TITLE: Insight - Past Tense RATING: R (language) CLASSIFICATION: X A DATE: June 2004 SPOILERS: Starts during FaD and takes a new direction ARCHIVE: Gossamer, Ephemeral - yes. Others please ask. AUTHOR: jowrites - joannhere@gmail.com LEGALLY: Legally these characters belong to some combination of 1013, Chris Carter and Fox. SUMMARY: Suppose Scully had arrived at the hospital two minutes later in Folie a Deux. The Insight series starts during Folie a Deux and takes a sharp detour. It's at: http://www.cbcasa.com/apb.htm This is a trip into the past, effectively a "missing scene" from the very beginning of the Insight timeline. With grateful thanks to Sana, Ann and Kel for beta reading, medical advice and general words of encouragement. The mistakes, as always, are mine. Joann ======= The bed was a prison and Mulder was like any other prisoner, dependent on the whims and good nature of strangers for survival. It hurt that she'd left him here. It stung that, face to face with a monster, Skinner had chosen to take down an ally. Really, he'd always known that he was alone. Despite Scully's love and Skinner's care, the penalty for not seeing the world their way was always going to be the same. Banishment. Yet, despite the carefully nurtured cynicism, it was still the slow burn of optimism that was in control of Fox Mulder. Scully would come through for him. She would repeat the autopsy and take the evidence to Skinner. He would call the hospital and tell them that there had been a mistake. The nurse would come in here, unfasten the restraints, and give him back his clothes. And it would all happen before Pincus showed up and either killed him or did something worse. But the nurse wasn't releasing him; she was tightening the straps. "What are you doing?" Stupid question. Mulder knew exactly what she was doing. She was opening the window, offering him to the thing outside. Yet he kept hoping - even as the shape returned. Kept shouting - certain that it couldn't end here. Scully would come. Reason failed as the creature entered. Choking on panic as his body convulsed against the restraints. Fear sweat dripping into his eyes. Too late now. It was on him, hot breaths licking at his ears, smelling of something slimy and green. Hairs on its wings, on its legs - fluttering, tickling, terrifying. He squirmed under its touch. Felt death as it jammed one hairy fist in his mouth to shut him up. Felt dead as it jabbed something sharp and sticky into his neck. He closed his eyes and tried not to breathe. A momentary prayer, that he was insane and that this was a hallucination, made him gag. The only way out was death. The thunder was a surprise. He opened his eyes in time to see the thing force an angry claw into his savior's stomach. Saw her gun skim across the floor. She'd come, and now the thing was ripping her apart. Got to get to Scully. Couldn't get anywhere. The restraints? Not even that. Attempted analysis in the middle of the panic. He couldn't move. Couldn't open his mouth wide enough to add his voice to her screams. A nurse entered, her cries more powerful in shock than Scully's were in pain. The thing ran, dived for the window and vanished into the night. "Sc..." He'd always hoped that his last words would be more impressive than that. Always been confident that Scully would live to fill in the blanks. Blood pooling under her body and this was all so wrong. Why had she come back? Another minute and it would have been over. Or not. The old nightmare of Pincus - the idea that the end might not be the end. The new nightmare was the body bleeding out before his eyes. And there wasn't a damned thing he could do about it. More people came. He'd always thought, assumed maybe, that death would be the end. Despite what the X-Files told him. He'd always hoped that death was a place where the universe took back the life, the memories, the ingredients, and made them into something new. He certainly didn't expect that, through eyes already dead, he would have to watch Dana Scully die. Had to watch, if only because he couldn't close his eyes. A voice demanded crash carts and gurneys and another wondered how the hell a man in restraints could have attacked the woman and someone said something about open windows, and Mulder wished they'd all shut the fuck up and get on with the business of saving his partner's life. He heard her cry as they lifted her onto the gurney. The surge of pain seemed to give her strength because she was shouting now. Screaming to get her point across. Ignoring her injuries to argue the case for his. "Help him." "What? Check him!" And suddenly his head was being pulled back and lights were shining and then his eyelids slid closed. "He's not breathing," said a woman's voice. A roomful of people but the only thing that seemed real was Scully. "He's alive. Look for neurotoxins. Get him on life support. It's suppressing his breathing." Suppressing! Aw, Scully - you always did like to play it cool. Of course, he couldn't say it. All he could do was listen