Title: Subcutaneous Author: Maria Nicole E-mail: marianicole29@yahoo.com Distribution: Anywhere that this goes to automatically is fine. Anyone else, I'd appreciate if you let me know where it's going. Thanks :) Spoilers: Season six up through Field Trip. This *really* won't make sense if you haven't seen One Father/Two Sons, Fight the Future, Patient X/The Red and the Black, SR 819, Memento Mori, Redux I and II, or Zero Sum. Rating: PG-13 Classification: XA Keywords: Skinner/Mulder/Scully friendship, Mulder/Scully UST Summary: Lies, threats, drugs, implants, warehouses, nanotechnology, and spackling: just a usual day in the mytharc neighborhood. Author's Notes: Sometime in March, I started to think of some of the issues that I wanted CC and 1013 to explore in the season six finale/season seven premiere. Eventually, I started to write out a series of scenes and piece them together. When I was about 70K into it, I saw Biogenesis...and found that my version was completely off. I decided to finish it anyway, my own personal alternate version of the end of season six. There are, unfortunately, no spinning, flying, Bible-bisecting, telepathy-inducing, artifacts in here. On the other hand, this is one hundred percent Fowley-free. Disclaimer: They aren't mine; they belong to Fox and 1013. Thanks to Lisa O., who put up with getting random, out-of-sequence parts of this in her e-mail. Subcutaneous Maria Nicole Part I--April 18-25--Skinner April 18 "Blood from *what*?" Skinner said into the phone, trying to restrain his impatience, his concern. "She had a nosebleed." *** He drove to Mulder's apartment quickly, changing lanes and passing cars often, only to be stalled by red lights. At the lights, his brain would stall too, and focus in on the traffic. But when he accelerated, his thoughts would switch from the traffic to the speech he was rehearsing in his mind. But that was wrong, because Mulder would have stopped him when he first said Mrs. Scully's name. Mulder would be puzzled, maybe a little suspicious. But he never would have gotten past Mrs. Scully's name. "Blood from *what?*" he had said into the phone. Mulder would say. "She had a nosebleed." *** He picked the lock at Mulder's apartment when there was no answer, and quickly toured his apartment, praying silently to any power who would listen. Please, please, please let Mulder be in the same condition as Scully. Let this be some woman with a grudge and a paranormal gift, one woman who can be stopped. But Mulder wasn't there. The red light on his answering machine was blinking, several times. Skinner paced restlessly around the living room, noting the cell phone lying on the coffee table. He didn't see Mulder's gun, though; at least the other man was smart enough to always carry that. Twenty minutes later, he was still pacing when he heard the footsteps, and the key turn in the lock. The door swung open, and Mulder entered, balancing a laundry basket, a bottle of Cheer, and two plastic bags in his arms. "Mulder," he began, and the other man gave a start of surprise, losing his grip on everything. The bottle of Cheer thudded and bounced slightly, and something in one of the bags clinked together. Neatly folded t-shirts and sweatpants and bed sheets came tumbling out as the laundry basket fell to the floor. Mulder reached back for his gun, processed that it was Skinner, stopped, and did a double take. "It's just me," Skinner finished, and the phone rang. Mulder looked at him, at the clothes on the floor, over at the ringing phone. "Dammit," he said mildly, giving the bottom of the laundry basket a small kick. "I knew I was gonna drop something at some point; I just didn't think it was going to be because my boss broke into my apartment. What the hell?" "You've been doing laundry?" said Skinner, irrationally furious. How could Mulder not have known, not have sensed, that something was wrong with Scully? Behind him, the phone rang again, and he heard the machine click to pick it up. "I like for my clothes to have that Downy fresh feeling." Mulder looked over at the machine, and they both paused to listen to his voice saying that he wasn't home and to leave a message. "Mulder, where the hell are you? Call us back now. We need to talk to you." Skinner thought he recognized the voice as being that of one of the men he'd met when Mulder had been in the hospital. The short one. "Weird," said Mulder, as the machine clicked off. "They usually tell me to erase their messages immediately. Is everything okay, sir?" Concern came into his eyes, and Skinner prepared for the barrage of questions about Scully, but he had misread Mulder. "The infection...the nanotechnology...are you feeling okay?" "It's not me," he said. "Mulder, Mrs. Scully called me this morning." He waited, for the interruption, but Mulder surprised him again by saying nothing, only drawing in a breath and turning pale. "Scully's at the hospital. She was in a lot of pain--a headache." He rushed into one explanation, the one he wanted to believe himself, to forestall what he saw growing in Mulder's face. "This woman you just investigated, could she have done something like this?" Mulder nodded, slowly. "She could, I guess. I don't know why she would though. To me, maybe, but I thought she liked Scully." He shook his head a little, as if confused. "You think that's what's happening? She got pissed off at us for some reason and did something to make Scully feel pain? But she'll be okay now, if it was Elizabeth Wendell. She could only inflict a physical feeling for a pretty limited time." He was looking at Skinner, bewildered, half-pleading, and Skinner told him the rest. "It wasn't just a headache, Mulder. She had a nosebleed." *** He caught up with Mulder in the hallway, grabbing hold of his shoulder. "Hold on. Hold on. It doesn't have to be the cancer." Mulder looked past him, through him, which didn't surprise Skinner: he understood that he had ceased to exist as soon as he had used the word nosebleed. Mulder had spun around and left the room without even asking what hospital Scully was at. "What else could it be? Let go of me." "You're not going to do her or yourself any good if you walk in there in a panic. You don't even know where you're going." "Are you gonna tell me or just stand in my way?" "St. Joseph's. But Mulder, at least let me drive you, you shouldn't be driving a car. Come on, let's get whatever you need from your apartment and then I'll drive you over." "It shouldn't be the cancer," said Mulder, giving in abruptly and letting Skinner walk him back to his apartment. He walked over his spilled clothes, moving to the center of his apartment and scanning. "She just had a check up a month ago. She was fine." "So, maybe it's this Wendell woman." "Maybe." Mulder grabbed his cell phone and patted down his pockets, presumably checking for keys. "Let's go." *** They flashed their badges to get past the emergency room personnel, who pointed them to a drawn curtain in the back of the emergency room. Scully was propped up in a bed behind it, face very pale and arm hooked up to an IV. Her mother had been sitting on the bed, but she stood when they entered. "Mrs. Scully," Mulder said, and moved past her to stand by the bed. His voice when he spoke to Scully was soft and gentle. "There are easier ways of getting out of going to church, Scully. If your priest's homilies are that boring..." Her hand reached up to grasp his briefly. "It wasn't the homily, Mulder. I have a pretty high tolerance for men who drone on and on, you know." Her tone was equally tender, but it sharpened as she looked past Mulder to Skinner. "Hello, sir. I'm sorry to have disturbed you today." Skinner shook his head. "It wasn't a disturbance. How are you feeling?" "My head's better. The pain's died down. They took some X-Rays. We should know in a little while what...if..." "It could be Elizabeth Wendell," Mulder said. "It could be. Although I'm not sure that the evidence points to her having that ability. And even if we assume for the sake of argument that she *can* trigger sensory feelings, I don't know why she would." "Maybe she was upset that you doubted her ability." "Maybe. Even if it's not her, that doesn't mean that it's... I never had a headache like that before I went into remission. The nosebleed could be something entirely different." "Like what, Dana?" asked Mrs. Scully, standing with her arms tightly wrapped around herself. For the first time, Skinner noticed that she was wearing hospital issue scrubs instead of her own shirt. He could only guess that she had gotten Scully's blood on her. Scully shook her head wearily and closed her eyes. "I don't know, Mom, let's wait and see." "I thought this chip in the back of your neck was supposed to keep you safe." "It has, Mom. I don't know what happened this morning. We'll have to wait and see." That, more than anything, told Skinner how tired she was; the Scully he knew would be able to whip off several possible interpretations for any medical event. "You said they took X-Rays? When is the doctor coming back?" he asked. "I'm not sure. They took them pretty recently. By the time we got to the hospital, the bleeding had pretty much stopped and the headache had died down, and there were victims from a car accident coming in...it took them a while to get to me." When a cell phone trilled, Skinner automatically reached for his. "Mine," said Mulder, and answered it. "Mulder." His forehead wrinkled. "What the hell is your problem? I was doing laundry. Listen, Frohike, I don't have time for this now, Scully's..." Abruptly, he stopped, and his face went grey. "What?" He looked around at them and then abruptly turned his back, moving towards the end of the curtained area. "What are you talking about?...Mmm hmm...Mmm hmm...Yeah, I know that...Well, did they try...what's the progression.... how many women are we talking about?" They watched as he reached his hand out and clutched at the curtain, knuckles white. Skinner could see the muscles in his arm, his shoulder, contract. "What's the progression of it? How much time do we have?" There was a very long pause, during which all of them kept very still. Whatever answer Mulder was getting ran through him like a shock wave. "Yes, I understand. We're at St. Joseph's. I think you'd better get your butts over here." He clicked off the phone, but didn't turn to face them, only held on to the pale blue curtain. "It's not Elizabeth Wendell, is it?" asked Scully from the bed. "No, no, it's not," said Mulder, subdued, turning around. "Mrs. Scully, maybe you should sit down." "What? What's going on?" "Mom, come and sit down." Scully shifted a little in the bed, patting the place next to her. Mrs. Scully sat down next to her, and reached out for her daughter's hand. Mulder sat down at the foot of the bed, facing them. He placed his hand on the lump of Scully's feet, under the blue blanket. "That was Frohike. He's...a friend of mine, Mrs. Scully." "Of ours," said Scully. "Of ours. He and some of my other friends are in touch with a lot of the MUFON women. MUFON, that's the--" "Mutual UFO network. I know. Dana's told me some of this." Mulder nodded. "Then you probably know, after we put the chip back into Scully's neck, we informed a lot of the other women, purported abductees, what we'd done. We told them that if they still had the implant, that putting it back in might help them if they were diagnosed with cancer." Mulder gestured to the back of his own neck. "It seemed to work, for a lot of them. Some took the implants back out, after the incidents on Skyland Mountain and the bridge, but many left them in, or had never taken them out in the first place." "Why wouldn't they do that?" asked Skinner. "You're not telling me some of them knew that taking it out would harm them?" "No, actually, some of them wanted it there," Mulder said, turning around to look at him. Skinner shook his head in puzzlement, as a question. "You've seen Cassandra Spender, sir," said Mulder, his eyes very dark. "After what's happened to them...not all of these women are what we'd call sane." "Some of them seem to have seen the alien interference in their lives as a positive force," said Scully. Her face was chalk white under the harsh light of the hospital. "Psychologically speaking, it's possible that many of them feel the need to give some meaning to the trauma that they've endured by seeing themselves as servants to great god-like beings." "What does this have to do with Dana?" Mrs. Scully's face had the same pallor as her daughter's, and Mulder turned back to face her and Scully. "Frohike and Langly and Byers have been keeping tabs on them, sort of sporadically. They went to a convention today and a lot of the women who would be there weren't. So they started checking into the others. Scully, a lot of them are..." "Just tell me." "Over the past month or two, a number of these women have had severe headaches, as well as nosebleeds." "The cancer goes out of remission." "Yes. But it's...it's different somehow. It's...um, very aggressive. This started about two month ago, the earliest cases, and..." "How much time?" "It varies a little, but...the average time from when the headaches and nosebleeds start is...two weeks." Mrs. Scully gasped. Scully blinked. "Has anyone tried to take the chip out?" Skinner asked desperately, feeling his stomach plummet. "That doesn't seem to make a difference, although it's possible that no one took it out soon enough. Whatever signals the chip is sending to trigger the cancer seem to be irreversible even after the chip is taken out. Or maybe it stopped sending some sort of signal that it was supposed to be sending. We've never really understood the mechanism." "What's the progression of the cancer, Mulder?" Scully asked. Skinner had to admire Mulder; he gave it to her straight and honestly, even though his voice cracked on words. "Intermittent headaches and nosebleeds. As the tumor grows, it presses into the optic nerve and starts to interfere with visual function. Then, um, motor function, and then...mental function." Scully closed her eyes and Skinner could see her chest rise and fall quickly. Her eyes opened and focused on Mulder. "Pain, blindness, loss of movement, and delusions. When does the visual impairment start?" "After about ten days. It's...um, after that, it's pretty fast," said Mulder, and Mrs. Scully let loose a breath that sounded like a sob. Scully patted her hand absently and kept her eyes focused on Mulder. "I'll try taking the chip out immediately. And--you have your cell phone--good, I'll call my oncologist. And the Lone Gunmen are coming over? I'll want to see the autopsy reports on the victims. If we can get hold of any of the implants, maybe we can see..." and then her voice faltered and broke, and her eyes closed again. "*Mulder*," she whispered. He jogged her foot, until she opened her eyes and looked at him again. "This cancer was *given* to you, Scully. That implant was found in a government facility. Someone has the information on how it was designed, how it was triggered, and that person has the information on how it can be cured." "We don't know who that person was. It might have been one of the ones who died in that airport hangar." "Even so, some traces must have been left, somewhere. And we'll find them." He was only touching her foot, but the way their eyes clung together made Skinner and Mrs. Scully extraneous. Scully nodded, very slowly. "Then let's get to work." End 1 of 8 _________________________________________________________ Subcutaneous, 2 of 8 Disclaimers, etc. in part 1 "So this Scanlon just disappeared?" said Skinner. "Let's put out a description of him to all the hospitals and police stations we can reach. If he knew how to make the cancer worse, he may know how to make it better. I'll take care of that." Byers nodded approvingly. "Mulder and Scully had the people in Allentown work with a sketch artist. If their copies were burned in the office, we still have one." "Let's get it out as soon as possible," said Skinner. "He might still be working in some capacity as a doctor somewhere." To anyone walking down the hospital corridor, the group in the lounge near room 319 would have seemed like any other group of concerned family members. Most concerned family members, however, had not brought at least three different laptop computers with them. Scully was in a private room in the oncology ward, having spent most of the day talking with her doctor. The floor's lounge, fortuitously, was across from her room. Skinner could glance up, every so often, and see her in bed, diligently reading through a stack of faxed information about the other women. Her mother was sitting in one of the chairs near her bedside. Mulder was in the other, peering through his glasses at the screen of his own laptop. In the lounge, Skinner worked with the odd collection of men whom he had met twice before, when Mulder had been in the hospital. They had been wary of him when Mulder had been shot and Scully had disappeared post bee-sting; they had been a little warmer in the hospital after Mulder's near- drowning in Bermuda. This time, they had actually told him their names, and he was at least reasonably certain that they were telling the truth. "We think that the Cigarette Man walked away from the hangar. He's disappeared since, but we've been trying to track what organizations he and Diana Fowley were involved in. What companies they payrolled. Roush has dried up, but there might be others," said Frohike. "And we might be able to work with what we know of him to figure out where he might be now." "You're the one who came up with his history, O Great One," said Langly. "Such as it was." "Shut up, you freak. It's better than *your* latest theory on the Kennedy Assassination. Extraterrestrial Biological Entities, my ass. And Johnson's wife was not..." "You're saying LBJ didn't seem like a droid put into power by greater forces? And who would be standing by his side, with access to him at all times? And don't tell me that any *human* would choose to name their child Ladybird." "I never thought any human would name their child Ringo." "You got a problem with my name, *Mel*vin?" "They're always like that. Pay no attention," said Mulder quietly from beside him, and Skinner pulled his attention away from them. The door to Scully's room was closed. "She go to sleep?" "Yeah, the nurse shooed