Reid sat upside-down on the couch, legs crossed over the back, head hanging over the seat cushion, eyes closed, as he scrawled words on the notebook folded open against his leg as fast as he thought of them. Mistakes were something to worry about later, if he ever bothered to send it. Mostly he just wanted to get it onto the page before the words -- and the feeling -- got away from him.

My fingers still remember the texture of your skin, and with my eyes closed, I can almost convince myself I feel it. Soft and cool, and I wonder how my hands differ from your memories in the places that you're warm. I remember the sensation of you pressed tight against my thigh, the way you trembled as you chased that pressure, the rhythm of your thighs flexing against mine. With my eyes closed, I can still feel the sound of your pleasure in my mouth, the sound becoming vibration in my bones, a physical transmission of your desire that reached up along my cheeks to brush against my eyes. I want to kiss you again, more, longer... I want to taste your mouth and the coffee-bittered air between us until visions of the divine burst across the insides of my eyelids. I want to watch your lips around my name, when it's the only word you remember.

He tucked his head and swung his legs to the side, twisting to sprawl down the couch with his heels propped on the wall. Slightly less upside-down. His eyes stayed closed as he rolled the memories back and forth in his mind.

How had he come to this?

He knew the ache in his chest and the twinge under his fingernails. The choking grip of the dread that hung behind the metaphorical forearm he'd slammed across that doorway in his mind.

Was this what he wanted? Hadn't he just said he wasn't doing this again?

He told himself it wasn't the same, but he could feel it in his teeth. He told himself he wouldn't let it end like that, but it wasn't really up to him, was it? And yet, there was the eternal nagging sense that if he'd said anything else in that moment, now years past -- anything but 'yes' -- he'd be living a whole other life, by now. A life in which his ribs didn't ache at the combination of dark hair and blood, in photos from other cases. A life in which he didn't know the sound of that one specific agony in his own voice. A life in which just one more person was alive, regardless of how anything else might have gone, afterward.

But, this wasn't like that at all.

Was it?

The papers piled on his desk weren't going to grade themselves, no matter how much he wished they would, some days, and Reid conceded the point, pen in one hand and coffee in the other. His students weren't stupid, but he'd noticed that some of them had very ... fixed perspectives that were likely to end in misjudgements in the field. Wild imagination could be difficult to temper, but someone who staunchly refused not only to look outside the box, but to even consider there was a box, was not ... He caught that thought and chuffed in amusement. 'Wasn't going to go far', he'd thought. And yet, that seemed to be the straight track into bureaucratic positions -- people who didn't have the eye for field work, but could defend their every decision with policy and protocol. It was his job, he thought, to try to get people to at least recognise that the box existed. Not technically what he was teaching, but still a fundamental part of understanding the content.

The phone interrupted his contemplations, and he considered ignoring it. Succeeded, in fact, until the machine picked up and he heard Garcia's voice.

"Reid? I know you're not supposed to be working, but I really need another set of eyes on this -- your eyes on this. It's bad. It's Vanity."

He grabbed the phone so fast the pile of graded work nearly toppled. "Garcia? What's going on?"

"Lisa Ortiz, over in computer crimes, was arrested this morning. That's... She used to be Vanity. I know her, Reid. She didn't do this." Garcia's voice was a panicked hiss.

"Okay, let's assume you're right. What's the evidence?" Reid picked up the base of the phone as he got up from the desk. "I'm getting my shoes, right now. Keep talking to me."

"It's not the case we had. It's a different one. They're saying she went after the Department of Defence, last night. The signature's the same -- she's the obvious choice -- but it's not her!" The sound of Garcia's typing was fast and loud, with tiny pauses as she read the screen.

"Where is the information coming from?" Reid thought he might regret asking.

"I have what was presented for the arrest warrant. The rest of it is the DoD's, and ... I don't really want to stick my finger in that right now."

"Can you reach our friend? Is it safe to try?" Reid juggled the phone and his jacket. "I'm coming in. I can give you about ten hours, and then I have to finish this grading before tomorrow's class. But, if we're not done, you'll see me again as soon as I can get back down, tomorrow. I promise you."

"I can probably get him." Garcia sounded like she'd started breathing again. "Thank you."

"I'll be there in ... as fast as I can drive without getting pulled over." Reid put down the phone, grabbed his keys, and ran out the door.

Reid appeared in the doorway of Garcia's office, having managed to avoid running into anyone else on the way. "Do you mind if I close the door?"

Garcia nearly leapt out of her seat at the sound of his voice, but frantically waved him in. "Please. Close it. Lock it. Duct tape it if you have to." She paused and looked at him. "Are you okay?"

Reid looked down at himself, as he closed the door, realising his shirt was untucked and misbuttoned, and he turned away from Garcia's eyes to fix that. "I was in a hurry. What do you know, so far?"

