help! it's me, nascent! an evil splinter of my personality has taken
control of my write brain and won't let me go until all the animals are
out of the barn! somebody help me, please!

Title - Lambs to the Slaughter
Author - Dark Nascent
E-Mail address - nascen...@hotmail.com
Rating - R
Category - SAH
Spoilers - Fight the Future
Keywords - Character Death
Summary - Your strongest enemy is one who has nothing left to lose. You
know how important Agent Mulder is to the equation. You don't want to
turn one man's fight into a crusade. Excuses, excuses.

Archive - Sure, just let me know where it's going. Unless, of course,
you represent Gossamer, in which case you don't have to tell me
anything.

Feedback - Nascent will gladly accept all feedback for DARK NASCENT at
nascen...@hotmail.com

---------------------------------------------------

"Lambs to the Slaughter," from the Barnyard Series
Barnyard Series installments are entirely independent and completely
unrelated.

by Dark Nascent (nascen...@hotmail.com)

---------------------------------------------------

CONTENT WARNING: Yes, character death. That's right.

DISCLAIMER: Nothing ventured. Nothing gained.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: Coffee. Mountain Dew. Safeway-generic vivarin.

---------------------------------------------------

The half-moon was so full it might have given birth if poked. It was a
sharp contrast from the wispy, eerie clouds which halfheartedly twined
around it, gauzy garments putting little effort into disguising the
nudity of the dark sky. The haze of pollution--light and oxidized
carbon--did a far more admirable job.

It was an ominous night.

But Dana Scully did not believe in omens. She stepped out of the car,
soft-soles against asphalt. Smelled the air. It was languid and heavy
with soot, but a sudden breeze carried the tangy scent of clipped grass
across her nose, and of this, she inhaled deeply.

Manicured lawns reminded her inevitably first of her childhood home and
then of countless cemeteries. Another unacknowledged harbinger.

She closed the car door softly, turned a critical eye to the tall,
nondescript building before her. A warehouse, cloaked in cheap aluminum
siding and shattered windows. The legacy of a formerly successful
industrial park.

The sound of an approaching car caused her hand to move immediately to
the gun nestled at the small of her back. She had long ago learned that
her profession rewarded nervousness.

But she quickly recognized the driver by his car--her partner, as
expected. She relaxed, but only a little.

He parked beside her vehicle, stepped out and strode easily across the
few yards between them. Black jeans hugged his legs, black turtleneck
hugged his neck, and his fingers already hugged the butt of a gun.
Scully swallowed. He was serious.

"Exactly what kind of tip _is_ this, Mulder?" she asked, eying the gun
deliberately.

The corner of his mouth twisted in a laugh-in-the-face-of-danger smile.
"The usual kind. Mysterious. I told you everything I know, though.
Something big goes down here tonight."

"Shouldn't we move the cars, then?"

Mulder pointed over Scully's shoulder, at another warehouse in the
distance. "I think they're fine. That building is actually where I was
told to go. I want to watch from inside here." He gestured up at the
warehouse beside them with his left hand, which, she saw now, held
high-power night-vision binoculars.

She was amazed he'd been able to swipe them from Frohike without the
little troll tagging along.

Mulder followed her gaze. "But he's a generous little troll," he said,
teasing.

She shook her head with a faint smile. Mind-reading became them.

He spoiled the mood by appraising her frankly, as if for the first time
noticing her quasi-casual attire. "All black. Very sexy," he
commented, eyebrows waggling.

She evaded him by turning toward the building. Those quips weren't
funny anymore. They hadn't been funny ever since he'd almost kissed
her, then never spoke of it again.

"Let's go inside," she said. "It feels..._ominous_ ...out here."

Mulder followed her with an amused sigh on his lips.

---------------------------------------------------

Two Hours Later

Mulder handed Scully the binoculars. "Your turn."

She took them and he sat back, rubbing his eyes with his thumb and
forefinger. They had begun to trade every ten minutes or so now, their
eyes flagging in proportion to their spirits. Nothing was happening.
She sat to his right, cool, collected and bored.