us out. They're starting to send nasty looks this way, too." "We'd better get going. I'm going to send something to the hospitals about Scanlon. Is there anything else I can do at the Bureau?" Mulder shook his head. "Scully and I discussed that. We'd like to keep this quiet for now. We don't want news of where our investigation is going circulating just yet. They'll just clean up their tracks." Skinner nodded grimly. "I'll come by tomorrow after work." "She took the implant out," said Mulder. "Maybe that will make a difference." "Maybe. Maybe it's what triggered the cancer." Skinner looked at the other man sharply, assessing the expression of guilt and fear on his face. "If nothing else, putting the chip in gave her a year longer than she would have had." Mulder scowled. "Maybe there was another way then. Instead of putting something under her skin that did God knows what, that could be doing anything to her. I should never have trusted that smoking bastard." "It was the only way then." "Well, we'd better find another way, now." *** April 19 "None of this makes sense," said Mulder, taking off his glasses to rub his eyes and speaking directly to them for the first time in an hour. "It's not surprising that a lot of leads haven't panned out," Skinner told him. "You know as well as I do that that happens in any investigation. You only found out about this yesterday." Mulder replaced his glasses and looked at Skinner oddly. "You leave your pompons at home today?" Skinner raised his eyebrows. "You sound like you're a cheerleader giving a pep talk. Not that I can imagine you in a little skirt--" Scully, who had not looked up from her own work during this exchange, whacked Mulder on the top of the head. "Behave," she said absently. The three of them were sitting in Scully's room. He had come from work to find that Mrs. Scully had left shortly before he had arrived and that the Lone Gunmen were gone, making a visit to another of the women whose cancer had gone out of remission. They had settled into a companionable silence as they had pored over reports, broken every so often by the sounds of one of them tracking down a lead on a cell phone. Leads were few and far between, and had led to nothing so far. It was the predictable end to what had been a frustrating day at work. Skinner had been jumpy, half-expecting the cigarette man to walk in at any moment to taunt them. "No, seriously," said Mulder, standing up suddenly as if energized, or as if he wanted to be out of range of Scully's hand. "This doesn't make sense. Not that any of our leads vanish before our eyes-- that's business as usual--but we haven't asked why this happened at all. Why now? It doesn't make sense." Scully did look up, finally. "What doesn't make sense about it, Mulder? These women were given cancer before, and now they're being given it again. All along, they've--we've--been lab rats for some purpose, either of the government, or of..well. Why would this surprise you?" "It made sense *before.* Taking out the implants somehow triggered the cancer. Because the women who took out the implants had evidence; they had proof in their hands. The truth that was in them, in their bodies, suddenly became accessible to them. Killing them off made sense. But this is the opposite, Scully. The women going out of remission are taking out the implants. And that means that that evidence is accessible again." "Evidence of nothing. They're destroyed when we look at them." "Still a pretty big risk to take, that we won't find out something from them. All to give cancer to these women? Why would they want that?" "So what are you saying, that the chips somehow malfunctioned? They were supposed to keep working but didn't? That this isn't intentional on the part of the remnants of the Consortium at all?" "Maybe they didn't spring for the extended warranty." Scully nodded cautiously. "Or maybe someone who died in that hangar--maybe he was responsible for whatever messages were being sent through the implant. In his absence, things might have gone wrong." "Or someone else gained control over the implants," said Skinner. "What?" asked Mulder. "The Rebels," said Scully. "That's what he means." "Yeah," breathed Mulder in comprehension. "They tried to kill the abductees before, to keep the Colonists from experimenting on them. Maybe they found another way. Maybe someone who was in the Consortium--Krycek or someone--sold the information to the Resistance. Maybe..." "Of course, that assumes that there even is such a thing as an alien resistance, which assumes that there is such a thing as aliens, which we never have actually...oh...oh, damn." Her hand went up to her nose. "Mulder, get me a kleenex, okay?" She had stopped work twice while Skinner was there, once for a nosebleed and once for a headache that had twisted her face into a mask of pain. They had her on mild pain killers, which didn't seem to work for those headaches. Mulder had held a wet washcloth to her forehead, speaking to her in a low voice, and Skinner, feeling like a voyeur, had fled the room to drink some coffee. "Another nosebleed, Miss Scully?" chirped a nurse from the doorway. "I'm afraid you gentlemen are going to have to leave. It's 8:00 already, and Dana needs her rest, doesn't she?" Scully glared at the nurse over the tissue she was holding, but there was no denying the dark circles under her eyes. Skinner said goodbye and fled again. *** April 20 On the third day (he had found himself numbering the days, counting out the span of her life), he went to the hospital again after work. Mulder and the Lone Gunmen had taken over the waiting room today, all of them busily tapping away at laptops or reading computer printouts. Mulder waved at him distractedly when he walked in, and the others looked up and followed suit, Frohike blinking like an owl behind his glasses. There were two pizza boxes and what looked like several cartons of half-eaten Chinese food littered around the room, and Langly was surrounded by at least eight different cans of Mountain Dew. Skinner's stomach turned as he looked at the debris. Mrs. Scully was sitting on a couch, staring blankly at the pattern on the wallpaper. She was holding a section of yarn in her hands, but her fingers had stilled on the knitting needles. He went over to sit by her. "Mrs. Scully? How are you doing?" She pulled herself out of her distraction. "Oh. Mr. Skinner. How was your day?" "Fine, thank you. How are you doing?" "Oh, fine. Dana was tired, today." "Is there a doctor in there with her now?" Skinner asked, eyeing the closed door. "No, she's talking with Bill. She's been...she's in there talking with Bill, now. Her brother. He got a flight to come in today. Have you met him?" "When she went into remission the first time," Skinner said. He remembered Bill. After he had talked to Scully in her hospital room, Bill had walked him out. "You're her boss?" he had asked. "Hers and Mulder's," Skinner had answered. "You're her boss and you're visiting in the middle of the night?" Bill had asked, incredulously. "What is my sister to you?" Skinner hadn't been able to answer the question. "Her other brother is coming in later this week. Have you eaten dinner yet? I know they ordered some food. There might still be some left." "No, I stopped for something to eat on the way here. Have you eaten yet?" "Yes, earlier." She gave him a quick smile. "They keep ordering food, and Byers keeps trying to make me eat more. He's quite a mother hen, really." "Do you know if they've found anything?" "Not as far as I know. They've been trying to track down where this C.G.B Spender might be, I think, but he's vanished without a trace." "Scully--Dana--has she been able to figure out any sort of treatment from looking at the medical records of the other women? Any sort of reason or method to this cancer?" "She and her doctor spent part of today discussing a treatment, I think, but her doctor's reluctant to try it, and I think Dana is also. I...you'd have to check with her on the details. I don't know all the medical terms." She seemed very troubled by that, and he reached over and touched her hands where they clenched on the knitting needles. "I'm not sure I'd understand either," he told her. "I'll trust her opinion on the medical side of things." She smiled at him. "Thank you. You're being very kind. It's difficult, you know, not to be able to do anything. I don't understand the medicine, and I can't do anything about the other side of things, the investigative side." "I'm sure that it's a comfort to Dana that you're here," he said, remembering to say Dana instead of Scully this time. She shook her head a little. "It's strange, when...do you have children, Mr. Skinner?" "No. Um, no." At her quizzical look, he added, reluctantly, "We...our baby was stillborn." "Oh, I'm sorry." "It was a long time ago. I didn't mean to bring it up. What were you going to say?" "Oh, that it's strange, when your children grow up, when they become the adults. I was talking with Dana for a long time today, and it seemed that she was comforting me rather than the other way around." She laughed a little. "She seems to be dealing with this better than I am, better than the rest of us." "I'm sure that..." The door to Scully's room opened and Skinner broke off whatever platitude he had been going to voice. Bill came out and scanned the room before turning back. "Yeah, Dana, he's here. You want to talk to him?" Scully said something, and then Bill turned towards him. "Dana wants to talk to you." Skinner frowned, puzzled, and looked around the room. Mrs. Scully had resumed her knitting, and no one would meet his eyes. Bill's eyes as he passed him to go into Scully's room were red-rimmed. "Don't tire her out," he growled. *** "How are you feeling?" he asked awkwardly, standing in the doorway. "Not badly, all things considered." Her face was grave and tear-stained, but her eyes were calmer than he'd seen them in a long time as she gestured for him to sit in the chair that was pulled up near her bed. "Sir, I wanted to talk with you. I wanted you to know that..." Her eyes were calm and peaceful, as peaceful as a thick jungle he had once visited and been drawn back from... "Scully," he interrupted, softly, harshly. "*Don't.*" Her eyes sparked fire. "I'm not accepting death. I'm going to fight this." "Then don't..." She caught his hand in hers, a gesture that he was sure cost her. It occurred to him that she had only touched him before when he was sick or injured, in the role of doctor or comforter. Her grip was amazingly strong. "But I don't know that I'm going to win," she said, just as softly, just as harshly. "Jesus," he said explosively, and pulled away from her, standing up to walk over by the window. People were walking to and from their cars outside. Those walking to the hospital carried bouquets or teddy bears or balloons; those walking away had only themselves. He could almost feel her waiting behind him, patiently. She would have had to develop patience, working with Mulder. It was unfair of him, he knew, to make her wait. She shouldn't have to be the strong one here. He remembered when she had stood by his bedside as his vascular system had slowly shut down; she hadn't refused to listen to his deathbed confession, only reached out to hold his hand. It still took all his strength to turn around and return to the chair. "I'm sorry," he said. "What is it that you wanted to tell me?" Tears came to her eyes, at that. "Sir, this isn't a goodbye. At least, I don't intend it to be. But...do you remember, a few months ago, the bank robbery attempt? At first, I didn't believe what Mulder said, that that day had happened a hundred times before. Who would believe that?" "Mulder," he said wryly, and for a moment they shared a glance of understanding that was partly exasperation but mostly affection. "I didn't argue with Mulder about it, because...it wasn't the job, and there wasn't any need to argue over it. But I didn't believe it, either." Her forehead wrinkled, the fine vertical lines between her eyebrows creasing. "The next day, I realized that I had a memory of being in that bank. I don't know, it could have just been my imagination, but it was...stronger than deja vu, stronger than anything, and whether or not it was real, it made me realize something." "It was real," he told her quietly. "I remembered too, the next day. I was sitting in a budget meeting and I knew that I'd talked to that woman before, outside the bank." "I remember sitting there on the floor, trying to keep Mulder from bleeding to death, and seeing Bernard's hand go to trigger the bomb. And I *knew,* in that instant, that I was going to die, and that I'd left too many things unfinished. Sir, I will fight this as hard as I can, but if I do die, I don't want my last thoughts to be of my regrets, of things left unsaid. And I need to do this now, before..." Her voice trailed away. Before weakness, before blindness, before insanity, before death. "I'm sorry, Scully." He reached for her hand. "Tell me whatever it is you want to." "I wanted to thank you, for all you've done for us, for me, over the years. For not giving up on the investigation after my sister's death. For not...God, there were so many times that you could have shut the X-Files down, and no one would have blamed you." "I didn't do what I could have. I didn't..." he stopped, remembering how he had cut them off from investigating the nanotechnology that had threatened him. "You did what you did. It was enough. I may not always have agree with the choices you made, but...I'm still grateful for so many of them. And...I wanted to say I was sorry." "Sorry?" "When I had the cancer, last time...I would have named you as the mole in the FBI. I would have...I look back at that, and I'm ashamed of myself." "It's okay," he said, although he couldn't deny that the memory of her voice saying 'you' as she'd crumpled to the floor still stung. "No, it's not okay. I told myself I was following evidence, but the evidence was shaky. It was...a bad time for me, and I was being paranoid, but that's no excuse for what I almost did." "Well." He coughed. "It turned out all right. It's not something you should worry about, not now." "I wanted you to know that I did regret that. And I wanted you to know that I've been honored that you've been our ally. And, I hope, our--my--friend." "Of course," he said. "I've been equally honored. Scully, you've always been one of the finest agents I've ever worked with." He paused, wondering how to tell her what she was to him. There was no easy slot that this woman fit into: not a lover, or mother, or daughter, or sister. "What is my sister to you?" he heard Bill say again, not antagonistic, but not comprehending either. What he felt for her, though, he had felt before: something born out of fire, and loss, and pain, and trust. "You've been a fellow soldier," he finished quietly, and (impossibly, for she had only been a child when he had gone to war) saw that she understood. *** He found Mulder in the men's bathroom, sitting against the wall, arms curled around his pulled-up knees. "Scully wants to see you," Skinner said, standing inside the door. "To talk to you." She had asked him, with eyes that had suddenly gone bleak and determined, to summon Mulder for this reckoning. "I can't do this," Mulder said flatly. "Yes, you can. This is what she needs right now." "I can't. Not like this. Not a goodbye." "You have to. Mulder, don't disappoint her on this one." "Why not? Because she's a dying woman?" "Because she's *Scully.*" Mulder didn't answer, but he did get up and start to move to the door, holding Skinner's eyes. The anger in his own were clear, and Skinner braced himself for a swing, but Mulder only said, "fuck you," as he walked past Skinner and out the door. *** Two hours later, Skinner looked up from the printouts that he was reading and rubbed his eyes. The Lone Gunmen were diligently reading the medical information on the women who had contacted them. Skinner, lacking a medical background, had been reading about their interactions with their local police departments. Reactions to their tales about alien abductions had ranged from mirth to pity to frustration to an uneasy denial that bordered on belief. "I'm going to head home," he said to Byers. "It's almost 8, anyway, and visiting hours will be over. I'm taking off work tomorrow, so I'll be in here around...I don't know, 10?" "We'll be here," said Langly. "Oops. Here comes the big brother." "Asshole," muttered Frohike under his breath, causing Skinner to wonder just what Bill might have said to him. "It's a stressful time for him," said Skinner. "I doubt he's at his best." "It's always a stressful time for him," said Langly. Bill came to a halt before them. "Is he still in there with her?" "Yeah," said Frohike belligerently. "It's been two hours." "You in a hurry or something?" asked Langly. "I want to say good night to my sister," said Bill, bristling and heading for the door. Frohike and Skinner both moved to stop him, but didn't reach him in time. He pushed open the door without knocking and halted. Standing behind him, Skinner saw how his shoulder and back muscles went rigid. Past him, he could see Scully and Mulder, sitting on the bed. Her arms were wrapped around his back, fingers clutching his shoulders; his face was buried in her shoulder. They weren't talking. "I came to say good night to my sister," said Bill stiffly, in a gravelly voice. "Give them a moment," ordered Skinner in his most authoritative voice, and Bill, responding to that, began to turn and obey. "No, I was just leaving," said Mulder, untangling himself from Scully and standing. He reached out and slid his hand along Scully's face. "I'll see you tomorrow, okay?" She caught his hand and held it for a moment. When she spoke, her voice was low but clear, and Skinner could hear each word distinctly even from the doorway. "I still have the strength of your beliefs. I always have." "I'll see you tomorrow," Mulder repeated. His face as he walked past Skinner was downcast and tired; whatever they had spoken of, it hadn't brought him peace. (End 2 of 8) _________________________________________________________ Subcutaneous, 3 of 8 Disclaimers and notes in part 1 April 21 On the fourth day, she died. She died in the morning, a little before 9. It was Byers who called him, and Skinner didn't recognize