"Guardian Angel" By XFBandit drambo@sonic.net Classification: SR, MSR Rating: PG Summary: The relationship through a third person's eyes. Feedback: Sure! drambo@sonic.net Please see the end note. Disclaimer: Not mine, never were, never will be. First, there was Deep Throat. Then, X. Now, me. <><> For obvious reasons, I have no name. I had a name once, but they made it vanish. My mother buried an empty casket. It wasn't totally empty, actually. It had exactly 150 pounds of sand ballast in it. The Army followed the regulations to the letter. The Company took it from there. Agents were sent to the town I was born in, and a midnight "excursion" into the hall of records removed my birth certificate. Seems like a lot of trouble to go to for a man who's face peers back at the reader from over 12 years of grammar and high school yearbooks, but they like to be thorough. New name. New face. The doctors adjusted my jawline, changed the shape of my nose. The contacts change the color of my eyes. Surgery took care of the shape and size. They even went so far as to take six millimeters out of my vocal chords. That changed my voice just enough. A new person, born again in the image of my creator. On paper we belonged to the Central Intelligence Agency. That was merely for funding and training purposes. In reality we took our orders from someone else. I started off as a peon, just like in the Army. Working my way up, taking the shitty assignments, learning the business as I went along. Some of us were marked as soldiers for our careers; we would never advance beyond strong-arming witnesses, planting evidence, stealing evidence and the other host of dirty tricks operations that we excelled at. Some of us, some like me, were earmarked for advancement. Slowly, we were brought inside. And as each small piece of the puzzle was revealed to us, they watched and they waited. Waited to see what you would do. Would you turn them in? Squeal? Or would the promise of more power than any man had a right to expect seduce you into accepting what they proposed? The Project, they called it. The details, horrific. The purpose, domination. Control. Colonization. A handful of men who would be Kings. Up until last year, my job had been mostly to monitor certain media outlets for hints that the Mulder man and the Scully woman were making waves. I would read newspapers and magazines, watch television, keep my eyes and ears open, listening and watching. Occasionally they'd ask me to kill someone. That was fine; It is something I am very good at. And not just the normal methods of murder, either. I can shoot and I can stab and I can poison, but all of those things leave traces, elemental fingerprints that can be dissected by police and criminal labs. Kill too many people the same way and someone begins to notice the pattern, begins to put disjointed facts together and before anyone knows it, I've drawn attention to the group. And that is the first, and only rule. Do not draw attention to us. It's like the mob used to be, I sometimes think. Before drugs infiltrated organized crime, the mob wanted a nice, low profile. Don't draw attention to us. We work behind the scenes, under cover of darkness. That's what the group wanted. And they took the oath of silence, their own twisted version of the Omerta, just as seriously. Break the silence and die. The rules were simple, actually. They were rules that I accepted, and in my own twisted sense of what passed for my honor, embraced. But then my mentor died. Died at the hands of the men who employ me. The name he gave me was Johnson. Mulder knew him as "X." He found me in the jungles of Vietnam. Taught me, trained me, took me under his wing. Sixty-three missions into the North. As far north as China six times. So far behind the lines that our maps were in Russian. He was ice cold. No one, ever, was better at what we do. And they killed him because he broke the rules. And his assignment became mine. My job? Protect Mulder and Scully. <><> I have my own team. Sixteen people. One of them is Scully's neighbor. She's sixty-eight years old, lives as a retired schoolteacher. She's baked Scully cookies. That was how we got one of the eleven bugs inside Scully's apartment. Another works on the cleaning crew that Mulder hires from time to time to tame the jungle he calls an apartment. I've got three people at FBI headquarters. One in the SciCrime lab. She's my favorite. She wears a pager. If she gets a certain number in the pager, she knows what to do. Destroy all the evidence on whatever case the Dynamic Duo is working on at that moment and then to vanish into the mist. Mulder's mechanic is an "associate." He doesn't' know he's working for me, but he made it clear one drunken night in a Georgetown bar that he had no love for the FBI and if I ever needed him to "take one of those pigs out," he'd be more than happy to fuck with the brakes of the car owned by his one and only FBI agent-customer. Others are scattered through their lives. We tried to reach a Gunman once. And failed. My job, my team's job, is actually more than it first appears. We're supposed to protect them. From themselves, mostly. But it's also to kill them if they get too close. Sounds like a contradiction in terms, doesn't it? An oxymoronic existence. But it's true. We protect them until they're needed. For the time is coming when they will be needed, when they will have to act out a script that was written decades ago, waiting only to be cast. So, we protect them. But they're dangerous. Like teenagers with keys to the BMW and a full liquor cabinet; fumbling around with things they don't understand and could never fully comprehend until it was too late. And so, if they get too close, we destroy the evidence. Or make a witness vanish. Or discredit them. Whenever we run one of those black discrediting operations I always flash back to that old "Mission Impossible" series and remember what that voice would always say at the end of the tapes. "If you, or any member of your IMF force is captured, the Secretary will disavow any knowledge of your activities." Disavowed. That day, too, is coming. They will be disavowed by the FBI. And then they will come to work for us. Because there will be no choice for them. Work for us...or die. <><> That was