Title: Bare Bones (4/?)
Category: MSR, Angst, Case-file (sort of)
Rating: PG for adult situations and general nastiness, some bad
language too kiddies.
Archive: Anywhere, just let me know so I can visit
Disclaimer: Not mine. If they were I'd be wearing better shoes.
Spoilers: Its been ended for years – hasn't everyone seen them all?

Mulder woke in darkness

The surface beneath him was hard and his skin stung from exposure to
the salty, sandy earth. Movement filled the blackness with glittering
white stars that swam around him and made his head throb. He knew even
before he put up a hand to palpitate his aching skull that he had been
thoroughly clubbed. Further inspection revealed a tender lump roughly
the size of a golf-ball and he felt the crisp edges of dried blood
around a cut. He was cold and confused and more than a little
frightened.

Mulder lay still, trying not to panic. He didn't know where he was,
nor why and he couldn't organise his thoughts enough to establish what
on earth could have happened. Deep breaths and eventually he managed
to conjure an image of what he had been doing before he came to on a
cold earth floor in darkness. Jogging. He had been jogging. He was
rifling through his sports bag, balanced on the trunk of his car.
Mulder remembered the crunch of a footstep on the gravel behind him,
then...nothing.

Scully. She didn't know where he was. She probably wouldn't even know
he was missing. Mulder couldn't remember why, but he had the vague
idea that something was wrong. He remembered dressing that morning and
slipping out of the door. His stomach flipped itself over and in the
back of his mind a reason hovered. Mulder struggled to remember what
his body was already reacting to, as unease boiled in his stomach.

It rushed back to him with a clarity that took his breath away. He
felt the fine bones of her throat beneath his hands; the overwhelming
urge to crush her like a little bird; met by the rise of his body.
Then all he knew was the way her hot skin smelt and how smooth her
skin was and how good her firm breasts felt in his palms.

"Oh fuck!" he moaned out loud, the words harsh in his dry throat. They
fell dead and flat in the dark, without a trace of an echo and Mulder
wondered for a second whether he was buried underground. Then his
stomach rolled with the thought of what he'd done – what THEY'D done –
wondering whether his partner would even want to find him. If she ever
realised that he was missing – not simply avoiding her. It was all his
own damned fault for running away. Two mornings on the trot he'd been
gone before she woke and now he was missing and she probably didn't
even know. Hell, he didn't even know how long he'd been gone: his
watch wasn't on his wrist and a brief search revealed no gun, no
phone. He could have been out for days.

Mulder dragged himself upright, giving a strained groan as the blood
rushed to his aching head. He squeezed his eyes closed for a second,
pressing with the heels of his hands. He saw red for a second, then
shifted himself onto all fours. Crawling around in the pitch dark made
him dizzy enough to vomit, but Mulder quickly pieced together a floor
plan of the room in which he was enclosed. It was small, perhaps one
meter by two, with cinder-block walls and a seamless dirt floor –
perhaps a room in a root cellar. Shuffling around the room, feeling
the walls, set his heart pounding once more. There was no door. Panic
stifled him in a thick blanket that made it hard to breathe and
brought him out in a sweat. Mulder jumped to his feet praying for a
trap door or a boarded up window, but found nothing. He whimpered and
gasped for air and scrabbled his hands along the featureless walls,
searching for something, anything that might provide him with a way
out. Nothing. His hands were wet and stinging and he knew he was
bleeding. He collapsed to the floor, kneecaps grinding on the
unyielding surface, tears hot on his cheeks and his breath tearing
along his dry throat.

He was bricked in.

He was bricked in and when he was good and dead – probably from
dehydration and starvation, but maybe suffocation – the bastard who
had put him in there would boil his body down to the bones and bury
him out in the desert. Mulder freed one leg from underneath his
slumped body and kicked the wall. Stupid. His toes smarted inside his
soft sneakers. Stupid. He was supposed to be writing the goddamned
profile on this fuckhead. Mulder had known him well enough to test out
a choke-hold on his partner before giving her a thorough seeing
to...Christ! But he was too busy experimenting with ideas on M.O. to
see himself as the perfect final victim, the grand finale, the piece
de resistance! The FBI golden boy, VCU's finest. Any idiot with dialup
could access his personnel file and know his history as a profiler.
The asshole had reeled him right in played him in ways he hadn't even
suspected. It was all so obvious.