his voice, both because Byers had woken him up from the first sound sleep he'd had since this had started, and because Byers' voice was clogged with tears. Later, Skinner would remember only flashes of that day. His confusion about Byers' identity as he had reached over for his glasses to read the clock--9:48 a.m. How the florescent lights had reflected off the floor as he walked down the hospital hallway. Mrs. Scully's voice, but not her face, as she talked to him: "Bill was sitting with her; he came in at 8 so that I could sleep a little later. He said it was peaceful. But I didn't even get to say goodbye. They'd taken her body away by the time I got here, for the autopsy. She'd told them she wanted one done as soon as possible, to help the others." The warmth of coffee through the styrofoam cup. The brown, scuffed loafers of Mrs. Scully's priest, who had told Mrs. Scully that maybe it was a comfort that Dana had been spared the rest of the disease. The expression of hatred on Bill's face, and the expression of blankness on Mulder's as he had hugged Mrs. Scully, patting her back as she'd cried. No one had called him ("I couldn't tell him on the phone. What if he were driving?" Mrs. Scully had said), and he had come to the hospital at 9:30, expecting her to be alive. The bleakness on Mulder's face as his friends had drawn him away from the hospital. Byers had murmured something to him, and Mulder had pulled away, arguing. Frohike had said, loudly enough that Skinner could hear, "Either we go home with you or you go home with us," and then Mulder, incredulous and angry: "She put me on a goddamned suicide watch, didn't she?" He'd gone with them docilely enough, despite the surge of anger that had been the only emotion Skinner had seen from him that morning. He spent the rest of the day at the bureau after all. It was an odd day. Parts of it were spent making and answering phone calls about Scully: to the appropriate people at the bureau, from her mother about the funeral arrangements. The rest of the time, he spent typing up employee evaluations, a supremely ordinary task. That night, he lay in his bed, on his back, wanting desperately to turn back time, as he had when his father had died in a car accident when he was twenty-five. It had made no sense to him, that one minute he could be joking with his mother, sitting with her on their front porch during a visit home, and that the next the police car could pull up to the front of the house, and Sheriff Taylor could step out and pause by the car as his mother's voice died with a gasp. It had been a sunny day, and the sun had glinted off the car as Sheriff Taylor took off his hat. The first few days after his father's death, he had kept expecting that he could do something to repair events as his mechanic father had been able to repair cars, meticulously rearranging the pieces until they made sense again. But he had learned again then, as he had learned first in Vietnam, that some events were beyond repair. Except, except, except... He thought of Scully's words to him in the hospital, about the bank robbery. If it had happened once, it could happen again. I'll play that woman's role, Skinner bargained, staring up at his ceiling as the tears began to slide down his face. I'll be the one in hell for fifty times, the one to remember, if Scully doesn't die on the fifty-first. When he woke up several hours later, time had continued as it usually did. If the day had rewound fifty times, no one knew, and the outcome hadn't changed. Scully was still dead on the fifth day. *** April 22 The wake was that evening. Skinner went after work, tired and sad. He disliked funeral parlors: their smell of flowers and preservatives, their faux-Victorian decor, their chill. He disliked the small prayer cards that had Scully's date of birth and death stamped on them above the Prayer of St. Francis. He disliked the atmosphere of hushed silence. Signing the guest book, he saw the names of many people from the bureau, but few were still remaining. He suspected that a lot of them had only stayed a short time, oppressed by the silence. Mrs. Scully, Bill, and his wife were towards the front, talking to a younger man and two agents that Skinner recognized from the bureau. "That's her other brother, Charlie," said Byers from next to him. "His wife isn't here; apparently, she's too pregnant to fly. He was supposed to come in today to see her, but then..." "Hell of a homecoming," said Skinner, moving with Byers away from the guest book and towards the back of the room, where Frohike and Langly and Mulder were sitting in the last row of folding chairs. All three men were wearing suits; Langly was wearing dark sunglasses. "Closed coffin, hmm?" "Apparently when she last had cancer, she wrote down what she wanted for her wake and funeral, and she requested that then. Since her mom didn't know...they didn't talk about it, so her mother went with those instructions." Skinner was grateful enough. He didn't want to see Scully still and motionless, her face changed and slackened by death. "Hey," said Mulder softly when Skinner and Byers filed into the row in front of him and turned in their chairs. "Hey." Skinner nodded at them all. "How are you doing?" Mulder shook his head a little and looked down at his shoes. Skinner looked over at Frohike, who just shrugged. "Did they find anything in the autopsy?" Skinner asked cautiously. "Nothing that explains anything satisfactorily," said Byers. "We've been receiving death reports all day. People have been mailing us the chips to look at. But they're very fragile. When we examine them, we destroy them. There's nothing that explains why Scully would have been affected differently than the other women and died first." "If you need anything on this, bureau resources--" offered Skinner. "I'll call," finished Mulder. "But I think it's safer to keep the investigation low profile for now. Anything that goes through the bureau goes back to them, you know that." Yes, Skinner did. He sighed and twisted back towards the front of the room. The two agents had left the family. "I should go up and pay my condolences." He met Charlie, who seemed bewildered to be shaking his hand, and more bewildered by Skinner's description of his sister as a fine agent. He met Bill's wife Tara, who hugged him as tears ran down her face, which was discomfiting. Skinner patted her shoulder awkwardly, thinking that he couldn't remember ever hugging Scully. "I know she had the greatest respect for you," said Tara. "Yes," said Bill, from behind her, with a shapeless antagonism in his eyes, "she always did speak of you with respect." "Have you seen the pictures?" asked Mrs. Scully, drawing him away from Tara and over to a poster board with snapshots thumbtacked to it. A baby cradled in the arms of a young, dark-haired woman, a red-headed toddler tugging at the leg of a man in uniform, a picture of four ginger-headed kids lined up by height in front of a small house. School pictures, Dana with freckles and a gap between her teeth. An adolescent with braces and glasses standing next to her taller sister. A senior portrait from high school, a pretty girl with a round face who was beginning to have the level gaze of the adult Scully. "This was her med school graduation," said Mrs. Scully, tapping one of Dana in a black gown, surrounded by her family. "I think that's the last picture we have of the whole family together. Bill was so proud of her. My husband Bill, I mean." "I think any father would have been proud of her," said Skinner. "Of what she accomplished, of what she was." The later pictures of Scully were fewer. She slimmed down, hardened. She put a little more space between herself and the other people in the picture with her. Her smiles were smaller. "Yes, he was always proud of her," said Mrs. Scully. "All of us were proud of her." He could hear the pride in her voice, but there was something doubtful in her face, as if she were not sure whether having a daughter of whom she could be proud was worth the cost. *** April 23 The funeral was unbearable, not because anything went wrong but because everything went smoothly. People said all the right things, but the words of the Mass and the eulogies from Charlie and Bill seemed to have little to do with the Scully whom Skinner remembered. Mulder, sitting towards the back of the church with a crowd of other FBI agents, was polite to one and all, and Skinner, who had been prepared to run interference for him, was disconcerted by this stranger who accepted concerned platitudes without sarcasm or irony. He pulled Byers aside at the funeral luncheon. "Is he okay?" Their eyes both went to Mulder, who was calmly listening to one of Scully's former students talk about how wonderful and precise Scully had been as a pathologist. "He hasn't cried," said Byers. "He doesn't rant and rave about revenge. He'll eat if we suggest it to him. He makes jokes when we talk to him. He doesn't sleep much." "Does he talk about Scully at all?" "He listens when we talk about her. He'll talk about her theories about the cancer. But not about her, no. Langly can't talk about her without crying, and he wasn't even that close to her. And Frohike punched a hole in the wall of Mulder's apartment. We spent half of last night spackling. But Mulder..." Skinner shook his head. "We're just waiting," said Byers softly. "We took away his gun, and we keep the razors out of the bathroom, and we don't leave him alone, and we keep him out of the kitchen and away from the knives. We're just waiting for it, now." *** April 24 The next day was a Saturday, almost a week since Mrs. Scully had called him looking for Mulder. Skinner spent the first half of the day at the office catching up on work. Around 2:00, he took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. God. It occurred to him that he had been moving from one confined space to another over the last week, and that he hadn't been to the gym in several weeks. Suddenly, the thought of spending more time sitting at his desk and reading was unbearable. He stood up abruptly, and then just as abruptly sat down again, regarding his phone with distaste. Dammit. Okay, he'd make the duty call to check up on Mulder, and then he'd go to the gym and take out his frustration on the punching bag. The phone rang twice, and then a voice answered. Frohike, he was pretty sure. "Who is this?" "Who is *this*?" asked Skinner. "I asked first." "This is Skinner. Who is this: Frohike?" "No! Don't use any names on an unsecured line!" the other man yelped. "Oh, for Chrissakes," said Skinner. He heard an odd echo, Mulder's voice saying the same thing in the background, and then continuing, "Frohike, give me the goddamn phone." "Mulder, I've got it, it's ok." "It's not gonna hurt me to talk on the phone. What do you think I'm gonna do, suddenly snap and wrap the phone cord around my neck? I'm gonna wrap it around yours if you don't..." There was a scuffling noise, and then Mulder's voice came on the line. "Hello, sir." "Mulder." "Sorry about that. Frohike isn't used to answering normal phones." "I noticed." "He *has* been scaring telemarketers away all day, though." Skinner grinned briefly at the thought. "I just called to ask if you'd made any progress on anything." "No." Mulder's answer, flat and unembellished, wiped the smile off his face. "How are you doing?" he asked. "I'm considering suicide just to get away from this damn apartment. (Oh, fuck off Frohike, that was a joke.) They won't leave me alone for more than two minutes, and they won't let me leave the apartment. Too many sharp edges in the world, apparently." "Mulder..." "If you say anything about this being for my own good, I'll break away from the Three Stooges just to come over and wrap the phone cord around *your* neck." He wasn't altogether sure that Mulder was joking. And he could sympathize. He would be going stir crazy if he had spent the last three days in an apartment with three other people. But it *was* for Mulder's own good. Skinner wasn't sure that Mulder would actively commit suicide if left alone, but he could easily see the other man doing something rash, or going out and being hit by a car simply because he wasn't paying attention. He sighed and mentally revised his plans for the day. "Mulder..." "I *know* it's for my own good. That doesn't mean I have to *like* it." "Mulder." "What?" "You want to go running?" *** Two hours later, Mulder slowed to a halt and bent over to catch his breath. Skinner did the same, spitting onto the weeds by the side of the trail. When he'd arrived at Mulder's apartment, the other man had already been ready to go. Byers had been gone; Langly and Frohike had delivered Mulder into his care with a distinct air of relief. There were jogging trails at a public park near Mulder's apartment, and they had chosen to go there rather than run on the streets by Mulder's home. In the car on the way over, Skinner had begun to understand the other men's relief. He'd seen hyperactive children who had better attention spans, and Mulder's constant fidgeting got on his nerves very quickly. He'd kept his silence, though. Once on the trails, they'd run for a solid hour, keeping a even, fast, steady pace the whole time. The other man's eyes had been distracted and focused on the trail ahead; Skinner hadn't even been entirely sure that Mulder knew that there was someone keeping pace with him. "Thanks," Mulder said, and Skinner was glad that he had kept his silence earlier in the car. The other man really did look grateful, and more than that, he was standing still. "Don't mention it," said Skinner, peeved at himself for how out of breath he was. He hadn't had a run like that in awhile. "No, really, thanks. I usually run at least five miles a day. I don't realize how much it clears my head until I can't do it anymore." "Uh huh." Mulder wandered off the trail, onto the grassy park land. Skinner could see a family picnicking in the distance. "You mind if we stay here awhile? I don't want to head back to prison just yet," called Mulder. "No, that's fine," said Skinner, perhaps a little too emphatically, and saw the gleam of amusement in Mulder's eyes. Well, what did he expect from Skinner? He was a decade older than the other man. He sat down a little off of the trail, and after a awhile Mulder came to sit by him. They sat for a time in silence, Skinner listening to his own breathing level out and return to its normal pace. Mulder lay back on the grass beside him, covering his eyes with one arm. For a moment, Skinner wondered if he were crying silently, but his other arm was loose as it lay on his sweat-soaked t-shirt, and his breathing was even. Running he could handle, but... "How are you doing?" he finally asked. "I wasn't keeping track, but those weren't six minute miles. I'm getting out of shape." "That's not what I meant." "I know what you meant." "Byers said you weren't talking at all. Maybe if you did, it would..." "What are you, my Scully-appointed therapist? Geez, the babysitters were bad enough." "Scully didn't appoint me to do anything. That doesn't mean that I'm not concerned," Skinner snapped, losing his patience and immediately regretting it. It was no wonder that Scully *hadn't* asked him to look after Mulder. But the harshness in his voice seemed to do something that gentleness hadn't. "It doesn't feel like she's gone," said Mulder. "I know it's hard to accept," Skinner said. "Do you know, I could usually tell when she was in danger? I'd just know. Like a splinter, you can ignore it but it bugs you, like when you know you've forgotten something. Even that day, the first day, I was sitting in the laundromat watching my clothes spin and thinking that something was wrong with Scully. But I figured that it was just because it was the middle of April." The middle of April? Skinner had a confused thought about taxes. "Why the middle of April?" he asked. "What? Oh. There are certain times of year, anniversaries, that are bad for us. The middle of November for me, Christmas for her. But the end of April's bad for both of us--my father, her sister--I get pretty manic, and she gets all--well. I just assumed it was that. I should have called. I was going to, after I got back from the laundromat. I purposely *went* to the laundromat and didn't bring my cell phone just so that I wouldn't call and bug her that morning. I figured that after a few hours of watching my clothes spin around I'd be calm enough that I wouldn't aggravate the hell out of her if I called. I thought that that was all that was wrong, that it was a bad time of year." "You wouldn't have known any different," said Skinner. "You can't blame yourself for not knowing" "Maybe not," said Mulder. "Maybe I could have, if I'd been paying more attention to her lately. Maybe I would have been more tuned into her. I'm way less tuned into her than I thought I was, though, because I still feel like she's there, in danger. I hate that I don't feel different. I should be like all of you are expecting me to be: I should be...mourning her loss and feeling like I've had half of me cut off. I should be grieving. She deserves that. But I can't. She doesn't feel...gone." "Grief doesn't follow a set course. You know that. You've worked with the families of crime victims; you've seen how disparately they can react. You don't have to rush the process." "She deserves better than my indifference," Mulder said, and Skinner saw that the hand lying across his chest had clenched into a fist, crumpling his t-shirt. "She deserves your honesty. Mulder, she was one of the most compassionate women I've ever met. She would have understood that you can't feel emotions on command." Mulder didn't respond, and Skinner sighed and retied his shoelace for lack of anything better to do. "Byers and Langly and Frohike keep talking about her. I think they think that if I hear enough stories I'll crack and start crying and...achieve catharsis or whatever. It's not working that way. They'll start crying and I'll sit there patting their shoulder and telling them that it'll be ok." "But you don't talk about her yourself." "What, you think that it'd be different if I did?" "I don't know. When my father died, we sat around and told stories about him. It helped. It made us all stronger." "Did it make *you* cry?" Mulder asked, and there was a nasty, goading edge to his voice. Skinner remembered the