TITLE: Rainbow Sign
AUTHOR: Vehemently (vehemently@yahoo.com)
SPOILERS: One Son post-ep
RATING: PG-13 to R, depending on your stomach.
DISCLAIMER: Characters and situations you recognize belong to 
Chris Carter / 1013 and are used with neither permission nor 
intent to profit.
NOTES: Beginning and ending citations are from Louise Glueck's 
"Gretel in Darkness"; a lot of love and no copyright infringement 
are intended.

* * * * * * *
Rainbow Sign
     By Vehemently
* * * * * * *

"This is the world we wanted.
All those who would have seen us dead
are dead." 

* * * * * * *

They left the A.D.'s office flipping through photographs so 
intently that by rights they should have walked into the walls. 
The sheaf Spender had turned over were 8x10, printed on glossy 
paper and in deep color contrast, so the parts where the insides 
of people had cooked instead of burned showed pink, coral, peach 
against the flaking blackened outer tissue. It was possible, 
after repeated exposure, not to feel nausea when a close-up of 
intestines uncannily resembled a coiled string of sausages.

Mulder looked up before Scully did, and touched her elbow to 
guide her past a protruding display case that threatened to brain 
her. "What do you think?"

She made a low noise and shuffled the stiff pages. A white piece 
of paper came to the top, and she read aloud from it. "68 bodies, 
the charred remains of a military truck and a large number of 
suitcases." Her lips were so full as to imply distaste with only 
the slightest movement. "Whoever they were, they all drove 
Lincoln towncars. Seventeen of them were parked outside, and a 
smattering of other civilian vehicles."

Mulder hooded his eyes. "A true bonfire of the vanities."

"Of the vain," she corrected him. He took it without reply. She 
let her heels describe her mood as she led him down the hall to 
the elevator. Without thinking, both of them had begun to head 
back to the basement, to that office that seemed to mean 'X-
Files' as much as they did.

The steel doors of the elevator swung open in near silence even 
before they reached it, as if it too were grimly eager to get 
started. Scully was already stepping in when a square-jawed 
security guard, the elevator's only occupant, reached out to lay 
his hand on her forearm.

"I'm sorry ma'am," he mumbled as he flinched away, "we've got an 
emergency downstairs." And, keeping his eyes to himself, he 
nodded at Mulder and squashed the button till the doors rolled 
closed again.

Long experience had its impact: they didn't need to look at each 
other to begin sprinting down the hall. Scully clutched the file 
folder to her breasts as she picked her way down the stairs after 
Mulder's athletic leaps.

He surveyed the first floor halls and beckoned her down, 
inevitably, to the basement. They flew together along the 
concrete hallway, passing file boxes and supply rooms, each 
wondering in private thoughts what could have gone wrong. The 
pages heavy in Scully's arms were they only thing worth 
destroying on the case, and it couldn't be --

The office door, still with the wrong names on it, was wedged 
open by an emergency medical kit. The white-jacketed paramedics, 
hunched together on the floor, suddenly parted to reveal a man on 
a gurney. They wheeled it out the door and toward the elevator -- 
the security guard flinched again, seeing Scully, but he held the 
door open with his arm -- and as it passed by them they saw who 
the man was.

Agent Spender matched his white dress shirt, the arterial red a 
startling speckle on skin and cloth alike. Mulder noticed the 
gauze padding that blood was gluing to the man's ribcage. Scully, 
who had worked hard to forget her rotation in emergency medicine, 
saw instead the face upturned, nostrils gaping and half-open eyes 
revealing only the whites. 

They stood together like that, in the hallway, while the elevator 
took on its passengers and began to close. Before the doors had 
closed all the way, the paramedics began shouting to each other. 
There was just a glimpse to be had of a man climbing astraddle 
the gurney before the doors were shut and all they saw were their 
own dull reflections.