the plan, anyway. Until the fickle finger of fate reached out and...well, fucked me. It came in the form of an envelope. The return address was an attorney's office, the postmark telling me it had originated in Chicago. I opened it and a small silver key fell into my hand, along with a short typewritten note. I know it was genuine because it came to a completely clean drop address. No one on my team, no one associated with the project knows of this address. It's invisible, untraceable. The note was clear and to the point. The man Mulder knew as "X," my mentor, had a double-blind system in effect. If he didn't call this attorney at a prearranged time and place, he was to mail the key to a list of names, starting with mine. If I didn't respond to the letter in a set amount of time, then the next name on the list would get the key and the letter. The last name on the list, I knew, was Mulder's. Maybe next to last. Scully's name would be last, because she would be X's last hope. I was on a plane to Chicago literally moments after getting the letter. Not a commercial jet, a private one owned by one of the Group. I landed in Chicago and made my way to the attorney's office. I made contact and got the address of the bank that held the safety deposit box. And inside that box I found something I never expected. The truth. The real purpose of the Project. <><> It was all there. Names, dates, places, missions. Details. Deaths. The truth. It was horrifying. Clues, bread crumbs left to follow. Just enough of a tease to draw me in, to make me investigate and explore. And before I knew it, I was in too far. I'd overextended myself. Any move in any direction and I'd reveal myself. Too far inside to go back. Too far outside to go forward. Which is exactly what X wanted. Son of a bitch. Because now I knew why he used Mulder. Why he would send Mulder on what appeared to the poor FBI agent to be a wild goose chase, only to remove the prize, the target at the last possible instant. Chess pieces, I thought wildly, reading the journal. The anger inside me was black, all-consuming. They'd lied to me. There were lies that I knew I had to accept. Operational security and all. Those were professional lies, known by all and accepted by most. Those that couldn't accept it would wash out of the program and literally vanish, never to be seen or heard from again. But these were the big lies. Lies that made everything I'd done for the last thirty years meaningless. Evil. The souls of those that I'd been forced to kill, assigned to kill, screamed at me in righteous indignation, pleaded for retribution, for the same blood lust I'd employed against them to be turned inward against those that twisted my purpose and intent. And I understood for the first time why X had done what he had. And I knew what I had to do. <><> The assignment came much earlier than I'd expected. The buff-colored envelope appeared in my IN box. A photograph, a name, a desired time frame, and the desired method. Public and messy, the note said. I glanced at the photograph and shuddered. It was her. The picture had been taken as she stood by her sister's grave. Public and messy meant one of several things. The professional in me ran down the options. Car bomb. Too much chance of taking someone with her, including him. The mission had been clear; she was to die. Not him. Not under any circumstances was he to be hurt. They wanted him alive. And grieving. That left something involving a gun, a knife. Something up close and personal. I could make it look like a rape. That would achieved the desired result, which I was beginning to understand translated to breaking his spirit by sending hers on to whatever came after this world. Rifle it was. Nice and public. Maybe walking down the street to lunch or something. I began making plans. <><> And, to do it right, I had to survail the target. That meant long hours in a cramped car waiting for her to appear from their basement office. Or following them on their various out-of- town assignments. All with a long-lensed camera focused on her. Learning her routine. Down to the most exact detail. Assassins rarely sit for interviews. It's almost like a secret club. I mean, I bet you don't know any professional killers, right? I'll tell you a secret. By the time we're ready to take the slack out of the trigger and send a hunk of lead the size of a quarter crashing through your skull, we know you better than your parents, your siblings or your lovers. We know you. Which is how I learned more about Dana Scully than I ever wanted to. <><> The first thing to do, of course, was to wire her apartment from top to bottom. I had audio and video and thermal. Every room was covered. Even the bathroom. I used to leave the bathrooms alone. I used to give my targets some semblance of privacy. I mean, it really didn't matter to me how many times they... You get the idea. But then I discovered some of my targets were on to me, that the knew they were being watched. They'd use the bathroom as cover, as a place to sit and think and talk to themselves, to work their plans out. So the entire apartment got wired. Top to bottom, like I said. And I learned something about Scully. I started to put it together early. She was in love with him. <><> How did I know? Because I know people. I overheard their cellphone calls. I heard what she said to herself after she'd hung up with him. I regularly intercepted her encrypted diary. And I realized why they wanted me to kill her. It had taken six years for these two people. At the beginning, he hadn't trusted her. His paranoia is so fine- tuned...he could be me. But slowly, over time, a inch here and there, she'd won his trust. And then she made the cardinal mistake. She fell in love. So I did the only thing I could. I started watching him, too. I put recorders on Scully's bugs. They were voice and light and motion sensitive; I wouldn't have to review hours of blank tape. Then I wired Mulder up. His housekeeper helped. The first thing I learned about Mulder was that he liked his entertainment. All kinds. The second was that he loved her, too. His conversations after they hung up were just as revealing as hers. So was his journal. Interesting reading. Paranoid rantings (mostly on target, but a few of them...wow...) separated