as she repeated her complaints, ignoring their attempts to silence her by announcing herself as Doctor and Agent, and sounding so fucking smart that it made him feel like crying. A man's voice. "Bag him." A sickening, gagging noise and Scully's words were lost in the sound of choking suffocation. Another voice barked orders. "People - let's move. Operating room. Call them on the way. Now!" Something closed over his mouth and things pressed, prodded and pulled at his body. Felt seasick as his head rocked against the sudden motion. A wild fluttering in his chest as the air rushed into his lungs. Mulder heard the rumble of unsteady wheels as they took her away. Scully's last words, and they'd been for him. Trying to save him, even though he was dead. "What we got?" queried the man. A woman replied. "No pulse." "How long's he been out?" "Don't know. I only heard the woman. V-fib?" A brief sigh from the man standing over him, and a slight hesitation before he replied. "Yeah. Shock at a hundred joules. Clear. Everyone - get clear!" The paddles on his chest were cold he realized, surprised that he could feel anything. The explosion of pain that followed made him wish that he couldn't. "What's he in for anyway? Head case, right? Were they giving him anything? OK, we go again. Two hundred joules. Clear." This time his body had mercy on him, and the world disappeared. ------ He sensed that they'd removed the straps, but couldn't test the theory. So many voices. Not Scully's though. Not anymore. He could see her life dripping away, heard her arguing with death, remembered the choking sound as she drowned in her own blood. No. She couldn't have died. Can't die in a hospital, Scully. Hysterical laughter ricocheted through his head at the insanity of the thought. No. Insane or not, Scully couldn't die. Was she here now? Wherever here was. The voices sounded angry. He tried to turn towards them, but couldn't. Tried to open his eyes, but failed. Lost himself in a babble of noise that had no meaning until bells rang and sirens screamed. "Don't fight it," said a soothing voice and something swept him down the rabbit hole again. When he woke up there were more of them. Angry, demanding, hating. All talking at once and far too loud. Laughter mocked his efforts to understand. If he could open his eyes, then he would know. Why wouldn't they open? What if they were already open? What if he couldn't see because there was nothing to see? Buried? They thought he was dead. They'd have buried him alive. Too much Edgar Allen Poe, not enough detective - he chided his imagination for taking a legitimate question and feeding him a horror movie. No. Not buried. Too much noise and not enough dark. A flutter of light and shade, not solid black. Blind? The voices made no sense. He tried to tune them out, looked for the one that would explain it all, even though she would tell him things that he didn't want to hear. "There’s only my hope that you’ll be able to see past this delusion." But she didn't come and the others became more insistent, until finally he admitted that it was not just the background noise of some overstretched Psychiatric Ward. Nor of TV sets played too loud, nor of a room too close to a busy lobby, nor any of the 101 other rational suggestions he'd come up with to explain it away. They were talking to him and they were angry. He forced himself to listen, tried to lock onto individual voices, identify particular words. Ugly, taunting, terrifying words. What had happened to him? Where the hell was he? He recognized John Barnett, not from the words but from the laughter. "Isn't this cozy?" Barnett chuckled, hideous and insane, an echo of deaths from years before. "Funerals for Fox's friends, then for Fox. Seems like we managed to skip your funeral, Fox." Fever dreams, he told himself. Good skeptic that he was, when it suited his purposes. It was hard to maintain the skeptical front, found it replaced by panic as he started to identify the others. Unpleasantly familiar and just as impossible as Barnett, but even harder to rationalize away. Barnett had died five years before, on an operating table surrounded by mystery men in dark suits, which might mean there was an element of doubt. But Mulder's bullet had splattered John Lee Roche's brains across a bus window, and there wasn't a miracle cure for that. The murdering bastard was dead. As was Gerry Schnauz. The list grew until Mulder stopped looking, terrified of what he might find. Unable to fight, his mind turned inwards. He dissected the events into easily manageable bites, slashing away the bias and emotion as he went. He'd always lived as much in his head as in the world and he'd always confronted new situations the same way. Research and preparation; investigation and imagination; hypothesis and experimentation. He would do the same now. Rationalizing the nightmares into a new reality by accounting for all the evidence, Dante met Bosch and swirled in Jung and Blake to offer a solution. Purgatory. Inevitably