Disclaimers, etc. w/ first part.

11/12

I was listening, morbidly, for that door to open and shut.

What kind of life was that? What kind of life had it been for her? Taken from the home and family she remembered to a sterile white place, poked and prodded with needles and catheters and tubing, convulsing from their poisonous tests, wasting away from their "gauntings", emerging to see rooms and rooms of women who had her face, knowing that an acid-green flow rippled underneath that fabricated skin and those mocked eyes. I wondered if she'd ever forgotten that she was the original one? Was it easy to look at a face not her own, and pretend that dying was only not being needed, like a hybridized slave?

The cell was cold now. It got colder each time that door opened. I held my broken ribs in place, not remembering when they'd been broken. Maybe the decontamination technique had been so hasty and callous that they threw us around. My skin was dry, parched, flaking off like a sunburn, but the color was unchanged. I didn't know how the effects of the gas had been flushed from us, and I didn't want to know.

Every few minutes, I lapsed into coughing fits, further breaking broken ribs. I buried my face into my knees, arms still wrapped around me like a flesh bandage, shoulder throbbing. I felt a heat on the back of my neck.

It wasn't heat, but a shaft of light. A square of the ceiling that could be pulled away in order to watch us, like an observation panel. A nondescript face looked down, saying something. I couldn't hear. I wasn't supposed to hear. He looked down again, and met my eyes. He accepted a challenge I wasn't making. Who could I fight now? And who fought for me? Krycek was right. I couldn't even save myself.

A loud hiss and a low pop accompanied the room being charged with the corridor's flourescent light. Before I'd even turned around, arms grabbed me from behind, hauling me roughly to my feet. I tried to match faces to violence, but they held my head pinned in one place. I felt the prick of a needle into my hip and I fought them with bruised elbows and back of my head. Two others, their suits rendering them faceless, had Krycek on a stretcher, and carried him away. Was that all? Take him, I thought. Run him through two gauntings back to back. Drain that motherfucker of all life and hope until he wanted to *stay* in this room. Do it. They dropped me abruptly and the jolt to the floor cut through the back of my legs. I screamed silently, and waited. That couldn't be all there was. They were taking us out to kill us. They took him first because he was already out. He was easier. We were going to die.

That was when I heard the sounds. Like the door to the children's ward being opened and closed over and over again, very fast. I was delirious; it couldn't be that. Like firecrackers. I peered up at the man framed by the observation window, as if he could tell me what was going on, and his face went down onto the glass, a spatter of blood forming like a corona around his balding head. Screaming. Closer now than the children, and just as desperate for reprieve.

I had my head against the wall next to the door, and was thrown forward by an impact to the door itself as it shook the entire wall.

Someone was shooting at the door.

The pressurization was undone. I crawled towards it, and almost lost my head as it was kicked open. I looked up at where Krycek stood, brandishing a security guard's rifle.

He was bleeding again, from at least three or four places in his head, completely out of breath. "I was playing possum. I knew they'd try to remove me if they thought I was unconscious. If they thought the decontamination hadn't worked." He gestured at the open hallway behind him. "Take me up on it, Mulder."

He was saving me? He was freeing me? I found my voice. "Why?"

"Because I can get away while they chase you. It's just a matter of seconds before someone in one of those other soundproofed labs comes over here to see what happened." He kicked at my hand. "Go now!"

What a tantalizing offer. I could die here, or I could run in my current condition until they tracked me down and killed me.

Or I could luck out. No matter what, it only got dimmer the more I laid there. Krycek was already out of sight. I grabbed the frame of the door, willed my knees not to buckle. What had my high school track coach said? The faster you run, the less it hurts. Tell that to someone on fire, I'd told him. The pounding in my head was a starting gun that wouldn't stop going off and I ran. I ran right into the children's ward. I wanted to run away.

At first it seemed it was quiet. But there were a million dull noises all banding together. Medical equipment. It was one large room made up of several small ones. All of the doors were open. I dropped, running with my back slumped. A woman sitting at a desk looked up at the strange, new noise, but only saw the empty hallway. I turned to my right.

The beds held the children. Was it bedtime? That meant it was night outside. I didn't have time to look for a clock. All sleeping children, wrapped in white, starched sheets. Faces like angels. I peered in closer, and saw that some had eyes frozen open, saliva pooling at the corners of their mouths. Drugged angels. I heard footsteps down the hall, and I practically slid into one of the rooms. What if I left blood behind me? I wasn't even sure if I was bleeding now or not. I folded myself up in a painful knot on the far side of the high bed. I ducked my head, kept my face down.

"Don't tell Miss Maddie."

I almost jumped out of my skin, peering up slowly. Big glassy green eyes pondered me from the pillow, bright auburn curls gathered at her neck. "What?"

"Don't tell her. She'll be coming to the room any minute now. She can't know that the shot didn't take. I knew it didn't. The technician is new, and he put it in the wrong place. But you can't say anything."

