Disclaimers, etc. w/ first part.

8/12

(Bill, this...look at him. He hates it here.)

(You can't let the kids decide where we're going to live.)

(He's so solemn, and Samantha starts the third grade next year. I don't think it's good for them.)

(You don't think it's good for you. For god's sakes, Teena -- for once can't you say what you goddamn mean?)

(I'm dying here, and you don't even care --)

Like the slap across her face, that outline of fingers across my sight, all I know and hear. Rain on my face, chill in the air unchanging. Faces pass...I hate you. I hate you, too. I hate all of you. I just want to go to my room and sleep. Can't you give me that at least? Blankets pulled over and my eyes wide open until it hurt to blink they'd been open so long. Right in the next room, oh you'd think they'd be more careful. Fox? Fox? Is mom crying? No, Samantha, go back to sleep. Fox, can I sleep over there with you? No, go back to sleep! And she'd crawl in anyway.

(It'll be good to get away for the summer.)

Martha's Vineyard was sunny and bright and good-smelling, right there close to the water. Samantha ran along the water's edge soaking it up like her entire body was thirsty and parched for it. How much more could she hold before she was too full? Never enough. I sat in the grass. Hell, it's going to follow me everywhere. Fox, are you talking to yourself? No, no, time to move on. Standing in the water, pretending that the sun was melting into a syrup and falling on me. This blackness, this place where no light can get in. This feeling in my chest that something is wrong. It's going to follow me anywhere. Tag, Fox! Tag! You're it! Feet sloshing panicked through the shallow areas of the water. Tag! I ran too slow. I'll never outrun it. I'm always it, always tagged and --

"Mulder?"

Who are they talking to? Even Dad, he was never Mulder. He never had a title. Just Bill. Picked up a ringing phone. Hello, Fox. Is Bill there?

Whose voice is that? I KNOW that voice. Who?

"He's starting to come to. Scully!"

Scully? Oh god. Oh.

I opened my eyes and my head loudly vetoed the decision. Her wide blue eyes were all I could see. "Mulder?"

Moisture that wasn't tears fogged my vision. My mouth was dry. "Are we free to roam the cabin at this altitude?"

Scully pulled her head back. "I think he's alright."

McGrath was bent slightly next to her, almost on one knee. "How did that statement qualify as an All's Well?"

"It didn't," she said firmly. "But it means he's not dead, which is always a good place to start. Either help me or go away."

He opted for the latter, and she rummaged in her pocket. Oh, no...not the penlight. I closed my eyes and grabbed for her wrist. "I'm okay, please. Don't do that. My head hurts already."

She stopped and held one side of my face. "Oh Mulder."

I closed my eyes and let myself be kissed. She tasted like the blueberry muffin in the minibar. I felt her tongue on the tip of mine and her hand seekingly tracing my inseam. My eyes flew open in surprise seconds before they were violated by a small, but harsh, beam of light. First one, and then the other.

"Dirty trick," I protested quietly.

She snapped off the light. "You need to learn to get as good as you give, Mulder. And it's just what I thought...you're dehydrated. You haven't slept, you haven't eaten. This is your first and last warning."

"Warning? For what?"

She leaned over me, hair brushing against my face, arm propping her up on either side. "You are going to go to bed tonight, right after you've had an actual meal, no matter what happens. Anything that's going on between now and then, I can handle it alone for eight hours. And if you don't go to sleep or at least do a damn good job of pretending you are, I'm going to take that to mean you don't think you can trust me, and I'm going to get angry. I don't think you want that."

It was probably a bad time to point out that I could see down her shirt. "Okay. I'll sleep. I'll eat. Fine. Tonight." I stared hard at the hollow under her collarbone and looked away. "Where am I?"

She pulled herself up. "I put you in here on the bed. I couldn't leave you laying in the middle of the crime scene."

My eyes skipped over bookshelves and seemingly anonymous oil paintings. The room remained aloof to my profiling -- there were no keys on the nightstand, no trinkets for any sentimental purpose, no photographs of her family on the chest of drawers. I pushed the alarm button on the clock radio, and there wasn't one set. I guess people on medical leave didn't need a wake-up call. I looked to see if Scully was behind me, and she was studying the spines of books on the shelf. "Is this the guest bedroom?"

"That's what I was wondering," Scully replied absently, choosing a title and letting her fingers flutter through the pages. "But there's make-up on the sink right through that door. Unless she wanted to walk across the house in the morning to use the bathroom, this is where she sleeps. The guest bedroom only has a half-bath."