"He's gone into arrest," said a ghost of Scully's voice. She had 
made no move to help. Neither did she move when a trio of fuming 
agents pushed past her, trailing a multicolored array of Metro 
and Capitol police. She clutched the folder in her arms as the 
crime scene was cordoned off.

Mulder cocked his head at her and together they moved away, 
Scully carrying from the scene what was surely evidence. As they 
waited for the other elevator Mulder found himself standing at 
such an angle as to obscure Scully's folder from the police, who 
were fussing with yellow tape and trying not to step in the blood 
tracks the paramedics had left everywhere.

There was nowhere to go, if their office was closed to them. 
Mulder fumbled in the elevator, hesitating to suggest his 
apartment as a refuge, but Scully pressed the button that would 
take them back up to the A.D.'s level.  "Skinner." She raised her 
chin. "And anyway, he'll want to know." So while she was 
composing in her head how to phrase the fact that the agent of 
record on the El Rico case was probably already dead, her partner 
stood beside her, feeling on his left shoulder that brief weight 
of Spender's hand. It had been such an awkward, defeated move, a 
concession, and Mulder had brushed it off as such. Now, of 
course, that hand was clawed and limp as the body it belonged to 
drowned in its own blood.

He tried to come up with the right words, and couldn't. He 
wondered, "Do you think he knew, when he left Kersh's office, 
that he would be executed for whatever success or failure these 
pictures represent?" Scully regarded him, and decided to spare 
him her sympathy.

She gave him purpose instead. "Let's go find out what these 
pictures represent, then."

* * * * * * *

They drove to West Virginia in a Crown Vic and a vague, dreadful 
parody of their investigation of the contents of Strughold Mining 
Company, three years ago. It was the same road, made strange by 
the dusting of snow that became full drifts as they entered the 
Blue Ridge Mountains. And again they had left Skinner in a 
darkened room, perplexed and morose. The only improvement was 
that this time they hadn't yet left the law behind.

Scully drove like her hair was on fire and the time they had to 
spend together thinking about burned flesh was made substantially 
shorter. Mulder didn't have anything to say, and after a while 
she turned the radio to a soul station and began singing along 
tonelessly under her breath. 

Mulder listened to her for a while, watching the tranquilly 
falling snowflakes spin and crash into the oncoming windshield.  
He shifted in his seat and told her what she already knew: "The 
crime scene is under military jurisdiction." She didn't say 
anything. She was leaning forward in her seat, her breasts 
practically resting on the steering wheel. "My experience 
notwithstanding, civilians don't just wander onto U.S. air 
bases." Scully didn't say anything. Aretha Franklin sang on 
unaided.

* * * * * * *

The guard at the gate to El Rico Air Force Base was tall and 
gaunt, adolescent pimples still showing on his face. His stony 
formality slipped a little as he scrutinized their 
identification, skeleton fingers drying themselves on his thighs. 
Scully watched him in the rearview as they drove in. He frowned 
and scratched, then spat after their car and turned back to his 
tasks.

The crime scene was marked with yellow tape and West Virginia 
official vehicles parked sideways. The snow had obscured any tire 
marks from the cars that had been lined up in front of the 
hangar. The fleet of Lincolns and other assorted luxury vehicles 
had all been impounded to some covered lot, where the 
fingerprints were being lifted from the interior, perhaps the 
best hope of identifying bodies.

But Mulder and Scully headed into the hangar. They had to pass 
another ring of security before they were allowed near the char 
marks and the fossil shape of the gutted truck. The concrete 
floor was bare in a curious pattern, pale gray areas amidst the 
scattered black. They were God's version of a chalk outline, too 
many of them cramped together in that huge space, all heaped over 
each other so that no one shape looked like a human silhouette. 

Scully asked the military police working on the truck what model 
it was and what it was used for. Hairs did the Tarantula waltz up 
Mulder's neck when one of them wiped sooty grease onto his 
forehead and said it was probably a hospital transport, judging 
from the struts laid onto the frame. Extra support, for hanging 
stretchers against the walls. They went back to tearing it to 
pieces. It was so badly mangled it wouldn't even be very much use 
as scrap.

