by Justin Glasser
Somewhere in the Antarctic
Day Five
2004 hours
For a long time all she did was sit there next to the tub, her fingers trailing in the water near Mulder's hand while he twitched and whimpered and moaned. It was like watching his worst nightmare, and she hated it because she knew that she couldn't wake him. Whatever tortured Mulder at this moment in his subconscious was a million times better then the hell that awaited him when he woke.
She had been kidding when she mentioned the Budahaas case, but now she recalled that case, the first one, the first time. Mulder has staggered, dazed and groggy, to the car, and she had felt something rough and fierce well up inside her. She didn't know what it was, but she knew that someone had hurt her partner and that they would have to pay. After awhile that feeling had gone--the revenge part anyway. Looking at him now, his mouth open, the bruise on his neck where the needle struck, the thin trembling and shaking of his torso with every breath, she still felt the protectiveness running rampant through her.
If they came back, someone was going to die.
****
Somewhere in the Antarctic
Day Six
0023 hours
�Tell me what you saw, Scully.�
�Mulder, do we have to do this now? How do you feel?�
I felt hollowed and charred, like someone ran butane through me and struck a match, but she was using that as an excuse. I shrugged her hand off of my forehead.
�I feel like shit. Just answer the question.�
She sighed, leaning back against the toilet. Her hair stuck up in strange shapes and her hands were pruny and pale from waterlogging. She looked almost as bad as I felt.
�Do you need more water?� She reached for the faucet, but I caught her hand in one of mine.
�What I need is for you to answer my question, Scully.�
She sat back again, closing her eyes. �You don�t want to hear this, Mulder, but I didn�t see anything.�
She held her hand up to silence me before my protest even formed in my throat.
�I know you don�t want to hear it, Mulder, but I don�t remember half of what happened to me. I was sick, Mulder. I was unconscious or in shock for most of it. I didn�t see anything.�
�What about on the ice, Scully?�
She sighed. �I felt something. We were thrown free of the cave-in by something, but I don�t know what.�
�What about afterwards?�
�Afterwards?�
�After we fell.�
�I only saw you. How�s the pain?�
Now it was my turn to sigh, craning my head back against the cool tiles. My whole body hurt with the dull muscle ache of someone who had worked too hard and too long, and once in a while there would be a flash of pain, frightening in its unpredictability and in its echo of the fire that had been in my veins only hours earlier.
�It�s okay.�
�You want to try getting out of the tub?�
�What�d you have in mind?� I asked, raising my eyebrows at her. I felt like I had been run over by a dump truck, but I still remembered the bliss of having Scully in my arms, and I still knew that I was wearing only a towel. Thank god the water was cool.
She just looked at me.
�You really didn�t see anything?� I asked, lurching to my knees behind the dry towel she was holding up. Her head was averted. Scully has a fine sense of propriety for a doctor.
�Mulder,� she sighed, looking up at me only after I took the towel from her and wrapped it around my waist. �I didn�t see anything.� She was still kneeling in front of the tub and I wavered over her, dizzy and awkward. I felt like a monument she was bowed before. �I didn�t have to see anything,� she said, before I could make a bad sexual joke. �I felt it.�
My knees buckled, suddenly, probably from the injection.
*****
�I see that Mr. Mulder seems to be recovering nicely.�
The voice startled Neill out of his doze. He had been dreaming that Agent Scully'd tied him down and injected him with her blood, laughing while he screamed. He wasn't sure if the dream was worse than this.
�Sleeping on the job, Captain Neill,� Smith said, smiling around his cigarette.
�I�m sorry sir. I was supposed to be relieved three hours ago.� Not that it mattered. He would be relieved soon enough, he supposed.
�You�ll be relieved when I say you�re relieved, Captain Neill.�
�Yes, sir,� Neill said, sitting up straight.
�He�s about ready for another test, wouldn�t you say?� Smith pointed at the screen with the butt of his cigarette. On it, Mulder slept.
�Sir, I thought we wanted Mulder alive.�
Smith pinned him with those cold snake eyes. �Who said we didn�t?�
Neill looked back to the screen. Mulder on the bed, Scully in the chair. It had been for nothing, then. His stupid little adventure to reclaim a piece of his own initiative had resulted in nothing.
He sighed.
�Another test, sir, would probably kill him.�
�Mr. Mulder won�t die, Captain Neill. I�ll see to that.�
�Another test, sir--�
�Captain Neill, you should concern yourself with your reports, not your subjects. Leave Agent Mulder�s welfare to me.�
�You�re not releasing them.�
Smith looked at him and took a drag on his cigarette, letting the smoke plume and swirl around Neill�s face.
