Title - Pillar of Salt
Author - Nascent
E-Mail address - nascent70@usa.net
Rating - NC-17 (sexual situations, disturbing themes, language)
Category - XA
Spoilers - through Fight the Future
Keywords - None provided at author's request
Summary - A casefile which tests the depth and strength of Mulder and
Scully's partnership.

Archive - Feel free, but please let me know.

Feedback - Very much welcomed.

Timeline - Matters very little, but is probably winter of 1998-99.
However, for the author it's fall of 1998, pre-season six, so please
forgive any inconsistencies with that season.

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"Pillar of Salt"

by Nascent (nascent70@usa.net)

---------------------------------------------------

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

I am one lucky little Nascent; I have an editing team who are not only
dedicated and thorough readers, but writers as well.  This story would not
be what you're reading were it not for them.  Please take a second to read
these paragraphs if you're going to read the story.

Dahlak and Flywoman both came back on board despite having worked with me
on T&P; they knew exactly what they were getting into and for that I thank
them deeply.  Dahlak lent her sharp eye and unflinching criticism to every
chapter, making me think very carefully about the motivations of every
character and the realism behind their voices, as well as the tempo of the
plot.  In particular, she helped me iron out the ending, which was very
rough the first time around. She has an unfailing instinct for pacing and
populating a story, and I thank her for sharing it with me.

Flywoman has had a busy few months but that didn't stop her from reminding
me of the difference between natural and synthetic ligand in naming ion
channels, and thus she became my official science editor for this piece,
keeping it close enough to reality that a scientist can smile and yet
simple enough that a layman can too.  I hope.  =)  Without Fly, the climax
would've been completely different as well--I was stuck in a narrative that
just wasn't working no matter how I tried to get around it, but she snapped
her fingers and said, "change the tense!" and the solution was clear.

Jordan and Marguerite not only beta-read large portions of this fic,
telling me frankly what worked and what didn't, what surprised and what was
expected, but also provided ubiquitous cheerleading throughout its
creation, without which I might never have finished it, especially given
the half-finished X-File I trashed a couple of months ago, upheaval in real
life, and all the barnyard antics.  Thank you, ladies.

Finally, it's to Justin Glasser that I owe any polish in the themes or text
of this piece.  He didn't know what he was doing when he sent me back that
first chapter with a comment on every paragraph: I snatched him up and
reeled him in right away, before he could figure out how extensively I was
going to use him.  He was unafraid to be honest, never coddling, and he
taught me volumes about the power of suggestion over the explicit--a tough
lesson for a science geek like me to learn.  Now I feel compelled to go
back and rewrite every pre-Justin piece I've written using his guidelines.
Further, the Scully first-person voice as well as the M/S angsty
interactions would NEVER have worked without his help.  Never.  Justin, you
have a mastery of understated intimacy between these two that shines in all
your work; thanks for helping it glow a little brighter in mine.  Your
facility with language and precise knowledge of what should NOT be said is
superbly, vastly, wonderfully appreciated.  Did I mention Justin hates
adverbs? <g>

If you enjoy this story, go check out work by the above authors; without
their contributions it wouldn't be what it is.


NOTES:

The science in this piece, like that of most X-Files science, is derived
from real principles that have been distorted.  If you're curious, what's
wrong and what isn't will be explained in notes at the end of the piece,
but don't believe everything you read.  =)


DISCLAIMER:

Damn, I've run out of clever things to say here.  So: The X-Files, Mulder
and Scully are the property of Chris Carter, 20th Century Fox and 1013.  No
profit made, no infringement intended.







Thanks, Jordan.











Prologue

---------------------------------------------------

When Mulder asked me to spend the weekend with him at an old friend's ski
place near Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, the invitation rolled off his tongue
with such well-executed carelessness that I almost said "Sure, Mulder,"
before I even realized what he'd asked.

Mulder does that.  He sneaks up on you when your guard is down, and, like a
stealthy virus, doesn't signal his intentions until he's fully colonized.
I keep thinking one day I will acquire immunity, but it never happens.

"Su--" I started, barely looking up, then performed a classic double-take.
"What did you say?"

