The Crusade 

By Brandon D. Ray


DISTRIBUTION STATEMENT:  Anywhere and everywhere, so long as my name
stays on it and no money changes hands.

SPOILER WARNING:  Lots of 'em, all over the place.

RATING:  PG-13 for violence

CONTENT WARNING:  Bill jr./Tara.  Character death.  Lots and lots of
character death.  Unlike most of my work, this is not a happy story.

CLASSIFICATION:  VA

SUMMARY:  "Kill Mulder and you risk turning one man's religion into a
crusade."
                                           --The Cigarette Smoking Man,
"Ascension"

DISCLAIMER:  Nope, I do not own these characters or situations.  If I
were THAT smart, I would be rich.


The Crusade

by Brandon D. Ray


There's only one of them left now, and tonight he will be mine.

I've saved the smoking bastard for last.  Not because he was the most
powerful or the most important or even the most interesting -- Lord
knows that all of these men and women were interesting, in a sick,
perverted sort of way.  No, I saved the smoker for last because above
all the others he is the one most personally responsible for what
happened to my sister and her partner.

For a long time after they finally disappeared forever I blamed Mulder
for what happened.  We'd gotten off on the wrong foot with each other
from the very start, and before long it had become almost a
preprogrammed response with me.  To be honest I still don't like him
very much, though far be it from me to speak ill of the dead.
Especially someone who mattered so much to Dana.

So it was easy for me to put the blame on Mulder.  I'd already put the
blame on him for so many other things:  Missy's death; Dana's cancer;
the way she'd withdrawn from our family and become an isolated,
closed-off workaholic.  And all the rest.  Even when they were still
alive, even at the height of my fury, a small part of me knew I was
being unfair to him, but I didn't really care.  All the pain I was
feeling over the harm done to my family had to have an outlet somewhere,
and Fox Mulder was the easiest target.

I like to think Dana understood that, and maybe she did, since as her
last act she put her personal journal in my hands.  Not literally, of
course; from her account of the last days of their lives it is clear
that she had no time to come to me and explain everything that had
happened in the past five years, and so she simply copied her personal
notes onto a disk and left it with a friend for safekeeping.  I won't
mention that friend's name; it might put that person's life at risk,
even now.  But eventually the disk found its way into my possession, as
Dana intended.  I doubt if she intended for me to make the use of it
that I have, but I had to be true to myself.

At first I didn't know what to do with that disk.  I couldn't even read
it right away -- the pain of losing her, and my anger at Mulder, was
still too sharp and fresh.  But as the months went by I found myself
wondering more and more just exactly what had happened to my sister in
the five and a half years she worked on the X-Files.  And day by day the
urge to slip that small piece of plastic into the floppy drive and find
out first hand got stronger and stronger.  And finally, one Friday
evening, I sat down in my study and started to read.

I didn't sleep that night.  Nor the next night.  Dana's notes were, as I
should have expected, detailed and meticulous.  She recorded everything
that had happened, every significant thought that she had had,
everything that she had seen and said and done.  And the farther I got
into her narrative, the more shocked and horrified I became.  In my
imagination I had dredged up scenarios of the sorts of things I thought
she might have faced in her work with Mulder and the FBI:  Serial
killers, terrorists, enemy agents, and the like.  But nothing I had
imagined prepared me for the sheer, stark horror that was my sister's
life.

My God.  Even today it gives me the shakes to think about it, even
though I now know far, far more about the organization she called the
Consortium than she ever did.

By Sunday afternoon I had finished reading her journal.  I was
exhausted, both physically and emotionally, but already I knew what I
had to do, and I knew it was going to cost me everything I had worked
for and built up for myself over the years.  In the distant back of my
mind I mourned for the life I was about to give up, but I knew in my
heart that I had no choice.  Long before I ever took my first oath as a
Naval officer, I had reconciled myself to the fact that I might someday
be called upon to make sacrifices in defense of my country, and in my
mind this was simply an extension of that oath.

I still feel that way.

I did grant myself one last indulgence.  I went to bed that night and
slept for twelve hours, and the next day I called in sick at Miramar,
and I took Tara and Matthew out for a day in the city, seeing all the
sites and doing all the things which I had expected to be able to spend
a lifetime doing.  And that night I made slow, passionate love to my
wife, and when she awoke in the morning I was gone.

I couldn't explain to her what I was about to do.  I just couldn't.  It
wasn't that she wouldn't understand -- I knew that she WOULD
understand.  Tara and I have always understood each other, and although
I knew she would be heartbroken at my decision, I also knew that she
would accept it.  She would have no choice, really, anymore than I had a
choice; she knew what she was getting herself into when she married a
Navy man, and the risk of loss and separation was part of the package.

Nor was it because I was trying to protect her.  Oh, certainly I
couldn't risk sharing any of the information in Dana's journal with
her.  That would have put both her life and Matthew's life in danger,
and that was just not an option.  But I would not have had to tell her
those things; she would not have demanded it.  If I had simply said that
I had to go, for reasons I could not explain, she would have accepted
that.  Tara loved me and trusted me, and I really believe that she would
have understood.  But I simply couldn't face her; I couldn't look her in
the eye and tell her that I was leaving, and then turn and walk away.

I'm a selfish bastard, and in some ways a coward, and I always have
been.