twenty-five year old he had been, his voice cracking in unexpected places as he had talked to his brother about their shared childhood, the tears that he had shed in Sharon's arms as they lay twined together in the bed he had slept in as a child, as she'd rubbed his back and told him about her own memories of a good man. "I'm sorry. That was unfair," said Mulder, and Skinner saw that he had removed his arm from over his eyes and propped himself up on his elbow. "Yes," he told Mulder, and the other man searched his face and then nodded slightly in comprehension, accepting that the yes was both an agreement that the question had been unfair, and an answer to the question. After a moment he flopped back onto his back. Skinner sighed and did the same, watching the clouds move in the sky. Jesus, he was getting old, when a run like that could make him tired. "Did you know she could shoot pool?" Mulder asked, his voice small and tentative. Skinner looked over at him and saw that he had turned his face away. "No, I didn't," he said, returning his own gaze to the sky. "She learned when she was just a kid. She was damned good. We were on this one case, in North Dakota. Maybe the fourth year we'd worked together. We'd finished the case but we couldn't get a flight back 'till some snow melted at the airport, so we went out with the local field office. This Harricks guy, he was hitting on Scully; he invited us. I think he wanted to impress the hell out of her by beating someone at pool, and she offered to play him. She kicked his butt. She was damned good." Skinner scratched his arm, carefully not looking over at Mulder. "She was wearing these jeans. Real old worn-in ones, you know? They had this little hole in the seam, right near her hip. She didn't wear jeans that often. Maybe she did, at home. I don't know. Most of the people there bet on Harricks, but I bet on Scully. I figured it was a safe bet; she's good at everything. We weren't invited back the next night, so we used the money I won to go to a really nice restaurant." "It sounds like a good memory." He heard the sound of Mulder sitting up. When he looked over, all he could see was Mulder's back, grass flecks clinging to his t-shirt. After a moment, he sat up, too. "You okay?" Mulder shrugged, and his voice was cool and distant again when he spoke. "I'm not crying yet. I still don't feel like she's gone. Other than that, fine. Do you want to walk or run back?" They ran. End 3 of 8 _________________________________________________________ Subcutaneous 4 of 8 Disclaimers, etc., in part 1. April 25 The following morning, he walked into his kitchen to find Alex Krycek sitting at his kitchen table, drinking a glass of orange juice. "What the hell are you doing here? Get out of my apartment." "You're not in a position to throw me out, Skinner." Krycek patted the pocket of his leather jacket. "We both know that. Why don't you have a seat? Or make us some coffee?" Skinner stood in the doorway, feeling enraged, feeling helpless, wondering if he could rush Krycek and rip away the control to the nanotechnology before Krycek activated it, wondering if the other man was only bluffing about having brought the control along. "Don't just stand there. Make the coffee or sit down." Krycek's fingers caressed the leather of the pocket, and the gleam in his eyes warned Skinner just how much the other man was enjoying his own power. Rat bastard. He sat down at the table, across from Krycek, and consciously unclenched his fists, choosing to fold his hands in front of him on the table. "What is it you want?" "Maybe I just stopped by for some coffee and sympathy." "Yeah, playing all sides of every fence must be exhausting, Krycek. Spender told us you were back working with the Consortium, but from what he said, you still had your own agenda." Spender may not have realized that Krycek had driven a wedge between Spender and his father on purpose, but Skinner had not believed that Krycek would ever be as disingenuous as Spender had described him as being. "Everyone has their own agenda. If I can save myself and my world at the same time, what's wrong with that?" "Don't try to make yourself into the hero here. You're a cheating coward whose main goal has always been to save his own ass." "You're one to talk about saving his own ass...you try so hard to save yours that you probably have marks from where you've been sitting on the fence." Skinner relaxed his hands once again, steepling his forefingers. "Why are you are? To lecture me about the art of fence-sitting?" "All in good time." Krycek abruptly stood up and went to the refrigerator to pour himself another glass of orange juice. "You're sure you don't want to make coffee?" "I'm surprised you didn't make it yourself. You seem to have made yourself at home." "At least your fridge is stocked better than Mulder's. Jesus, it's a bore breaking into his apartment. Nothing at all to eat." "Krycek, what the hell's your point?" The other man shrugged, one-shouldered, and pulled out a loaf of bread, putting two slices in the toaster. "I get hungry. You want toast?" He shrugged again when Skinner just glared at him, and leaned against the counter. "As you surmised, I haven't been of one mind, heart, and soul with the Consortium for a long while, and what happened at El Rico cemented the split. The Consortiums' plans went to hell, and I'm not sticking around to see what happens." "They say rats always desert a sinking ship." "Unlike you, who never got on board in the first place. You're not going to make me feel guilty for surviving, Skinner, so don't even try. I'm actually doing something to change things...and that's more that Mulder can say, no matter how much he may shout at the heavens. It's more than you can say." "What do you mean, doing something to change things?" "Colonization's closer than any of you think. I'm helping to stop it, in whatever way I can." The toast popped up, unnoticed by either man. "The women who are dying...Scully...did the people you're working with now engineer that?" "The *people* I'm working with? God, were you born that naive or do you have to work at it?" "The Resistance. The rebels. Whatever. Who activated the cancer in those women? Did you tell them how to control the implants?" "Their lives were forfeit a long time ago, since the colonizers first took them." "So who was it who reactivated the cancer now? The colonizers or the resistance?" "The resistance can't afford to let the colonizers get their hands on them...do you know how close they were to an alien human hybrid? Do you know how fast that would propel colonization forward?" "I know those women died. I know these women *are* dying." "Don't be sentimental. They were only lab rats to the other side... we freed them from that. And we're starting to learn how the chips function. Knowing the technology--that's a weapon we can use." "Is that how you justify these women's deaths to yourself?" "Don't get self-righteous. I've never blown the head off a ten year old boy." Skinner moved fast enough that he surprised himself, wrapping his hand in the fabric of Krycek's shirt and shaking him. "How the hell did you know about that?" "Let go of me," the other man said, and for a moment Skinner saw fear in his eyes before he twisted violently away, moving to stand in the middle of the kitchen. He readjusted his shirt, and when he met Skinner's eyes again his were taunting. "How do you think we knew about that? You think Mulder's office wasn't bugged back then? You think yours wasn't? I gotta tell you, it was a touching scene." Skinner suddenly felt immeasurably old, immeasurably weary, and the adrenaline surge that had begun when he'd walked into his kitchen faded and died. "It was war." "So is this." "That didn't make it right." "I never said what I was doing was right. I said it was necessary." "Cut the crap, Krycek. What are you doing here?" "The women who died...we found out that activating the chip in certain ways did certain things. The progression of the cancer was and is extremely predictable. Except in one woman." "Scully." "She died too soon. We want to know why." Skinner stared at him incredulously. "One woman? How could it possibly matter that she died sooner than the others? God, after the past six years, it makes sense that her body was worn down." "It's an anomaly. We don't like those. Apparently, neither does the other side. When we went to find her body, we found only an empty coffin." "What?" "You heard me." "You went and dug up her *grave*?" "We needed to know. We still need to know. Maybe it had to do with the vaccine Mulder gave her last summer." "Nothing turned up in the autopsy. The chip that was in her neck was examined and destroyed in the process. There's nothing to find. She's dead." "Don't be an idiot...autopsy results can be falsified. They wouldn't have taken her body if there weren't something there. We need to know what it is." "Why are you telling me this?" "Because you're going to find out for us." *** An ID, a set of keys, and a piece of paper with an address on it, a warehouse on the outskirts of Crystal City, disturbingly near his apartment. He stared at them for a long time after Krycek had left. Scully was dead; she couldn't be hurt by what was done with her body. He was still alive; Krycek could easily kill him. Krycek might just be bluffing. The death of an Assistant Director wouldn't go unnoticed, and Mulder and Scully would at least follow it up... Damn it. Mulder might follow it up. Would Krycek risk that? They were probably experimenting on her body wherever she was. He had called Scully a fellow soldier. He had told her that he'd honored her friendship. He would never be able to look Mulder in the eye again. He would never be able to look *himself* in the eye again. Scully was dead; he was alive. <24 hours. Or...it's as easy as flipping a switch.> He felt oppressed, as if Krycek could read even his thoughts, could watch every move he made. As if...he looked thoughtfully around the room. *** Part II--April 25--Mulder As Skinner was confronting Alex Krycek in his kitchen, Mulder was walking into his own kitchen for the first time in four days. They'd named his kitchen off limits to him when they'd taken him home, just as they'd taken away his gun and removed razors, medicine, and cleaning products from his bathroom. He'd told them that if he were planning on killing himself, he certainly wouldn't choose a way as painful as ingesting large quantities of Drano, but they'd only looked at him warily and put anything they'd considered dangerous to him in his kitchen. He hadn't argued, though, incapable of movement or emotion through the pall that had settled over him when he'd walked into the hospital to be told that Scully was dead. First drawer, second drawer, third drawer, bottom drawer...there it was. They'd hidden his gun from him under a mishmash of rubber bands and old, frayed pot holders, and one fairly new one shaped like an alien's head that had been Scully's most recent birthday present to him. The weight of the gun was familiar in his hands, and he held it for a moment before tucking it in his waistband and pulling his shirt out over it. He returned from the kitchen to see them still hard at work at his computer. "Find anything?" he asked lightly. "Not yet. Someone sure did a number on it. What'd you download a file from a stranger for anyway?" Langly asked. "You should know better than that." "We've gotten good information that way," Mulder said. Langly just grunted in response. "When's Frohike coming back?" "What? Oh, about an hour. He wanted to get some sleep. Not everyone keeps your hours, Mr. Insomnia." "I slept," Mulder said mildly. "For about two hours," Byers said absently. "Langly, let's try..." and they were off again, in their own world of recovered and corrupted files, trying to save his hard drive from the virus that had overtaken it sometime this morning. He returned to his bedroom, loading the gun quickly and as quietly as possible. Then he walked over to his closet, which they hadn't checked and should have. He didn't often wear the ankle holster, but he'd kept it and the second gun. Where he was going, it would be best to be prepared. Thinking ahead; Scully would be so proud. He caught the edge of his madly grinning reflection in the dull reflection of the glass face of his clock. Running with Skinner had shaken something loose in him, or made it coalesce. In the shower, afterward, the deadening of feeling that had overtaken him in the hospital had begun to disperse. Feelings hurt; the physical absence of Scully was a dull ache that could easily become a jagged, twisting thing. Nonetheless, he'd begun to smile in the shower, as thought had returned as well. For the first time in days, his mind had begun to consider possibilities as if they were skipping stones, turning them over to marvel at their smoothness and their edges, testing their weight. He pulled on his shoes, lacing them tightly, even tying them with a double knot. Wouldn't do for him to trip over his own shoelaces, which, he ruefully admitted, he was capable of. In the shower and throughout yesterday evening, he'd thrown out lines of ideas like stones, watching them skip and sink, thinking through the ripples of possible consequences. Scully's physical absence ached, but her voice echoed in his mind, pushing and prodding at his thoughts; she had long since gotten under his skin until she was now as much a part of his mind's workings as the cancer had been part of her body, or the nanotechnology part of Skinner's bloodstream. He, unlike them, was blessed by the invasion. He searched through his sock drawer for his extra set of keys, muffling their jingle as he slid them into his pocket, and walked back out into the living room. He'd considered the possibility that he had simply gone insane, from several angles, and had dismissed it. Maybe he was, but he didn't think the evidence pointed to that. "Will you be able to recover what I was working on?" he said quietly, and they grunted, both completely absorbed. In the end, it had been surprisingly easy. He'd spent the past eight days sifting aimlessly through information, but last night he'd narrowed his search and changed his assumptions. The whys and hows, the hard questions, could wait. As methodically as he knew how, he'd set out to find the where instead. "Yeah, yeah, whatever, Mulder," Langly finally said, waving a hand in dismissal. They had forgotten he was even there, lulled by four days of his apathy and sidetracked by an interesting puzzle. There were any number of wheres, of course, not all of them in the country, but the events at El Rico would have taken a toll on their finances. Those who were left would be regrouping, in flight, after what had happened to their compatriots. The events at El Rico and the subsequent attention to their doings in the media would keep them away from government-owned places, or the railways. Maybe. He couldn't get onto military installations or in the Pentagon anyway. But they had had ties to pharmaceutical companies, and those pharmaceutical companies had holdings in the area, warehouses that might hold any number of things. He'd chosen six addresses within easy driving range of the hospital. Places to start. He walked out the door, not looking back. *** The first warehouse really was abandoned, in fact as well as in name. He toured it, seeing signs of fairly recent activity...lines where boxes had been dragged through the dust. No one there, though. Frohike would be arriving at his apartment just about now, glancing around the place and asking where Mulder was. The second warehouse was their property, although ownership records listed it as the property of Jenkins Pharmaceutical. He felt the skin at the back of his neck prickle. There were a lot of people walking around; he could see more inside through his binoculars, through the windows. Too many windows, too much activity. He paused, biting his lip and turning the problem over to the cool, detached, questioning part of his mind, the Scully part. A possibility. Not a probability. If nothing else panned out, he would come here after dark. He nearly got lost on the way to the third warehouse. The address was somewhat near Skinner's apartment, and he almost stopped to ask for directions...Hey, sir. Wanna go break into a warehouse that I think is being used for nefarious purposes? Come on, it'll be fun. The boys might have called Skinner by now, to ask him if he had any idea where Mulder would be. Mulder abruptly sobered and swiped his forehead with one hand, unsurprised to discover that he was sweating. The sight of the third warehouse made him swallow, hard. There were a few cars here. No trucks, no signs of loading or moving that he had seen at the other warehouse. Expensive cars, two Lexuses, one Mercedes. The sorts that doctors would drive. It was a closed place, a secretive one. ("Are you anthropomorphizing a *warehouse*, Mulder?" Scully asked with dry amusement in her voice.) More than the cars, more than the appearance, the quickening beat of his pulse told him everything he wanted to know. End 4 of 8 _________________________________________________________ Subcutaneous 5 of 8 Disclaimers, etc, in part 1 He watched for a bit. One man dressed in a lab coat drove one of the cars away. Probably going out for an early lunch...there wouldn't be a better time. "Okay," he whispered to himself. "Okay, okay, okay." He drove up to the back of the warehouse, where his car wouldn't be seen if the man came back, and moved to a door in the back of the warehouse, a small side door. His senses had sharpened, completely focused on the wood of the door beneath his hand, the metal of the lock underneath his fingers. He knew from some distant place that his pulse was beating faster than normal, that he was on an adrenaline high. He entered the warehouse carefully, half-expecting to be clubbed from behind. But no one challenged him, or came to kill him. He walked carefully and quietly through the open first floor, around boxes and carts, before he heard voices from a small office. "Do you want to call him or should I?" "He gives me the creeps. You call him. I'm going to head home. It's Sunday. My wife likes me to spend time with the kids." "Everything all set upstairs?" "Yep." "All right. Take off, then. I'll see you tomorrow." "Bright and early." He peered from behind a stack of boxes as another man left the office and strode quickly through the warehouse, whistling "The Rain in Spain." What a guy. Performed experiments on human test subjects for alien colonizers on weekdays and enjoyed show tunes on weekends. Bastard. Upstairs, then. Upstairs was...not a warehouse like any he'd seen, but was set up like a laboratory. Computers, monitors, four medical gurneys with restraints. The overhead lights were off, now, but he'd bet they would shed powerful light. Goddamn song was running through his head. The rain in Spain stayed mainly on the plain, which could not be explained. There was a small room, with a metal, locked door, in one corner of the second floor, and he got out his lock pick again, fumbling with it this time, keeping an ear open for the man downstairs and for any movement within this room. He was terrified. Please. The door gave way unexpectedly, and he stumbled a half-step into complete darkness, holding onto the doorknob for balance. Empty. God *damn* it. He took one more step inside, letting go of the door, and was unprepared when the edge of the door swung heavily and suddenly into his side, knocking him off balance. Then there were hands on his back, twisting him around and pushing his face against the wall roughly, and something hard kicked his feet out from under him. Face pressed against the wall, on his knees, he heard his own harsh breathing and that of the person who had felled him, felt the thin edge of something knife-sharp and cold touch the back of his neck, and was flooded by an almost immeasurable joy. "Scully?" he whispered tentatively. There was a sharp, indrawn breath, and then he felt a hand run, not gently, down his back, to his holster, taking his gun. The steel stayed at his neck the whole time. Then there was the soft sound of footsteps (so softly that the person must be wearing socks, or barefoot) walking backwards. "Turn around. Slowly." The command was whispered, the voice unrecognizable and hoarse, and he felt his certainty suddenly falter. "Turn *around.