Mulder smirked and leaned back in his chair, watching me from across the
room.  "You heard me, Scully," he answered. I could almost hear him filing
my reaction away for later entertainment on his mental VCR, and it irked me
unaccountably.

But this was not a battle he could win.  I schooled my features into my
best G-woman stare, and let it never be said that I don't know the effect
of that expression on testicles.  Mulder flinched, and I felt avenged.
"What's in Stroudsburg?" I asked.

"Someone I want to talk to," he answered, rapping his pen against his left
knuckles.

Ah, here it comes, I thought.  Not that I'd suspected for a moment that it
would be anything else.  I waited, my silence an obvious signal for him to
continue.

After a pause, he did, but I knew he was leaving something out because he
kept staring at that damn pen, unable to meet my eyes.  "A friend
recommended I go talk to this man--he's well-respected in the
parascientific community.  And Keith Fields--you remember Fields from
Quantico?--he's always said I could use his condo up there.  It's supposed
to be gorgeous this time of year."

Contemplating the wet, brown slush that passed for snow outside, I pursed
my lips into a thin, suspicious line.  "So why are you asking _me?_"

Mulder feigned injury, but it wasn't very effective as he was still unable
to meet my eyes.  "Well, I want to hear what you think of this guy.  And I
figured you could use a weekend away."

I blinked.  "I'm away virtually every other weekend.  With you."

I thought I had managed to convey, in not so many words, that vacations--if
that's what he really had in mind--should be from each other as well as
work.  But he missed the point, or pretended to, waving it away with a
dismissive flip of the pen.  "Not a case," he said, as if that should
explain everything.  Then: "Come on, Scully.  You're always complaining
that I leave you out of things like this.  So now I'm asking you: do you
want to come with me?"

"Just to talk to some paranormal 'scientist?'"

"Yeah," he replied with a shrug.

So I agreed.  I knew he was lying, but I figured it was an innocuous lie.

Throughout the week, Mulder was predictably if charmingly coy about the
weekend.  He didn't mention it again for several days, and I followed his
lead, assuming he felt as absurd and awkward about it as I did.  Agents
Mulder and Scully chase killers, question suspects, buy plane tickets, hunt
for aliens, rent cars, save one another's lives and on occasion cry in one
another's arms, but they do _not_ spend weekends together in ski condos.  I
had deliberated and rejected half a dozen believable excuses to gracefully
back out of the increasingly uncomfortable prospect when at last he brought
it up again on Thursday.

He suggested we leave work early the following day to make the drive.  When
I asked him again about the man we were going to see, suggested he at least
provide me with some background to review, he only offered a mysterious
smile and told me to "Wait and see."

"I'm not in the mood to play games, Mulder," I told him flatly.

His immediate expression of contrition was genuine.  With his patented
earnestness he touched my arm and said: "I don't mean to play games.
Just--just trustme, okay?"

I lowered my eyelids, acquiescing with a brush of my fingers against his.
I _did_ trust him.  Only later did I realize that the game hadn't stopped,
and, as always, we played by his rules.

The drive was peaceful and the condo beautiful if a little small.
Well-hewn peaks frosted with snow and sprinkled with evergreen hemmed us
in, abrogating the need for any decor other than windows.  Mulder insisted
I take the bedroom, and after we'd relaxed some from the drive, we went to
dinner down in Analomink. We shared a bottle of wine and spoke very little,
content that for once there was no investigation to discuss.

To his credit, he did finally tell me that our appointment with Dr. Arthur
von Deer was scheduled for the following morning.

His behavior was suspiciously affectionate--or perhaps it was the wine--as
we returned to the condo; he walked with his arm threaded through mine and
held my hand as he drove.  In retrospect, this should have set off warning
bells, but I was too comfortable at the time.  I was only a little
disconcerted, abstractly worried about what to do if this morphed into
something unexpected later on that evening.  But the warmth of his hand,
the cold, snow-laden air and the freedom of our caselessness was enough to
keep me from worrying much.

When we returned, we built the obligatory roaring fire and played a game of
chess on a cardboard set we'd discovered in the closet.  Mulder and I have
surprisingly similar chess strategies: we are both unwilling to sacrifice
pieces, even when such action would be advantageous.  Almost, I speculated,
as if we're both unwilling to make even a pawn suffer capture under our
respective commands.  It makes for a long game.