And so I dropped out of sight.  I'm sure the Navy looked for me for
awhile, and Tara did, too, but they never found me.  So far as I know,
they never even came close.  And I built a semblance of a new life for
myself in another city, far removed from anyone or anything I had ever
known, and I started doing research.  I needed to know just exactly what
I was going up against, who and what my enemies were, before I could
act.  I had a good start with the information in Dana's journal, but it
wasn't nearly enough; I knew I needed more before I could act and be
sure of getting all of them.

It took three years.

I really don't remember much about those years.  I lived by myself in a
small Midwestern town, on the banks of a river which I'm sure was very
lovely.  Early on in my sojourn I'd contacted the one friend of Dana's
who I was sure from her journal that I could trust, Melvin Frohike, and
he provided me with money and other resources, so I was able to live
comfortably and do my real work.  I never told him explicitly what I was
planning to do, but I think he knew.  Frohike is a smart man.  Smarter
than me, in a lot of ways.

I did a lot of traveling in those years; I had to.  A lot of the records
I needed to look at were only available on paper, for one thing.  And
for another, I had to check the terrain so that when the time came to
act I would be comfortable and familiar with my surroundings.

Once I almost bumped into Tara.  I was in Seattle for a few days,
running down a lead, and I rounded a corner and there she was, even more
beautiful than I'd allowed myself to remember.  Matthew was with her,
and he was walking on his own now, dressed in a cute little sailor
suit.  Tara, as I should have expected, was dressed in black.

Fortunately she had her back to me, and so she didn't see me during the
fifteen seconds or so it took me to collect myself, remember my purpose,
and turn and walk away.

I haven't seen her since that day.

Finally, six months ago, I felt I was ready.  I had all the information
I could reasonably expect to get, and I had a plan.  And on the day
after Christmas I set that plan in motion.

The blonde bitch at the U.N. was the first to go.  I don't know why I
chose to do her first; it just seemed right.  Marita was her name;
Marita Covarrubias.  She never even saw it coming; it was quick and
clean, as clean as any death ever can be.  Cleaner than she deserved, at
any rate.  The police are still looking for the guy who did it; it never
occurred to anyone to suspect a middle aged Y2K expert witness from the
Midwest who happened to be vacationing in Manhattan that day.

Next was the one Dana called the First Elder.  I found out his real name
in the course of my research, but it doesn't really matter.  It's carved
on his tombstone, and once a week his wife puts flowers on his grave.
Nobody else cares.

After that they sort of blur together in my mind.  I had expected that
each death would be etched in my memory, but it didn't work out that
way.  As with anything else, after awhile killing just got to be another
job, another task.  No big deal; go on a business trip, sign a couple of
contracts for the sake of your cover, kill a man or a woman, go home.

The only other one that really sticks in my mind is Alex Krycek.  That
was the only one I've allowed myself to enjoy.  From reading Dana's
journal, it was clear to me that this son of a bitch was really at the
heart of all her troubles, second only to the smoker.  He was the one
who killed Mulder's father; he was the one who prevented Mulder from
rescuing Dana from Duane Barry.  And he was the one who murdered
Melissa.

I did him slowly.  Very, very slowly.  And I enjoyed every minute of it,
and by the time he begged me to kill him, whatever fragment of a soul I
still had by that point had fled.

I haven't missed it.

Now there is only one remaining.  The smoker.  I have chosen, this time,
to let him come to me.  I have been leaving clues here and there, traces
of my presence and my plan and my crusade.  From my researches into his
life, I know just exactly which buttons to push to ensure that he will
come to me in person rather than sending his thugs.

I'm sitting in my study now, in the house which my neighbors think is my
home.  It's late, past midnight, and I've finally finished going over
the papers for the deposition I have to give on Monday.  In my heart I
suspect that there will be no deposition, but I can't be sure when he
will come, and so I have to be prepared to maintain my cover.

I smell the smoke of his cigarette before I hear him, and I smile to
myself and rise from my chair and turn.  He's standing in the doorway,
looking just as he does in the countless photographs I've collected,
wearing that same annoying, know-it-all smirk of condescension which
Dana described in her journal so many years ago.  While I stand there
watching him, he drops the stub of his cigarette on my carpeted floor
and rubs it with the tip of his shoe to put it out before lighting up
another one.

"Good evening, Commander Scully," he says at last.  His eyes flick to
the clock on my desk, then back to me.  "Or should I say 'good
morning'?"

I know how this man operates, both from Dana's journal and from my own
research.  He is supremely confident in himself and in his ability to
control any situation he may find himself in.  At least twice that I
know of he talked Mulder out of killing him, and once he talked his way
past Walter Skinner.

I've uncovered enough other, similar incidents in his life to know that
this is his modus operandi.  It's been such a long time since any of us
little people stood up to him and really tried to take him down a notch
that he no longer really believes it is possible.  And even now, with
the organization he has worked in for more than 30 years in ruins, he is
still smugly sure of his own immortality.  I can tell just from looking
into his eyes.

He takes a drag from his cigarette and simply stands there, waiting to
see what I'm going to say.  He is confident; sure.  He has the situation
under control, and even though he must know that I've killed nearly
twenty of his colleagues, he cannot believe that I am about to kill him.

No time like the present.  Without any hint or a word of warning, I pull
my pistol from my belt and put five rounds into his chest where his
heart should have been, and he falls heavily to the floor without
uttering another word.  And I stand looking at his body for a moment,
numb with the realization that my work is finally done, and at last I
can rest.

There is one more round in my pistol, but there won't be for long.



Fini