Perched side by side on a tall wooden packing crate infested with
splinters, they stared together through the broken window across the
dimly lit parking lot. The passing seconds were slothful, and though
Scully felt impatient, she would have begged them to slow had she known
what the next hour promised.

But she could not know; Clyde Bruckman was dead. And anyway, time was a
universal invariant (but not really).

So, for the fifth (or was it the seventh?) time that night, she
attempted to engage her partner in conversation. "It's surprising how
well you can see the stars so close to the city."

Mulder's reply was frank and predictable. "You watching the stars or
the building?"

Her mouth twitched in irritation and she permitted herself frustration
in the form of a softly expelled of breath. Asshole.

Each time she'd tried to talk, he'd answered monosyllabically and
without interest. She knew this mood well. He was thinking of
possibilities, mulling over their quest, their questions, the future.
Making up scenarios which would free him from the gnawing consumption of
his vendetta. Only Mulder could turn hope into a dour thing.

When he got in this kind of mood, there was no use talking to him.

Of course, the anonymous phone call had set it all off. _Do you want to
witness an important transaction, Mr. Mulder?_ An address, no more.
This address. The usual cryptic, manipulative rigmarole. As usual,
he'd grabbed for the measly carrot.

One day his voraciousness would get them both killed.

But in the meantime he didn't have to be an asshole about it.

She was so sure of her psychoanalysis that she almost jumped when he
spoke. "Scully, do you believe in God?"

For a forgivable second, she forced her gaze away from the plastic
eyepieces before her, regarded him with what, even in the dark, could be
recognized as frank incredulity. "Mulder, you don't have to be a prodigy
profiler to know the answer to _that_ by now."

"No, I mean _really_ believe, Scully. Not just in some abstract,
undefined higher being, but in a consciousness with a will capable of
emotion and omniscience."

She shifted uncomfortably on the crate, returned her attention to the
watched warehouse. "What brought this up, Mulder?"

Scully was always honest, even when hedging.

"The stars," he said, as if it were an admission. "I was thinking about
how virtually all primitive cultures have imbued the stars with the
qualities of deities, usually by constellations, and wondered why the
transition to gods of a more abstract, yet simultaneously more active,
nature."

Scully blinked. She'd been miles off-target. "Actually, Mulder,
there's a widely held anthropological theory that the myths generated
around constellations were actually a timekeeping device, used to mark
historical events in the absence of numbered years. If a warrior won a
great battle in a certain year, the constellations visible at that time
would be incorporated into a story telling where the battle took place
and what happened. For instance, 'so-and-so walked over such-and-such
mountain and killed the beast at its eastern edge.' That's simplified,
but the warrior would be regarded as a deity and his constellation would
at that time be rising over said mountain and the beast would be another
constellation representing the conquered people. The stories were
easier to remember and had cultural import as well, but the elders of
the culture knew how to translate them with astrological significance so
that they could mark anniversaries or even the passage of centuries.
Hence all the architecture devoted to stargazing, common to Native
American, Celtic and even Asian cultures."

Mulder smiled at the familiar ease with which she lectured. "So only in
our modern western arrogance do we assume that these ancient people were
just telling fairy tales?"

"If you want to call it that, yes."

"That's very interesting, Scully," he said pointedly, "but you've
avoided my question. Do you believe in God?"

Her brow furrowed and she pursed her lips with annoyance, but he could
not see this. "I don't know what you mean."

"Just tell me what you think about the matter."

"Why do you want to know?"

Mulder leaned back on his elbows, stretching his legs toward the grimy
wall below the window. "Why are you getting defensive?"

Without letting her eyes stray from her duty, she replied immediately.
"Why shouldn't I be defensive, given your attitude in the past toward
religious things?"

"You think I'm only asking so I can deride you, Scully? I'm not. I'm
asking because I'm curious as to why someone I respect so highly can
have such a completely different view from mine on this. I want to know
why, given your unwavering demand for evidence, you're willing to accept
the existence of something fundamentally unprovable."