I put her age at about nine. At the most eleven. I was never good at pegging those kinds of things. "Miss Maddie? You mean Miss Madeline?"

The footsteps were right outside the door, and the girl put her head down quickly as I contorted myself back behind the bed where she couldn't see. I looked over my arm at the woman who poked her head in. Samantha, or Madeline. Or a clone. But she had a bandage on her face and a patch over one eye with gauze stuffed behind it. Krycek's work. Apparently satisfied with the bedcheck, she passed the doorway. I thought of calling her name. It's me, Samantha. But she'd only help them to find me. In her eyes, I was no better than the man who'd attempted, successfully, to kidnap her from her home that afternoon. I waited for the footfalls to fade and I raised my face.

So did the girl. "Are you just now back from the gaunting?"

Did I look *that* bad? "No."

"Are you Kurt?"

How many of the sea of Kurt Crawfords had this girl seen in a day? "No, I'm not."

"Oh." She played with the hem of her coverlet. "I've only seen him the one time, from far away. But he looked like you do right now. He's dying like me."

I was speechless for a moment, wondering how I'd get her out of there. How many were there?

I heard the hydraulics of another door, and the sudden cacaphony of a search party.

"You better run," the girl told me matter-of-factly. "The troops are coming."

I dropped and ran down the hall with my head down, and got on what looked like a service elevator, only thinking about how easily they could disattach it and make it my coffin seconds after the doors had closed. There were no numbers on the buttons, only symbols. Biological symbols. I recognized a few, but not enough to know where I was going. It came to a shuddering stop, and the doors opened like an eye on the blood spattered hallway where I'd just been. I counted five bodies. Two dressed as security guards, and the other three as doctors. Six with the man face down on the observation panel, not visible from where I stood. A few feet beyond them I saw a glass door, and outside. Trees and grass and a dark night sky. I knelt down to the dead security guard who still had a rifle. I'd never seen a gun like it, and hoped I didn't have to find out just how little I knew about it by being compromised into using it. I stepped over one of the doctors, and pushed at the door. I breathed when it opened, even as another security guard stood in front of me, gun drawn. "Drop it!"

I found the trigger. Was it a pump rifle? No. Automatic. Primed? Yes. Pull the trigger, dammit. I did. I don't know where I was aiming since I had my eyes closed, but it hit him, and he didn't run after me. The rifle recoiled into my injured shoulder and I dropped it, swearing at myself. Bending down took time, and I didn't have any. I ran like hell out the door.

The grounds around NeuroMast were like a golf green. As if open season on Fox Mulder had just been declared, I froze in the klieg lights. I caught my breath, looked around. Stopping made the pain apparent again, and I ran for what what I hoped were trees. Random yelling and opening doors erupted behind me. Finding my wind was going to hurt.

But Scully was gone. I don't think the true ramifications of that had hit me. She's gone away again. It was a miracle she survived the first time. It was a miracle she survived her cancer. Lightning strikes twice, and that was twice more than most people received in a lifetime. I shook my head, shaking it away. If I thought too hard about it, I would crumble. I would crumble and stop running. I'd just lay down and die.

Maybe no one's got her. Maybe she's fine. Maybe Jonson failed. Maybe Jonson gave himself away and Krycek had no way of knowing.

(In that case, where is she?)

Don't think, just run.

I almost ran into the high security fence. I could barely see. I glanced up, trying to gauge the distance. Too damn high. My legs were not going to survive. I bit down hard and started the climb. The pain was a white-hot light that kept getting brighter in my head. I wanted to scream. The height of the fence seemed to grow with each advance to the top, until finally, delirious again, I thought it must be. Then I made a grab for only air and fell over to the ground on the other side.

(Sleep now. Sleep.)

No. I got up on all fours like I was waiting to sprint.

I disappeared into the trees. Where was I going to go? Branches slapped me in the face, and when my feet hit a lower level, I had to bite back the howling in response. I had to be a monster by now. One of the broken ribs threatened to tear through skin, and it was knifing me from the inside. Remember this, I told myself, taking a few seconds at a time to stop and harden my resolve. Remember how terrible this is when you're back with her, moping through life because it was routine to do so.

(If you're back with her.)

I had to run. Faster. I caught sight of the street through the trees every few yards and saw the black cars on the highways, with their headlights killed and their occupants hidden by tinted windows. The trees ended a few yards ahead of me, and I split off in the opposite direction. Away from the interstate now, and away from familiarity. I wondered what animal I was hearing in the brush around me, and realized it was the sound of my own breathing.

There were lights. They sparkled through the leaves at odd intervals when the wind blew them apart. I was running out of forest. I couldn't see the road. Maybe the men were right on my trail. It was like smelling blood that wasn't mine.

The brush line cleared for a moment. It was landscaped now. Familiar again because I had stood here before. In front of me were houses as far as I could see, and they all looked the same.

I was standing in Pam Wyeth's backyard.

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