I won, but not easily.  We both fell asleep sometime after that, in the
middle of a sparse conversation about the reliability of evidence in animal
behavioral science.  He sprawled across the couch and I stretched out on
the floor, my back against the couch's base, my head tipped back and turned
so that I could watch his face and feel his warmth.   He argued,
predictably, that we could perform meaningful analysis on animal
communities, while I cautioned that such studies are too much colored by
human worldviews, and that since the system is almost impossible to
perturb, observation would never be sufficient evidence.  But neither of us
invested much, and the silences were long enough for us to finally fall
asleep, Mulder's fingers wound loosely in my hair.  I woke late in the
night, threw a blanket over his lanky form and pressed my palm fondly
against his cheek, soft enough that he didn't even stir.  Then I crept away
to the bed.

At the time, I chastised myself for having questioned my partner's motives.
I was very glad I'd come.

Between the chess game and the argument, I'd asked him again: "So you
brought me up here just to talk to this paranormal scientist?"

"Yeah," he'd said, staring  into the fire, again unable to meet my eyes.

I knew he was lying; I just didn't know how big a lie it was.








Chapter 1

Where I Stood

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10:02 a.m.
Saturday
Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania

Saint Luke Hospital was an unexpectedly bustling facility for what I'd
anticipated to be a backwater clinic.  Its physical therapy and orthopedic
surgery departments are nationally recognized, which is to be expected of
the only major hospital in a snowskiing community.  But it also claimed 650
beds and reasonably highly regarded residency/internship programs in
internal medicine and emergent medicine affiliated with two universities.

I learned all of this in a two-minute perusal of the usual cardstock
pamphlet I picked up at the door, the purpose of which was presumably to
make me wonder why I, a physician, hadn't previously heard of their program.

I tossed the pamphlet in a garbage can in front of the elevator doors.

"Scully, we can't exactly be ourselves for this," Mulder said then, looking
at the lights above the elevator instead of at me.  "I told him my name's
George Hammond and you're my wife: Dana."

"Mulder...." I warned.  I recognized the names as one of the multiple
aliases Frohike et al. had painstakingly constructed for us should we ever
need to disappear, but his use of them today reawakened every dormant
suspicion.

His worried sidelong glance to evaluate my expression did nothing to
assuage my concern.  But then the occupied elevator arrived and there was
no more time to talk, as he'd no doubt intended.

Dr. von Deer's office perched on the fourth floor in a secluded wing
labeled "Clinic" which hung off the bulk of the hospital like an undergrown
appendage.  A few outpatient consultations were underway in the hallway's
lighted offices, but Dr. von Deer's light was off.

After a glance at me to assure himself of my complicity (I refused to look
at him), Mulder rapped sharply on the door.

An elderly male voice from within answered.  "Come in!"

We did.

The little man who greeted us could have had a role in any movie as the
perfect grandfather, right down to the bright, bespectacled eyes, the
male-pattern baldness fringed with white, and the permanently fixed smile.

"Hello!" he cried, circumnavigating his desk and extending an enthusiastic
age-spotted hand.  Mulder shook it.  "Mr. Hammond?"

"George," Mulder corrected him, and I looked out the window.  "And this is
my wife, Dana."

I offered my hand to the little doctor, and he took it but instead of
shaking it he bent his dry lips to the backs of my fingers.  "_Dana,_" the
man repeated reverently, as I deliberated with a wide-eyed look at Mulder
whether to be flattered or offended.

Before I could decide, the little man popped up again, favored me with a
raucous grin, and quipped: "You're too good for him, I can tell already."
He turned to Mulder, who watched with ill-concealed amusement.  "You know
that, don't you?"

Mulder grinned.  "That's what _she_ tells me," he replied, with a
significant glance at me that I knew was intended to make me hear a
different answer.

And damn him, it worked.

We settled into the two taupe chairs facing the desk, and Dr. von Deer
returned to his seat, still sporting that indeflatable smile.  I had to
smile back; everything about the little man pushed childhood buttons which
memorialized my own grandfather.

