"What's this all about, Frohike?  Why are you being so clandestine for pity's sake?"  Yves takes another slow sip of gin.  You watch her, careful not to let your thoughts gel into the lascivious.  She doesn't know who you really are yet, but after tonight, for her sake, and for yours, she will.

She sponges away the libation's excess with the tip of her tongue on her lower lip the color of a blazing fire, and you wrestle with those thoughts you vowed you aren't allowed to have. 

"Once I finish my drink, I'm out of here unless you tell me what it is you wanted to tell me," she says, and this time you know she means what she says.

This dusky drinking establishment was made for her.  It brings out the deep darkness of her sultry eyes.  Eyes that have the uncomfortable habit of seeing right through a person.

She has her mother's eyes.  Once she looked at you the way Yves is looking at you now.  They are filled with a sorrow you could never hope to allay; not in your wildest dreams.  It's funny, you think, how dreams, wild or otherwise, have a way of asserting themselves into real life.

'Watch over my dear girl, Melv.  I'm counting on you.  You and she are all I've got.  I'm just so tired.'  Those words, uttered over twenty-five years ago in that antiseptic hospital room in London, have never left you.  The words didn't, but you made a promise incapable of being fulfilled.  Ultimately, *he'd* seen to that.

Yves drains her glass, and dabs at her mouth daintily with the flimsy cocktail napkin.  "I'm late for my appointment.  I've got to run--"

"Sit down," you say sternly.  She gapes at you, unaccustomed to your using that tone with her.

>From not too far away, a giddy woman is laughing with abandon.  The laughter is reminiscent of another's.  Your eyes divert in its direction for just a second and then quickly re-focus on Yves.

"You can't leave until I tell you what I came here to tell you.  Dammit, Yves..."

Sighing exacerbatedly, she replies, "My, aren't we testy tonight.  You know, right about now would be the perfect time for you to get on with it.  All this dragging of whatever it is out is bordering on the absurd."

"I know who you are.  I really do."

"So you've said," Yves imposes with a brief, but dramatic roll of her eyes, like you're so full of yourself.

You regard her with not a muscle in your face moving.  You wonder what her dearly-departed mother, your beloved sister, who had chosen to remain in England, dead these many years, would think of the kind of woman her daughter has become.  Not too far from following in the footsteps of her estranged father...

Talking from somewhere deep inside yourself, because you don't want her to see the full scope of your remorse, you say, "This won't be easy for you to hear,..."  You want to.  You've been wanting to since the incredible happened and she so unforeseenly burst upon the scene of your life.

You had meant to keep that promise to her mother, but your own life intruded.  It needed salvaging, as it was turning out.  How it has turned out.  'Nam did a number on the world, you lament, never taking your eyes off your sister's child's face.  Her face nearly the spitting image of her mother's, instilled with her father's coloring.

You had, at one time, thought, she had come to tell you who she was.  Her real name is on the tip of your tongue.

"Hannah..."

Yves' eyes widen like saucers, and she looks as though you've just smacked her across the face.  "H-How," she chokes out when she sees this was something you've kept from her over time.

"I knew your mother."

"How could you have known my mother?" she says in the same manner as an accusal.

"Known you since you were born."  Faintly, in the cockles of your mind you think you hear a drumroll.  "Your mother was my sister."  You have never heard the beauty gasp that loudly before.

Before your eyes she's become that sprite of a girl your sister used to like to dress in frilly blues and violets; matching ribbons in her hair, when she was three.

"That isn't possible," Yves denies with a smirk that rivals one of Langly's.  "Ludicrous."

"Oh, it's possible all right.  We were there."

"The next thing you'll be telling me is that you knew my father, which I know would be a lie.  My father's in a convalescent home in Englewood, New Jersey."

"Your father was evil incarnate."

"How dare you!"  Her outburst gains unwanted attention.

"That man in Jersey isn't your real father.  Greg Haynes is the man who tried to restore some happiness to your mom, at least for a short time, anyway."  Yves' eyes cast soften.  "I'm your uncle, Yves.  Not a very good one, but guilty as charged."  Your eyes cross.  "I mean, _Hannah_."  In a lowered voice you say, "And I didn't look that up in some mysterious file.  I played along with the anagrams until the right moment, and got up my nerve."

"I, Fro--"

"I tried keeping tabs on you, on your whereabouts over the years.  Hell, it wasn't easy.  It wasn't until learning about that little situation you pulled south of the border which drew too much attention in the circles we run in that I got a fix, and kept it, playing it tight.  And then you started zigzagging across our paths.  Coincidence is a bitch, ain't it?"

"I don't believe you, Frohike," Yves flings, visibly rocked.  Her breathing quickens.  "You're lying."