*" The voice was so quiet, he had to strain to hear, but he could hear the click of the gun cocking distinctly. He turned and rose in one swift motion, reaching for his gun in his ankle holster as he did so, half-expecting to hear a gunshot as he did so. They faced each other, guns held ready. "Scully?" he said again, softly, and heard his own voice crack in disbelief or fear. He blinked, but the vision before him remained the same, Scully in hospital scrubs, feet bare and white against the floor, hair limp and tangled around her white, strained face. Her eyes were wild, but the gun was perfectly steady in her hands. "Put down the gun." He shook his head. "Scully, whatever is making you do this, it isn't really you. You don't want to..." "Shut *up.* If you are Mulder, put the gun *down.*" "Scully, it's me." "Put it *down.* Unless you're going to shoot me, is that it?" He shook his head again. "Okay. Okay." He held one hand up in surrender as he crouched and put the gun on the floor. "Kick it away." Her voice was still hushed, still cold, and he did as she asked. "Scully, it's me. You don't need to do this," he whispered again, rising slowly with his hands still held up in supplication. "Whatever they've told you, or whatever you're thinking right now, you don't need to do this. I'm not the enemy." "*Mulder* isn't the enemy. I don't know who you are. A man with Mulder's face once threw me into a glass table and kidnapped me." "It's *me,* Scully." He paused, waiting for a memory to come him, something that only they had shared. "You sang to me in Florida. Joy to the World. Not the Christmas carol, the one by Three Dog Night. How would I know that if I weren't me?" "You could have taken that from my memories! You could have gotten that from me, by stealing from my mind..." The gun shook in her hand, and he thought he saw the glimmer of tears in her eyes in the dim light. Her voice was intense, but still pitched low, as was his, to avoid being overheard. "My memories are all I *have,* Scully. How else can I prove this to you?" She held up a scalpel with one hand--that must have been the sharpness against his neck. "I want to see your blood. I want to know that you don't bleed green." She held it out to him at arm's length, and he came forward slowly, cautiously, to take it. He stepped back, holding it with his right hand to the palm of his left. "Be careful," she blurted out, and he glanced up, startled, to see that she looked startled herself, as if the admonition had come from her unawares. He sliced shallowly, carefully, across the base of the palm of his left hand, wincing a little, and held his hand out to her, palm up. Finally, finally, she lowered the gun, reaching out her other hand to touch his. "Oh. Oh, Mulder." "Scully. Are you...? What did...?" "I'm so sorry." Her eyes were fixed on his hand, at the blood welling up. "But he was here, the other man, the one who looked like you that one time. I couldn't..." "You had to know," he said. "It's okay." The cut wasn't bad anyway; he'd have gone through much worse to prove himself to her. Her eyes rose to meet his, and he could see that she was in command of herself again. "How did you get here? How did you know to come here?" "Paper trail...stuff we dug up about Spender before. Scully, we gotta get out of here before they come back. There's only one guy downstairs now. You going to be up to getting out of here?" She reached out silently to take the scalpel from his hands, and held it up to him, raising an eyebrow. "I didn't steal this just for fun." He nodded, suddenly close to tears or laughter. She looked almost as bad as she had in Antarctica, pale and tired and barefoot, her eyes strained and red. But damned if she hadn't been ready and able to get herself out of here by taking on whoever would next walk through the door. The sheer pride that he had in her nearly silenced him, and his voice was husky when he spoke. "Let's do it, then." *** He was preoccupied with the shoe problem, trying to think if there was anything between the room and his car that she couldn't run over, if necessary. The factory floors were okay, only the risk of splinters. When she stopped in the middle of the top floor and turned around, he stopped too. "What's the matter?" he whispered. She was staring at the computers and their blank, silenced, screens. "What's the matter?" he repeated, a little louder but still as quietly as possible. She was moving over to them swiftly, her fingers flipping switches with confidence and reaching over for a blank disk. "I want what they know," she said. Her voice, like his, was still hushed. "Scully, we can come back with a warrant and get this. Come on, let's go out to the car. We'll call on the cell." She shook her head, not bothering to look at him. "It'll disappear before we get back. You know that as well as I do. I want what they know, Mulder." He glanced uneasily at the stairs. Staying here longer than necessary was pushing their luck...the lure of knowledge pulled him back, as it always would, and he moved to stand by her side. "Keep watch," she told him. "I don't want him to hear us and alert someone before we can get down there and prevent him." He nodded, keeping an eye on the stairs, trying to listen for any movement that might come from downstairs. "What are you looking for?" "What they did to me...what they did to the others." She was rapidly searching through file names now, selecting one to save on to disk. "How do you know what's relevant?" She did glance up at him, briefly, at that, but her head turned back down, hair covering her face so that he could not see her expression when she finally responded, in an affectless voice. "I imagine they were planning on...erasing my memory again, before they sent me back. They didn't bother to keep their research quiet." The computer whirred and clicked as the file saved, and she pointed and clicked to save another one. Her voice was a merest breath as she continued. "I remembered...being here, I remembered more from the first time they took me. Not everything, but more. They didn't bother to hide their plans that time either. They would talk about their science projects in front of us then, too, if we were in the room." His gaze moved, involuntarily, to the set of gurneys, and he imagined Scully there, trapped and helpless, and fighting it, or immobilized. He shivered. "They're very arrogant," Scully said calmly. "Who was here?" he asked. "Alien or human? You said that the man who...the man with Samantha on the bridge, the shapeshifter. He was here?" Her eyes slid up to meet his and away again. "Briefly. To...he claims to have the same sort of ability as Jeremiah Smith. The others who have come, and those who held me last time, were thoroughly human. No special abilities at all. Sorry to disappoint you." "Dis..." his head snapped back, as if she'd physically struck him. He felt as if she had. "Scully, I would *never* want...I need to know what we're dealing with. It wasn't..." She moved to save another file, and his words stumbled to a halt. "At any rate, they talked more than they should have," she said finally. "What are you getting from their computers?" he asked. "Information on how the cancer was programmed into the women through the implant. How they designed it, basically." "Is that what they wanted you for? Are more of the women here?" She shook her head. "They wanted a chance to test me because of last summer. The vaccine. They wanted to know its effects. The other women didn't seem to matter to them. Mulder, I'll tell you about this later. We don't have time now." She ejected the disk, inserting another one. The backwash of what she had said earlier hit him suddenly. "Scully," he said, and reached out to touch her shoulder. "This man, this being, you said he claimed to have the same abilities as Jeremiah Smith. Scully, Smith could heal people. Did this man, did he?..." He knew that his hope was naked in his eyes when she finally turned to face him. Her own eyes were troubled. She nodded slowly. "I think maybe so. I don't know how, and I'll need to have some tests run, but...I haven't had a nosebleed since he came. I haven't had any of the other symptoms." "But that means..." "I have to have the tests run," she repeated stubbornly, and turned back to the computer. After a moment, he put his hand on her shoulder again, feeling the fine tremble of her skin underneath his touch. She had been stretched too far these last days, he knew, and he also knew that she would not fully talk to him about them for a long time, if ever. "Don't get your hopes up," she said, very softly, so that he had to strain to hear her. "They might have just wanted me healthy enough that they could run their tests on me. It doesn't mean..." "I want to have my hopes up," he said, leaning in close to her ear. "I need to." She shook her head, her hair brushing against his chest, his neck, because he was standing so close. "I thought you were dead," he told her. "I thought you were dead, and gone, and then I started to hope that you were still alive. I can hope for this, too. For both of us." She didn't say anything, but neither did she step away. He ran his hand up and down her back, soothingly, as she stood at the computer, feeling periodic tremors shake her underneath his hand. *** A half hour later, she had filled up three disks when they suddenly heard movement below, doors opening and a multitude of voices. "Hell," Mulder muttered. "I think some of the other doctors are coming back. How many were there, total?" She shook her head, ejecting the disk and shutting down the computer. "Nine or ten men. Not all doctors. Some were just muscle men or assistants. Usually not more than five or six were here at the same time." He glanced again involuntarily to the gurney. Nine or ten men who had seen Scully helpless, who had put her in that position...he snapped his head back to the stairs. "You think they'll come up?" "I don't know." She reached out her hand, and without even thinking about it he pulled his gun from its holster and handed it over to her, drawing the second one from the ankle holster automatically. "You're not on some kind of drugs that would make you not shoot straight, are you?" he hissed belatedly. Her eyes went distant again. "Not enough to make a difference." "You want to go downstairs now and confront whoever's there or stay here and wait to see if they come up?" She cocked her head to one side, considering. "They may just leave," she said doubtfully. "And we're not sure how many are down there." "We're trapped if they come up here, though. If we go downstairs now, we might be able to avoid them." She shrugged. He ran his gaze over her, trying to gauge her fitness to storm downstairs. She wasn't even wearing any shoes, for God's sake. "Downstairs," she said suddenly. "I don't want to be trapped." He nodded, started to warn her to be as quiet as possible, and then forced himself to silence. She wasn't an idiot. "My car's out the back way..." "You think anyone's noticed it by now?" "If they had, they'd probably have come up here." Their eyes met for a minute, as they usually did before searching a building for a suspect, and then she gestured for him to take the lead, holding the disks in one hand and the gun in the other. He reached over to take the disks and tuck them into a pocket, and she let them go slowly, reluctantly. The walk down the stairs was an eternity, Scully at his back, the proper distance away as defined by training protocol. As always when he had to be quiet and sneak up on someone or something, he had to fight the urge to yell loudly and run at them, brandishing his gun. He wanted, badly, to hurt the ones who had hurt Scully, who had taken her away for their own uses, to pummel them into the ground, to wave a gun at them until they pleaded for mercy, to strap them to the metal gurney and...he stopped his thoughts. This wasn't the time. He had little idea of Scully's condition, and less idea as to how many people were downstairs. Anything could happen in a firefight, and he didn't even know what kind of weapons they had. Priority was getting Scully out and the disks away. He gritted his teeth against the part of him that wanted to take the rest of the stairs running and yelling like some sort of Celtic warrior, Mel Gibson in Braveheart. He had mentioned this temptation to Scully once, and she had said dryly that Mel Gibson might be able to get away with it, but she wouldn't advise that he start wearing kilts. Four men were standing by the small office; they sounded like they were joking with each other. None of them looked in Mulder and Scully's direction as they sidled to the back door carefully. The opening of the door gave them away, as it cast patches of sunlight on the ceiling, and he heard a raised voice. "Hey, who's...shit, get him..." But he had already pushed Scully in front of him, and they were running to his car. He already had his key in the ignition as she was pulling her door shut. "Duck!" he snapped, pushing her down on the seat, crouching low himself, and putting the car in gear. Yells behind him, and the crack of a weapon and he waited for the car to slew sideways as a tire went out or for the back windshield to shatter, but it didn't happen. "The four who were there were all researchers. Probably not very good shots," said Scully from where she had slithered down to crouch in front of the seat, one hand balanced against the dashboard. "They might get lucky," he said, accelerating and peeling out of the parking lot. "You think they'll follow us in the cars?" "Don't know." He grunted in response and pulled out onto a main road, following it before he saw a smaller side street and pulled onto that. No reason to follow a straight path. "The police?" he asked after a moment. "No." "What?" That surprised him; Scully was usually such a stickler for the letter of the law. "Whatever's on the disk will become evidence. And our evidence disappears. I want to see exactly what I have on here first before I let anyone else see it or tamper with it." He nodded; the reasoning made sense to him. But then, it was his own kind of reasoning, his own brand of paranoia. "Hotel?" he asked. "Somewhere out of the way. Somewhere where they won't be able to see your car. And we'll need a computer..." "I'll call the Gunmen." "No! Not on your cell." "We'll stop someplace at a pay phone," he told her. And she nodded, and after a moment pushed herself up onto the seat. "You okay?" he asked. She didn't answer. "Scully?" "Fine." *** They drove around aimlessly for over an hour until he found a pay phone and called the Lone Gunmen. There were a few clicks, where he suspected that he was being transferred over to his own apartment's line. "Byers." "It's Mulder." "Mulder! Where have you been? Are you all right?" He heard Frohike and Langly's voices as well, clamoring to talk to him. "I'm fine. Is this a secured line?" "As secure as it can get." "Okay. I need you guys to come, and bring a computer. We'll be at the Dayz and Nightz hotel at 600 E. Wesley, okay? Under the name of..." he paused, frantically searching for a name that had no connections to his own. "Um, Rowland." "We? Who have you got with you?" "Just come," he said, and hung up. After a moment of hesitation, he called Skinner as well. "Skinner." "Sir? It's Mulder. Listen, I need you to do me a favor, without asking questions. I need you to come to..." "No." Skinner's voice was sharp. "What? This is about Scully, about...what happened to her. It's important." "This isn't a secured line. Don't say anything that you don't want to be overheard." "You think your line is being tapped?" Mulder said after a moment, thinking about the shifting edges of uneasiness that he'd heard in Skinner's voice. "Maybe I've met your friends too often," said Skinner. The comment was light enough, but the undercurrents of his voice troubled Mulder. He replayed Skinner's tone in his mind. "Are you okay?" he asked finally. There was a beat of silence at the other end. "Just fine." "Okay, so I'll assume your phone might be tapped...um, suffice it to say that I made a visit to a warehouse owned by the Consortium and found something...interesting. My friends, if you talk to them via a secure line, they'll know where I am." "Where was this warehouse?" Skinner asked, and the uneasiness in his voice had escalated. "Virginia--not far from where you are, in fact..." "No...don't say any more than that..." Skinner said urgently. "We're a long way from that now, anyway," said Mulder, trying to catch what in Skinner's tone was troubling him...a lack of surprise? "We?" Skinner asked, and now he was surprised. "Um, yeah. I don't want to talk about that over this..." "Oh, my God," Skinner said, as if in realization. "Oh my...is sh... is the person you're with, they're physically okay?" "Yeah." He found that his face was stretching with a grin. "Yes." "*How?