"That's the point, Mulder. It's not about evidence because there can
_be_ no evidence."

"That just seems...inconsistent to me."

"_I'm_ inconsistent?" Scully demanded. "I'm certainly no more
inconsistent than you are. Why do _you_ so callously reject faith and
organized religion when you're so willing to believe in much less
tenuous things?"

Now Mulder shifted uncomfortably, transferring his weight from one elbow
to the other. A splinter lodged itself obstinately in his forearm and
he winced, sat up to pluck the offending twig from his shirt and skin.

Scully did not see this, still intently watching the warehouse. "Well?"
she insisted.

He sighed. "It's just different, that's all."

The answer sounded unsatisfactory even to him. It was an opening, and
he knew Scully would be unable to resist darting in, going for the
jugular. Her instinctual voraciousness quite honestly terrified him at
times.

She didn't hesitate. "It's not different at all. You've proven
yourself more than willing to believe in the supernatural aspects of
other cultures' religions--shamanism, Eastern European folk tales, even
Judaism--but for some reason, Christianity is a stumbling block for
you. If I had to write a logical premise on which to base the
concurrence of the things we've seen with cultural myth, I would say
that they represent recurring phenomena around which religions have
built up explanatory mythology. And, by the way, their recurrent nature
would suggest to me that they are analyzable, quantifiable and
explainable by science."

"'Nothing happens in contradiction to nature, only to what we know of
it?'"

She smiled at the sound of her own words repeated back to her.   "Yes.
But anyway, why should you be so ready to believe the so-called
supernatural aspects of random religious myths or folk tales, but not
those of Christianity?"

_Wrong turn, Agent Scully,_ Mulder thought with satisfaction. "Are you
saying that Christian miracles are just myths to explain recurring
'supernatural' phenomena? I thought you believed in miracles. And that
still doesn't explain why you believe in God."

"You've avoided my point."

"You've avoided mine." To soften the tone of the argument, Mulder
willed a smile to creep into his voice as he added, "And mine was
first."

She gave a short snort of amusement.

The two partners fell silent for several minutes. Mulder could hear the
scratchy scuffles of rodents scurrying among the crates, and it made his
nose wrinkle and cringe. Scully, though, was listening to the steady
_drip, drip, drip_ of a pipe crossing the ceiling off to their left.
Each drop marked the passage of another second-fraction. Had Scully
known this was the last falling water she would ever hear, she might not
have found it so irritating.

Nothing moved in the large building across the parking lot. She was
beginning to hope nothing would, though she couldn't admit it.

Suddenly it came to her. "Mulder, you can't give me a rational reason
for your prejudice because there isn't one. You don't believe in the
tenets of Christianity for the same reason you don't believe in my
sister's New Age spiritualism. And I doubt you believe in the more
aspects of shamanism or Judaism which _don't_ involve monsters or
spirits, all for the same reason. Because they're _good._"

Mulder rubbed his eyes, beginning to regret he'd brought this up. "I'm
not following, Scully," he said reluctantly. "Are you saying I don't
want to believe in goodness?"

"I'm saying you don't _dare_ believe in goodness," she replied. "And
why should you? When everything and everyone you know or love ultimately
fails your trust, when you become so accustomed to loss that you
anticipate it before it happens, why let yourself believe in good
things? It's easier to believe only in the monsters, because they will
never disappoint you."

Mulder's eyes narrowed. "Trite psychoanalyses of UFO-chasers, by Dr.
Dana Scully, on the next Oprah. I'm glad you've found another way to
reduce me to an archetype, Scully."

Scully glanced back at him, trying to determine whether he was angry or
just bitter. But he shook his head at her, dismissing her concern.
"Want me to take over?" he asked, gesturing at the binoculars.

She smiled gratefully, handed them to him. "Yeah, for awhile."

She slid over and he moved into her place, leaning his elbows on the
window and resting the plastic bridge of the binoculars on his nose.
She reclined on the crate, propped on her left elbow so she could face
him, or his back, at least.