"Let's go look at the bodies," she said, and Mulder went with 
her, neither of them mentioning the last person they had seen in 
a stretcher. Mulder froze at the door to the second hangar, his 
suddenly clammy palms sharply uncomfortable on the metal handle.

"If Cassandra could heal, like she said she could . . . " Scully 
looked up at him, arms crossed in front of her. She let him coax 
out the thought, his face blanching a little as he approached the 
conclusion she had already found.

She wrapped her fingers around his fist on the door handle and 
pulled. "If that were so, then she won't be among the bodies in 
here." Her breath made steam in the unheated hangar, clouding 
around Mulder's face. He felt the moisture turn cool a few 
seconds after it left Scully's mouth. They crowded together 
through the hangar door to go have a look.

When they flashed their FBI badges yet again, a blond young man 
strode towards them, waving his clipboard. "Agent Spender, glad 
to meet you." He flashed his large white teeth at Mulder, then 
turned to Scully. She noted the creases in his tan slacks and 
realized he was a soldier. "We spoke on the phone," clarified the 
young man, as his greeting went unreciprocated. "I'm Captain 
Joseph Briggs." 

Mulder shook the hand Briggs offered, unsmiling. "I'm not 
Spender," came his rough reply. "Agent Spender was injured in the 
line of duty. He asked us to take his place." He took a certain 
ugly pride in avoiding a lie, but Briggs didn't notice. He 
pointed his sharp chin at a grim grizzled man who crouched over a 
body bag and led the way towards the corpses.

The bodies were laid out in neat rows, each zipped into a black 
bag. Some twenty or so of the bags were far too large for their 
contents. Children. The man stood from his crouch as Mulder and 
Scully approached, his iron gray hair bristling straight out from 
his temples. "This is Major Leonard Zabriskie," said Briggs, 
launching into an explanation of the Air Force's Judge Advocate 
system. Scully knew enough from the Navy to wave him off, 
eliciting another nervous tooth-flash, and Mulder couldn't have 
cared less.

Together they wandered the rows, Briggs following their measured 
tread like a puppy unsure of its welcome. Mulder lowered his head 
to say directly into Scully's ear: "What do you want to bet the 
cervical x-rays are clean?"

She looked at him, her features bright and clear in the cold 
afternoon. His long face got longer. Then she ducked her head, 
and pulled out a pair of latex gloves. "The sooner I can work, 
the sooner we'll know," she said behind her, as she walked away. 
She didn't see him watching her. She didn't need to see it.

When Mulder caught up to her she was back with Zabriskie, 
kneeling on the floor, handling the twin bones of a charred 
forearm with a care that approached tenderness. "The preliminary 
photos were messengered to us in D.C., but not the autopsy 
results. Was it the same chemical reaction?"

"The same," muttered Zabriskie. Mulder crouched with them and 
noticed that the man had hairs growing out of his ears. They were 
carefully trimmed short against his square head. "My guess is, 
the first flash vaporizes a portion of the body, then the rest 
catches fire. It explains the cooking in random places."

"Like searing a steak," Scully replied, toneless. Briggs, 
standing behind her, made a noise in his throat and moved away. 
Mulder watched as a fine dust of soot fell from the forearm. 
Scully gently tucked the arm back into the bag to rejoin the 
remains of its owner. The marks on her gloves were half soot, 
half grease from boiled human body fat. She rubbed this obscene 
lye from finger to finger, smelled it, grimaced.

Zabriskie rested his arms on his thighs and looked at the floor. 
With apparent effort he turned his gaze to the rows of bags in 
front of him. Mulder thought of him suddenly: he will look into 
each bag, no matter that someone else has already examined it. 
The knowledge made Mulder frown, because he knew he would do the 
same himself. Scully zipped up the bag in front of her and raised 
her head.