"Personally, I keep my make-up in the car."

Scully raised her eyes from the pages. "It wouldn't hurt you to have some right now."

I smirked and opened the bathroom door. Even the clutter here of female paraphernalia was subdued, if Scully's bathroom was any basis of comparison. I opened the medicine cabinet, feeling extremely rude. Orange and yellow prescription bottles made a mini-pharmacy behind the mirror. "Scully, come take a look at this."

She walked up behind me and I stepped aside so she could see.

"Oh my god." She put her book down on the sink. "There must be twenty bottles here."

I swallowed. "Are there any in there she'd...that she couldn't be without?"

"What I'm seeing here are painkillers and -- I've counted five kinds of antibiotics. This one here controls blood pressure." Scully held up a box. "This is a finger-prick kit for blood sugar, so she's hypoglycemic...and allergic to bee stings. These are the kinds of tablets you're supposed to take right after you're stung to counteract anaphylactic shock."

"So unless she gets stung by a bee or he force feeds her Snickers bars, she should be fine," I noted wryly.

"If not in a lot of pain. She may have a doctor in her pocket where she works, but still, no one has this many painkillers without a reason."

"Why would she have five kinds of antibiotics?"

"She wouldn't," Scully answered. "But *some* people, when they start to feel better, don't take the rest of the prescription like they're supposed to and leave a third of them sitting in a bottle."

I ducked the scolding. "And the expiration date is always the day the prescription would be finished, right?"

"Approximately."

"Right." I rattled a bottle at her. "But all of these are current."

She took the bottle from me. "That's strange. Five kinds of antibiotics at once?"

I shuffled them around. "There's also no diaphragm or birth control pills."

"None in my medicine cabinet either," she pointed out.

I tilted my head at her sympathetically. "That's what I'm getting at. And I bet her medical records would verify that she doesn't have them because she doesn't need them."

"Mulder, you'd get a news crew into 6th level access at the Pentagon before you'd ever get a copy of this woman's medical records."

"That's what I know, but I also think we're looking at it. It's plausible that someone very sick and in a lot of pain would be this medicated, isn't it?"

"Not by any *ethical* doctor."

"Gamepoint," I said softly.

"There's not even a physician's name on the prescription. Just NeuroMast."

"And we never did figure out why she had to undergo surgery again so recently if she was supposedly cured in 1993."

She took her book off the sinktop. "Things have a way of coming back."

I closed the medicine cabinet, and the mirror confirmed that I looked like shit.

Scully sat on the hope chest at the foot of the bed, reading a different book now. "I guess it's admirable that she has so many medical books. She wanted to know what the doctors were telling her I suppose."

"You don't sound exactly admiring."

"It just seems a little odd."

I chose a book at random, something that looked like it might have more pictures than text. "If I had a disease, I'd want to know everything about it."

"That's the holistic approach, but that's also my point. These aren't the kinds of medical general interest books you can buy at Barnes and Noble. These are...the books a doctor would read. Laymen need not apply."

I'd read one paragraph and already found myself out of my league. "No kidding. Would laymen include doctor-patient liaisons?"

"She got the job because she has a disease, not because she had a degree." Snapping the book closed, she slid it back into an empty slot. "The whole idea of liaisons is still fairly new. Someone who was or is suffering from the disease explains what the doctor is going to do and how the disease is going to advance. Typically, this is done at children's hospitals. I haven't heard of it utilized much with adults. Adults listen to nurses. If all of these books covered neurology, it might make a little more sense."

"So what are you saying?"

She shrugged one shoulder. "Maybe she doesn't stay here alone."

"Or maybe she's educated and doesn't practice," I remarked as a black plastic garbage bag landed at my feet.

Jonson stood in the doorway just for an instant. "Brought you both a change of clothes. McGrath's on his way with dinner."

"Thanks," I said begrudgingly.

Scully opened the bag and pulled out my jeans, t-shirt and Nikes. "It's not standard issue, but it'll do for now." She lifted my jacket out of the way, running her fingers along the blood line there. "I think you should consider this shirt a lost cause. That's never going to come out."

"I was going to set it on fire." I pushed the door closed and locked it, pulling the jacket and shirt away like they were already burning.

There was still this amusing hesitation from her when it came to casually disrobing. If the intent was solely to get naked and heed the call, the gloves were off. Even after the initial, awkward "where *do* I look?" phase passed, undressing just to change still seemed mildly obscene. I'd found it was best to not make teasing comments, though I ended up biting my tongue an inordinate amount of the time.

