She was still alive, and he could breathe.

"Fox?" Startled, Mulder swivelled abruptly on his heels to see Mrs. Scully approaching from the open door of the consultation room. He glanced around quickly and caught brief sight of the dimly-outlined shape of a lab coat disappearing out the door.

He noticed then that she was alone, and he clenched his teeth in irritation. His histrionics must have finally cost him the last of whatever credibility he'd ever had with the local police. At least it no longer mattered. Simms and the sheriff would handle Hessman's murder, for what it was worth. The killer had disappeared into the darkness in a rented sedan and would never be caught, and it would all be forgotten soon in favor of more pleasant things. It was over, for the moment.

Mrs. Scully touched his shoulder. "Where have you been?"

Mulder grimaced. "I was... unavoidably detained," he murmured quickly, then moved on before she could question him further. He inclined his head toward the consultation room. "What did the doctor say?"

Mrs. Scully hesitated for the most brief of instants before replying, "He said... he said she's going to be fine." She tried to smile for him.

Mulder caught the hesitation in her voice. "What's wrong?" he demanded.

Mrs. Scully fixed him with a discomfited look. "I..."

Mulder's brow furrowed. "What?" he asked softly, suddenly apprehensive. "What is it?"

"Fox," she said hurriedly, seeing the rising panic in his eyes, "no, it's ok." She placed a comforting hand on his forearm. "She's going to recover."

Mulder was not to be comforted. "Then what? What is it?"

Mrs. Scully shook her head. "They couldn't even... they don't know how it happened," she finally managed. She sounded drained; defeated.

"What did the doctor say?" Mulder asked again, gently.

Margaret moved away from him to claim a chair at the far end of the nurse's station, out of her daughter's potential earshot and line of vision. Mulder followed, sinking down next to her.

For a moment, she was silent. Mulder searched her face.

"They... they couldn't even find a wound," she murmured finally, so soft it was almost a whisper. Her eyes looked frightened, confused. "They couldn't find a reason, Fox." Tears spilled over onto her cheeks. "The doctor said they did something called a laparoscopy, and she looks as if she's never been touched."

She wiped her eyes with the balled-up tissue that had been clenched tightly in one fist. "They're calling it a post-surgical complication, but even the doctor admitted it doesn't make sense. My baby girl almost died tonight, and no one can tell me why."

Unsurprised, Mulder sighed, a deep and bone-weary sound, and fixed his gaze on the floor. He felt suddenly numb and powerless in the face of her bewilderment, and all he could say was, "I'm sorry." I'm sorry, he thought bitterly. There's a lot of that going around lately.

"Fox..." Mrs. Scully hesitated uncomfortably, then finally continued. "Do you know what's happening? Did you find out who did this?"

There was the shortest of pauses, then, never meeting her gaze, he simply said, "No." It was the only thing to say. "No, I don't know."

Mrs. Scully shook her head. "But you suspect someone."

Mulder shifted uneasily in his seat. What could he tell her that would make any sense? "Mrs. Scully, I..." he trailed off, thinking. Finally, he moved to meet her gaze with his own. "The answers you're asking me for... they're the same answers I want."

She was silent for a moment. Then, with a small, wistful smile, she said, "Her father didn't approve of her career choice, you know. He wanted her to set up a practice somewhere. Do something safe." There was another pensive pause, and Mulder watched her as she stared at her hands. He felt vaguely queasy and so very, very tired, and he wondered if she blamed him.

Unexpectedly, she broke the silence when her head swivelled upward to face him dead-on. "Fox Mulder," she said with sudden forcefulness, "what are your intentions toward my daughter?"

Stunned, Mulder blinked in a kind of jolted anxiety halfway between a sixteen-year-old schoolboy on his first car date and a guilty man being asked unforseen questions on the witness stand. He hadn't expected such a forthright question; she wasn't asking if he planned to make her daughter an honest woman.

Seeing the panic in his eyes, Mrs. Scully immediately backpedaled. "I'm sorry," she said hurriedly. "That wasn't a fair question."

Mulder shook his head and chuffed a brief, bitter laugh. "Yes," he said, his voice thick and tangled with sudden, poignant emotion, "yes, it was." His voice caught on the last word, and he cleared his throat and fell again silent.