There were six or eight other people in the room, all moving 
slowly and surely with relative professionalism. Briggs stood 
apart, scrawling on his clipboard. He muttered to himself and it 
echoed against the round ceiling and came back a dull roar of 
tension. Scully felt grit in her eyes, the dull ache of smoke 
inhalation in her windpipe. 

She choked on it, on her first try. Then it came out more 
smoothly. "God gave Noah the Rainbow Sign --" But everyone who 
had looked at the scene had already thought of the rest of that 
song. She didn't say it out loud. Everyone who had heard her felt 
it, an absurd sibilance of the pre-spoken hanging in air. In 
their minds they all completed the rhyme, each in individual 
fear, or ritual, or apology to James Baldwin. Lips moved, only a 
little. A tiny hiss of sentences completed. No more water; the 
fire next time. The fire next time. The fire . . . 

If anyone had been watching from above, or from a distance, one 
could have seen a contagious shudder begin at the periphery of 
the small crowd and reverberate through to everyone in hearing 
distance. Nobody was immune, even unto Scully, kneeling on the 
concrete. 

Mulder shivered in high descant to her low wrack. They both stood 
abruptly, and got on with the work.

* * * * * * *

The West Virginia technicians, the Air Force investigators, and a 
sepulchral local mortician later, Scully stripped off her last 
pair of gloves for the night and sought out Mulder where he was 
disputing details of the crime scene schematic map. He showed her 
from the photos how the male pelvises tended towards the outer 
ring of the heap, the rounder-hipped women and the children in 
the center. The male bodies were mostly charred to black bone, 
but those in the middle of the pile were more often cooked, or 
only partly burned.

"Chivalry isn't dead," he said sardonically. "They were 
surrounded and retreating. They knew what was coming." He put 
down the pictures and waited in vain for her to make eye contact. 
"Not one-by-one, like at Skyland Mountain and Ruskin Dam."

"No chips in the cervical vertebrae," was her non sequitur reply.

She started walking and he followed, neither sure where they were 
going. Mulder mused, as they pulled even with the guards at the 
hangar doors, "Hoist on their own petard, it seems."

They were climbing into the car before Scully said what she had 
been thinking all day: "They didn't set themselves on fire."

* * * * * * *

That evening they convened an impromptu bullpen at the Buckeye 
Bar and Grill, run by an exiled Ohioan, who was observant enough 
to notice their strained faces and professional clothes and 
suggest a private table so they wouldn't scare the regular 
customers. Briggs made his way methodically through three fingers 
of whiskey before he caught Zabriskie looking at him and switched 
to beer. He didn't show his teeth all night.

Scully ate only sides and an undressed salad, nothing with butter 
or gravy. The men ate well-fired meat and the grease they wiped 
from their mouths made her want to throw up, or yell at them. She 
kept her peace, but Mulder eventually slowed, staring at his 
plate. He looked as ill as she felt when he made the belated 
connection.

After the meal was cleared, they settled in to speculate, each 
with his own chosen poison at his elbow. Scully eyeballed her 
partner when he ordered coffee, and when her turn came she asked 
for a shot of tequila. The military men blinked at her, before 
hiding themselves in their beers.

"Well," said Zabriskie at last. "I been to accident scenes that 
would make your hair stand on end. Bombs dropped on the wrong 
targets, an F-16 meeting a mountainside, and one time there was 
this kid who was smoking around 15 year old stores of Napalm. But 
this is the goddamnedest thing I ever saw."

Everyone else nodded, even though two of them had already 
witnessed scenes like this. Scully laid her hand on Mulder's knee 
and he nodded without looking at her. They would not discuss her 
intense personal knowledge of this goddamnedest thing.

Briggs spoke, his lips a thin line: "Luggage. Adults and 
children, male and female. All ages. Sound like families to you?"

"No drivers left behind in the cars," added Mulder. "This was 
some kind of last-ditch assignation. And somebody else 
anticipated it."

Zabriskie asked, "But where were they going, and why?" 