"I hate to do this," von Deer said, "but I need to see two forms of
identification from both of you.  To make sure you're not reporters, you
understand."

Mulder half stood to reach into his back pocket.  "How will that prove
we're not?" he asked.

"Well, it won't," the doctor admitted.  "Not really.  But I did search the
internet and Newsbank for your names before you arrived and didn't find
anything other than your address, so this is the best I can do."

I snorted softly at the boys' ingenuity.  I didn't know George and Dana had
an _address._  I wondered where we lived.

Mulder handed two I.D. cards across the desk and flashed me an expectant
glance.

I spread my hands.  "I didn't bring my wallet," I lied, with more pleasure
than I should have permitted myself.  My wallet was actually in my purse.
Right next to my gun.

"Oh," Mulder said, unfazed.  "Hey! I think I still have your driver's
license from when you asked me to carry it last night."  He made a show of
rummaging through his wallet.

"She still gets carded," he confided to von Deer as he produced a card and
handed it across the table.  Then he snuck a triumphant grin at me.

I ignored it.

While von Deer peered at the plastic cards, I casually inspected the
office.  The only light came from without, and was dimly grey.  An
expensive-looking stereo sat atop the two filing cabinets.  An entire wall
hosted bookshelves, and the polished teak desk boasted several
official-looking stacks of papers.  A Gateway 3000 perched on the lefthand
side, and a family picture featuring a far younger Arthur von Deer with a
smiling wife, daughter and grandson (presumably) decorated the wall beside
his framed diplomas.

I squinted at the diplomas hanging over Mulder's head, but I couldn't make
out the writing.

"So," von Deer said finally, satisfied that our fake I.D.'s were not fake
as he returned them to my partner, "I'm sure you have questions."

At the time, the phrasing struck me as odd, but Mulder didn't let me dwell
on my suspicion for long.

"Well, yes," he said.  "As I told you, Pamela McGinnis and I have been
friends since childhood, and she told me about her enlightening experience
with you."

Pamela McGinnis? I didn't recognize the name.

"Yes," von Deer beamed.  "Pamela had wonderful results.  Wonderful.  Very
encouraging.  I'm glad she referred you."

"She told me a lot," Mulder continued, "but I do have a few questions."

"Of _course,_" von Deer soothed.  "Go on."

Mulder leaned back in his chair and propped one ankle on his knee.  "Well,
to start with, how did you get interested in NDE research?"

_NDE?_ I thought.

Dr. von Deer nodded his encouragement like a teacher pleased with his
pupil's insight, though I saw nothing outstanding.  "Good question.  Not
exactly something they teach you about in med school.  But did you know
that 21 percent of physicians have had at least one patient claim to have
had a near death experience? It's not as uncommon as you might think."

And suddenly I began to understand.

"So a patient piqued your interest?" Mulder prodded.

"No," von Deer admitted, and a grey cast seemed to overwhelm his features.
"Though I had had one patient claim it.  But the impetus of my study was
the death of my daughter and her family."

I blinked; I had not expected that.

"They were killed in a car accident," the old man continued.  "Sixteen
years ago.  My daughter, her husband, and their four-year-old son, Peter."

"I'm sorry," Mulder said, and I heard the honesty in his voice and his
regret at having asked--Mulder's ever-reliable capacity for probing others'
pain.  "But why--?"

"Why did this interest me in NDEs?" von Deer smiled gently. "Don't worry,
George.  The memories are old and not as difficult now.  But I became
interested because my daughter and I, we had some unresolved issues between
us, and the guilt over her unexpected death was very painful for me.  I
began to seek a way to tell her I was sorry.  I met Timothy Leary at a
conference in 1984, and he suggested some people I could talk to.  Ever
since then, I've been perfecting the technique."

"Technique for _what?_" I interrupted, including Mulder in my alarmed glance.

"Why, for inducing near death experiences, of course," von Deer explained,
as if he were surprised I didn't know.

"And how do you do that?" I drawled, aware that I had slipped into a more
severe investigator's voice than Dana Hammond should be capable of.

"Well, I've already explained this to your husband," von Deer said
helpfully, "but I'd be happy to explain it to you too, if he hasn't."
"I--" Mulder started, but I silenced him with a glare.