the first visitors were the men he'd killed. Some of them. Presumably the others were more softly spoken, or were content to wait. ------- An eternity later, his fingers responded to a command. When he woke up again he was strong enough to open his eyes. Dread at first sight. Vision only confirmed what his ears had warned him against. Barnett sneering. Roche laughing. Carl Wade - insanity dancing in his eyes. Luther Lee Boggs, zoned out on too much artificial spirituality. Gerry Schnauz, looking as puzzled now as when Mulder shot him. Even that damned skinhead terrorist who'd been executed in his place, only a week or so before. Panic gave him a strength that had no basis in his body's physical state. Soft hands stroked his face. Calloused fingers squeezed against his throat. Someone moved his head into position for the drill - "Unruhe," Schnauz murmured, smiling at the thought. The skinhead squeezed fingers still tender and swollen from the time he'd crushed them before. Mulder tried to twist away, looking for the owner of the soft hands, wondering how hands so soft could be involved in this. Soft hands trying to hold him in place for Schnauz's drill. Scully's hands? No. Not Scully. No. He tipped his head back, saw Scully's face. Whatever he deserved, he wasn't ready for it. He bucked and fought, gagging as he rebelled against things in his throat, needles in his arms and wires on his chest. They called for help and more hands appeared. He knew it was over then, finally caved in to the weight of them, and the terrifying lack of air. -------- When he woke up his eyes were closed and Barnett's venomous laughter was ringing through his ears. He didn't fight the voices. Just accepted them as fact and tried to ignore them. The faces paraded through his thoughts. Men he'd killed - deserving their positions. The terrorist thug though, his presence meant something else. The man had died in his place but someone else's finger had been on the trigger. Luther Lee Boggs had been executed in a gas chamber in North Carolina. It was going to get very crowded in here. Scully had been with them, blaming him, helping them. He tried to block the specter out, but couldn't. She was dead and that was bad enough. The panic had nowhere to go. His brain drowned in it. His body, such as it was, screamed as best it could, destroying itself in pain and shock. Purgatory was only fair, but it wasn't fair that she'd been here. The others complained and nagged and laughed, and the hardest thing to handle was the helplessness. Had he been able to speak he might have tried to argue. In his head, he rehearsed the words, the confident rebuttals that would prove that he was right to kill them. Right? Maybe it was better that he couldn't talk. After a lifetime of blood and words, maybe he needed to shut up and listen. His conscience challenged him on legal, moral, ethical grounds and found him lacking. Roche had died because Mulder let him out of jail. Schnauz because he hadn't been paying attention and had let Scully get taken from under his nose. Scully. Oh God, Scully. Why couldn't she just have shown up in his hospital room a couple of minutes later? Why did she have to arrive while Pincus was still in full flow? Hysteria in that idea, he noted - blaming the victim again. Why hadn't he carried Scully and Skinner with him on the Pincus case? He'd alienated them, pushed them away. He'd forced Skinner to call 911. He'd had to beg, blackmail and cajole Scully into helping him. The road to hell was paved with good intentions and, as the voices became angrier and more insistent, Mulder was starting to doubt even his intentions. Another voice, The Soother as he'd taken to thinking of her. Guardian angel? Spirit guide? Almost too quiet to hear, she was telling him that it was for his own good and that he'd be able to move again soon. Not that he wanted to. He certainly wasn't eager to open his eyes. The sounds were bad enough. He listened to the litany of complaints, the chants of contempt, the laughter. It was only fair. The Soother broke through the fog. "Mr. Mulder. I'm Cathy. Cathy Dillon. I'm your ICU nurse. I've been with you since you came in." Cathy Dillon? He didn't recognize the voice or the name. But there had been so many bodies. Not just on the X-Files either. Was she a name on a file somewhere in Patterson's unit years ago? He couldn't remember. "You've been very ill. You've been given a drug called Norcuron. It'll give your body time to recover, but you're not going to be able to move while you're taking it. Try not to be scared. We're reducing the other drugs - things should be getting clearer soon." The third, or the thirtieth, or perhaps the three hundredth time she repeated her little pep talk using similar but un-identical words he started to wonder if she was real. An ICU nurse? A drug that paralyzes? He was alive? It could be true. More plausible perhaps than his own personal version of purgatory in which he got to lie with his eyes shut in a hospital bed while his