Mulder shifted uncomfortably, glanced at Scully. She was toying 
with her full shot glass and said nothing. He plunged in alone. 
"More to the point, who were they, and how did they know to 
convene here?"

The gray old airman answered heavily, "The fingerprints will ring 
bells somewhere. We'll track down who rented those cars. We 
haven't started on dental identification or DNA yet." Scully 
downed her shot while he spoke, smacking the glass on the table 
as punctuation. The three men glanced at her, but said nothing.

They let the dinner end on that false-optimistic note, excusing 
themselves abruptly. The two airmen returned to base, while 
Mulder and Scully checked themselves into a motel down the 
street. It took only a cursory examination of the out of state 
license plates in the parking lot to convince them to register as 
George Hale and Barbara McClintock.

Noises from an impromptu party met them as they approached their 
rooms. A man in a t-shirt opened his door as they passed and 
hailed them like old friends. "Peter Withers, Associated Press," 
he beamed at them. "Who you with?" Several people sat in the 
brightly-lit room beyond him, their conversation animated by 
brown bottles.

Scully plastered on her false smile and began, "I'm sorry sir, 
we're just --"

"Hey Carrie!" shouted the man, mashing his consonants into a 
drunken glut. "Somebody else from the press room! Good thing we 
were here first, eh?"

Mulder reached out his long arm to push past the man. Withers 
staggered away while Mulder growled, "We're on our way to an 
actuarial conference in Akron, if you don't mind."

Withers shouted something rude at their backs and returned to his 
room. As they found their own rooms, Mulder pressed his fingers 
to Scully's back and told her, grinning, "Thanks for letting me 
play the protective hero."

She gave him her enigmatic face. "I was going to say Biometrics, 
but actuarial is even more boring. Good choice." She let herself 
into her room without saying good night, leaving him standing at 
his own door in the freezing night air.

He didn't turn around to look at the stars, crisp and bright in 
the sky. He unlocked his door and dropped his things in his motel 
room.

* * * * * * *

They breakfasted in silence on cold bagels. The air was sharp and 
clear, outlining the white-topped mountains so perfectly they 
seemed preternaturally close, circular rainbows sparking off 
their heights. When they got to the base, Mulder mentioned it to 
Captain Briggs, who smiled a wan toothless smile and said it was 
the high altitude.

He worked with Briggs all morning, listening to him mutter 
fearfully to himself, while Scully rounded up the last of the 
autopsy writeups. It wasn't till noontime that Briggs brushed 
back his wave of blond hair and asked, "You have a pretty good 
idea who these people were, don't you?"

Mulder shuffled the papers in front of him. Briggs ran his short 
nails down his face, nodding. "I figured as much." He didn't seem 
to realize he was marring his skin with scratch marks. The air 
made noise between them, a curious blanketing hush like the 
atmosphere just before snowfall.

The pockmarks of Scully's heels heralded her presence, saving 
Mulder from trying to explain about the balance of world power. 
She scooped him up and they walked together across the hangar, 
her grip tight on his lapel. She said: "Cassandra Spender isn't 
here."

"So." All the reply Mulder could think of. Another odd datum to 
add to the vertiginous churn of facts.

"They might have been sending her somewhere else, from Potomac 
Yards. Or they might have arrived too late, and escaped detection 
in the chaos of the crime scene." Scully drew a breath, heard the 
catch in her chest. "Or she might have been here and been spared 
that death."

"Taken?" asked Mulder.

"Taken," she replied.

They both abruptly realized they had stopped walking and were 
standing still in the middle of that large space. Mulder hung his 
head, keeping his hands to himself, until Scully reached out for 
one of them. "I told her," he muttered. It was so quiet it did 
not echo off the ceiling. Scully leaned in to hear. "I told her 
to come. Diana Fowley might be one of those bodies."

Scully interrupted: "She wasn't. Skinner said he spoke to her 
yesterday morning."

"I might have been one of those bodies." Mulder continued, 
expressionless. His fingertips were cold to the touch. "If you 
hadn't insisted."