He could not meet her eyes, and a long, awkward hush drew out between them. He could not explain himself. He didn't have the answers Mrs. Scully deserved, no promises of Dana's safety and happiness. He had only the apparent transparency of his feelings. That, and a covenant of the will, the private offering to die before she shed another drop of blood. That vow hung between mother and beloved, heard but unspoken.

When he finally broke the silence, Mulder's only words were a quiet request. "It's over now," he murmured. He found the courage to face Scully's mother, to look her in the eyes. "They won't be back here. Let me take her home."

Before she left, she had bought him some shoes.

Scully asked no questions beyond the scribblings in her chart, and her doctors and nurses seemed only too happy to forget the entire incident, especially given the rumors that had begun to swirl around this strange patient from the FBI and the death of Dr. Hessman, a man they had all known and liked. They seemed civil, polite, but wary and vaguely blameful. Mulder knew they would be only too happy to see Scully leave.

Mulder kept his experiences to himself, kept them from her. He reconciled his silence by deciding that she simply didn't know, about the implants, the visitation, any of it. They did not really talk. She slept, and he held her and kept a quiet vigil beside her, and he watched as the barely glowing embers of life and strength, color and breath, caught fire again and flared into the bright blaze that was her.

He took her home.

Before she could flip the switch, he reached out, closing his hand over hers, and gingerly pulled her fingers away. He drew her against him, his arms wrapped protectively around her midriff, her back pressing into him. The front door swung closed behind them, suspending them alone together in sweet, dark silence.

"Mulder?" she murmured, sounding bemused.

"Shhhh," was his only reply, a gentle, whispered sound that ruffled her hair. He wanted desperately just to hold her neverending in the shadows.

Her lips quirked upward, a tiny smile in the darkness. She turned in his embrace, and he caught her face with his hands and brushed his lips against hers in an unhurried, delicate kiss. He felt her arms surround him, felt her small hands pressing against his back, and wondered at how he had been in the world before her arrival; lifeless, numb. He couldn't remember living before Scully. There had been no joy before her; nothing that had been real.

Slowly, so slowly, he pulled away.

"We have to talk," she whispered.

He sighed, not willing to release the bliss of the moment. "I know," he murmured finally.

Reluctantly, he stepped back and surrendered her to the inevitable. They did need to talk, and the need had been building for days. She drew away slowly, and warmth lingered everywhere she had touched him.

She shrugged out of her new winter coat; he did the same with his own, and she took it self-consciously from his hands and hung them both on one hook beside the door. She left the overhead light off but clicked on the end-table lamp next to the sofa as she headed for the kitchen. The room became infused with a soft amber glow.

"I'm getting something to drink," she tossed backward over her shoulder. "Do you want anything?"

"Uh, yeah," he replied, moving toward the couch. He wanted a drink, all right; a strong drink, one that would calm the choppy, anxious brine churning in the pit of his stomach. "Sure."

Mulder heard muffled kitchen noises and the clinking of glass, and Scully emerged from the kitchen a moment later with a bottle of wine in one hand and two thick tumblers in the other; no pretense there, no need for wine glasses, not for him. The thought filled him with unexpected happiness. She sat down to face him, one leg drawn beneath herself, and handed him a glass half-filled with the sweet red liquor. She took the other glass and placed the bottle on the coffee table.

Mulder took a long, deep sip and regarded her pensively. She did the same, and for a moment no one spoke. There was too much between them now, and nowhere to begin. Still, Mulder took comfort in her seeming lack of regret over the step they had taken in the cabin that night, the one that could not now be undone. He took a second sip, even larger than the first, and absently set his tumbler on the table beside him. They could not go back, only forward and through; but he wondered if she would hold him to his promise of partnership and fidelity when she really knew the price, all of what had happened in the hospital. He wondered if she would leave him; he wondered if she should.

She was watching him, too, watching and wondering at the complexity of what went on in his mind. There were still questions. She had sensed it for days; something was wrong. He had been keeping something from her. She sighed, took a second large swallow, and set her glass on the coffee table beside his as she leaned in toward him. "What happened in the hospital?" she asked, giving voice to her fears. "What haven't you told me?"

He cringed, realizing then that she suspected more than he had offered. He should've known better, known not to sell her short. She was an FBI agent, after all, every bit his caliber, and she knew him better than anyone had ever known him; better than he knew himself.

He knew he would have to tell her the truth ...and still, what came to his lips was an uneasy, dissembling smile and an effortful, "What? What makes you think I haven't told you something?"

