The first door opened from the outside, but the next one didn't.

"It's me, asshole," Langly barked into the panel beside the steel door set in steel-reinforced stone, and once he closed the outer door, he could hear the grind of the bolts drawing back. No one in the cellar, which meant one of them had gone up to the control room.

As he came up from the cellar, Byers was waiting for him, at the top of the stairs, pistol trained through the final open vault door, the third line of defence in that route. 

"It's me and only me," Langly promised. "But, you know that, because you can see tha -- Oh. Right." He sighed and spit out the cotton padding, tugged off the wig.

"Get in here and shut the door. We may have a problem." Frohike's voice, but no Frohike, which answered the question of where he was.

"The Black Queen got back to us while you were out. I'll admit I pretended to be you, so she'd talk to us," Byers explained, as Langly peeled off a few layers and started looking more like himself.

"What'd she say that we don't already know?" Langly asked, making his way through the warehouse toward his desk.

"About a third of that room is Mulder's files. They're low-priority for scanning, because nobody wants to have to admit any of that happened, but the feds are still holding on to them because have you ever known a federal agency to throw out paperwork?"

Langly stopped suddenly in the doorway of the kitchen and Byers walked right into his back. "Son of a bitch. What did she get?"

Byers staggered back a step. "Nobody's sure. Those files aren't individually accounted for, just the cabinets. And they're not consistently numbered, because a lot of them were old by the time Mulder got them, so there's gaps all over. She let us know out of professional courtesy. Because we might be in there. And if they're going through what's left, trying to figure it out--"

"Then I picked the worst week to decide I was going outside." Langly rubbed one eye under his glasses, as he turned around and nudged Byers back another step. "Coffee first. You make it. I'm getting my chair and a hot pad. My legs are killing me. What did she say about Vanity?"

"Nothing." Byers shook his head. "I don't think it is Vanity. You remember the fan club."

"That was my thought." Langly nodded. "Chair. Coffee. Painkillers. I'll meet you at the front in five."

Langly slumped in his chair, vibrations turned up high, with his keyboard in his lap and a hot pad tucked under his legs. One of the second row of screens showed the conversation logs. He'd left the black box plugged in to a throwaway that was isolated from the rest of the network, just in case the Queen had something else to say -- which she had. 

First, it was just the holes she'd exploited to get in. She kept hammering him for a few days, until he sorted the last of those -- every fucking time he looked, something else had a bad patch and a new hole. Something something damn kids in technology. 

Then, how she'd figured out there was even something there to hit. And that was a point -- if she could figure it out, so could some other people they used to know. Not the eyes that might still be looking for them, but if any one of them got caught and turned... Pride had always been his sin, he figured, and purged some in-jokes, diving to the depths of public archival backups to ensure they were clear. That took time, but it hadn't been difficult. 

And now, she finally had word on the case. Not much -- he was just a contractor and his role was over -- but the heads up that the names on those cases were going to get another look was something, at least. A strong suggestion to keep his head down.

"So how's Special Agent Twink?" Frohike asked, slippers almost silent as he came up behind Langly.

Langly opened his mouth and closed it, blinking a few times before he managed an answer. "Living in a fucking closet with his mother, at a glance. Seriously, I'm pretty sure I had more personal space in our old place, even with both of you up my ass all the time."

"You make with the naked tango, yet?"

"Not actually your business, Frohike." Langly squinted at the choice of words on the screen. Byers had done a pretty good job, mostly by saying as little as possible to keep the conversation going.

"That's a no." Frohike nodded. "World's first fifty-year-old virgin."

"Bullshit. There are still nuns. And I keep telling you it's not even true." Langly pushed his glasses up to rub the bridge of his nose.

"Which is why you can't name any of them, and neither of us have ever caught you, smelled it on you, heard anyone calling for you that wasn't business, heard anyone bragging about you, heard you bragging about them..."

"What happens in my pants stays in my pants."

"What happens in your dreams stays in your dreams, too." Frohike leaned an elbow on the back of the chair as Byers came up with the coffee.

"Byers, tell him I'm not a virgin." Langly grabbed a cup as soon as Byers put down the tray.

"There's only one way I'd know that, and we both know I don't."

"Because I love you to death, but I wouldn't fuck you with someone else's dick." Langly changed the subject by pointing at the screen. "Nobody knows what all of those files are supposed to be. We don't know. She doesn't know. The archivists don't know. Mulder might know, but that's a lot of shit to keep track of, and he's brain damaged anyway. Scully had her memory fucked with so much I couldn't even guess what she knows. There are other people who might know, but I don't have any reason to think they were paying attention -- paperwork is someone else's job. Point is, whoever went in there knew exactly what they were after and where to find it."

"So, either they work there..." Frohike started, and Byers finished the thought.

"Or they've got leverage on someone who does."

"Because the archivists don't know officially, but what they do in their spare time ..." Langly's hands flickered across the keyboard and another screen spawned three windows that he switched between, typing non-stop. "... would be on camera. And she's probably thought of that, but now I've thought of it."

"Wouldn't they have tightened security since that happened?" Byers sipped his own coffee and leaned against the opposite side of the chair from Frohike.