victims came visiting. He burrowed down into his thoughts and tried the analysis again. The electric paddles on his chest had brought him back. Worst case - brain damage due to lack of oxygen, expect epilepsy, physical disabilities, problems with speech, the hallucinations might never go away. Best case - nightmares and drugs had merged to supply him with a living hell and, given time and luck, both would fade. But the simplest explanation - the one that would pass Occam's Razor with flying colors was that this latest disaster had left him insane and his conscience had come up with the ideal punishment for Scully's death. These personal hauntings, courtesy of a horror movie's worth of memories, would be his torture and his penance. Nurse Cathy was consistent in her explanations. Sometimes she just said, "Hi," and ordered him to rest. Other times she talked. "When you were attacked, you were injected with a toxin. It paralyzed you - heart, lungs, everything. We got you through that, but we nearly lost you when you started moving again." He'd lost her. He'd lost himself. They should have let him go. Better to face hell for real than to be left behind to invent his own. "You hadn't moved for days. You were still very weak; you couldn't breathe. The first hint we got of trouble was when you started thrashing around and the alarms went off. You dislodged the IVs. You were choking on the ventilator tube. It took four of us to hold you down while the sedative took. Your blood pressure took a tumble so we had to switch to paralytic drugs. It must be very frightening." It was, but not for the reasons they thought. A week after his first attempt to move, they risked letting him have his body back, albeit carefully sedated and firmly restrained. "Paralysis," said Dr Shirawa, "was gentler on the system than sedation. It gave your body time to heal." And his brain all the time it needed to rip him apart. Cathy sat with him as the drug faded and the nothingness was replaced by a twitching hesitancy in muscles eager to try and yet not actually back under control. "Don't fight the ventilator," she reminded. A quiet mantra in the chaos of noise. "OK," she announced, as he succeeded in squeezing her fingers. "I've got the lights dimmed. Try opening your eyes. Keep your focus on me." He did. Was rewarded with a smiling Cathy for his efforts. Followed her advice and didn't look for trouble. But, despite his efforts to ignore them - they shouted for his attention, danced in his peripheral vision. He tried not to look. He could deal with the dead. He would have to, but not yet. "I'm going to get Dr Shirawa to check you out. Just relax." She gave his fingers a last brief squeeze and vanished from view. He tried to follow her advice, lay very still as they withdrew the tube from his throat, drifted in and out of sleep and ignored the angry crowd surrounding the bed as new drugs worked their magic. But later, when a familiar face ringed with red hair and blessed with moist blue eyes appeared above his head, he screamed. It was the first sound he'd made in more than two weeks. ------- Cathy kept talking to him as she worked and it was nice. It blocked out the noisier-angrier-deader voices when she did it. The first time he'd replied, she'd shocked him with a warm smile and a fast, "Oh thank God." They'd feared brain damage, she admitted. He saw the extra sedative that she was carrying and wondered why she needed it, as if he wasn't fogged already. Doped enough that for minutes at a time he could forget that Scully was dead and hating him. He tried to reassure the nurse that he was OK. Cathy nodded, acknowledging his bold words but looking as if she believed none of them. He didn't blame her. Everything spooked him. Everything except Cathy and a couple of other softly spoken nurses she'd insisted were good guys. He'd been a patient on the Psych Unit even before this started, but there was still sympathy for someone who'd almost been killed while restrained in a hospital bed. Some acknowledgement that a uniform might not reassure a man whose nurse hadn't been seen since the night he was assaulted, and who was almost certainly complicit in the attack. "Agent Scully's been asking if she can visit you." The steady tingle of pinprick on top of pinprick electric pain built on his skin, scratched at his eyes, tightened the muscles in his throat, sent a tidal wave of blood pulsing through his body. Vaguely, Mulder could hear Cathy's voice telling him it was going to be all right, but still couldn't remember how to breathe. Valium - delivered fast through the IV port made the panic attack subside. Cathy was still there and talking to him when he came crashing back down to earth and hit a momentary patch of lucidity. "Scully?" "It's OK. She's leaving today. You don't have to see her." Scully's alive? And then he passed out. After the initial shock, and the double whammy of Scully and Valium he'd slept for six hours. Or maybe been unconscious. Not that the distinction mattered. The