"Please do," I said to Arthur von Deer.

"Well," von Deer said, all brisk good-naturedness again, "you see, a person
experiencing an NDE usually exhibits depressed neural function and their
heart usually stops.  I know that sounds severe, but it's not quite the
same as death.  All of our cells, but especially our nerve and cardiac
cells, have small, tunnel-like proteins called 'ion channels' in their
membranes, which is how electrical current is carried through our body,
making our muscles work and making thought--"

"I _know_ what ion channels are," I fairly growled, no longer unbalanced by
his friendly appearance.  I knew now this man was dangerous.  "What do you
do? Introduce a hallucinogen? Or just stop the heart?"

"Well, I'm getting to that," the old man said.  "First, I anesthetize the
patient with a mild opiate.  Then I inject a drug which stops the heart."

"What drug?" I asked. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Mulder.  He
watched me impassively.

"Well, it's a chemical, actually.  Potassium chloride."

"Which is used in lethal injections," I noted.  "For a reason: it's lethal."

Now it was Dr. von Deer's turn to blink in surprise.  "Are you familiar
with the drug, Dana?" he asked me.

I chose not to answer.  "How do you sap up the ion imbalance to restart the
heart?" I asked.

"I inject a chelating cocktail to complex the ions and then defibrillate,"
he said quickly.  "It's perfectly safe, I assure you.  Most subjects
experience a little disorientation for an hour or so afterwards.  They may
feel a tingling in their lips or loss of sensation in their limbs, and they
may experience defective blood clotting if injured, but all those symptoms
can be abrogated by chewing on Tums or Rolaids."

_Why are you assuring me?_ I wanted to ask, but I feared I already knew the
answer and Mulder's conspicuous silence confirmed it.

"Tums?" I repeated.

"High in calcium," von Deer explained.

I nodded, understanding.  "It saturates the chelator."

His lower lip twitched nervously and he glanced at Mulder.  "I thought you
said your wife was a homemaker," he said through a forced chuckle.

With his usual easy smoothness, Mulder answered before I could register
my...I suppose the nice word would be 'surprise.'  "Dana is a nurse," he
said.  "But she's taken something of a sabbatical the last two years to
paint."

I hoped the inevitable memory of Amy Cassandra he'd just evoked had been an
unconscious association, though such a prospect wasn't very reassuring.
Nonetheless, von Deer seemed to relax, the effect Mulder had obviously
desired.

"Oh, how _nice!_" he dimpled at me.  "I wish I could do something like that
myself.  Take time off, that is.  But my research....  I must say, I'm
impressed, Dana.  I know few nurses--or _doctors_ for that matter--who
remember their chemistry so well.  My assistant, who also happens to be my
lovely wife, is also a nurse and another such exception.  I can't wait for
you to meet her."

I smiled back but not with my eyes.  "But _why,_" I said carefully, "would
people want to do this?"

He blinked again, confused, glanced at Mulder and I was certain what was
coming.

"Well," he said, flustered when my 'husband' didn't speak.  "People have
been trying to induce NDEs for years just for the experience, for the same
reason they try sky-diving, I imagine.  Some people have used a method
similar to mine; others use drugs like ketamine or LSD, and fighter pilots
claim to be able to reproduce the phenomenon with high-G dives.  Several
dozen researchers around the world claim to be able to induce it (quietly
of course, but they boast a large clientele), and many important names have
studied it--Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, George Richie, Raymond Moody, Timothy
Leary.  But the reason people come to me, as I'm sure your husband has told
you, is that a special feature of the NDE I offer is the chance to
communicate with loved ones on the other side."

"The other side," I repeated, skepticism coloring my tone.  Timothy
Leary--now, _that's_ a credential only Mulder wouldn't back away from.
"How do you do that, Dr. von Deer?"

"Call me Arthur," he insisted.  "It's a fascinating thing. I think it tells
us a lot spiritually as well as scientifically, and one day when I can
publish my findings without fear of reprisal, many fields will be very
interested, I think.  I'm a neurologist, you see.  I spent several years
doing basic neuroscience back in the pioneering days of electrophysiology,
and I've kept up with the work ever since.  Can we ever cease to be amazed
that something as small and disparate as the millions of cells which
comprise our brain can actually contain our consciousness?