*" "I don't know. I'll explain later." "Okay. Get off the line. Make sure that you go somewhere far enough from this phone." And then there was a click. He returned to the car thoughtfully. "The Gunmen are coming." She looked over at him. "Something wrong?" "Maybe. I don't know. Skinner was weird." "Is he coming?" Mulder shook his head. "I don't know. He was more paranoid than the Gunmen are. I think he figured out that you're still alive, too." "How would he possibly have..." "I don't know. I guess it doesn't matter. Come on, let's find that hotel." "And maybe at a K-mart or someplace first. I need clothes." "Oh, I brought 'em. You still had your overnight bag in the trunk of my car from our last trip, and I never took it out." When he glanced over at her, she was looking back with an expression of fervent gratitude. "Clean clothes and my own shampoo?" she said longingly. "Oh, I owe you." He found himself grinning again. "You're so easy to please." End 5 of 8 _________________________________________________________ Subcutaneous 6 of 8 Disclaimers, etc. in part 1 She took a shower when they got into the hotel, moving with as much haste as she could without actually running, and he waited in the room they'd checked into, torn between restless pacing and sudden waves of exhaustion. When she came out again, she was dressed in the outfit that she had had in her overnight bag, her standard outfit of black pants, white blouse, black blazer. No pantyhose; her feet were still bare. "The Gunmen will probably be here pretty soon," he told her, settling in the middle of one of the double beds. She sat on the side of the other and regarded him seriously. "Do you want to wait for all of us to be here before you tell us what happened, or tell me now?" She pulled her feet up on the bed, sitting cross-legged as he was; for a moment, they could have been on any of a hundred cases, batting ideas back and forth across the beds. "They told me that they were telling people I was dead. What tipped you off that I wasn't? Another mysterious informant coming out of the woodwork?" He bit his lip. "No, I...you didn't feel gone to me. For the first few days, I thought I was just in shock. Denial. Whatever. And then I started to think...I'd never seen your body. My proof that you were dead was based on what other people had said. Not necessarily people I knew or trusted. I thought it was worth a shot to check some of the warehouses owned by the pharmaceutical companies that we know they're allied with." "That was it?" He lifted his eyes from the bedspread to give her back words she had once given him. "I just knew." Her lips twitched a little in what might have been a prelude to a smile. "What about your brother?" he asked quietly, knowing that the question would defeat the smile altogether. "That stopped me for awhile; he wasn't a doctor I'd never met before. I couldn't think of how they..." "Easily. The EH substance that Susanne Modeski synthesized." "Hell. I thought that Susanne had destroyed the samples of that." "I can only assume that they had a similar substance, or that her fiance had already given them the formulas." For a moment, her brows drew together, in a remembered pain. "They came in, three of them, and injected him," her hand traced a path behind her right ear, "and told him that it would be better for me if they took me off to save me, that he should tell people I was dead. They did the same for the medical examiner, I imagine, or instilled some conviction that he had performed the autopsy. I don't know. I don't remember the time I was under the EH very well; I doubt he does either. Probably he doesn't remember anything about that day, only that he was told I was dead...I don't know." He let out a sigh of relief. "I was afraid that..." "Afraid of what?" "That they'd gotten to him in some way. That they'd..." "Trust no one?" He shrugged. "He's my brother, Mulder." "I know." They fell silent. Her eyes closed for a moment and then blinked open again slowly before closing again. "What are you thinking?" she asked softly, still with closed eyes. He looked at her tiny figure, hair still wet, and told the truth. "Foot fights." The corners of her mouth turned up involuntarily. "What?" "Sam and I, we split a room in the summer house. We'd sit on the edge of our beds at night, when we were supposed to be asleep, and have foot fights." "Melissa and I did too," she said, and he could imagine the two of them, little red-heads in the dark of the room, dressed in frilly nightgowns, kicking at each other's feet and trying to stifle their giggles so their parents wouldn't hear them. The corners of her mouth turned up even more, and then she said quietly, "I'm glad that my brother didn't sell me out. Not voluntarily." "So am I." *** The Lone Gunmen were happy. No, ecstatic. "Why didn't you let us go with you?" exclaimed Frohike, punching Mulder in the arm after he'd hugged Scully. "Didn't have any proof that there was anything odd about her death. Besides, you guys already thought I was cracking up." Frohike slugged him again. "We would've come." "Are you doing okay, Agent Scully? We should get her to a doctor," Byers said. Frohike had hugged her exuberantly, Byers much more carefully, and now he put his hands on her shoulders and peered at her face. "At least they didn't take her to Antarctica this time," Langly said in an aside to Mulder, and he nodded in response. His credit card had never been the same since. "We should get you to a hospital," said Byers, even more seriously. Scully shook her head in what Mulder knew was carefully concealed irritation. "There are some other things I need to take care of first. How many doctors are there among your subscribers?" The three men looked at each other and shrugged. "About fifteen, maybe," said Langly. "No one ever tells us their real occupation. A lot more have medical knowledge of some sort." She reached out her hand to Mulder, and he pulled the disks out of his pocket. "I want some other doctors to see what's on these. Especially some oncologists." "What's on them?" Frohike asked, pushing his glasses up with one finger and reaching out for the disks. "Scanlon said he had a treatment for the cancer. It made it worse, but I should have paid more attention to it. Because...twisted around, changed a little...it might be a treatment. How many more of the women have died?" The three looked at each other, and Byers delivered the news. "Forty- two that we know of. There are sixty more who have gone out of remission. They're in various stages of the disease now." "You think this can save them?" asked Langly. "It might be a start," said Scully. "An explanation, at least." "And you?" said Frohike. "I don't know," said Scully, biting her lip and not telling them about the shapeshifter. "Let's get this done before they realize that I've taken their information, okay?" *** They told their stories to each other in dribs and drabs while the Lone Gunmen began to upload the files and disseminate the information to their friends and allies. How the Cigarette Man had come with the two other men to her hospital room, directing them. How her mother had reacted to her death. How the shapeshifter had placed his hand on her forehead, and the tingling warmth she'd felt. How he'd slowly begun to realize that the feeling he still had of her presence wasn't simply denial. How they had tested her blood in a million different ways to see what the virus and the vaccine had done to it. How he'd decided to escape his apartment by presenting the Gunmen with a busted computer. He felt alternately solid and shaky, both happy and undeniably fragile. "Okay, we're getting something back from Dr. Who," said Frohike. "Dr. What?" asked Mulder. "Dr. Who. We're fairly sure that he's really a doctor," said Byers. He was sitting and typing at the small desk, and the others crowded around him. Mulder stood on the outside, trying to decipher the graphs and tables that were forming on the screen. Medical data. Scully's department, not his. She was engrossed, her eyes moving swiftly to process the information. "He thinks that..." Byers started to interpret. "I got it," Scully interrupted, and bent to take control of the keyboard herself. Her hands were on the keyboard were both elegant and capable, but the nails were chipped. He could see part of a bruise on her wrist, most of it hidden by the cuff of her blazer, probably from where she had fought the restraints. His throat closed up, another quick emotional response. "I'm gonna take a shower," he said, and beat a hasty retreat to the bathroom, grabbing his own overnight bag along the way. The tears waited until he was in the shower, for which he was grateful, but they were not kind when they came, wrenching, noisy sobs that shuddered through him. The small, calm part of his mind told him grimly that he should have been expecting this, that he was on emotional overload and that this was an acceptable, typical response, but it was a small comfort as he tried to stifle his weeping so that the others wouldn't hear, tried to breathe. *** He'd stayed in the bathroom for a long time, carefully shaving, taking his time. He wasn't eager to go back to the other room; he suddenly wanted nothing more than to hole up in his own apartment with nobody else around, not even Scully. They were still clustered around the computer, but he let himself settle on one of the beds, pulling the pillow out from under the neatly tucked bedspread and leaning back on it, letting his mind wander over the events of the day. He supposed that this had been a victory, but he had been trained by myth and fairy tale to expect a pattern to victory: boy defeats danger against great odds, saves girl from captivity, gets girl. No mention of post-traumatic stress or reoccurring dangers at all...he sighed. Well. They'd deal with it, he supposed. He reached over to the end table for the remote, clicked the TV on, and switched channels until he had reached a college basketball game. Not a team he cared about, but he settled back and let his mind drift. Skinner. Skinner had definitely sounded strange. The four others were talking, and he picked Scully's voice out and let it be the background to his thoughts. And then, unexpectedly, to lull him to sleep. *** Part III--April 25-29--Scully April 25, evening Mulder was mumbling in his sleep, which wasn't unusual. Scully had heard him do the same in hospital rooms, on airplanes, on her own sofa once or twice. Usually, the words were slurred and unidentifiable, but occasionally a phrase would come through clearly. Several times over the years, she had heard her own name, usually surrounded by phrases like, "listen for a moment," or, "how can you not see it that way?"; she didn't know if it was amusing, annoying, or comforting that he argued with her even in his sleep. She thought she heard her name in his mumbles today, but indistinctly, and she couldn't tell the context. Byers had apologized for Mulder, as if Mulder's falling asleep on them were bad manners, by telling her that Mulder hadn't been sleeping more than two or three hours a night since her reported death. It hadn't occurred to Scully to take offense, and in fact she was somewhat grateful. She wanted to focus on the data that she was sending and receiving to the Lone Gunmen's subscribers, not discuss her death and resurrection with Mulder. She would have to call her mother. Or better yet, have Mulder call her and explain so that her mother wouldn't be shocked by her dead daughter's voice on the telephone. And maybe it was time that Mulder got the chance to deliver good news to her mother. She would have to reverse the process of paperwork that her death had started, she supposed. Answer questions about the warehouse and what had happened to the police. And somehow she thought that Karen Kossoff would want to see her about this. God, they hadn't even managed to wade through the emotional minefields created by the first abduction yet. She let her eyes close for a moment, wanting to get up, away from the computer, to go over and and curl up on the bed as Mulder was doing, to let exhaustion take her into dreamlessness and thoughtlessness. "More from Dr. Who," said Langly, and tapped her shoulder. "You up to this, Scully?" "Yeah," she said, and opened her eyes again to read the message. "Dr. Scully--I'm sending this to some other oncologists I know, and I'll have to look over it more carefully myself over the next few days, but even a preliminary read-through shows that what you have here, if correct, will forward cancer research by at least five years. Now, some questions about some of the protocols..." She blinked to clear her tired eyes and continued to read. *** April 26 Something was soft underneath her, and she relished that, pushing her face deeper into the pillow. "Rise and shine, sleepyhead," said a voice, and she twisted around and sat bolt upright, feeling her heart begin to beat faster and looking around in confusion. "Hey, it's just me," said Mulder, and she blinked him into focus, sitting on the end of her bed. He held his hands up briefly as if to show her that he wasn't armed, and she saw the very thin red line where he had cut himself yesterday. "Oh...oh, what time is it?" "8:00. You've been out for about twelve hours." "I was working at the computer..." "Yeah, well, you pretty much conked out about eight, Byers said. Sort of slowly keeled over. They figured you'd had enough. Put you to bed." Which meant that she'd slept all night in these clothes...God, she wanted to brush her teeth. She rubbed her eyes. "I need to eat breakfast. 8:00 in the morning, right?" "Yeah, unless that was the moon coming at dawn." She looked around the room. The Lone Gunmen were gone, but evidence of their presence remained: empty Doritos and Cheetos bags from the hotel vending machine. "Where'd they go?" "They're going to get your mom, and your brothers. We're going to need to return you to the land of the living today, but I thought you might want to talk to your family before officialdom strikes." "Deciding my schedule again?" she asked dryly, looking around the room for anything else, and then looking back at him when he was silent. He looked stricken, and she replayed her words in her own head, realizing that Mulder had misinterpreted dryness as rebuke. "Thank you. That sounds good," she said in apology. "They'll be here in about an hour. Maybe you wanted to clean up, get some breakfast?" "Yes, please." He smiled, restored to good humor. "There's a bagel place nearby. How about if I go and get some while you take a shower or whatever?" "Thanks," she said, and tried to smile for him, too, although she suddenly couldn't wait for him to leave, to leave her by herself. Perhaps he saw that behind her smile, because he suddenly looked sad again, and started to stand up. She caught at his arm before he could, and leaned into him for an awkward, quick hug. He put his arms around her as she was pulling hers away, and gave her a longer, tighter hug, and she felt tears come to her eyes. "Mulder...I'm not a very nice person right now," she said, muffled into his shoulder. His hand was warm on her hair, smoothing out what were probably tangles. "Join the club. You and me, we can get a joint membership. I'm gonna get the bagels, okay? You need to build up your strength, you know. Because let me tell you, rising from the ashes is a bitch." *** It was. Oh, it was. Later, she would appreciate Mulder's tact in leaving her alone for the half hour it took her to shower and dress in the jeans and denim shirt that she had in her overnight bag, because it was the last moment alone she had that day. Her mother burst through the doors of the hotel and had her arms around her almost before she realized it, and she returned the hug tightly, fighting back more tears. Then Bill was holding her, apologizing incoherently--the Lone Gunmen had apparently explained the EH drug to him--and then Charlie snatched her out of his arms, swinging her around and telling her that he was so happy, so very happy, he couldn't believe it. Then it was Tara's turn to gush over her, telling her that she looked so well, so very well. As if she'd been gone at a spa instead of a government-owned warehouse. And then she was back in her mother's arms again, torn between the desire to cry as if she were still a child and the urge to comfort her mother. The part of her that wanted to retreat into the bathroom and take a very long, very hot bubble bath, she ignored. "But how did this happen? How did this happen?" her mother kept saying. *** The police and the FBI agents had much the same questions, which she spent the rest of the day answering. Skinner asked hardly anything when they saw him, standing in the corner of whatever room she was in with his arms folded, waiting for someone else to ask any questions for him. She wished that she had worn her jeans and shirt yesterday, and saved the suit for today, an additional armor against their probing questions. Yesterday, though, she had needed that armor as well. At some point, someone pointed out that she had been kidnapped from a hospital, which indicated sickness, didn't it, and shouldn't she go back there? Her mother approved of this plan; Scully adamantly refused. She didn't know what the shapeshifting bounty hunter had done to her, but she did know that cancer or not, she would not go into a place that would leave her defenseless or drugged. It was Mulder and Bill, in a surprising, and very temporary, alliance, who supported her decision. Bill was furious at Mulder, perhaps because he hadn't been able to rescue her himself. In a quick aside over lunch, when she apologized for Bill's continued cutting remarks, Mulder casually diagnosed Bill's problem as shame: he had been duped, without even realizing