important thing was that after some negotiation they agreed to let him use a phone when he woke up again. Scully was alive. Badly hurt but alive. The Gunmen wanted to know when they could visit and he couldn't answer that, but he hoped that it would be soon. He spoke to Cathy afterwards and knew now that Scully had been banned from the ICU after the last incident. Incident! The last time he'd freaked out because he'd placed her on his personal dead list. But it was OK now. Everything was going to be OK. ------------ Out of the ICU and back in an ordinary hospital bed. Deja vu. At least they hadn't pinned him down, but he knew that could only be a matter of time. People, people, everywhere and not a place to think. He was alive. He was pretty confident about that. The charade of temperature, pulse and pressure repeated too often and too rigorously to be a joke. He wasn't so confident of the people around him. They all looked at him with the same expectation that he take them seriously and reply to their questions, but not all of them were real. Not real because they were dead like the people he'd killed. Dead like the ones who'd died because of him. Dead like those he couldn't save. Not real, he told himself. But saying it wasn't enough. Cathy, she was real. As real as anything. Dr Shirawa was real because Cathy talked to Shirawa. He'd built up a chain of reals, but like any chain it was full of holes and only as strong as its weakest link. It was exhausting too. Which was an excuse really. An excuse for lying on his side with his knees pulled as close to his chest as his weak and aching body would permit. An excuse for wrapping his arms over his ears and dragging the bed covers over his head. Dead voices and dead faces and there was no way to stop it except to try and block it all out. At first he'd accepted the drugs the doctors offered with a "try anything" gratitude but he'd soon discovered that sleep was the only escape and even that was only an escape into a different nightmare. Doped or high seemed to allow him to ignore real people but scarcely touched the fakes. He'd been weighing up the pros and cons of dying for the past couple of days, grateful that he still had enough freedom that death was an option. But he'd found the arguments of Gary Lambert, Mark Backus and the others difficult to reject. Victims of Pincus, victims of the same thing that had attacked Mulder and hurt Scully. But, even if he agreed that Pincus had to be stopped, was there a damned thing he could about it? Not if he was going to be a permanent resident of a psychiatric unit somewhere. Not if he killed himself. But it was so hard. And so fucking lonely. Scully hadn't come back to the hospital after her release and he was glad. Really, he was glad. He couldn't face her like this. Couldn't stand to see the pity in her eyes, or hear the horror in her voice. She'd got out - alive and sane. She'd been lucky on both counts. He was going to make sure she stayed lucky. He wasn't quite sure how long Walter Skinner had been talking to him before he realized that anyone was there. He could feel the pressure on his arm as if someone was touching him through the sheets. Maybe that was Skinner, too. He peered out from under the white cotton nest. "Mulder?" Mulder said the first thing that came into his head. "What are you doing here?" Skinner looked vaguely shocked, embarrassed maybe. Mulder could sympathize. Not every day an Assistant Director of the FBI was faced with the indignity of dragging one of his agents out from under a pillow. "How are you feeling?" "Are you alone?" "Yes." "No nurses, or orderlies?" "Do you want something? I can get one." No. He didn't want anything or anyone else in here. He almost smiled as he shook his head, got as close to the gesture as he'd done in the past three weeks. Gingerly, and with only a little unasked for assistance from his boss, he sat up. Ignoring the pulls and bites of pain, he studied the allegedly empty space. More than twenty people were gathered around him. He looked at the mix of angry, sad, and worried faces. Recalling some names as he did, mentally filing the others under Unknown. He had a good memory. He was going to need it. He turned his attention back to Skinner and ignored his horrified expression. "Thanks for coming." "I should have come sooner." It wouldn't have helped. Too much pain. Too many drugs. Too hard to block out the heckling choir of other voices. Too hard to see past Scully's body bleeding to death on that gurney. Skinner's worried frown became even tighter. "Scully asked me to come." The world started to go gray. Couldn't talk about her. "Christ. Mulder - are you OK? I'll call a nurse." But Mulder was getting stronger now and had both the energy and presence of mind to grab Skinner's wrist and insist on a, "No." "I should -" "No, I'm fine." He was, really he was. Lucky that Skinner hadn't come any earlier. "How is she?" "She's home with her mom. Still very weak, but she's going to be all right." "Good." Skinner