As always.

"Besides," he pointed out quietly, and she knew the conversation wasn't
over. "_You_ haven't failed my trust. I believe in _that._"

She stretched out her right hand to graze the muscles of his back,
sliding lazily down the length of his spine. "I know, Mulder, but
someday I'm probably going to die, and then I'll have betrayed you like
the rest."

He tried to sound jovial, but there was a catch in his voice. "How do
you know _I'm_ not going to be the one to die first?"

Scully's hand abruptly stopped its progress at the small of his back,
and she pressed her palm there firmly. "This has become suddenly
morbid," she said clearly. "I don't think I want to pursue this
discussion any further."   Her palm traced a quick circle against his
lower back and then was retracted.

Both were so engrossed in the thoughtful silence that followed that they
did not hear the whisper-soft footfalls on cement, did not heed the
tickle at the backs of their necks that suggested someone was watching
them. The warehouse was a largely empty building, but the many wooden
crates muffled what would otherwise have echoed like a canyon.

Mulder kept his still-alert gaze on the second warehouse, across the
dimly-lit parking lot. Just when Scully thought the unexpected
conversation had truly ended, he spoke again.

"But see, Scully, that's exactly the problem--you don't want to discuss
death. You're right, I don't believe in religion because it's good, but
my disbelief is not"--his voice took a melodramtic turn--"'born out of
the depths of my tortured psyche,' as you seem to think."

She blinked against the darkness, scratched her thigh. "I didn't follow
that logic, Mulder. Why is my lack of desire to discuss your death 'the
problem?'"

For a second he turned away from his vigil, needing to meet her eyes.
"Because it's about _motive,_ Scully," he said. "People who believe in
the tenets of organized religion _want_ to believe in it because it's
good. Adherents of New Age spiritualism or a number of other things to
which I am hesitant to lend credence are the same way. But you see, no
one wants to believe in golems or spirit possession or alien
abductions. The motive is immediately suspect, and thus the story much
more discountable."

Scully chewed her lip momentarily, considering. But her pause was
brief. "I wouldn't say there aren't people who truly want to believe in
possession or alien abductions. Those people may want attention, or
they may want to imagine their lives as more exciting than the humdrum
existence they actually lead. Or"--her voice softened--"maybe they want
to believe because these stories provide preferable alternatives to the
potentially more banal explanations for things that have happened to
them."

Mulder didn't miss a beat. "Low blow, Scully," he said neutrally,
returning his gaze to the window.

Scully sat up, moved her hand to his shoulder and squeezed firmly. "You
say it yourself, Mulder," she insisted gently. "You want to believe."

She paused, letting that sink in, then continued. "You told me once
that you see hope in the possibility of monsters which exist despite our
knowledge of the world. Yet what you're hoping _for_ is not a happy
resolution, but the affirmation that what happened to your sister was
beyond your--or any human's--control. You want that absolution."

When he responded to neither her speech nor her touch, she let her
fingers stray across the back of his neck and then to his arm, so that
her arm lay across his shoulders. "Which is not to say," she continued
quietly, "that I don't think there's some truth to your beliefs, after
all I've seen. I'm only pointing out that you want to believe in aliens
as much as--maybe more than--I want to believe in God."

"It's not really about Samantha anymore, anyway," he said softly, and
charged on before she could comment. "But, Scully, you're talking about
isolated individuals. I'm talking about whole cultures. Mass
indoctrination. The benefits of belief in God to both the individual
and society as a whole are _substantial,_ not just _appealing_ in a
Jungian sort of way. Religion is selected for by social evolution, if
you will, and hence its reputation as 'truth' is highly suspicious.
Because it's good."

He could hear the faint relief in her voice as she stepped back up to
the line, moved her hand back to rest lightly on his nearer shoulder.
"Many aspects of religion are _not_ something that people would want to
believe in, though, particularly if you look at history. God isn't just
a comforting old grandpa figure, but a powerful, sometimes vengeful
being."