it. "How did you feel the day after you'd been drugged, huh? Imagine that, but with worse consequences," he said. "And then it's the guy who's ruined your sister's life, who you hate, who gets the fun of saving her." "Thank you, Mr. Psychologist." Mulder took a bite of his sandwich and spoke around it. "And, while you and I know that you were probably on your way to rescuing yourself, Ms. Scalpel, he doesn't see it that way." "Because it wouldn't occur to him that his little sister could." Mulder shrugged. "Charlie didn't look surprised at the scalpel-waving part of the story." "Dana, are you sure you don't want to get checked out by a doctor?" asked her mother, coming to sit by them. "I've already called my oncologist. I'm going to go to the hospital for some tests later today, but I'm not staying there overnight." "But the hospital could..." "Mom, no." "The FBI would put protection on your room." "People can be bribed, or drugged. I'm not putting myself in that position again." "But surely you don't think they'd try something again?" "They didn't let me go, Mom. That probably means they weren't finished with me. No, I'll be okay, but I'm *not* going back to that hospital." Her mother hugged her again, tears streaming down her face. "Oh, Dana. It was so hard to lose you once...I can't bear..." and then she was hurrying away to the bathroom. *** The battery of tests at the hospital were stressful and exhausting. It was almost an anticlimax when the X-rays and the blood tests came back. Not a trace of the tumor. Not a trace of the cancer. No implants. Other than exhaustion, she was a healthy woman. End 6 of 8 _________________________________________________________ Subcutaneous 7 of 8 Disclaimers, etc., in part 1 The pillow under her head was softer than the one at the hotel had been, but she didn't snuggle into it. Instead, she twisted and turned, trying to find a comfortable position in which to sleep. She was restless. In the end, she went downstairs to where Mulder was, supposedly, sleeping on the couch. They'd all ended up at her mother's house, since her mother had already cleared many of Dana's possessions out of her own apartment (she gritted her teeth), and by the time that they'd finished talking it had been too late for Mulder to leave. She suspected that they would have had to pry him from this house from a crowbar, anyway. Bill had blustered, but he had also looked relieved that someone with a gun was there to protect his little sister. There was part of her that was glad as well, but it hadn't let her sleep. Mulder wasn't sleeping, of course; she saw the gleam of open eyes as she neared the sofa, and then he sat up to make room for her, the blanket falling away from his chest. "How're you doing?" he asked softly. "Couldn't sleep. You?" "No. It's been a busy week...I'm still pretty wired." "It has been that." She didn't elaborate, and after a moment Mulder reached for the remote and clicked the TV on, flipping past psychic friend ads and infomercials to the cartoon network. "How about some Scooby Doo?" She swung her legs onto the coffee table. "Just what we need... cavemen restored mysteriously to life." "I'd think you'd like Scooby Doo. There's always a rational explanation, at the end. The ghosts and goblins get their masks ripped off." "Mulder, four people running around solving mysteries with a talking *dog*--there isn't a rational explanation for that." "At least they manage to solve their mysteries," Mulder said, his voice sounding sour. The last time she had gone into remission, Mulder had been overjoyed, his eyes shiny and bright. This time, he had smiled, but the darkness and the frustration in his eyes had lingered. In hers, as well. "Do you know, a week ago," she said to the screen, "all I wanted in life was a cure for the cancer. I wanted to be healthy, and I wanted that damn chip out from under my neck. When I took it out, I was so relieved that I could do so, even if it was because of the cancer. I should be tremendously happy now." "And you're not." "Are you?" He shook his head. "That you're healthy, yes. That you don't have an implant under your skin, yes. But..." "It was too easy." He swung his head to look at her in disbelief. "Scully, the one thing I wouldn't call this last week is easy." "Easy for them, not for me. I saw Penny Northern die, Mulder. I sat with her, a woman I never expected to like, let alone feel close to. But I did like her, and I watched her die in pain and confusion. And they could have cured her. It makes me...angry." Furious, in fact. She had been irreversibly changed by the cancer, had shaped her life around it for the last few years, had fought it with every bit of strength she had in her. And then, that shapeshifter had placed his hand on her forehead, touching her skin ever so lightly, and taken away from her what she had struggled with for so long. "That they can do this so quickly, and yet the other women are still dying. Even if we find answers for what caused the cancer, we may not find them in time for these women. That's not just." "No, it's not. Scully." "What?" "If those women do die...it wouldn't be unusual for you to feel survivor's guilt." "I'm not feeling guilty." "Hush, hear me out. It's not uncommon, you know--" "Mulder, I know perfectly well where to place the blame for those women's deaths." "Do you? Listen, I'm not trying to make you angrier, okay? I'm just saying...in situations where one person lives and another dies, it's not uncommon for the other to feel guilty for it. I mean..." he shrugged again, and his voice took on a tone of careful nonchalance, "take me as an obvious example. Logically, I couldn't have done anything to prevent what happened to my sister. That doesn't mean that every single day, I don't wish that I had done something to protect her, to wish that I'd been taken instead." "But I don't wish..." she stopped abruptly, and he reached over and smoothed her cheek lightly, as lightly as the shapeshifter had, and then curved his hand around to the back of her neck, where the implant had been. It distracted her, made the words tumble out. "I want to be alive, Mulder. I'm glad I am. Even if...I just..." "Yeah, I know." "I want the others to live, too." *** April 27th She did manage to sleep for a few hours, although she rose again at dawn. Mulder didn't wake up when she went downstairs this time, his face pressed against the side of the couch as if he would burrow into it to keep himself away from the morning light. She smiled a little at his bare feet, which had kicked the blanket away. His arm rested on the blanket, and she fought the impulse to turn it over so that she could feel the pulse at his wrist, the lines of his palm, underneath her fingers. She went to the kitchen instead. Charlie was already there, and she inhaled the scent of coffee with pleasure. "What're you making?" she asked, because Charlie was occupied with stirring what looked like a large bowl of batter. "Muffins. Chocolate chip. Want to help?" "Sure." She reached out and scooped out a lump of batter, eating it slowly off her finger. Her mother would have frowned at her, but Charlie grinned. "Don't eat it all, Red. Why don't you start scrambling some eggs or something? Time this family was out of bed." "It's 6:00, Charlie." "And we're Navy brats. Start the eggs." "Yes, sir." She saluted. "Did you sleep okay?" "Billy Boy snores. I could hear it even in the room across the hall. Don't know how Tara stands it." They worked in companionable silence for awhile, him spooning the batter into the muffin tins and her cracking eggs into a bowl. He put the tins into the oven and stood there, and she looked up in puzzlement. "Charlie?" He lifted a hand and surreptitiously wiped at his face, and she realized that he was crying. "Charlie," she said in surprise, and moved over to him. He didn't turn around, and after a moment she reached over to hug him from behind, pressing her cheek against the cotton of his T-shirt. Charlie, like Dana, had rarely cried when Bill or Melissa had teased him. It was him who had told her to react as little as possible when the older ones teased them, a bit of advice that had placed them in a conspiracy that had lasted over the years. He wiped his face again, and then turned around and gave her a quick hug before releasing her. "Sorry, Red. Didn't mean to freak you out." "You didn't freak me out. What's wrong?" "What's wrong? Jeez. You almost died. You did die. I didn't think I was ever going to be able to see you again, and here we are, making breakfast. It's just weird. You know?" "Oh, yeah." "I mean, it's a second chance. I was...I was furious with myself. That I hadn't gotten an immediate flight, that I had decided that the end of the week would be okay. I came here, and it was too late. Mom and Bill said that you'd had long talks with them, and I realized I'd missed that. And then at the wake, your boss, your friends from the FBI, they'd come up and talk to me about this woman they knew, a woman that I'd lost touch with, and would never have the chance to know. I don't want to lose you, Dana." "Oh, I don't want to lose you either, Charlie. I've missed you when you've been away." They both paused, smiled a little at each other, and then lapsed into silence. Charlie laughed. "So what do we talk about, huh?" She punched him lightly in the shoulder. "Whatever we want to. Tell me how Julie and the kids are doing." "Fine. I wish they could've come up, but with Julie being pregnant..." "No, I understand." "We'll come up soon, after the baby's born, how about? Or you come and visit us. I don't want to lose touch with you, Red." "Are you going to need help when the baby's born? I could come up that week, if you wanted, help take care of the other kids." She half-regretted the offer once it came out of her mouth. What was she doing, volunteering to spend time around a newborn? But she hadn't seen her two young nephews for quite some time, and...could she handle being reminded of Emily? Surprisingly, the answer was yes. "Yeah, that'd be good. Julie's mom was going to come, but then her father had a stroke. You going to be able to get the time off of work?" "Yes. I've got vacation days built up." "Great. But don't feel you have to. Jase and Pat are little terrors." "I'll look forward to it." And that was only partly a lie. "So, tell me what had been going on in your life, huh? Before this whole thing?" Before this whole thing. Oh God, that covered a lot of ground. She told him about her and Mulder's experience getting stuck in a giant mushroom, playing down the dangerous parts and playing up the weird, LSD type flashbacks that she had had in quarantine while the drug had worked its way out of her system. Predictably, he found it hilarious. "Your partner isn't what I expected," he said at one point. "What were you expecting?" she asked, somewhat defensively. "Someone less...subdued. From your story, from what else I've heard about him, he sounds pretty impulsive. Intense. Not this quiet man who calls Mom 'Mrs. Scully' and keeps his patience when Bill insults him." "He's not usually this quiet, no." "Yesterday, he was more what I was expecting. At your...uh, wake, though. When I first met him. I didn't think he'd be as...polite as he was." "You were expecting someone rude? Whatever Bill may have told you--" "Not rude. He was...oh, never mind. I think I was just expecting someone a lot more intense, someone who was a lot more honest. Not that he wasn't honest, but he was also very...veiled. I don't know. Forget it." "He's a good man. He's...an honorable man." Unaccountably, she blushed. Charlie looked speculatively at her for a moment. "You don't have to convince me, dork. Anyone who's put up with you for the last six years..." *** The warehouse had been nearly empty when the FBI had gone there. The first floor still contained boxes full of pharmaceutical products, perfectly legal, but the second floor was entirely empty. The FBI agents in charge had not been happy. Scully herself was equally unhappy, standing in the room that she had been held captive in, listening to a Jenkins executive tell them that no one from his company had been to their warehouse in the last four days, and that if Scully had been held captive there, it hadn't been by anyone in his company. If she and Mulder had called the police immediately, maybe they would have caught those men. Yes, they might have been only lower- level functionaries, but they might have led them to people who were higher up on the Consortium food chain. To Cancerman himself. (C.G.B Spender, she told herself, but that was probably an alias, too). And she had traded that, knowing what she was doing, for information that might or might not do them any good. She called the Lone Gunmen around noon, and found that six more women had died since she had last seen them. An oncologist who was treating four of the remaining women at a cancer research facility ("We ran a check; he seems all right," Langly had said, anticipating her) had spent time with some members of his team and devised a treatment that he had sent out to the oncologists of the other women. ("His name's Dr. Wolf. He says he's been on the verge of something for months now, and this clinches it. The problem is time, though. Many of these women are too weak to undergo the treatment.") Mulder nodded coolly at the news, and then frowned at her in sympathy; he seemed to be going through as many mood swings as she was. The warehouse floor looked bigger without the computers or medical gurneys crowded into it, and she bit her lip remembering how they would restrain her on the gurney. There were still bruises on her upper arms, on her wrists, on her ankles, on her stomach, on her back, from the times when she had tried to fight them. She had had to stand still while they were photographed, yesterday. Mulder must have seen the photographs, but he hadn't mentioned them. Actually, he had asked relatively few questions about what her captors had done to her specifically, although he had been endlessly curious about what they had spoken about in her presence, what they had looked like, what they had revealed about themselves and their superiors. He was trying to give her space, she knew, to let her be an investigator instead of the victim, and for that she was grateful. The room that they had kept her in when they weren't testing her seemed smaller. She'd been asleep, under light sedation, much of the time that she'd been in here, and her memories of the room were mixed with the memories of nightmares, the walls turning into snakes or spiders. They hadn't given her any sedatives on the last day, as they'd said they wanted her system clear. And they'd placed the table full of scalpels close to her, and left the restraints somewhat loose. Their mistake. That, and they hadn't counted on Mulder. The investigating officers, dusting for fingerprints, looked at her with pity in their eyes. *** "Are you coming back to Mom's?" she asked him at about 5:00. "Um...do you want me to?" he asked, pulling his mind away from whatever he had been thinking about. "If you'd like dinner, you can come." He frowned. "You don't have to, of course," she said, started to get exasperated. "I was thinking about stopping by Skinner's." "For dinner?" she asked, now completely confused, and his eyes snapped back into focus. "Huh? No, of course not. No, he's just been acting stranger than usual." "He doesn't usually act strange at all." "Exactly." "Do you know what Kersh most disliked about you?" she asked, when it appeared that he wasn't going to explain. Ah, that rattled him. "Kersh?" "Obliqueness, Mulder. Kersh disliked obliqueness. He was not impressed when you acted all mysterious. And, although I don't like to align myself with Kersh--" "Perish the thought." "I'm beginning to understand him. Now why are you dropping by Skinner's apartment, exactly?" "You could have just asked, Scully. You didn't need to bring Kersh into it." "I'm asking." "Right. It doesn't surprise you that Skinner wasn't here today? He didn't even talk to us. I mean, this is a man who came by the hospital every day to visit you, who kept checking with the Lone Gunmen to make sure that I wasn't in imminent danger of offing myself. And then it's like, poof, he starts ignoring us. Doesn't want to meet us at the hotel because he's afraid of bugs, doesn't talk much yesterday, doesn't talk at *all* today..." "Okay, so let's visit Skinner." "Us? You don't have to, you know. You can head back to your mom's, if you want. She frowned at him. "I'll go with you." He shrugged. "Okay." She took one last look around, a look that lasted a long time, until Mulder said, "Come on, don't Dana-dally." Past and present merged, and she whipped her head around. "What?" He was smiling at her, apparently pleased with himself and his discovery. "Charlie was saying that that was what they used to say in your family when someone was the last one ready, usually you because you had your nose in a book." She hadn't heard that phrase in years, and she stared at Mulder, feeling disoriented at hearing it now, in this place. She shook her head. "Scully? Is something--" "Let's go." *** They could hear the raised voices from the hallway, when they were close enough to the door, and halted instinctively, eavesdropping instead of knocking. "I won't leave them at your mercy," Skinner said. "What, you think you have a choice?" Mulder's hand came down hard on her wrist, and she heard his indrawn breath, even as she tried to pull away. "That's..." "Let *go,*" she hissed, and saw the awareness of the bruises that the restraints had left flood his memory as he dropped her wrist. "Krycek," he said softly, even as the guilt came into his face. "What makes you think I don't?" Skinner said from inside the door, and Scully turned her attention back that way. "Have you forgotten this little gadget? Two choices. One, all the little robots in your blood stream start having fun again, and you die. I prefer that choice, myself, but you might not. Two, you set up a meeting with Mulder and Scully so that I can talk to them, in a place where we won't be seen." "Third choice, Krycek." There was the sound of something clattering on a hard surface. "What's this?" "It's a copy of a tape. I'm assuming it was you that left a voice- activated tape recorder in my apartment? Just to see if I'd do what you told me