by Justin Glasser
Disclaimers and Acknowledgments in section 00/10
*****
When I woke up she was gone.
*****
Somewhere in the Antarctic
Day Four
0900 hours
When they came to get her, she didn't fight them.
They didn't say anything to her, just pushed open the door silently and stood there, hands folded behind their backs, legs slightly spread. At ease. A posture Scully knew intimately from life in a military family. These kids weren't medical personnel, even though they wore green medical scrubs. They had probably been drafted into orderly service by their gruff C.O., a commandeering stern fatherly figure like her own.
She almost smiled at them, at their young inscrutable faces, despite the fact that she suspected each of them had a neat revolver tucked in the waistband of his pants. Instead, she slid out of bed, tugged her robe on over her sweats, and padded toward the door, leaving Mulder asleep in his chair, a bad guard dog.
She went without waking him, because she wanted to, because she was tired of not knowing what had happened to her. Because this was the only way she was likely to get some answers. Because she was bored.
They put her in a wheelchair, although she told them she was well enough to walk, and wheeled her through a series of halls so complex and vast that she was lost within minutes. Each hallway she was turned down looked exactly like every other. There were no markings of any kind that she could see. One of the orderlies, the one who seemed younger, an academy boy, pushed in absolute silence. Ghosts with guns.
When they pushed her through the stainless steel doors into the lab, she felt a surge of relief and familiarity, comfortable for the first time since eternity. They wheeled her past the waist high tables and over their glossy edges she could glimpse the microscopes and charts, the slides and lab books. Centrifuges lined one wall, the gel boxes were stacked neatly against another. Lab technicians bent over dishes, microscopes, microfuges, hypnotised by the somnolent hum of the refrigerators, murmuring back and forth to one another. They didn't look up as she was wheeled past, but their indifference did not trouble her. They were scientists, people she could understand.
The orderlies pushed her into a room at the back, a converted office, judging from the cheap metal desk and the bookshelf. She knew that normal protocol dictated that samples be taken outside the lab, but she also knew that she and Mulder were not at a medical facility. They were in a military research compound, a facility that was doing its best to accommodate the two stray federal employees who had stumbled into their hands. Nothing could make that more clear than the fact that she was wearing the underpants of a man named Bauer, a man who was probably one of the low guys on the totem pole, and was definitely one of the shorter ones. It was a relief, though, to be brought to the lab to give samples: Mulder already knew enough about her--he didn�t need to watch her pee in a cup, too.
The blinds on the large glass office window were lowered, but through the window in the door she could see the orderlies talking to a thin man in a white coat--the doctor, she imagined. When he turned to enter, she could see that he wore a surgical mask, and glasses with heavy black frames. She had the feeling she wouldn't be able to pick him out again if her were the only man in the room. She suspected that was the point.
"Dr. Scully," he said as he entered, and she heard the metallic buzz of a voice masker.
"I don't think we've been introduced," she said, standing and holding out her hand.
The doctor looked at her, twisting one of the fingers of his latex glove.
"You are?" she tried again, re-extending her hand.
He took a step back. His eyes behind the distorting lenses of his glasses were wide and blank.
�Look,� she said. �I�m sure that what you do here is very important and also very classified. I know that my partner and I aren't supposed to be here, and that you�re trying to limit our exposure to what is probably very sensitive information, but I don�t think your name is too much to ask, do you?� She smiled.
The doctor�s swallow was audible in the small room.
"Perhaps we should just get on with the tests, Dr. Scully," he said, finally, turning to pick up the chart on the desk.
"Perhaps," she murmured under her breath.
He waved her toward the scale in the corner of the room and began putting her through her paces. She complied with the tests, the weighing and measuring, the salve for windburn, the blood drawing, the cell scrapings from the inside of her mouth, the lights shined in her eyes, nose, and ears. The doctor did not speak except to tell her where to stand or to open her mouth wider.
And when the doctor left the room to allow her to give her urine sample, Scully snuck a look at her chart.
*****
I must have been in the doorway a micro-second after the orderly left. Scully was sitting on the edge of her bed, her legs dangling over the side. She wore a white robe over her sweats and thick socks. She looked like a commercial for tea, only she wore the puzzled and concerned expression she used during a case, when she was piecing the puzzle together.
"May I come in?" I asked, and she didn't look at me, but just nodded, brushing her hair back out of her face.
"Are you okay?" It seemed like the only question I ever asked anymore.
She nodded again, finally glancing up. She gestured at me, patting the bed beside her. When I sat down she leaned in close, her voice hardly a whisper.
"They gave me some tests, Mulder," she said, and I felt my heart drop. It couldn't be the cancer again, it couldn't be. I had fixed that, hadn't I? I had paid my debt.
"And?" I said.
"While they were talking I saw my chart. There's something odd about it."
"Are you okay?" I asked again.
"What do you know about the makeup of the blood, Mulder?"
"High school biology was a long time ago," I answered, wondering if there was such a thing as blood cancer. Shit.
Leukemia.
But Scully was already talking. "The blood is made up of several different kinds of cells, Mulder-- lymphocytes, granulocytes, mast cells, macrophages. Any histologist could tell them apart just by looking at them. According to my chart they took blood when I got here and once on the second day--"
Her slight and accusing glance swept over me like a breeze. I opened my mouth to offer some sort of excuse for standing by while the orderly drew blood, but she had already moved on.
"--and have been counting my cells. If I had some sort of infection it would show up in variations of those numbers.
"My count's were all normal as far as that went. But Mulder . . . "
I saw her throat work as she swallowed.
"There's an extra line on my chart. Mulder, over eight percent of my blood cells fit into a category labelled 'X-cells.'"
"I knew it was in your blood, " I murmured, but she refused to be dissuaded. I squeezed my fingers together in my lap.
"Eight percent is a lot, Mulder. Too much for an unknown quantity."
"What does it mean, Scully?"
She shook her head. "I don't know. It could be some kind of code, something they're testing for but don't want to explain. Or it could be some aspect of research that I'm not aware of, but that doesn't seem likely. We've been studying the immune system for years. We know all there is to know about blood components, even if we don't always know what they do."
"What if it's something new?"
Her eyes met mine. "What do you mean?"
"What if something happened to you while you were . . . " I groped for words to describe it. "What if they did something to you?"
Scully paled. I put my hand on her knee, and kept my mouth shut. I'd said enough already.
"That's possible, Mulder. As of yet, I have no way of knowing what effects my abduction has had on my physical well-being."
I didn't say anything. She'd resorted to the medical voice, which meant that she wasn't about to discuss it. I rubbed her knee through the thick terry and thought about how long it'd been since I'd seen her in clothes, her clothes. It dawned on me that I missed her in clothes, in those fitted suits she wore to meetings, and the high heels designed to make her look taller, and the t-shirts and jeans she put on for the field work we'd been doing in Dallas. She didn't seem like herself in the robes and sweats they'd put us in.
"There's no point in worrying about it now, Mulder," she said. "I couldn't do anything even if I did know what they're looking for."
"So we'll just put our faith in the government to do right by us, hmm?" I asked, slinging my arm around her shoulders.
She laughed, which was my intention, and leaned into my loose embrace. I kissed her on the head, right where her hair parts. Right where I always kissed her. Almost always. For a moment we forgot all that we had been through, all that we had yet to endure once we got back home, and just sat there, together. In that second I think we were both convinced that we were going to be fine.
I should have known better.
*****end 3/10*****
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