She unbuttoned her shirt and it fell to the floor. Count the bullet wounds, one, two, three. I bit my lip and yanked my shirt over my head. Temporarily blinded, I jumped back at her cool hand on my stomach.

"Sorry," she murmured. "God, Mulder. Did your ribs always show like that?"

I raised my shirt, suddenly self-conscious. "I don't know. Did they?"

"When did you last eat? Don't lie."

"On the plane."

She raised that eyebrow. "A tiny package of pretzels."

"Two actually. You were asleep so I ate yours."

She pulled her knit top over her bra. "So basically, you're running on a meatball sub and some pretzels. How long has it been since you slept?"

I had no idea, and smiled. "How long was I passed-out just now?"

"Unconsciousness doesn't count."

"Then it's been about...Dammit, Scully. I don't know."

She zipped up her jeans, checked that I was decent, and padded out of the room in her bare feet, very short without her high heels. She walked back in with a glass of water as my cell phone rang.

"I'll answer it. Drink that."

"Yes, doctor," I said sullenly, raising the glass.

She picked my jacket up off the floor and found my phone. "Hello?" Straightening suddenly, she answered, "Yes."

Shit, I thought. It's Kersh.

"Yes," she answered again, impatient now. "Yes, when? Why didn't you call us then?...What flight? Hold on." She gestured for a pen and paper, and the third drawer I pulled open yielded both.

She scrawled a number. "Who was with him? He was?" Her eyes locked with mine, inscrutable. "Connecting flights? What flight? I need times! Can you call them now and tell them to detain him when we get there? Yes, I have the authority. Thank you."

The word detain sat in my mind like a poison. I went bottoms-up on the glass of water, wishing it was something much stronger. "He's here, isn't he?"

"He was," she said, pushing the end button angrily. "He passed through security twenty minutes ago."

"Twenty minutes ago? And they're just now calling? They didn't stop him?"

"Airport police only handed them the faxed composite five minutes ago." She laced up her shoes. "Welcome to Nebraska."

"Suprisingly lax domestic terrorism procedure for a state not that far south of Montana. What gate? Where was he headed?"

"Gate A14, Northwest Airlines. His pre-booked flight for Minot, North Dakota had just announced last call for boarding when security passed him through. The airport police handed them the faxed composite and the woman recognized him. By then his flight had already taken off." She put the piece of paper down, and her hand interrupted the very beginning of my frenzy like a punch. "Mulder...he was alone."

I stopped. "Alone?"

"She wasn't with him. Security said he came through by himself."

"Then where was she?"

She only shook her head slowly. "I don't know."

"We have to go Scully. What's in North Dakota? Where's Minot?" I pulled my laces too tight and didn't care. Pain was all that was keeping me awake now.

"My atlas is at the hotel in my suitcase. When's the last time we were --?" Her voice trailed off and she shook me with a stare. "Terma."

Oh god. That silo. Room upon rooms, impenetrable to illumination with our search and rescue flashlights, moonlight spilling in through the perforated steel like a similated midnight sky. "How close is that to Minot?"

"I'm not sure. But it may be the only major airport nearby."

I felt like Pam Wyeth's Louisville Slugger might've done me some good right then, knocked some of my brains back in order. "Okay, you head down to the airport and book us a flight out. If there's not another one there, book us anywhere in North Dakota and we can organize the mess later. McGrath and I will be in the Jeep right behind you."

"They can go in the Jeep and we can go in the car together."

"I want to take a quick run-through of the airport's cargo distribution. I'll need him with me, if only to watch my back."

"You honestly think he just tied her up and left her in the airport somewhere?"

I knew that look. "He may be waiting on someone to pick her up. Consider it the holistic approach, Scully."

"Well, you consider apologizing to McGrath for overreacting in there."

McGrath stood in the door defensively. "What about me?"

I turned around and shut up abruptly. "Tell Jonson to get in the car and wait for Scully. We're going to the airport."

Scully struggled back into her jacket. "They're supposed to head him off for us in Minot. Hopefully we can catch the next flight there and not have to rent another car."

Jonson already had the keys in hand. "They found the sonovabitch?"

No thanks to either of you, I muttered to myself, and Scully stopped the words with a cautioning look. Allegations of negligence, true or imagined, weren't going to solve anything.

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