Chapter 5—Jack Hinks

The cell phone on the bedside table chirped eagerly, announcing its need to communicate with annoying good humor.

From beneath a pile of quilts an arm thrust angrily towards the phone, hand extended, fingers questing blindly across the tabletop. When the fingers encountered the phone, they snatched it up greedily, and the arm retracted back into the depths of its blanket cave.

“Mmmrph.”

“Mulder, it’s me.” Scully’s voice was tinny and laced with static and barely audible, and it made Mulder scrabble out from under the covers like his ass was on fire.

“Scully, where are you?” he asked excitedly, and then, seeing the movement of blankets out of the corner of his eye, he lowered his voice and continued, “What time is it? Are you in Calgary already?” He peered owlishly at the alarm clock on the nightstand.

“It’s early and I’m not,” replied Scully. “In fact, I was able to get an earlier flight, and a decent rental car—without having to show my ID or gun, I might add—and I’m in—uh—Banff.” She barely stifled a giggle as she wrapped her mouth around the strange-sounding word.

“Banff?” His outdoor voice again, and more movement from the bed, along with a noise that sounded suspiciously like a hibernating bear around the first week of spring. Mulder brought his voice back down to a whisper as he pulled on loose gray sweatpants, holding the phone cradled between his ear and his shoulder. “How can you be in Banff already, Scully?” With a quick glance back at the bed, where it appeared that no bear would be coming out of its den just yet, Mulder padded bare-foot out to the kitchen, still talking. “Didn’t you just leave Washington five minutes ago?” A pause, then suspicious and smiling at the same time: “Are you missing time?” In the kitchen he found juice and a glass and a very surly cat, and he poured, drank and patted, all in the right order, while Scully explained to him how the Lone Gunmen had come to her aid. Not only had they managed to somehow retrieve all the information from the hospital back when Skinner had first been stricken with the nanotechnology that was currently threatening his life, but they had also gotten Scully a suddenly vacant first class seat on an earlier flight and at one third of the price. Frohike claimed that they’d also programmed her favorite film as the in-flight movie, but Scully was pretty sure he was exaggerating.

Still, their hard work was evidenced by the fact that she was now at the Banff Springs Hotel in a five star room with a new and improved three Gunmen price tag, glad to have a place to base herself and her work out of. She was grateful to the three men who had started out as Mulder’s friends and now become three of her closest as well, although no small part of her was still fairly sizzling with worry for Mulder and Skinner.

Mulder was laughing out loud by the time Scully finished telling him her travel adventures.

“They never did anything like that for me, “ he told her. “Guess I’m not *hot* enough.”

“Mulder, shut up!” Scully exclaimed, her indignant tone washing away in a laugh of her own, and for a moment it was just like old times between them. But then Scully felt an ache in her badly scarred wrist, and Mulder caught a glimpse of Skinner moving through the hallway.

Mulder said, “Why don’t you kick back and put your feet up, Scully. I’ll bring Walter into town in—“ he paused, checked his wrist, remembered that his watch had broken the week before, and continued; “what time is it?”

She told him and he gave her a time some two hours later.

The bear that had been hibernating in their bed came into the kitchen just as Mulder was setting the phone down. In a display that was half Redskins offensive and half Fred and Ginger, Mulder turned and Skinner blocked and the younger man found himself in the bear’s eager clutches.

“Did I wake you?” Mulder asked.

“I missed you,” Skinner said, wrapping his arms tighter around Mulder and pressing a kiss to his cheek.

“You were asleep,” Mulder countered. “you couldn’t have missed me.”

Not willing to allow Mulder to be the voice of reason for even a second, Skinner instead kissed him again, this time on the lips, ignored the open-mouthed invitation Mulder gave him to escalate the encounter, and released him.

“Was that---“ He paused a moment, looking perplexed. The moment turned into two, then doubled again, and Skinner looked less perplexed, and more pained.

