Disclaimer: "Yes, dear, Mommy loves you. You know that. Mommy will always love you, no matter what. But sometimes, Mommy doesn't like what you do very much. Do you understand, Sweetie? Mommy doesn't like it when you say that, OK? Just because Mulder said it, doesn't make it right. OK? Besides, I'm very sure that Scully told him to make his own damn...err, ham sandwich himself."

It came down to a choice. The day could have been frantic, stressed, a frenzied twitching parody of a lifetime of dreams and hopes. But by unspoken mutual agreement we chose a normal day, one like any other.

She made coffee first thing, and our basement morning was filled with light banter and all the beloved arguments of old. We sorted case files, even plundered a file cabinet drawer of slide carousels for space for the promising 'to do' folders. I made her laugh by balancing one carousel on my head like a hat, and she in turn graciously helped me retrieve the scattered slides when my 'chapeau' fell off.

At lunch we bent our agreement a fraction, and crossed the street to McDonald's to get two large fries, then strolled up 9th to a street vendor and bought a couple of foot-long dogs with everything. She chided me for having ties that didn't betray relish spills, and I returned the favor by wiping mustard from the end of her nose.

The afternoon passed quickly, punctuated by follow-up calls and online research. In a fit of comical madness we crept up the back stairs and spent $4 each on candy and junk food and drinks. She, of course, stored her loot in the desk drawer, just as she always did.

I shared my can of iced tea with her.

The call came at 4:50. Kimberley's desk was tidily vacant, but Skinner's door was open. The AD seemed lost in thought at first but waved us in to the two chairs in front of his desk. The update didn't take long and no one seemed in the mood for chit-chat. It wasn't customary for him to escort us to the door of the office, nor were the tearful hug she gave him or the firm handshake he and I traded everyday events.

For once we left on time, and like headstrong children we decided to pretend that it was Friday. We drove in tandem to the video store, then Lin Chow's and Amelio's, and took the whole affair to her apartment. She agonized over the best wine to serve with Peking Sesame Beef and Pepperoni-Sausage-Red Pepper pizza, while I assembled our feast on the coffee table in front of the television.

We were halfway through "The Truman Show" when her mother called. Speaking to Maggie became more and more difficult for her, the charade of normality more and more painful to maintain, until at last I wrestled the phone from her and told Maggie that her daughter and I had decided to get married. Maggie was overcome with joy and asked to speak again with her daughter. The rest of the telephone conversation was all on Maggie's side, with a thousand and one pre-nuptial details and her plans for telling Bill and Charlie.

Even normal days have a few well-intentioned lies.

I knew my mother was away, visiting friends at some exclusive resort, playing bridge and talking over old times. So I dialed another number and the Lone Gunmen picked up on the third ring. The guys sounded pizza- and beer-buzzed and sounds from #34 on the list of The One Hundred Best Skin Flicks Ever Made blared in the background. Byers offered that maybe my suggestion that UFOs caused Gulf War Syndrome wasn't so weird after all, but Langly interrupted to announce that the cookies were ready and that a couple would be consumed in our honor. Then I put her on the phone, and a wistful Frohike declared his undying love for her yet again. She waved me off for a moment for a few private words with him, then gave the phone back. They'd engaged the speaker phone at the other end by that time, and as #33's opening sequence soundtrack rolled in the background, they toasted us with beer and cookies and said that they'd call us tomorrow. The receiver rocked slightly in the cradle as I hung up.

They knew, that much was obvious. I don't know how they found out.

We followed "The Truman Show" with that classic porn video "Debbie and Her 21-Gun Salute." The best part was our colorful color commentary, complete with rude conjectures about just what *those* were stuffed with. We laughed through the whole thing, taking two minutes out for an impromptu pillow fight.

As the video rewound, we realized that a normal end to a normal day would include my leaving soon. Her eyes brightened as she locked and chained the front door, then beckoned me into her bedroom. It wasn't Friday anymore, now it was another evening on the road in GodKnowsWhere, Kansas, in the last available motel room for miles and flat miles around. She complemented me on my better-than-usual choice of accommodations, then scooted past me to grab the bathroom first. Ten minutes later and clad in our normal on-the-road sleepwear, we climbed in to share the only bed in the only available room in GodKnowsWhere, Kansas.

It's lonely and cold on the Kansas prairie, so we cuddled together for companionship and warmth. Although it wasn't really necessary, we let the cuddling evolve to intimacy, to the physical acknowledgment and consummation of a bond forged in six years of shared quests. Satisfying that hunger wasn't part of our normal day, but we didn't let that stop us this once.

Neither of us was sleepy, so after her post-coital turn in the bathroom, she unplugged the clock from the wall outlet and crawled back under the covers next to me. In low whispers we talked about the truly important things in life--why purple SweeTarts were the best flavor, why God had many names and voices but no 900 number of His own, whether lost socks really ended up in a deep bunker in the Cheyenne Mountains.

Almost certainly the President was there now in the Cheyennes, deep underground, perhaps far enough underground to escape what was about to happen. The information I'd been given by the remnants of the Consortium was specific as to time and place, but not as to the breadth of the devastation that would result. The verbiage was terse and pointed: in 50 hours a device would be detonated over each major city in every industrialized nation on Earth. It was the aliens' response to our discovery of the hybrid research and the bees and the use of humans as breeding chambers. It was their response to the development of the vaccine. Theirs was now a strategy of sterilization rather than colonization.

With only two days remaining it had been easy for those in power to dismiss the information as a hoax, even as they hustled the President onto a helicopter in the dead of night to connect with unidentified transport heading out from a local airbase. With less than two days remaining the disappearances of an increasing number of key government officials had gone unnoticed by the media. We had found ourselves shadowed by sharpshooters as governmental insurance against our starting a nationwide panic. We had found ourselves with one last day.

The date had been set, but the calendar had been changed. The end would come not on a weekend, not during a holiday, not as a conclusion of an avalanche of abridgments to liberty and the rule of law. The end had come in the middle of a week, free from holiday travel and supersaver fares. The end would arrive as a single bright flash in the dead of night, as if the light of one sun had been delivered suddenly into the sky. After the end, there would be only plains of glass and rivers of dust, choking clouds of silt and ash that would wreck the biosphere beyond all hope.

And now, we wait, cradled in each other's arms, our fingertips on each other's lips so that these last whispers are felt rather than heard. We wait for the bright light of a premature sunrise, so that in that last split-second we see each other with calm eyes of trust and love. We have been lovers but once, and yet what we have goes beyond the physical, beyond this earth, beyond the mundane and the ordinary. We will have won, even as the dust of our remains dances in torrential post-apocalyptic storms. We will have won, because together we have found the truth.

The moment is here. Our eyes meet, and we feel but a single word on our lips.

"Partners."