"Why would I do that?" you ask levelly, reaching out with your fingers to touch the knobby portion of feminine wrist.  "She sure as hell didn't deserve me as a brother.  I let her down enough.  Still doin' that in spades."  Your sigh leaves your body, draining you.  "Your mother was such a loving, giving person."

"Everything I'm _not_," Yves snaps.

"Everything you try hard not to be, but haven't exactly got it down pat.  There's a lot of your mother in you, Hannah.  She cared until it hurt, literally."  Your voice turns bitter.  "Before she got mixed up with the devil."

Yves casts her eyes to the thinly-shellacked table as though looking into a reedy pond, you assess.  Her hand recoils from your touch. "M-My mum was a very sad woman.  She lived the way she always was.  That is how I remembered her before she died, and I went to live with--"

"Clara.  I know.  Another sister, living in Vancouver.  Until you went off to England, to school."

"Y-Yes..."  Yves stares at you, looking a mix of profoundly dazed, then puzzled, but you know she has chosen to wholly believe you when she asks, "Frohike...my real father."  Her pause fills with speculative expectation.  "What was he like?"  Regretfulness stains her voice.

The miserable son-of-a-bitch, you mentally decry, but don't put it to her that way.  The kid's taken it on the chin, as tough as ever, so you say, "He was a mistake, and I told Grace so, but she had fallen madly in love with him.  Nothing I said, as the older brother, could have ended them."  Yves lifts up her head, wanting to see the fire in your eyes she knows you have when you get worked up.  "The bastard's never told the truth a day in his life, and dedicated the balance of his life, distorting it, camouflaging it, burying it.  He ran out on her, all those years ago, with Gracie never getting over him doing that shit to her.  Never got over him.

"How do you know, if he left mum when I was still a babe-in-arms, as she had often told me?"

Well, that much never changed, you think, seeing as how she is still quite the babe.

Then, you sneer, and your smile, one that speaks of malevolent, raw hatred, asserts itself first.  "By bizarre twists and turns of sick fate.  I know him, have known, going on a long time now.  He seeped back, so to speak, several years ago."  Through your fateful association with Mulder, you inwardly rue.

So caught up in a maze of distracted thought are you, her question almost goes unheard.  "W-Where is he now, Frohike?  Do you know?"  She jiggles your hand, the one that tried to touch her before.  "_Fro_hike, my father.  Who is he? I want to know."

You shake your head, and rejoin her in the present.  Her resiliency, just one of her damn father's many traits, you have abhorred and cursed over the years, proves to be your re-activator.

"He's dead, Hannah."

"Dead?" she says as though you've given and taken away in the same breath.  "How?"

You drain the second shot glass which held the J&B, and you reach for the third.  "Months ago.  One of his own operatives, a man who went by the name of Krycek, and his whore pushed him down a flight of stairs in his wheelchair."

"Good, God."

"He gave chain smoking a whole new definition.  Given long enough, he would have succumbed to lung cancer."  You pause a bit as your vivid imagination plays out the vindictive murder.  "I could say, 'sorry,' but I'd be lying."

You down the third shot in one gulp, and wipe your mouth off on your leather sleeve.

"What was his name?"  She asked that with a strong sense of oral mystique.

You hesitate, having more than an inkling of suspicion that when you tell, she'll brand you a liar for sure.

"I want--I've got to know."  Then she hesitates, but after a beat says straightforwardly, "Melvin, please.  You must tell me."  You can't deny those eyes.  "If you're really my uncle as you claim, then you will.  I've no feelings to spare.  Remember?"

You want to kick yourself where the sun don't shine for having said that to her a week or so ago.  "I never meant to say anything so crappy," you say as though it's penance, your stab of conscience making you smart.

"What's said, is said.  Now, tell me what I need to know...Uncle."

Wishing you had a fourth shot to down before dropping the name like the bomb it is, you look at her long and not as hard as you first felt.

"His name was...C.G.B. Spender."

"The devil's own," Yves-now-Hannah susurrates, and clutches your hand convulsively.  "And what does that make me?" she asks in a small, defeated voice, so uncharacteristic of her.

Now you wish it had been you instead of Krycek who'd done the deed.  "My sister's beautiful, brilliant daughter," you reassure her.  Your hand covers over hers and you further, "The child I'll love and protect as best I can, for as long as I live."

Her eyes glisten with tears in just that special way her mother's always did.  Your hands clasp, with her grip matching your own, and you know you did the right thing by them both.

A thoughtful look overshadows her bemused expression.  "Shall we tell Byers and Langly, then?  Unless you already have..."

You shake your head, and avow, "I had to tell you first, my dear.  You squeeze her hands.  "I'll let you make that call," you easily say, confident that she'll make the right one.

~o~o~
End