"But that's comforting, too," Mulder insisted, still keeping his gaze
trained on the warehouse. "It takes things out of one's control. 'I am
not responsible--God is.' It gives meaning to things which are, in
actuality, quite meaningless. It's just very difficult for we, as
humans, to accept that our lives have so little meaning, so we create
gods whose unfathomable intentions we trust are good."

"The old cliche answer to 'Why do bad things happen to good people?'"

"Exactly. You told me once that while you were fighting the cancer,
what gave it meaning was the _struggle_ to _look_ for meaning. I'm sure
that God was a very comforting concept at that time in your life."

"Low blow, Mulder," she answered dryly, but with a hint of hurt.

In the shadows across the warehouse floor, a watching figure crept
closer, edging along the wall to their extreme right.

Mulder turned to smile briefly at her, reached up to his shoulder to
capture her hand. He drew their clasped hands down between them, then
turned back to the binoculars, which he held in his other hand. "Pull
no punches, Scully," he told her, the gentle smile still in his voice.

He waited a moment to continue. "Fundamentally, though, religion is a
creation of humans who are afraid to die. Everything dies, Scully, but
only humans _know_ it. Only humans are aware, sickeningly aware, of
their own mortality. So they create and then put their faith in gods
and heavens out of desperation for meaning. That's questionable motive
if I ever heard one, a lot more suspicious than the desire for a witness
to believe in any X-File we've ever investigated."

Scully's voice, when she replied, was tinged with irritation, but she
did not release his hand. "So what do _you_ think happens when we die,
Mulder?"

The interloper listened to their conversation, bemused. No wonder these
two never uncovered the truth.

"Nothing," he answered simply. "Ashes to ashes."

Scully bit her lower lip with displeasure. Though Mulder did not see
this, he added, "I'm sorry, Scully, I really honestly wish I could
believe something different, but I won't delude myself that way. I
won't discard the truth just because I'm afraid of it."

Scully looked up at her partner's profile, framed against the yellow
sodium light from the parking lot. "I find it ironic that my faith is
considered delusional in your book while yours, which the majority of
the world labels as delusional, must be the canon truth. You should
keep a more open mind, Mulder. There's more evidence in my personal
experience and in the history of religion for God and life beyond death
than there is for any X-File."

With a silent, almost regretful sigh, their uninvited guest raised his
gun, checking the sights.

"I thought your faith wasn't about evidence, but, hell, Scully, it'd be
nice if you were right. And maybe that's exactly the problem. It'd be
nice."

"Like I said," she insisted. "You can't let yourself believe in what's
good."

Mulder put down the binoculars, turning toward her. "No, it's not the
same thi--"

He was interrupted by a flash of light and a sharp explosion. A
familiar, sickeningly terrifying sound--the report of a gun.

Even in the crate-filled warehouse, it echoed.

The warm, familiar grip on his hand was loosed, and Scully fell with
some force into his side. Frohike's expensive binoculars clattered to
the floor as Mulder turned in horror, twisting his friend's limp body in
his arms, turning her over in desperation to see her face.

She was gasping for air, eyes bulging, the workings of her mouth silent
and vaguely obscene. He saw immediately that the bullet had pierced her
back, exploding out of her torso like a gestated parasite. Her
still-beating heart pumped black-red blood in pulsing gushes onto his
shirt, his legs, his face. His Scully, stubborn to the end.

No last dying words in his arms, no kisses or I-love-you's. Just blood
and the horrifying sight of Scully's pain-filled eyes, blood now
trickling from her rapidly working jaw. Her whole body seized against
him once, twice.

And all he could do was stare in unregistered anguish; and even beyond
the bewildered and obvious WHY, all he could think was, _Please, God,
let her be right._

What God could not be moved by such a prayer? Even though Mulder's
motives in so praying were highly questionable.

But perhaps there is a God who is good, because a second bullet ended
his torment almost as quickly as it had begun.

Even as Fox Mulder lay dead, his blood mingling with hers, the horrible
sound of her desperate gasping for breath scraped at the walls of the
cavernous warehouse. It took several seconds for the interloper to
cross the room, to reach the crate where the two people lay drowning in
the fluid which moments earlier had sustained them.

