By Amanda Finch
[email protected]

Disclaimers, etc. w/ first part.

12:34 AM

Common sense and instinct. For me, no two catalysts had ever been more
disparate, especially where driving was concerned. At one point on the
expressway, I pushed the gas to the floor and realized that I'd buried the
needle at least ten miles and three possible speed traps before. I let the
common sense win out, for now, thinking of the unofficial obituary. (Could've
saved his partner; wrapped his damn car around an exit ramp sign instead.) My
foot felt heavy on the pedal though, and the stress lied in not hurtling
forward.

(Breathe.)

I ignored my own advice.

(It's as good a time as any.)

Yeah, what was good about it? For days and days, Scully and I had
choreographed our lives to only exist in clips and phrases. Yet, here I was
berating myself about the unposed questions, about all the words I tried to
say to her that were choked out by either pride or doubt.

I deserved to have my psychology credentials revoked.

(Scully - )

I took a deep breath, wondering by what sick twist of coincidence it was that
these utterances had become so private. They bobbed to the surface when they
were the least damaging: when she was gone, when she was dying. But if she
came back, if life started creeping back... there they went, submerged. This
could *not* keep happening. Even as I thought this with such conviction, I
wasn't sure I would drop the show of strength if I saw her again.

*When* I saw her again, as Maggie Scully would insist.

Oh, yes. Because optimism had served me *so* well thus far.

Did she resent me for this life? For the turns it had taken? I'd steered
towards them without telling her (yet *another* set of lapsed promises). I
put a bullet in a man's head, and after that night -

She never mentioned it again.

Not typical after-dinner repartee, but the opportunities had been there,
noted, and passed up. God forbid I should kill the mood that was flatlining
anyway, even when the hunt for Krycek in Sheehan somehow alleviated the
tension. Don't ask me how.

I glanced across the car. It didn't matter if she was angry, if she hated me,
if she never wanted to see me again. A gun to Krycek's head would be nice, of
course, but just finding her, salvaging *something* from this botched year.

(I love her.)

My hands tightened on the steering wheel. Such things failed to be considered
as candor in my mind. If my mother said "I love you," it always meant she was
going to leave for weeks at a time to stay with her sister. If my father said
it -

Well, he never had. Maybe that was the point.

(If you're done making excuses - )

I put myself in check. The exit for Salisbury was seven more miles.

Common sense lost the battle.

x

Methodist West
1:28 AM

The hospital was a sprawling mess. The different wings and specialized
centers of it covered several cross streets, as if it had developed slowly
and overtaken the buildings around it as progress was made. A five-story
complex of research labs here, the same-day surgery building there.

She was here, somewhere. I parked in front of the building with the most
floodlights and the vaguest sign.

There was something spectacularly depressing about hospitals at night.
Granted, they didn't purport to be cheerful. A skeleton of a night crew had
learned how to walk and talk softly among the sleeping. My footfalls sounded
inconsiderately loud in the foyer. I didn't slow down. If they pulled the
nonchalantly unhelpful bullshit that seemed to befall most night crews I'd
encountered, they were going to find that established tranquility largely
jeopardized.

Maybe it showed. The man in his white coat and scrubs, too young to be more
than a resident, glanced up from the chart in his hands. The tag around his
neck said he was R. Matthews. And he closed the file, instantly at attention.

Looking like shit had definite advantages.

"Sir?"

I focused my eyes ahead of me, frozen with my hand fumbling inside my jacket.
So much for the added influence of the badge. I dropped my arm to my side. "I
received a call a few hours ago about a Jane Doe brought here yesterday."

"A Jane Doe?" He furrowed his brow, absently striking keys on the computer
terminal in front of him. "Two John Does, but - "

"This is a woman. Caucasian, red hair, blue eyes, five-feet-two. Brought in
unconscious." I realized that the snapping I heard was my own fist, rudely
rapid-fire against the front of the desk. Balling my fingers into a tighter
knot, I fought the still-puzzled expression on his face. "There was a problem
with the paramedic who signed off on her - "

His face cleared suddenly. "Who called you?"

"Someone who thought I might be able to identify her."

"When?"

I searched his face for suspicion, but found none. "A few hours ago, like I
said."

"Oh. Oh hell." Backing away a little, he teetered on his heels. His eyes
swept the expanse of hallways behind me. "She - Sir, she went into
respiratory shock about half an hour ago - "

"Where?" I spun madly, waiting for a direction.

" - couldn't revive her."

(No No No NO! NO!)

My fist came down hard, pushing folders down into the chair, onto the floor.
Papers spilled out. "No! I asked you where she was!"

"She's - " I followed his finger over my shoulder, staring back, panicked.
His face matched the pulse rapping against my ribcage, his shock blandly
trained. I knew the pose. The gun was bared at my side, and he took another
step back. "The morgue... two floors down on this hall."

Morgue. I was waiting for myself to run.

Incognizant, I raised my hand to my mouth, as if stopping the sound that
would come out. But I didn't make a sound, didn't move a muscle. My eyes
wouldn't close, but I wanted them to, just for a temporary reprieve from the
sterile walls and poached air.

