anything to hurt Mulder. For god's sake, Krycek - "

"No," Krycek interrupted him, keeping his voice steady and low. "His. And yours."

"I will do nothing to hurt Agent Mulder," Skinner rasped at him through his teeth. "Regardless of any pressure applied to me. By anyone." He looked pointedly at Krycek.

That was also enough. For now.

Skinner, huffing slightly under his breath and looking like he wanted to punch a hole in the wall -- or through Krycek -- stalked into Mulder's room and stood at Scully's shoulder. Standing sentry. Krycek glanced over at Doggett, further down the corridor, listing slightly to port but in essentially the same position. What was it with Marines? Krycek shook his head and walked over to stand in front of Doggett.

Before he could say a word, Doggett snapped out of the fugue state of exhaustion he was in and glared at Krycek. In a voice that could define gravel, he barked, "I want some answers."

Krycek gave him his best innocent look, a surprisingly good one considering his soul-deep absence of anything resembling innocence. "You got what you wanted, John. He's returned, and he's alive. The past didn't repeat itself."

The glare didn't diminish one whit. "What the hell just happened?"

Beneath the demand was a bedrock of bewilderment. Krycek could relate. He just hid it better. Making a snap decision, he told Doggett, "Follow me," and turned on his heel to head for the parking lot.

"Where?" Doggett asked plaintively from behind his left shoulder. Krycek looked back at him.

"How bad do you want the answers?" Then he turned back and kept walking. After a second, Doggett followed.

Of course.

He hadn't the faintest idea what the hell Krycek was going to do next, so when the man led them directly to a Motel 6 and registered them under Doggett's name, it didn't surprise him as much as it probably should. "How'd you know where to go?" Idle curiosity. He was too tired to care.

"I know a lot of things," Krycek told him carelessly, brushing past him and walking toward the front window. He cased the street without letting it show, and Doggett was impressed in spite of his dislike. He didn't know where the guy had gotten his training, but he was good.

Then Krycek posed in the window. There was no other word for it. It was subtle, but it was there. He paused for a second, profile to the glass like a movie star going for a head shot, then stripped off his coat.

Then he unbuttoned his shirt. Left it hanging open and stroked across his chest with his hand. Doggett saw the whole show reflected in the glass.

He could feel his jaw starting to drop, and forcibly closed it, wincing as he nipped his tongue. Instincts kicked in, but not the ones he expected. Instead of stalking over to the window and chucking Krycek through it, Doggett closed the door and locked it. Then he stood there and watched.

The kid was a born exhibitionist. Doggett didn't know who Krycek was performing for, but at the moment he didn't care. He also couldn't drag his eyes away, and he had no idea why. In the next moment, Krycek casually unbuckled his belt and turned to face him.

A surge of arousal shot from Doggett's heels to his scalp, stopping for a quick electrification of the groin area along the way. He nearly died of heart failure from pure shock.

He had to try twice before he could talk, and when he did his voice was barely above a whisper. "What the hell was that all about?"

Krycek shrugged, looking perfectly at home in his skin. Just as well one of them was, since Doggett was about to jump out of his. "Cover," Krycek told him. Then he walked over to Doggett, moving like a streetwalker on a mission, and said under his breath, "Follow my lead."

Doggett had to lean forward to hear him. Which left him wide open and vulnerable as Krycek caught him around the neck, swung him around so they were both framed in the window even though they were further back in the room, and kissed him.

With deliberate carnal intent.

He went into shock for the second time in as many minutes. Especially since instead of knocking Krycek on his ass, like he no doubt should've done, Doggett found himself kissing him back. The shock was compounded not only by his own actions but by his physical response. He was liking this kissing gig. A lot.

Well, it had been a long time since the divorce. And he was so tired he was punch-drunk. He couldn't be held accountable for his actions.

Especially when a hard-on was an autonomous response to stimuli that didn't rely on logic to begin with.

Feeling a little better with this internal justification, Doggett stopped thinking and returned measure for measure on what was rapidly becoming one of the nastiest kisses it had ever been his pleasure to share. He was so caught up in tongue and teeth and lips and heat that he didn't really notice they were moving until the side of his knee bumped the edge of the mattress.