MacDonald was a killer, but he was not a cruel man. He looked down at
Scully's gaping, pain-wracked form and aimed the barrel of his gun
coolly at her temple. Fired.

End 1/2

Begin part 2/2

---------------------------------------------------

Twenty-One Hours Later

A well-fed man put down the phone and looked darkly around the room at
his companions. "Mulder is dead," he announced clearly.

A cigarette-smoking man leapt out of his padded armchair with a startled
cry. "Oh no! Dead? But...but...he will...there will...crusade, a
massive movement..." He fumbled desperately for the words, but failing,
ended with, "Who ordered this?"

"There will be no crusade," said Strughold. "The woman is dead too. No
one else believed him."

A man whose hair looked like it was cast in plastic frowned. "You had
the woman killed?"

"No," the well-fed first elder admitted, clearly embarrassed. "The
assassin missed....."

"The woman..." mused the man with the curly mustache. He glanced at the
others in confusion. "What was her name?"

The man mysteriously called Strughold snorted impatiently. "The
_woman._ The one thing without which he cannot live?"

"Yes, what the hell _is_ that about, anyway?" asked plastic-hair-man.
"Why does he let her follow him around all the time?"

"Must be really amazing sex," said a man whose exceptionally hairy chest
was covered by an expensive Italian dress shirt, shrugging. "Did we
ever have any decent video feeds of that from our surveillance of
Mulder's apartment?"

Strughold grimaced in disgust. "Anyway," he said, forcing the room to
return to the subject at hand, "she's dead. And she's the only one who
would've started a crusade. Thus, even if it was a mistake, it was a
good one."

"Well," stumbled the well-fed man awkwardly. "I...I didn't really think
about that. Yes, you're right. That might work after all."

Strughold shook his head. The fact that he had chosen these men for
their frequent displays of stupidity didn't make it any less irritating
at times.

At that moment, a young man in a tuxedo entered the wood-paneled library
with a fortuitous bottle of champagne. He proffered it to Strughold,
who raised it before the rest of the room. "Gentlemen," he announced in
a proud voice, "we've finally rid ourselves of Fox Mulder."

That's when the men noticed that the cigarette-smoking man was still
gaping in shock. He waved his hands in front of him as if warding them
off. "No, no, we can't celebrate this! He can't be dead! He served a
purpose! He was important to the equation!"

"Morley, you're so full of shit," the furry-chested man said,
disgusted. "How? _How_ was he important? You never _did_ explain that!"

The cigarette-smoking man assumed an unbecoming pout. "It's my secret,"
he said.

Strughold's eyes narrowed, and he took a step toward the man, champagne
still in hand. "You can't keep secrets from us. We know why you were
protecting him."

The cigarette-smoking man's eyes widened like those of a trapped animal,
and he unexpectedly lunged in desperation at Strughold. Before he even
took two steps, a shot rang out, and the man crumpled soundlessly to the
floor. A bulky man who was obviously born to be a bodyguard put his gun
away.

"Well," the well-fed man sniffed disdainfully. "That takes care of
another problem I'd been meaning to resolve. Let's celebrate in another
room. Someone keep an eye on his body until he's definitely dead,
though, please."

Others nodded in agreement. But before they could move the door burst
open and a white-haired, crinkly man in an equally crinkly suit stepped
in. The men could not help but notice his look of grim determination,
nor his large AK-47 assault rifle.

"Rupert Murdoch!" cried the man with the mustache. "Didn't you receive
our blackmail packet this month?"

Murdoch's eyes narrowed as he brought the gun to bear on the man who
spoke. "It doesn't matter now," he said darkly. "Nothing matters now.
You've destroyed the biggest profit vehicle I've ever had. We had
_dolls!_ DOLLS, I tell you!"

The men glanced at each other nervously, aware that Rupert Murdoch had
snapped. How had they failed to anticipate this?