“Scully,” Mulder confirmed, horrified.

“Scully,” Skinner agreed, but his voice was suddenly shaky. He put a hand to his forehead, and then the two of them stared hard at one another, almost daring each other to comment on what had just happened.

“She’s in Banff,” Mulder finally said. He ignored Skinner’s look of gratitude and started fussing with the coffeemaker.

Skinner sat down at the kitchen table muttering, “Scully…Scully…Dana Scully…” The cat jumped into his lap, and he petted him absently, his gaze fixed somewhere in the center of the table, while Mulder gave the coffee filters an equally bleak look.

“Mulder?” Neither man could look at the other.

“It’s going to be okay,” Mulder stated flatly. He attacked his coffee-making project with renewed vigor, and the cat jumped off of Skinner. When the switch on the machine was turned on and the slow drip of brown caffeinated water had begun, the lap that had been holding a ten-pound cat was filled with one hundred and seventy pounds of former special agent.

Petting resumed, and both men were quiet for a while, listening to the coffee maker hiss and gurgle contentedly.

Mulder cupped Skinner’s face briefly and the look he gave the older man was as stern as it was loving.

“It *is* going to be okay, Walter,” he said firmly.

“You’re right,” Skinner agreed. “You—we’ve faced worse than this.”

Mulder shimmied off of his lap and went to fetch coffee, saying, “Worse than this is going to be Scully if we’re late today.”  He handed the Tasmanian Devil coffee cup to Skinner and kept the Marvin the Martian one for himself. He sipped a little, burned his mouth, and then laughed when his lover did the same.

“I’m going to grab a shower. While I definitely enjoy a little ‘eau de Walt”, I don’t think I can say the same for Scully. And I can’t stand the look on her face when she thinks we’ve been acting out X-Rated movies.”

“I don’t know,” said Skinner, looking almost thoughtful, “I am kind of fond of that blush she gets when her mind pulls up an extra-graphic visual.”

They shared another laugh and Mulder took his coffee with him as he left the room.

***
“Who is it?” came Scully’s query after Mulder knocked on the hotel room door.

“Steven Spielberg,” he replied. Skinner gave him a confused frown, but he found himself fully vindicated when the door flew open and Scully greeted them with a huge smile.

She backed up to allow the two men to enter the room. Skinner immediately slipped his boots off, mindful of the expensive carpet beneath their feet.

Mulder was too busy being hugged by Scully to worry about what his shoes were doing to the rug. He indulged her need to crush him for an extra minute while he relished their physical proximity a little himself, and only gently disengaged from her when he felt tears matching hers threatening to fall from his own eyes. He gave her a chaste kiss on the forehead and offered a goofy grin.

“Hey, lady, how ya doin’?”

“I’m good,” she replied instantly. “Really good.”

She turned to the other man in the room with the same loving smile on her face.

“Dana.” Warmth rumbled through the word like a big cat’s purr, and Skinner received a hug only a bit more reserved than the one Scully had given Mulder.

“Oh, it’s good to see you, sir.”

“Sir?” Skinner arched an eyebrow.

“Old habits die hard, s—Walter,” she replied with a blush.

“It takes twenty-one days to break a habit,” Mulder informed them needlessly.

“Well,” Skinner replied, “I wouldn’t have been able to sleep tonight without that particular piece of information.”

Mulder pouted and Scully laughed at him.

A minute later, though, *doctor* Scully was all business, asking Skinner to sit on the bed while she found her kit and began pulling out her regalia, including stethoscope and blood pressure cuff.

Meanwhile, Mulder found the files that the Gunmen had sent with Scully, and he idly started flipping through papers—familiar terms and names seemed to almost leap off the page at him: “SR819…Senator Matheson…New Technologies…diplomatic immunity…”

He could hear Scully’s voice, low and soothing, occasionally rising in volume just enough for him to pick up an actual word or two: “…vision…burning…ringing…memory…”

Soft, growly replies from Skinner. He couldn’t distinguish the words, but the tone of his lover’s voice made him think of that moment in the kitchen this morning, and a small shudder worked through him. He shot a glance over at the two people he valued most in the world, and watched as Skinner removed his glasses and Scully shone a light in his eyes. Then he went back to his reading.