Reality broke through the haze of lust. He finally came to what was left of his senses and balked. "What-the-fuck?" All one word. Pure Bronx. Krycek grinned maniacally at him, but let him go. Doggett stood there and swayed. Felt like the only thing holding him upright was the weight of his boner. Certainly wasn't his knees, because they were mush, and it wasn't his brain, 'cause it had exploded.

"You and Mulder have more in common than you might think," Krycek informed him, voice as shaky as Doggett felt. That helped. A little. Before he could decide whether to be honored or insulted, considering the source, Krycek broke his train of thought into itty bitty pieces and scattered them all over the track by the simple action of reaching over with his index finger and tracing it around Doggett's mouth.

Not fucking possible for such a small touch to feel so big and shut him up so completely.

"You're in the vanguard now," Krycek continued, his voice now depressingly steady. "Protecting the future of humanity. Are you up for the job?"

Nothing, but none of this shit, made any sense. Not him, not Krycek, not everything that had happened in the last day and a half. "What the hell am I supposed to do now?" God. He sure hoped that hadn't sounded as much like a whine outside his head as it had inside.

Krycek seemed to take it at face value. He shrugged, grinning lopsidedly, with an edge that Doggett didn't trust. "For the time being, keep your mouth shut. When we need you, you'll know."

A flare of anger almost displaced the horniness still running rampant through Doggett's body. Almost, but not quite. He concentrated on it, trying to ignore the rest of his reactions. "I s'pose you'll tell me?" Good. Sarcasm was good. Kept him from tackling the guy and doing all kinds of things he wasn't sure he actually knew how to do.

Then Krycek reached over and touched his mouth again. Irritation gave up the fight in the face of pure unadulterated want.

"You'll know," he repeated softly. He turned and, before Doggett could say a word, disappeared out the door.

Leaving Doggett, dead tired, totally confused, completely pissed off and more turned on than he could remember being in months, staring after him with his mouth tingling and his balls tied in knots.

Giving up thinking as a bad deal, he wearily stripped off and dropped his clothes on the floor, falling over sideways to land on the bed. His last thought before he surrendered to sleep was, 'Situation normal since joining the X Files -- all fucked up.'

For the first time in weeks, he didn't have any nightmares. For the first time in longer than that, he woke up with the sheets stuck to his belly. He told himself he didn't remember his dreams and he didn't want to.

Going in and writing up the report on Mulder's return would actually be a relief compared to analyzing those dreams.

The pain had stopped. That was the foremost thought dominating Fox Mulder's mind. For the first time in so long in felt like forever, the pain was gone.

He opened his eyes and saw a face he hadn't seen in months. Jeremiah Smith smiled down at him, then reached out a hand and touched his chest. The touch was warm, then cold, chilling him down to his bones.

"What are you doing?" he mumbled, eyes widening with fright.

Smith leaned closer. His lips parted, but no sound came out. Staring at his mouth, Mulder could see tiny stitches keeping the internal flesh closed tightly. He didn't know what to say, what to do.

"I'm on your side," he tried to force past lips rapidly going numb. All that escaped was an inarticulate mumble. There was a hissing sound, a jolt against the side of the bed as Smith was pulled away from him, and a flash of what appeared to be gray flesh as an oxygen mask was clamped over his mouth and nose. He threw his arm over his eyes, instinctively avoiding any gas that might escape.

When he opened them, Smith was gone. Smoke rose from a burnt patch in the carpet.

He was alone in the room.

Staring at the space where his attacker had stood, Mulder's thoughts chased themselves in circles. That had been a Resistance fighter, he was sure of it. Almost sure, because while his mouth had been sewn closed, his eyes had been open. Who had killed him? Another Resistance fighter? A collaborator? A bounty hunter? Whose side did they think Mulder was on?

Whose side was he on?

He didn't close his eyes for hours. The already complex maze of his life had just added a few layers. He didn't know any more who the bad guys were, who the good guys were, who was the cannon fodder. He pulled the oxygen mask slowly off his face and nestled against the pillow, staring at the ceiling.

He didn't know who he was. What he was doing. Who he could trust. What to believe. A smile crept over his face.

It was good to be home.

fin