"It doesn't matter now," Murdoch repeated. "Look out the window. Your
reign of terror has ended, nameless ones!"

The furry-chested man, who was nearest the window, rushed to look.
Outside, an angry, muttering crowd had gathered in the streets. They
didn't look very dangerous but the numerous 'X's inscribed on their
apparel was deeply disturbing. "My God!" he cried. "Morley was right!
It's a crusade!"

The first elder who had spoken tried to regain control of the
situation. "Mr. Murdoch," he said, panic creeping into his voice,
"you're a man of God. A Christian. Put down the gun. Put. It.
Down."

Murdoch smiled unpleasantly. "Sometimes the Lord demands that we kill
in his name," he replied nonchalantly.

And with that he opened fire on the room, spewing bullets like water
from a hose, left to right. Every man in the room collapsed to the
floor, screaming with great lack of dignity as they died.

Every man but Strughold, who turned quite calmly on Murdoch. The
champagne bottle had sprouted several leaks and was dripping loudly.
From the holes in Strughold's torso emerged a sticky, green ooze.

Murdoch's eyes widened in horror as he realized his predicament, but
already it was too late. He began to gasp, reaching for his throat, as
he crumpled slowly to the floor.

Strughold looked around the room of dead and dying men and sighed. "Oh
well," he said to himself. "I guess all this ups our timescale."

For the chic shall inherit the earth.

---------------------------------------------------

DARK NASCENT had an alternate ending which didn't result in character
death, at least not in the traditional way. She wants to tell you about
it so you'll know what you missed. Instead of being their assassin,
MacDonald was actually their guardian angel, Angel MacDonald. Angel
MacDonald had called Mulder to tip them off about the Second Coming of
Christ, which was going to occur at the warehouse across the parking lot
(because, as everyone knows, Jesus will return to earth in an industrial
park either in D.C. or New Jersey--I opted for D.C.--and of course it
will happen in 1998 because we were two years off on Christ's birthday.
Or was it four? Obviously not.). Christ descends from the heavens to
pass judgment on humankind and the first folks He gets to are Mulder and
Scully. "Agent Scully?" Jesus says. "You get to go to heaven, but your
partner here has to go to hell. Sorry."

Mulder thinks he deserves it but Scully stands up for him. "What,
because he didn't accept You as his personal Savior? Come on, Sir,
that's a little cheap."

"Don't be stupid, Agent Scully," Christ says. "You think with six
billion people in the world, every one of them brainwashed by their own
respective culture into their own faith and more than half having never
heard of me, that I'm so petty as to make that a requirement? No. Agent
Mulder has to go to hell because he hasn't been truthful with you about
your ova or his ex-wife, as Angel MacDonald is prepared to testify."

Angel MacDonald shrugs sheepishly and nods.

"Sir, whatever my partner hasn't told me, I forgive him for," Scully
says quickly, giving him a 'we'll talk later' glare.

"Are you saying you want to intercede on Agent Mulder's behalf?" Christ
says. "You're not a saint, Agent Scully."

"You just said you didn't go in for all that dogma," Scully argues,
then, after a thought, adds, "Sir."

"Touche, Agent Scully," Jesus answers with a hint of a smile. "Okay,
you win. He can come to heaven. Now I've gotta go, I've got a lot of
work to do, raising folks from the dead, you know."

So Angel MacDonald starts carrying Mulder and Scully into heaven. They
say some mushy stuff to each other on the way up, then Mulder feels the
need to add: "You really _are_ my savior, a thousand times over!"

And Angel MacDonald is so shocked by this blasphemy that he drops them
and they fall into hell anyway. But at least they're together.

Fade to flames on black with Mulder's "God, Scully, I not only ruined
your life, but your afterlife as well! I'm such a schmuck. You
should've become a pediatrician."

In retrospect, it's probably a good thing DARK NASCENT didn't run with
it.

---------------------------------------------------

End 2/2

06/28/98 - 07/12/98

Nascent will accept all feedback for DARK NASCENT at
nascen...@hotmail.com.