Scully shook her head. He was usually so eager to fill her ears with his version of the truth, his theories, his experiences... but now, he was afraid. The realization of that was more disquieting than anything she imagined he could say.

She leaned over to grasp his hand in both of hers. "Mulder," she said simply, pointedly, "whatever happened, I need to know."

He gazed down at the small, delicate hands clasped so firmly around one of his. How could he tell her this? How could he say it? He wrapped his other hand around hers, brought them both to his lips, kissed her fingers gently with half-closed eyes.

"Mulder, what -- "

"There were more implants, Scully," he blurted, forcing the words out in a rush from his lips before he lost courage. He relinquished her hands. He couldn't open his eyes, couldn't look at her.

There was a second of stunned silence, then he heard her breathe an almost inaudible, "What?"

"The surgeon took one out of your chest," he explained. It took every ounce of strength he had to keep the tremor from his voice. "It was a lot like the one you found."

He steeled himself and opened his eyes in time to see the confusion in her expression transform into a mute horror she was making no effort to suppress. It was almost too much to bear. He reached out for her shoulder and felt her trembling. "Scully, I -- " he began.

She cut him off, shrugging his hand away. "You said implants, Mulder."

He nodded. He was desperate not to tell her now, frantic to will away the truth. Yet still it demanded audience. It always did. "There was another one," he admitted. "They..." His voice broke; he cleared his throat. "They found it on your x-ray, in your..." He took a deep breath and focused hard on finishing the sentence. "In your ovary."

She silently covered her mouth with one hand; the other moved in an involuntarily protective gesture toward her abdomen. She said nothing, merely stared at him with an expression of half-paralyzed shock in her wide blue eyes, an expression that he knew would haunt him for a long, long time.

There was a question there, too, a question she wouldn't voice... a grim, harsh question he knew he would have to answer. He shook his head quickly, as much for his own benefit as for hers. "No, no, it's not there anymore."

She did not move; the only change was the deepening of the furrow of her brow. He wasn't making sense; there had been no surgery to remove it, no mention at all of any of this in her chart. "I don't understand," she breathed through her hand.

He took a deep, calming breath and let it out slowly. "That's why you bled that night, Scully," he explained gently, as gently as he could. He felt bruised, his heart battered beyond anything it had the capacity to withstand. The rest came out in a sudden rush, as if keeping it unspoken were causing him physical pain. "They took them back, both of them. What's in your chart was a lie. They killed your surgeon, Scully, and They replaced your x-rays. You didn't hemorrhage that night because of your stab wound." He caught her eyes with his own and said pointedly, "You bled because of what They did."

"Mulder..." she murmured softly, her expression a mixture of confusion and disbelief. Both hands drawn across her abdomen now in reflexive, unthinking self-protection, she leaned away from him with a look that was equal mixtures of defiance and terrible realization. She shook her head slowly. "Mulder, you're not making any sense," she insisted in a small, tenuous voice that belied the substance of her words.

Carefully, he moved from his seat. He pushed the coffee table back slowly with his foot as he knelt in front of her. Gently, he took one hand, then the other, and uncoiled her, tugging her gingerly toward him. For an instant she resisted him, then she pulled her foot from beneath her body and shifted so that she faced him.

But she hung her head and would not meet his eyes, and he recognized that set to her mouth, her lips pursed in a mixture of anger and grief.

He felt as if his heart were going to burst forth and flee the confines of his chest for greener pastures. "Yes," he insisted softly. He was shaking now, too. "I am." He pulled her hand to his face and placed her palm against his cheek, but still she would not look at him.

"Scully, look at me," he implored.

Silence.

"Dana," he whispered. He sounded lost. "Please."

Finally, she turned her face upward. There were unshed tears gleaming like bright gemstones in her eyes.

"Oh, Scully," he murmured ruefully. He had no words that could take away what had to be said, and he felt as if nothing could possibly convey what he felt for her. He pulled her hand from his cheek and placed her palm over his heart.

She could feel it beating fast beneath his shirt, could feel him breathing.

"I'm telling you the truth," he finally murmured. "You know that."

There was a beat of charged silence between them. Then, without warning, she jerked her hands away and shouted, "No!"

Mulder jumped, startled at the unexpected anger, the shock and hurt showing in his eyes.