only by... Love poetry. Didn't take a genius to figure out who the poems were about. I backed off on the survail of Mulder. Didn't want to spook him. And started the hands-on watching of Scully again. Wondering what I was going to do. <><> After a month, I got a call. A wheezing voice asking me when the Scully woman was going to die. I made up an excuse about time and opportunity. He bought it, but reminded me that time was running out. And he was right. It was. For me. <><> I requested everything the Group had on my target, and everything they had on Mulder as well. I spent two days reading. Reports, speculation. Photographs taken during their various cases. Steps the Group had taken to restrict their actions, their discoveries. Coupled with the information in X's journal, I knew what I had to do. And it didn't involve Scully's death. Just my own. <><> It wasn't that hard to arrange. We all have them. They're called Spidey Holes. Money, issued for clandestine purchases while on assignment, stashed away in untraceable accounts. New identities. Doctors on call to change my face once more. I would die and become born again. Not as what I had been. But what I should be. What X wanted to be. From what I could piece together, he'd been weeks away from making the break that I was planning. But he'd made the mistake I wouldn't. He tried to contact Mulder. To warn him. To finally confess all. I had a better idea. I contacted X's lawyer and set up the same deal. If he didn't hear from me at a series of prearranged times and places, he would mail Mulder the key to the safe deposit box. I made a copy of X's journal for myself. Insurance, you might say. On the last day of my old life, I suddenly realized why X had risked it all. These two people... They loved each other and were completely afraid to admit it to each other. I was giving up everything for them. After tomorrow, I could never give blood again. Never be an organ donor. I could never let any part of myself enter the system again. Fingerprints, voice print, blood, saliva, semen, nothing. They would track me to wherever I lived and kill me in my sleep. I wanted them to know that I was doing this, and that I was doing it for them. I'm a watcher. And if someone is watching the watcher, I'll be dead. <><> They are out of town on a case. I ago to them. Find them in the motel. He in his room, she in hers. I wait. At some point, they would be in the same room at the same time. It takes four hours. He knocks and she grants him admittance. The microphone lets me listen. They are arguing about the case. Of course, I smile. Only they and I knew that when they argue, they are really saying, "I love you." Time to end it. I have master key. And a silenced pistol. I'm inside before either of them knows what's happening. I toss a pair of handcuffs at her, indicating him with my chin. She moves for her pistol on the nightstand. I bury a round in the wall two inches from her ear. She glances at me, fire in her eyes. I just shake my head, indicating his hands with my eyes again. "Please, Scully, do as he says," Mulder says, thinking that I am here for him, wanting to save her. She does what I asked. I lift another pair of cuffs from my pocket and toss them to her. She puts them on. Time to finish this. "I'm not here to kill you," I say slowly. "And I won't answer any questions." They glance at each other, and then at me. "I am the third in a line of Watchers assigned to you." They frown, not understanding. "The first you knew as Deep Throat. The next, as X." Recognition blooms in their eyes. "My job is simply to watch you and keep you out of trouble. To make sure that you don't learn too much too quickly. There is a schedule, these men say, a schedule for you to learn what you seek." I pause. "I know everything you wish to. X told me from beyond the grave what he couldn't tell me when he was alive. I can't tell you what that is. But...to use a phrase you're both familiar with, the truth IS out there." I hesitate. "My original mission tonight was to kill you," I say to her, letting her see my eyes, see the truth. She pales. He winces. "But I'm not going to. I'm going to...go away. Like X wanted to, and like..." I almost say his name. "Like Deep Throat should have." I hesitate again. "I have three things to tell you. First, the Smoker sent me. He is the one that decided that Scully must die. What you do with that information is your business. Second, that if I die, you will know it all. I have made arrangements for certain information to be delivered to you upon my death." I hesitated one last time. "And one final thing. They do not fear you right now. But they fear what you are becoming. They fear what you _can_ become. Give into it. Give into the feelings you both have. If you take that one final step...nothing can stop you. When you learn what you can be to each other if you stop being afraid of losing what you have now... "If you stop being afraid of losing tomorrow for what you can have tonight, you will be unstoppable." I take a handcuff key out of my pocket and place it on the dresser. "You're all each other have," I say softly. "Together, you can win." I leave. <><> It took them six weeks to find me. Another watcher, a man I know, enters my new apartment in the dead of night. He wakes me. To mock me, I think. To let me know that he's gotten my old assignment, that he's been sent here to kill me and then her. I nod, accepting my fate. I've done the right thing, I know. Just as X did. Just as Deep Throat did. Just as Mulder and Scully will. <><> FINI! Feeeeeeeeeeeeeedback me, Seymour! END NOTE: First, the Watcher in this story is NOT the same character in Night Eyes. Second, the boyfriend in Night Eyes was NOT Skinner. An original draft of that story made it clear that he was a "true" boyfriend, and a doctor as well. When editing that story for terseness, the line got cut. In this story, there is a mention that an attempt was made to recruit a Gunman. I will not reveal which Gunman I thought was ripe for recruitment, so please don't ask. Use your own imagination. ;) Also, a beta reader has put forth the idea that the "Watcher" is Marita, since the gender is never made clear. In the first section, the character speaks of "dying" in Vietnam. 'nuff said.