A piercing look, then a small confused grimace. "But I did 
insist."

Neither said anything for a little while. They watched the plumes 
of their breath mingle between them. At last Mulder raised his 
head, neck tense and eyes wild as a man in the grip of febrile 
delirium. "She wasn't here," he said.

She did not respond, only turned them back towards the paperwork 
they would soon be hauling back to Washington. Scully was 
squinting at Zabriskie's illegible handwriting ten minutes later 
when Mulder came to the end of the thought he'd begun aloud.

"She knew not to be here." 

He sat slouching in a chair next to Briggs, whose alarmed eyes 
darted around the table in search of context. Scully let Mulder 
wallow in his misery until she finished transcribing the note 
Zabriskie had written. Then she straightened and told him: "Let's 
get going."

* * * * * * *

Zabriskie and Briggs stood side by side in the rearview mirror as 
Mulder drove away. There had been cards and promises of follow-up 
exchanged all around, and then an awkward leavetaking. As Mulder 
glanced back, he saw Briggs's movie star looks collapse into a 
frown. Zabriskie clapped a hand to his colleague's shoulder, 
turning him away, and then the car went round a curve and Mulder 
saw no more of them.

Scully sat silent in the passenger's seat until they were well 
onto the highway, watching the vague shapes snow made of boulders 
by the side of the road. Each of them let time flow, unraveling  
the days' speculation to its logical conclusions.

An idea had been hurtling a sickening orbit around his 
consciousness for a day or so. He let himself say it out loud for 
the first time, the disarray of facts snapping to a sudden 
gestalt. "What Krycek told me last year." He gasped it, his foot 
unconsciously pushing the gas pedal to its upper limit. "The 
third faction just saved us from immediate colonization."

Scully glanced at him, snorted. "This is Krycek's version of an 
ally in extremis?"

"I wonder if he's working for them, or them for him." Mulder 
grimaced, kept his eyes on the road. Next to him, Scully did the 
same. "He tried to convince me they were our only hope."

They drove that way for a little while, unsmiling. Scully folded 
her hands in her lap, examined them. "Out of the frying pan, into 
the fire," she murmured. Then she realized what she had just said 
and turned towards the window, vaguely nauseated at herself.

Sparing her his scrutiny, Mulder tapped his fingers on the 
steering wheel arrhythmically. "I wonder --" he began, but Scully 
cut him off.

"Krycek's not on the side of the angels, Mulder," she snapped, 
her face still turned away. "Don't you dare go calling him some 
kind of freedom fighter."

He knew it was stupid to demur, but he did so anyway. "His allies 
stopped the actions of a flagrantly illegal and incredibly 
destructive group." He tried to couch his voice low and soothing. 
The flush at her neck signalled he was failing.

From the spark of gold at the base of her throat to the tip of 
her pert chin Scully's skin flushed a dark rose. Her eyes 
confronted him, cool blue amidst the pink. "Sixty-eight people 
are dead," she reminded him, her consonants crisp and clipped. 
"And Krycek isn't God." Scully dropped her eyes and turned away, 
staring into the snowy countryside.

Mulder let her withdraw, then glanced skyward through the 
windshield. The sky, pale fragile blue, gave him nothing but 
wisps of clouds to look at. He returned his eyes to the road. 
Neither of them said anything.

It became so quiet that the ring of the cellphone made Mulder 
swerve in his lane. Scully hunted through her pockets and 
answered it. She listened, punctuating her short replies with 
'sir'. Mulder waited until she had hung up, then waited longer 
while she frowned at the melting snow on the highway divider.

"That was Skinner," she said. "Spender held on in a coma for 
almost a day. He died this morning."

They didn't speak again until they reached Washington. By then 
Mulder's knuckles were cold and stiff, frozen on the steering 
wheel. 

* * * * * * *

	                      "Spies
	hiss in the stillness, Hansel,
	we are there still and it is real, real,
	that black forest and the fire in earnest."

* * * * * * *

END 

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