She turned abruptly away from him on the couch and pulled her knees tightly beneath her chin. Gone was the dispassionate physician, the cerebral FBI agent. Mulder had never seen her like this; she emanated the contained fury and the sorrow of a wounded child. "You've got it wrong," she insisted sharply.

There was nothing he could say. He was miserably bereft, out of comforting words, out of steam, out of gas. And overarching all of it, he was responsible. He was to blame. All he could do was plead. "Scully, please," he whispered softly, his hand on her shoulder. "Please believe me."

Unthinking, she blurted angrily, "I don't want to believe you, okay?" She felt the tears spill over onto her cheeks and swiped violently at her eyes with the back of her hand.

Mulder pulled back as if she'd struck him, and suddenly she realized the meaning of what she had said. She deflated, pressing her forehead against her knees, withdrawing that much more completely. She just couldn't face it, the truth or the hurt in his eyes. "I don't want to believe," she repeated softly, mumbling into her knees.

For a long moment, neither of them moved or spoke. Scully could hear Mulder breathing, could hear his watch ticking over a silence that was heavy and oppressive.

Then, gradually, she became aware of another sound, soft and muffled and utterly disconsolate. The sound penetrated her, pulled her out of the desolate well of herself. She lifted her head to look at him and found him still kneeling before her, doubled over now, face buried in his hands.

He was crying.

She felt a sudden, sharp pang of remorse at the thought that she might have caused it.

"Mulder?" she asked tentatively. She had seen him ill, wounded, delusional... but she had never seen him cry. Not like this. She unfolded her body and reached out to touch his shoulder. "Mulder, look at me."

When he didn't respond, she reached down and pulled him up toward her. When he dropped his hands and looked at her, his glittering eyes held an expression that made her ache for him.

"I'm sorry," he breathed. The words sounded as if they had been summoned from the very core of who he was. "I'm so sorry, Scully." He drew in a shuddering breath. "From the beginning, I have done nothing but cause you pain."

She winced. "Mulder, that's not true."

It was as if she hadn't spoken. "After all I've put you through, Scully. After everything that's happened and all that you've lost because of me. I don't understand why you stay." He looked at her pointedly, the statement not one of self-pity but of simple fact layered in pain and confusion. "I don't understand why you want me."

She looked at him, incredulously, tenderly. "After everything we said in that cabin, Mulder, you still don't know?" She shook her head. "From the moment I met you, a part of me knew I couldn't walk away. Not from the work... and not from you." She reached out to take his face in both hands. "Never from you."

"Maybe you should," he blurted unexpectedly, pulling back from her embrace, refusing to be comforted. Thoughts of being without her clamped down hard on his heart, seizing it so forcefully he almost choked on the words. "Maybe you deserve more."

Alarmed, she watched as he rose abruptly from the floor and began to pace in a tight circle. "Mulder, what are you saying?"

"I can't keep you safe," he insisted, swiping an agitated hand through his hair. "I can't, Scully. Don't you see that? It's because of me that you were abducted, that your sister was killed." He turned back to her and said flatly, "As long as you are with me, you're never going to be out of danger."

Suddenly, Scully was angry, frustrated with his overdeveloped and misdirected sense of guilt... hurt at the thought that he might break his promise to her, even if it were out of loyalty and love. She exhaled loudly, thumped the arm of the couch with her fist.

"How do you know this, Mulder?" she demanded. Her tone was biting. "How do you know? Why do you think it all revolves around you?"

Her anger wounded him. He felt everything leave him in a rush, and he sank down on his knees before her. "I only know what I was told, Scully," he said softly.

Surprised, she felt the anger leave her in one great, swift wave when she saw the raw pain in his eyes. What...? "Who told you this was your fault?" she whispered.

"X. The man you met once, our source. I... I met with him in Colorado. He told me we were a problem." He hung his head. "He told me They thought you -- giving me your partnership -- had been a mistake, one that needed to be fixed."

He looked up at her again, and she saw despair etched in the outlines of his face. "They'll be back, Scully. They're not done."

She studied his face and for a moment said nothing. His gaze was intense. She didn't know what to say to him, how to comfort him.

But she did know the truth. She remembered, and she could give him at least the gift of her honesty. "I remember now, you know," she murmured finally.

Mulder's brow furrowed. "Remember what?" he asked, thrown by the shift in the conversation.