�That shouldn�t concern you, Captain. Not if you want another assignment.�
Neill understood. He understood completely.
*****
She helped him into the other room, half dragging him toward the bed. His legs shook and trembled, but he kept saying he felt fine, so she kept moving forward. She knew from experience that if someone insisted they were fine, you had to treat them like they were.
He managed to crawl back up onto the bed himself, sliding under the covers and pulling the towel out from beneath them like magician pulling a tablecloth from beneath a full table. �Care to join me,� he asked.
She did, but that wasn�t the most important thing now (and if she were being honest with herself it was almost never the most important thing). She sat on the edge of the bed, instead, and put her hand on his arm.
�You need to rest,� she murmured. �You need to recover as much as possible.�
�What can we do, Scully?� he whispered back, catching her mood.
She shrugged. Then she pulled the paper out of the drawer and began to write.
*****
He was impressed by her ingenuity.
He sat, bent over, head in his hands, staring at the screen in front of him, watching as Mulder struggled into the bed, as Scully began to write, and admired her. She knew they were being watched and recorded, she knew that the door was locked and there was no possible way out, she knew that her partner was at risk for his life and she was still trying to resist them. She was what Neill�s long dead mother would have called a �stone cold bitch� and would have meant as a compliment. That idiot Mulder wouldn�t even be alive if it wasn�t for her.
Neill shook his head. The only thing that saved Mulder from being a pathetic asshole in his opinion was the fact that he had traveled to the end of the earth to get her back. At least he recognized what he had, even if he didn�t deserve it.
He didn't deserve it. Mulder didn't deserve the devotion and loyalty and strength that woman showed him every single minute, but he had it.
Neill sighed. Not for long, he thought.
Mulder was a trial subject, he would last another couple of days, maybe a week and then . . . well, he might live, if Smith took him out of the trials as he had suggested he would. But they would certainly be separated in the next day or two, and Mulder would go to the lab and Scully . . .
What would happen to Scully?
Neill looked up, at the screens, at the top of her head, at her profile, at Agent Scully, who was *not* a trial subject, who was *not* the particular pet of a certain man-in-charge-named-Smith, who would *not* be kept around for fun and games after Agent Mulder was subdued . . .
Then he got up out of his chair, and walked out of the office.
*****
That man said if you were injected again, you would die she wrote.
I nodded. She had told me about the man while I was soaking in the tub, weeping a little from the pain. Someone here had come in and told her what they did to me, what they were planning on doing.
We can�t let that happen. Her penmanship was as neat and precise as it was on the notes she left herself in our office. �Call Mom,� those notes said, or �don�t forget to pick up dry cleaning.� It was reassuring to see that penmanship here, on these notes of my impending doom.
I took the pencil from her and made a single question mark. My hand was still shaking slightly, nerves trembling.
She shrugged again.
I wanted to kiss her then. �Let me worry about it.�
How typical. How absolutely fucking *Scully.* I
remembered that stupid Tom Cruise movie, the one
about the Marines with Jack Nicholson and Demi
Moore in it, which I had considered a total waste of a
body like Moore�s. They might as well have gotten
an *actress* for the part that she played. When
Scully said that to me, wrote that to me, I
remembered what the Demi Moore character had
said when Tom Cruise asked her why she liked their
clients. �Because they stand up there and say
�nothing�s going to hurt you, not on my watch,�� was
her answer. That�s what Scully was saying to me,
and I loved her for it. Get me a boob job and marry
me to Bruce Willis.
�Scully, you ever seen that Tom Cruise movie with
Jack Nicholson in it, and Demi Moore?� I asked. I
lay back and closed my eyes.
�Get some sleep, Mulder,� she said, patting my arm.
�Sure you won�t join me,� I asked again, wondering
how Scully would feel against my raw and naked
skin.
She just stroked my arm again.
A while later, when I was in the borderlands between
sleep and awareness, I heard her get up and flush
our paper conversation down the toilet. After that I
don�t remember much for a long while.
*****
J. Edgar Hoover Building
When he returned to his desk after lunch, Assistant
Director Walter Skinner found a single yellow piece
of paper in the center of his dark green blotter. He
picked it up and read it, pulled his glasses off, rubbed
his fingers into his eyes, shoved his glasses back on
and read it again. Then he stood up from his desk
and strode for the office door, shouting for Kimberly,
his assistant.
The paper stayed behind, placid and open on the
desktop. "Mulder Scully alive STOP" it read. "South
79.oo lat East 61.oo long 290 feet STOP Relocation
imminent STOP"
*****end 8/10*****
Washington D.C.