The Gunmen had been far more thorough than he would have expected. In addition to the thick wad of SR819 information, there were more medical charts, reports all typed by Kim Cook and signed with Walter’s precise hand. Mulder saw Scully’s name once or twice in the pages, and his own much more often, but mostly dismissed the bulk of the material as irrelevant. Skinner’s report on Crime Projections for the third quarter of nineteen ninety four was not likely to be of much good to them now.

“Sometimes they come back.”

He didn’t realize he’d even spoken until he heard Scully call his name.

“Mulder?”

He saw both her and Skinner giving him curious looks.

“Just thinking out loud,” he said, trying not to notice the hopeful look on Scully’s face; the concerned look on Skinner’s. He went back to his reading, moving over to a small chair and table in the corner as he did so, and spreading out the files there.

He was absorbed in grainy photos of Alex Krycek when Skinner stood up and he turned as he caught the movement from the corner of his eye. Scully was packing up her kit, and Mulder gave Skinner a smile as he sat down in the other chair at the table.

Scully approached them and they both looked at her expectantly. Mulder didn’t like the way she was frowning, but didn’t comment.

“I’ll need to see the information at the hospital in Calgary to be sure of anything, but I can tell you some of the things we can probably expect.”

The men didn’t comment and she continued, her tone dry, though her eyes were telling Mulder more about her emotional state than she probably even realized.

“What happened this morning—losing vocabulary like that—is common and may happen again.” She focused on Skinner. “Or you may use the wrong word. Like thinking ‘It’s a car and saying ‘boat’ instead. The common term for it is ‘aphasia’”

Skinner’s throat worked for a moment, but he didn’t reply.

“A mass in the parietal or temporal lobe like you describe will cause these word finding
difficulties or speech arrest or seizures. Although most commonly associated with the occipital lobe, you may also experience phantom sounds and smells. Burning is a common one, bells ringing as well. Visual problems can also occur from pressure in this area. Until I see the MRI and CT scans, to determine the exact nature of the tumor, I can’t say if any or all of these symptoms will occur.”

Then she turned to Mulder. “He may say things that he won’t remember saying; things he doesn’t mean.” She included them both in her gaze again. “But as I say, until I see the charts at the hospital, I can’t completely set any expectations on symptoms, complications, procedures, or any sort of timetable.”

“Well, then, I guess our first stop is the hospital.”

“If we’re going into the city, is there anything else we can do there?” asked Scully. “It seems to me that this is some sort of deliberate act. There’s been no changes until now—it seems unlikely that this is just a coincidence.”

Mulder stood and offered Scully his chair. “There’s information here about the device that Krycek was using to control these things,” he said. “Some sort of handheld computer—like a palm pilot.” He moved closer to Skinner. “Walter, I never saw Krycek with anything like that. When you—when he was killed, did you recover anything like that at the scene?”

Skinner shook his head, the sound of Krycek’s voice suddenly loud in his mind: “push of a button, Walter…”

“Then it’s possible that the device is controlling this latest attack, and that someone who knew what Krycek was doing has gotten a hold of it,” said Scully.

“The question is who, though? Who has the means to do it, and who has the motivation?” Mulder paused and glanced at Skinner. “And even if some chain smoking ghost of malice past has come back to make our lives miserable, that doesn’t even begin to answer the question of why.”

Skinner started to say something, and Mulder silenced him with a fierce look.

“Why you, Walter? Why not me?”

None of them had an answer for that, and after letting the question hang in the air for a moment, Skinner said, “Let’s go get the information you need, Dana. We can take our next step from the hospital just as easy as from here.”

5/19