"It's the federal government. You know how long it takes them to even change a roll of toilet paper." Langly spared the quarter second to roll his eyes, because he didn't need to see until he hit enter. "What do we want, a month? Let's try a month."

He hit the release on the chair and leaned forward, knocking Frohike to the side and spilling Byers's coffee, eyes locked on the list of downloads, one file and then the next. "Come on, come on..."

"Breathe, Langly." Frohike grabbed Langly's actual desk chair and sat down. "You're not doing this at ninety-six hundred any more."

"Yeah, and that just means they're not coming back at me at ninety-six hundred, either," Langly snapped, eyes flicking between windows.

"Did you get spotted?" Byers sounded surprised.

"Of course not. But, if it happens... It's not just about how fast I can type any more." Langly shook his head without taking his eyes off the slowly climbing file numbers. Suddenly, his fingers started moving again, terminating in a tiny flourish as he lifted his hand off the keyboard to smack the enter key. "And we're out. One month of surveillance from that camera. Most of it probably of an empty room."

"Throw it across the room," Frohike said, getting up and edging around Byers to take the last cup off the tray. "I've got something that'll cut it down to what we're interested in."

"You know, she's probably already done this," Byers pointed out.

"Fuck her. I'm doing it. She's not going to tell us. You know how this works." Langly dropped the back of the chair without checking behind him and yelled across the room. "Dates and times! I think that's a badge lock, so we don't have to match the face!"

"You still want to match the face," Frohike called back. "Who the hell's going to use their own badge?"

"He's got a point." Byers pulled Langly's desk chair over and sat down. "So. You and Dr Reid?"

"We had dinner, Byers. I haven't left the fucking building since we moved in." Langly hit buttons until the leg rest came back up.

"Hence my concern. Why now?"

"Because for like... eighteen hours I remembered what being alive was like." Langly shook his head and took a swig of coffee. "I got to be me again. I forgot I even missed that."

"Don't do anything stupid, Langly." Byers looked concerned. "It's not going to be a cow's ass, this time, and we don't have any backup."

"Why is it that every time me being stupid comes up, it's always the cow's ass? I'm pretty sure that was Jimmy's fault."

"Okay, how about the fourteen consecutive times you electrocuted yourself in one night? Or the time your sole act of genius got you covered in baby shit? Oh, wait, the time Yves fake shot you and then you almost got real shot?"

"That last one wasn't even my idea. And?" Langly held up a finger under Byers's nose and turned to face it. "Literally anything involving Susanne Modeski. What'd she tie a string to your dingle? Because I seem to recall you walking us all into trouble repeatedly, every time you heard her name."

Byers batted the hand away. "That is my point, Langly. Don't ... do that. I made that mistake for all of us, and if I'm honest, I'd do it again, if I had the chance."

"Yeah, see, that's not happening. It's an enjoyable evening, not a whirlwind romance with a side of twenty years of pining." Langly's eyes narrowed. "Besides, you were the one hitting on him."

"I absolutely was not. I've read his work, and I wanted to discuss some of it."

"Climb down from the ivory-coloured plastic tower, Byers. Down here on earth, that's flirting," Langly scoffed, memories of Reid shivering and whining in his sleep unspooling behind his eyes. There were questions he wasn't going to ask. "And good luck, anyway. He doesn't have a computer. He doesn't want one."

"Long live King Ludd." Byers sounded surprised.

"Ludd was a communist. Everything else is slander. Means of production in the hands of the people," Langly muttered, switching windows and pushing a message to Frohike.

"Still, if you're going to go see him again..." Byers trailed off.

"And I'm not supposed to make stupid decisions? What the hell is that, then, Byers?" Langly ducked his head and ran both hands through his hair. "Yeah, I know. Don't do it, but if I'm going to do it, leave a way for him to reach us that can't be traced back to us."

"How did you get there, anyway?" Byers asked, watching the screen Frohike was pushing work onto. "I know you didn't walk that."

"No, I only walked about fifteen miles one way and six or seven the other." Langly laughed. "I know the shipment times for a few of our neighbours and hitched a ride most of the way in. Back was a little harder."

"Fifteen? You picked the wrong truck, didn't you?" Byers struggled not to laugh.

"Oh, yeah, yuck it up. I'm lucky I didn't end up in the ass-end of Virginia. I swear to you, that was the right truck. I've been watching everything that comes in or goes out and they've all got GPS. That's how I picked one," Langly complained into his coffee.

"And you still picked the wrong one."

"Fuck you. It was the right one. It just wasn't on the right route for some stupid reason."

"Which makes it the wrong one."

"When the two of you are done bickering like a pair of queens over the last tart," Frohike called across the room, "I've got it cut down to three half-hour segments on three different days."

Langly folded his hands and stretched up over his head. "Give me the times!"

Frohike did, one at a time, and there was silence but for the clattering of Langly's keyboard between them. 

"Those are all the same badge number, but that's still not the thief." Langly picked up his coffee as the connection closed behind him. "It's a woman, but she's taller than you, Frohike. Five foot six, according to her employee file. Also according to the file, that last date was the last time she checked out of the building... But, she wasn't fired for two weeks."

"There's two ways this could go," Byers started, and Langly cut him off.

"She's in cahoots and she ran, or she's dead." His eyes darted to Byers. "You know which of those I prefer."