too?" "So you found it. So what?" "So this is a copy. If I die, the original makes its way to C.G.B. Spender. Including the conversation we had two days ago. The one where you made it pretty clear that you're working for the other side." There was a very long silence. "You took a hell of a risk, Skinner. How'd you know I'd come back so you could tell me this?" "I figured you for the type who likes to watch while he kills." "I've escaped from Spender before." "Caused a lot of trouble for you, though. And would again. It's pretty simple. You kill me, they'll be hunting you down, too. Now get the hell out of my apartment." "This tape only protects you until I officially break with Spender. Don't count on being alive if circumstances change. Unless it's an advantage for me...I don't mean any harm to them. Just a meeting." Scully reached back, touching Mulder's arm with one hand, and then placed her other hand on the doorknob. She saw him nod in her peripheral vision. The door opened easily. End 7 of 8 _________________________________________________________ Subcutaneous 8 of 8 Disclaimers, etc., in part 1 "You wanted to see us?" growled Mulder. The other two men had expressions of surprise on their faces; Skinner also seemed irritated. Scully moved to her left as she walked in the door, Mulder a few paces to the right. "What are the two of you doing here?" he asked. "We thought we should report," Scully said, and the two men turned their faces to her. "Thought you might be slightly interested. Of course, now it seems like Krycek might be as well," Mulder said, causing the two men to look back at him instead. She and Mulder did this often enough in interrogation rooms, making the suspect look back and forth, trying to keep him or her off balance. "So," Mulder said, after a beat of silence where Krycek and Skinner had turned their eyes to Scully, expecting the next statement to be from her, "what was it you wanted to see us about?" "Why don't we all sit down?" asked Krycek, who after all was trained in the game of interrogation as well. Scully glanced at the chairs and the sofa in Skinner's living room, all very well-stuffed, easy to sink into, hard to get out of. "I don't think so. Why don't you tell us what you want?" "If that's the way you want it...I've been authorized to offer you a job opportunity. Both of you." "No." Their voices came out in a chorus. "You don't want to even hear what I'm offering?" Krycek shrugged, one- shouldered, and then sat down in the one hard-backed chair in the room, a move that Scully briefly admired. "It seems like you're planning on telling us whether we want to hear or not," said Mulder. "Oh, I am. Wouldn't want you to start working for the other side instead." "That wouldn't happen," said Mulder. "It nearly did. You're sure you wouldn't like to sit?" "What do you mean, it nearly did?" asked Skinner. "What, you haven't grasped the point of that little exercise in death? And you're supposed to be the brightest kids on the block. I'm disappointed." "If you're referring to them taking Scully, it was to do tests on her blood. To see the results of the vaccine," said Mulder. "That was a nice side benefit, I'm sure. But if they'd wanted blood samples, they just had to take them from the hospital. Or, hell, they could have just taken her again. You wouldn't have found her. There was a reason why the cover story was that she was dead." "You didn't say anything about this two days ago," growled Skinner, and Scully's eyes flicked to him briefly, fitting together puzzle pieces. "I didn't know then," said Krycek. Maybe a lie, maybe not. "What are you getting at?" said Mulder, and Scully could hear the frustration in his voice, which meant that Krycek could probably hear it as well. A mistake on Mulder's part. "Hypothetical situation, *Agent* Scully. Say that instead of Mulder rescuing you, you have to stay there. After a few weeks, a month, they give you a choice. Help them with the work they're doing, or keep on as you have been, a test subject who's drugged just enough to keep her sluggish but not enough so that she doesn't know what's going on. They offer you a chance to be a scientist again, to know what's happening with your own body, to the other abductees. Which do you choose?" "I would not choose to work for them," said Scully grimly, erasing all doubt from her voice. "Maybe not the first month. But after two months? After three? After six? You'd be furthering their agenda either way; wouldn't you rather have control over it?" Scully half expected Mulder to break in, and hoped that he wouldn't. If he did speak for her, even to give her breathing space before she had to respond, Krycek would pick up on that indication of weakness. But Mulder didn't. Instead, the voice that broke in was Skinner's: "What does this have to do with your offer?" Krycek ignored him. "Agent Scully, which would you choose, after all that time?" He grinned a little when she didn't respond, and then abruptly shifted direction. "And what would you choose, Mulder?" "In the same situation? I don't know, what would you, you rat bastard?" asked Mulder, very, very calmly. "But it's Scully who would be the laboratory rat. Let's say that after six months of that, she does choose a spot of collaboration instead. What if they came to you one night, and asked you to join them as well? What would you choose, to be reunited with Scully, to be given all the answers that you've been searching for? Maybe you could try to convince others that she was alive, but what chance would you have of that? Most people would just assume that you'd have gone insane from grief. Which would it be for you, Scully or a padded cell?" "Very interesting hypothesis, but it didn't happen. And after this, they'd be idiots to try something again so soon," said Mulder. "So you'll gamble on safety for a few months? And then what?" "What are you offering?" asked Scully. "Resistance. Work with us. Make a difference instead of piddling around in the basement." "The Resistance tried to kill me on that bridge. As far as I know, they may have triggered the cancer in the other women. Why would working with them bring me safety?" "All the Resistance did was trigger the implants that the Consortium had planted. The Consortium could have healed those women any time... you know that. They didn't. They stole away your body because they wanted your science. They stole away a few other women who were the best test subjects. And they're letting the rest die, since they've outlived their usefulness. Wouldn't you want to help bring them down?" "It was the Resistance who caused these women's deaths. Who nearly caused mine." "Work with us and you can find out why. Work with us and you can be a scientist. Work with us and find out what the bigger stakes are. Work with us and make a difference." "Make a difference?" said Mulder, and Krycek's eyes moved from hers. She felt a brief moment of disorientation, as if she'd been let go from a spell. "You sound like a damn public service announcement. All you need is a multicolored shooting star logo." "We could help you, too, Mulder. Tell you what happened to your sister. Keep Scully safe from the other side. And think about it: no more going through the FBI bureaucracy. You'd be a player." Mulder shook his head, although he looked almost dazed, and Krycek returned to her. "What about you, Scully? What reason could you possibly have to retain an allegiance to an institution that's done nothing for you?" "My allegiance isn't to an institution," Scully said, making every word as distinct as she could. "My allegiance is to myself, and to the other women who have been taken, and used, and discarded. And I will *not* ally myself with those who would harm them. Harm *us.*" "But if you could--" "You've heard their answers," said Skinner. "You've heard mine. Unless you have something else to say, get out of here." Krycek regarded them all for a moment, and then stood up, without hurry. "The stakes are getting higher as we stand here. Sooner or later, we'll all be working for one side or another. You should choose carefully, or someone will make the choice for you." He ambled to the doorway, and then turned around in it. "Your answer wasn't real strong, Mulder. How about you?" But whatever doubt had been in Mulder's face had left. "My allegiance is to her," he said quietly, and for a moment, some fleeting emotion crossed Krycek's face that looked almost like shame. It passed quickly. "I'll look forward to working with all of you." *** "Why didn't you tell us it was Krycek putting the screws on you?" demanded Mulder angrily. "That'd be a dangerous move, Mulder. For all of us. You yourself said that they wanted to see who I might turn to, and turning to the two of you would have been putting both of you at risk. I chose instead to wait and see what he wanted." "Which almost didn't work." "It did," snapped Skinner. "But you kept this from us..." Skinner almost seemed amused, at that. "And the two of you haven't done your share of keeping things from me? Let it go, Mulder." "You're taking a very big risk," said Scully. "Circumstances can change very quickly, and that tape might not be a lever for much longer." But she could see that something had changed in Skinner's face, a lightening, as if the concentration that he'd used for playing a game had scattered at game's end. "And the two of you aren't taking risks? Tell me, Scully, are you coming back to the X-Files?" "Of course," she said automatically. He shook his head. "There have been times when you wouldn't have been so sure. But you've become more and more committed, the deeper you've gotten into this search." "You still have options, though," said Mulder. "You could close us down, or transfer us under Kersh again, or...you don't have to be in this." Skinner looked at him tolerantly. "You think that's an option? I'm in this whole mess now." "Yeah, well, you could have told us about Krycek," said Mulder sulkily, crossing his arms, apparently hoping to win this argument by repetition. "It was my problem. Mine to deal with," said Skinner, and for a moment his eyes met Scully's in perfect understanding of what it was to have something in your own body that could be turned against you, what it was to know that you were in the search not because of what you'd gotten into, but because of what had been forced into you. "He's right, Mulder," she said. "Although I hope you know, sir, that we'd always be glad to help you." Mulder, who didn't understand (and oh, God, Scully prayed, please keep that knowledge far away from him), threw up his hands in disgust. *** April 28th She spent the morning moving back into her apartment with the help of her brothers. Bill still acted prickly, angry with himself for what had been done to him, maybe angry with her for putting him in the whole situation. But she and Charlie had time to talk, and it was good; she had forgotten how much she liked her brother. Her mother and Tara came for a late lunch, and they all ate together, as much of her family as would probably ever be in one place again. And even then, her sister-in-law was missing, and Charlie's kids, and Matthew, back in California under the care of Tara's mom. The Lone Gunmen came by afterward to, as Frohike put it, "keep the lovely Agent Scully safe from creepy-crawlies." Byers gravely passed on the news that eight more women had died. When they left, she spent an hour or so rearranging her shelves, putting the pictures at the correct angles, until it almost looked like it had before. She had been yearning for a bubble bath all day, all week in fact, but she found herself too restless. She paced around her living room and kitchen and bedroom. She imagined that Mulder would say that she was feeling the need to make her territory her own again. Of course, then he would say that animals did the same thing by peeing, if she'd like to try that. "I don't think so," she said out loud in her living room, and stretched her arms wide, turning around in a half circle, relishing the knowledge that no one was watching her. Arms still out, she turned, faster and faster, as she had when she was a child, until she was spinning and dizzy and had to lie down on the floor with her arms and legs sprawled out. The whirling, multi-colored shapes gradually become solid again, turning into the familiar walls and objects of her own apartment. Pain and grief caught at her as she lay there, and she curled up her arms and legs, fighting tears without success until the spell of crying ended and she could let her arms and legs stretch out again. The dampness dried slowly on her cheeks. *** April 29 She went back to work. Well, of course she did. What else was there to do? She'd spent time in front of the mirror this morning, applying make-up carefully and blow-drying her hair more slowly than usual. Choosing clothes required thought, as she found herself suddenly sick of the color black. Unfortunately, black constituted the major part of her wardrobe. Instead, she went with a dark blue pantsuit that covered the fading bruises on her legs better than pantyhose would, and fastened on small gold earrings and the gold cross that her mother had returned to her yesterday. Mulder's eyes fell to the cross when she entered the office, and then he gave her a smile of such sweetness that it almost took her breath away. "Have a good day at home yesterday?" he asked. "Yes, yes, I did. I was able to have a long talk with Charlie, and that was good." His face darkened, and he glanced down at his desk. "Well, I guess that's good, since you weren't able to talk to him at the hospital like you did with everyone else." "No, I wasn't." Mulder was fiddling with pencils on his desk, as if embarrassed. "And I'm glad my talk with him wasn't done under the shadow of death...and I'm glad that ours wasn't either." He looked up warily. "What do you mean?" "Oh, Mulder, I had a speech all planned, a million and one things that I wanted to say to you that I hadn't yet said, and then--" "And then you took pity on me and realized that I wouldn't get through that?" interrupted Mulder, and she realized he was ashamed. "And then..." And then Mulder had walked through the door, and she had realized that she couldn't say any of them. Instead, she'd opened her arms to him speechlessly, and they'd held each other tightly until Bill had come, letting their hands and arms and nearness speak for them. "Do you think you were the only one who couldn't get through that? I didn't intend for those to be my deathbed farewells, but because of when and where they took place, they became that, and I realized...I can't say goodbye to you. I won't. Not under any circumstance." His face held enough wonder, enough light, enough energy to move the stars in their paths...or to keep her standing where she was against all her inclination to run, to hide, to close in on herself. "So these million and one things, Scully..." "What, you want to hear them all *now*?" "I'd probably keel over from shock. Maybe you'd better tell me them in small doses. One a day for a million and one days or so." She smiled at him. "A million and two things, since I need to thank you for rescuing me again." "Well, you were halfway there, yourself." "But it might not have succeeded. And I almost certainly wouldn't have had time to download those files. I know that it was a longshot, but..." she saw the light in his face dim, and knew that her own face had become somber as well. "I don't know if it will do any good, but at least we tried." "Yeah." "So..." "So, you just going to stand there?" She moved from the doorway. "What do you have lined up for us today?" "I thought we'd try to catch Skinner while he's in a generous mood, so I'm trying to find a case that he wouldn't normally accept..." He bounced out of his chair and moved to the filing cabinet, and she rolled her eyes and sat in his chair. "I'm going to check my e-mail." "Mmm hmm," he murmured, already flipping through files. The third message got her, and she felt tears begin to run silently down her face. She stared at the computer screen for a long time, long enough that Mulder turned around. His hand came down on her shoulder. "Scully?" She gestured towards the screen, and felt his hand move to rub reassuringly over the back of her neck, over the scar from where the implant had been, over the clasp of the gold chain, as he bent to read. Dear Dr. Scully-- As you know, I've been coordinating the treatment of several women who are afflicted with the same sort of nasalpharangyeal cancer as you yourself suffered from. From the information you provided, I and several other doctors have put together a treatment program for those afflicted with this or a similar type of cancer. Sadly, this comes too late to help many women, as the cancer has been very aggressive. However, for at least twelve women that I know of, the treatment has put a stop to the cancer's progress. While it is clearly too early to speculate about their recovery, I thought that you would at least like to know: initial results are promising. Sincerely, Dr. Steven Wolf. End Author's final note: As I said at the beginning of the story (lo, so many kilobytes ago), this story grew out of some issues that I wanted to see CC and co. address in the season finale. Most importantly, I wanted them to address the issue of the implant in Scully's neck, and, ideally, to get it out of there. I think it must be a tremendous strain to live under, and we haven't seen the possible consequences since Patient X/The Red and the Black. Also, I wanted to explore the conflict in Scully's feelings towards other abductees. On the one hand, she seems to feel a solidarity with Penny Northern or Cassandra Spender, but on the other, she doesn't want to see herself as an abductee. And finally, I thought I wanted them to address the nanotechnology in Skinner's blood. Of course, they did that, but not in a way I particularly liked (I like Skinner being a good guy, not Krycek's pawn). Incidentally, the whole story was originally supposed to be Skinner's POV, since I like outside POVs of Mulder and Scully, but the events of the season finale left a bad taste in my mouth and prompted the change to Mulder's POV, and then to Scully's. Anyway, feedback on what worked or what didn't, or general X-Files comments, are always welcome at marianicole29@yahoo.com. And thanks for reading :)