From the beginning, I'd only remembered her the way I wanted. Even when I
closed my eyes and imagined her hurting, she still contained the vigor of
life. But in the nightmares -

In those, she was as dead as these hallways.

I couldn't see her that way. My brain was always too reliant on cause and
effect. I would never remember her alive without following the memory to its
final conclusion each and every time.

In each memory, she would die. Over and over again.

Dr. Matthews spoke. The audio had gone out. His face was uneasy through the
trained calm. I knew the tone from similar FBI training, but had never
*really* known just how desperate the bland, soothing voice could sound. Like
negotiating someone off a ledge, like knowing which wire to sever.

I thought back to December, of sitting outside that emergency room. Each time
that long, high-pitched whir had reached inside, found no heartbeat, and
screamed for everyone to stand and deliver, I sat there and absorbed that
terror. I'd heard it then, three times. Only once had it alarmed for her, but
it happened all three times for me.

(And you kept her beside you, even though you *knew*... you motherfucker. YOU
KNEW THIS WOULD HAPPEN.)

The flatline might as well have gone on forever. I took her out of that
hospital, to get her well, to get her standing.

So she could die.

My throat constricted around what threatened to be a penetrating howl in my
chest. All I heard was my own heart, convulsing as every nerve siphoned its
efforts.

(I don't *deserve* to remember her alive.)

I hung my head. I told him I wanted to see. Every step intimated the
opposite.

(You keep your eyes fucking peeled.)

(You remember *everything* about this day. Every minute detail, sound,
sensation. Breathe deep, remember this smell. Get your hands out of your
pockets and touch her hand and KNOW)

I felt the first sob build in the center of my chest. No.

(and KNOW that you will never again engage joy. Not in this lifetime. Not in
the next. You profile yourself like her killer and you die crying - )

The elevator doors whined open, and the long harshly-lit hallway waited.

( - because today is the day.)

Matthews turned in the hall. I was still standing in the elevator. "Sir?"

I simply stood there.

"Sir?" He had me by the arm. "Isn't it possible that the woman you came here
to identify isn't the one in the drawer?"

How could I explain to him that the moment that when the call came, I'd felt
something like *certainty*? Even before that, I'd lost the connection. The
day felt inevitable, and what had happened to her was inevitable.

(Walk.)

Whatever line I had on sanity, frayed and worn since days before, I let snap
in two as I walked in.

The fluorescent lights came on, section by section, gleaming dully on the
bays and drawers. At once, the thickly cold air had worked its way through my
clothes, seeping into my skin.

He found the drawer, and hesitated. "Are you ready?"

"No," I said coldly. "But you'd better open it."

I forced my eyes to stay open. That small figure under the cloth, with the
red hair brushed back from the blue-white forehead -

(Oh god god god god god I can't do this I can't do it I can't - )

He pulled the sheet away from her face and -

I half-stumbled backwards.

It wasn't her.

The doctor stared hard at my face, trying to get some kind of reading on what
in the hell had just happened, when the fax machine in the corner sprang to
life, ringing in an incoming message.

"It's not her," I said angrily. For all the trouble that had been taken, the
proportions were right. A red, scabbed corner of the missing skin was exposed
from the side of the thigh. The eyes were frozen open, blue and glassy as
they could be. The kind of things that set her apart from Scully - the wide
mouth, the close-set eyes - wouldn't have made it onto an official police
description. But I knew what I was looking at, after years of finding bodies
dumped at the side of the highway, left for dead in basements, buried in
shallow graves on the outskirts of picturesque towns. Fetish killers, when
they couldn't find their ideal victim, *made* their ideal victim. They dyed
the hair, they painted the nails, they put the girl in their mother's dress...

Or they cut hair that had probably been thick, long and blonde into a short
bob, dying it a harsh red.

"You're going to want to call the police back here," I said shakily. "The
description they released isn't accurate - "

Preoccupied, he pulled the papers off the fax machine, nervously shuffling
through them. I knew this feeling, too: the dread and the anxious energy that
one built up to cushion themselves when the bad news hit.

But it wasn't Scully, just the love of someone else's life laying there. I
pulled the sheet back over, wincing at her sudden indecency.

Indecency that was nothing but a mock-up for a hoax designed to get me here,
to get *me* at attention. Repulsed, empty now, I shook my head, glancing at
Dr. Matthews as he stood there. He'd shuffled that fax too many times now.

Something was wrong.

"What in the *fuck* is going on here?" His voice quavered in time with his
hands, and he censored the action quickly. "This is some sick joke, isn't it?
This is the same name that the bogus paramedic put on the books when he
brought her in." Flipping them over and back, he gave a sharp, unsettled
laugh. "I can't even tell where they came from!"

I took the papers from his hands. There were five, all addressed to me along
the top edge of the page. Each one only contained a single word, set in the
center of the white page, all capital letters...

THIS

IS

JUST

A

REHEARSAL.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

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