"Our friend just threw himself in front of the train and figured out what the DoD attack was after -- accounting, of all things. Specifically, repeated and large billing since oh-one." Garcia typed a few lines into one window and waved for Reid to take a seat... that didn't exist. "Our friend seems to think they're looking for former-agent Dana Scully, because of the X-Files connection. I asked him why not Spooky, and he says it's because of, I quote, 'some freaky top-secret shit about the cancer she didn't actually have, and the baby she did'."

Reid moved a stack of files and parked himself on top of a short file cabinet. "As much as I hate conspiracy theories, I'll give him this one, because the files you got for me to read on the flight back from Colorado were... You were right about them. They're solid and well documented cases -- photos, lab reports, interviews, it's all there. If I wanted to dispute the evidence, I suspect I'd be maligning the professional competence of at least fifty people in nine states. Assuming, then, that the evidence is real, the conclusions are ... I'd be very hard pressed to come up with something more likely than Agent Mulder's conclusions."

"I'm... looking at a whole lot of something I don't understand from a friend of our friend, who apparently got a look at the cancer that wasn't. Something medical? Biological?" Garcia opened the file onto another monitor, closer to where Reid sat. "It's the evidence, he says, that Agent Scully is worth pursuing."

"Why the DoD's accounts?" Reid asked, leaning in to squint at what had to have come from Byers. "That doesn't seem like a reasonable place to go looking for a former FBI agent."

"I asked. He said to ask you."

"It's a pattern?" Reid looked up in horror, as he remembered Frohike's off-hand correction of his assumptions. "Ask him how common that was. Tell him I'm asking."

"What am I asking?" Garcia blinked. "You skipped a step."

Reid closed his eyes and considered the words. "DoD funding misdirects to conceal persons of interest from other government agencies."

"What?" Garcia spun her chair around to look at Reid.

"Whether or not it's true -- which it may be -- our friend believes it is, and that means there are other people who do as well, given his line of work. And our friend isn't running from a figment, according to documents you put in my hands, which inclines me to think this may not be entirely empty supposition. But, the files referenced in those documents only exist in the room that got robbed in the Vanity case. Which implies there are other digitised files that reference those other files. But, those files have been moved from where they were originally stored. And the case numbers aren't indexed... and that's not the point I was making, sorry. The point is, there's some definite suggestions that someone went in looking for a specific person, in those files, and found some reference to their death or disappearance, and then had the context to chase that to the next place that might show evidence that the disappearance was well-funded and intentional -- or that they're not dead. Whether or not that's Scully is still open to debate, but if what I'm looking at has any basis in reality, that really would be an excellent reason."

"So, multiple thefts of information, potentially regarding a single target -- a person, rather than a place or thing." Garcia paused, plucking a candy from a small, pink kitty cup tucked between monitors. "Unless it's a thing the person disappeared with, in which case, in the end, it's still a person, but it might be a thing in the initial files, but that doesn't matter because we still don't know what the initial files even are."

"Correct." Reid nodded.

"God, how am I supposed to prove she didn't do it, when I don't even know what 'it' is?"

"Did you ever track down the last person in the file room, before the break in?" Reid asked.

"She's wasn't answering the phone, and then with the pressure to stop looking into what was in the files... It wasn't a serial case. We're not supposed to be 'wasting time' on it." Garcia opened a few more documents, making them large enough for Reid to see. "Alondra Metcalfe, much too tall to be our thief, and her badge obviously wasn't used in the break-in. Looks like whoever picked up the case stopped trying to find her and... this case got kicked around a lot. We've only been off it for a few weeks, and it's been passed through four other departments. Nobody wants to get X-Files on them. ... Let's see... Oh, no. No, no, no. As of fifteen minutes ago, this is now a DoD case, because of the link to their other case. Okay, paper copies and then I'm washing my hands, before anyone notices we were in here."

"Alondra Metcalfe who hasn't been answering her phone and wasn't directly involved in the break in..." Reid murmured as the printer started up on the other side of the room. "She's still involved, if she's still missing. Otherwise that's more coincidence than I'm comfortable with."

"Our friend says he's already looked at her. She was fired after not showing up for two weeks." Garcia looked back at Reid, eyes wide with dread.

"Okay, this is our problem, and it's not even our problem because we're not supposed to be involved. It's not even a Bureau case any more. You're not a field agent. I'm supposed to be on leave. It's not going to look good for either of us if we take the obvious next step, here," Reid pointed out.

"I should call JJ," Garcia decided, reaching for her headset. "She'd do it anyway."

"You should call Rossi," Reid suggested. "Think about how long he's worked here. Of all of us, he might remember some of the people involved in those cases."

Garcia blinked and nodded. "Genius," she said, pointing at him, before she dialled Rossi's number.