She sighed. "My... my..." she began, but trailed off, unable to finish. She snagged his eyes with her own, and the expression there sent another wave of plaintive dread through him. He knew what she would say next.

"When I was missing," she finally breathed. "I remember...things." Her face contorted into an ugly frown to punctuate the last word, and she cut her eyes quickly down at the hands in her lap. Things, Mulder echoed, and shuddered, wondering if his imagination could possibly be worse than the reality of what she had suffered; hoping it was.

"I saw you that night," she continued. "I don't know why. I don't even know if it was real. But I remember it. There was all this...this light, and there you were in the middle of it, with Duane Barry. You were shouting at him; I couldn't hear what you were saying. But you were shouting. And then you looked up."

She finally dared to look at him again, and what he saw in her crystal blue eyes caught him and held him helpless with the sheer force of its intensity. He was wide-eyed and silent, paralyzed for fear that if he spoke he would break the spell of her confession. "God, Mulder," she breathed, "I was sure you looked right at me."

Suddenly self-conscious, she dropped her gaze to her hands once again. "I clung to you. I remember that now too. I clung to that last image of you, to the idea that you'd never stop looking for me. I held onto that through everything."

For a brief instant there was only silence, and Mulder groped dumbly for the voice that it seemed had simply fled. "You're right," he finally replied, the words a throaty whisper. He reached across the space between them and covered her hands with his own. "I never would have stopped."

She found the courage to look at him again and saw the ferocious, infinite honesty of that promise laid bare before her in his eyes. It seemed a lifetime since the night in the cabin. It had been so overwhelming then, the sudden knowledge of what he felt and what it meant...the knowledge that she returned it a hundredfold. It frightened her for so many reasons, yet here it was now, raw and true, and she could not run, even after knowing everything he knew. She could only love him with a bottomless depth that had been alien to her before him, before his life had enveloped her so completely.

She could not walk away, and now she had the missing piece of the puzzle, the certainty that she was right. "Mulder, don't you see?" she said. "They're afraid of us. They want us apart. If I leave you, then They've won."

She shifted, her hands gripping his now, tightly. "You made me a promise --"

Abruptly, Mulder looked up at her, his eyes fierce with the strength of some sudden internal epiphany she couldn't quite decipher. "It's because you make me strong," he interrupted with the enigmatic conviction of sudden realization. "That's why they want us apart." He looked stunned.

"You make me strong," he repeated, realizing what the words meant, needing to hear them aloud again.

Scully reached out to run her fingers lightly along his jaw. That was it, wasn't it? Strength. "I think we make each other strong," she whispered in a voice full of emotion. He would keep his promise.

He leaned into her and their lips met, coming together in a kiss that was this time anything but tentative. She moved her fingers through his dark hair as the kiss deepened. Mulder slid his hands around her waist, pulling her closer, drawing her against him.

When they finally broke away from each other, he buried his face in her hair and whispered, "I don't think you know how much I love you." Then he turned to lay a gentle kiss upon her neck.

"Stay," she whispered in answer. "Stay with me."

She felt his lips curl into a smile. "Why, Agent Scully," he mused quietly, "that's hardly standard procedure."

She laughed then, a soft noise deep in her throat. "Mulder," she murmured softly, running a hand through his hair, "nothing you do is standard procedure."

He chuckled, and she lost herself in the low, seductive sound and the feeling of his lips against her skin.

He glanced over at his sleeping partner, at her slow, rhythmic breathing, and knew they weren't a part of that world anymore. They were beyond it, apart from it, aliens in their own ways, strangers in the midst of backyard barbeques and baseball games and suburban routine. He had always been an outsider, living his own eerie life quite apart from the rest of humanity, and he had been distinctively unprepared for the fireball from the heavens that had been Scully. She had haunted him from the beginning, and she had paid the price for it.

Yet, she made the choice and she stayed, was somehow willing to walk with him along this strange, dark path that was his -- their -- life. She had become his partner in every sense of the word, and she had forsaken all others, all which embodied the prosaic and the secure. His quest and his grail had become hers as well.

Somehow, she loved him. As he watched her shift in her sleep, a smile crept over his features at the thought of that one simple truth, the only constant in the universe. She made him strong. Alone he was just a man, but together they were a force of nature, powerful and fierce.

And dangerous. His eyes clouded over and he returned his gaze to the window.

He was watching the sky.