She says: We find bodies every day. That is the worst part, but it's even worse when they're so disfigured, you can't even tell if they were men or women. I don't know why. John is a man. He has dark hair and long fingers. He sleeps on his back like his body remembers the military cot even when his mind doesn't. He once broke my skin with his teeth.

I was born in the morning. It was snowing, someone told me. I was there to keep them warm, is how the story goes. He touches me now like he's got ice in his stomach. He has a scar slashing across his back, and he says the way he feels sometimes, he wonders what they packed him full of. He gets sore. He drinks his coffee black, and he likes it when I'm on my hands and knees, and he's behind me.

He would like to sleep with Dana Scully, because he thinks she would be soft and smooth and virginal. She's the pinup on his wall when he was fourteen. He doesn't think she'll have stretch marks. He thinks she might cry when she comes.

He doesn't think she'll be like me, cool to the touch. It's funny, because first they thought that I was crazy, and then they thought I was expendable. I spread my fingers against the desk where my nameplate sits and think of how when I was getting a degree in English literature, I decided to become an FBI agent. I think of John Doggett. I think of absolute choices.

And he says: Dana Scully left the same day Mulder did, leaving behind her skin and her hair. One morning, she came down to the basement, and her hair was turned under, and her shirt pulled tight over her breasts. In the middle of an argument, she said, "This isn't about you," and she didn't have to tell me, because it was never about me. She thought she could hide, but she was transparent. She told me my forensic technique was terrible, and I told her she could keep her opinions to herself. She didn't look hurt.

Monica's never said no, and she makes everything into a fight for acceptance. She hears voices, and she gets impressions, and she acts like you're going to hit her if she's bad. She wears black thong underwear, even when we're out on assignment, and spread out across the sheets of a bed in some shitty hotel, her arms and legs are long.

She doesn't like me very much. Hell, she probably likes Scully more than she likes me. She isn't warm to the touch. She always feels like she just came in from a winter morning and took off her gloves. She looks at me like she hates me sometimes, and she only sleeps next to me because she's too tired to get up and move. It isn't for warmth.

Nothing, these days, comes in terms of love.