shook his head, looked baffled. "This is my fault, not hers. I had you brought here." "Have you seen her?" His hand still rested on Skinner's, which would be disconcerting in normal times but just served as a reminder of how abnormal this was. "Yes. She'll be OK. It was bad - they don't think she'll be able to continue in the field." Mulder already knew that, but it was nice to hear it confirmed by someone other than a record hacking Frohike. It was good. It was right. No temptation for her to go back into the firing line with anyone. "Good." "Mulder?" Maybe good was the wrong word. "She'll be OK." "This wasn't her fault." "It wasn't anyone's fault." "Talk to her. Tell her that. She's dying out there." No, she wasn't. Scully was strong. He'd never have been strong enough to send her away. But she wasn't dead. Now she could start living. "I need your help." Skinner flinched, growled at the change of subject. "What?" "I've been having very vivid dreams. The drugs - his, the hospital's. It's left me -" he braced himself for the lie and plunged on, "- nervous about strangers. If you could introduce me to the staff, get them to introduce new people." Skinner nodded and tried to sound as if he understood, and maybe he even imagined that he understood. "I've got agents at the door. In case your attacker comes back - Pincus. There was a nurse, too - she's not been seen since that night. I'll make sure whoever's on duty comes in with the staff." "Thanks." "What do I tell Scully?" "Thank her, for saving me." "Can she come?" Barnett was licking his lips. Roche was sneering. Schnauz played with his drill. She couldn't know about this. Too hard to live with, even for him, worse for her. He'd felt her cringe before, as he launched into some impossible theory in front of strangers, seen her frown as he persisted in some bizarre line of questioning to the bewilderment of other officers. He'd always been her secret vice. Well, no more. She didn't need to know that he'd finally lost his mind. That the boundaries between fantasy and reality were now so blurred that he was considering taking photos to remind himself which people he was supposed to talk to and which were to be ignored. He could do this. But not with her here. It had to be a clean break. No contact. It would hurt, but not as much as the alternative. She was alive and sane. He couldn't lie to her. Their last case together had proven that. On Skinner's orders, he'd hidden his involvement with Haley, Bremer and the New Spartans. He'd passed the simple brutality of the terrorists' lie detector but failed the Scully test. He couldn't fail it again. He would get out of here. He would go after Pincus. She didn't need to know her partner was delusional. After years of keeping him sane and defending him from those who thought him mad - it would be too brutal a blow. It's not your fault, Scully. "Mulder? If you don't want to see her yet, then call her. She needs to hear you." Mulder looked into Mark Backus' dead eyes and shook his head. One day maybe. When he was well again. He smiled at the optimistic lie. He couldn't see her like this and if he spoke to her then he wouldn't be able to turn her away. Nine parts pride to one part altruism. He gave himself credit for the ten percent that was about her. He couldn't let her waste her life on a mad man. He couldn't bear the thought that she might conclude that she'd made that mistake years before. "Mulder? He looked at his hand, realized that he was still clinging to his boss, forced himself to pull away. "Sorry, sir. You've got the report with you?" "What? Oh, yes." Skinner looked down at the folder. "It'll keep for another day." "No." Mulder put his game face on, mimicked the FBI Agent he'd been. "Now please. I'm ready." Skinner acknowledged the bold words and swallowed down his disbelief. "What do you remember?" "Very little of the attack itself." A lie is best hidden between two truths and the statement was actually true. Compared to the nightmare of Scully's blood and what came later, the assault had left few marks. "What did Scully say?" "I'd like to hear your version." Of course he would. Skinner was a detective at heart and Mulder sympathized with that, but couldn't let it spoil his plan. "I didn't see it clearly. The nurse had given me a shot of something." He paused as Skinner's jaw tensed. "The thing was strong enough to pin me down, but that wouldn't have taken a lot of effort - I was already in restraints, the drugs were having an effect." Necessity, he reminded himself. But still he hated how easy this was, how simple it was to slide into the role of manipulator to push Skinner's buttons. Unavoidable though. He didn't have any other cards to play. It worked. Skinner couldn't meet his eyes and Mulder felt an odd mix of pride and shame at that. The AD nodded, became a silent co-conspirator in Mulder's game, accepted the lie. And Mulder tried not to think about how many more lies he was going to have to tell. THE END Return to X-Files Index Page EMail Me