"This problem has fascinated me all my life.  But only after the death of
my daughter did I begin to wonder exactly what that meant.  Is the brain
the _source_ of consciousness, or is it merely a transmitter? While I once
believed the former, the incredible complexity--not to mention the
incredible mental leap from chimp to human with very little cellular or
genetic change--argues against that.  Are you following me?"

Mulder hid a smirk behind his hand, but I simply nodded.

Arthur continued enthusiastically.  "Now I've come to believe the brain is
simply the wire that connects our consciousness to our bodies.  How
well-developed and how well-trained one's brain is determines how much of
our true consciousness, which is vast, can be accessed.  This theory goes a
long way toward explaining intelligence, emotions and even reported psychic
abilities, don't you think?"

Mulder waggled his eyebrows at me but I ignored him, listening closely to
the old man.

"Though nerve cells die with bodies, consciousness--our souls--do not.
This is widely accepted by almost all religions throughout time, though
they may argue about an afterlife versus reincarnation.  I have come to
believe this is true, and by manipulating the brain in specific ways, we
can follow the path of our consciousness to its source, a place where all
souls mingle and distance is immaterial.  To do this, your soul must be
'tricked' (in a manner of speaking) into believing your body is dead.  Just
before stopping the heart, though, I inject phencyclidine, which releases
magnesium in N-methyl-D-aspartate, or NMDA, channels--"

"Long-term potentiation," I breathed, suddenly understanding and torn
between fascination and horror.  "LTP."

The doctor looked inordinately pleased.  "You've heard of it?"

"Yes," I said, with a glance at Mulder, who watched me now with interest.
"It's a relatively newly described phenomenon where a single nerve cell is
depolarized for a very long time, on the order of seconds."  For my
partner's benefit, I added: "By depolarized, I mean that the cell is
conducting electric current, as when it transmits an impulse.  But in LTP,
it keeps going.  Researchers think it may be a clue to how things are
learned or remembered, but as far as I know it's only been seen in
hippocampal brain slices."

"You mean, the cell may be storing information somehow?" Mulder asked.

"Essentially," I replied.  "But it's probably not just binary--that is,
each cell being 'off' or 'on'.  LTP may be an analog, or flexible, code in
a multidimensional matrix where each cell represents a point.  The output
of the matrix may be what we call memory."

"That's right, Dana, I'm _very_ impressed," von Deer said, beaming.
"Dissociation of glutamate from NMDA receptors in an isolated hippocampus
seem to trigger LTPs, and the EEG we see when we administer NMDA to
patients suggests that it may have the same effect on a whole person."

"Don't the subjects experience memory loss?" I asked.  "You could be
erasing information in the matrix that's already there by inducing random
LTPs."

"I worried about that myself," von Deer admitted, "which is why we did many
trials with animals and then with both myself and Eleanor--my wife--before
we tried it with anyone else.  The time we're talking about here is less
than five minutes, well under the time in which protein kinase activity is
required. And we've never seen any evidence of change in brain function,
which suggests strongly to me that LTP is just a mechanism for the brain to
_access_ the memories, which are actually _stored_ in one's consciousness.
Again, we must learn to view the brain as a mere _transmitter_ for
consciousness."

I frowned.  "So you, as you say, 'trick' the brain into thinking the body
is dead, then the soul is able to travel back to it's source.  Why do you
induce LTPs as well?"

He held up a wizened finger.  "Because this single difference in the near
death experience, the NDE, allows the traveler to meet with the souls of
loved ones--both living and dead, but mainly dead because the souls of the
living are occupied here--in the place from whence all souls come.  What
researchers call the memory function of LTP may just be the ability of the
soul to access this place, while the NDE merely permits the start of the
journey.  This way, one can experience both without dying.  Do you
understand?"

"I understand perfectly," I said calmly.  "I understand that you're risking
the lives of hapless volunteers with quackery.  How much do you charge
them?"

"Now, Ms. Hammond," von Deer chided.  "I wouldn't do that.  As I told you,
I've undergone the procedure many times myself and my wife has undergone it
many more times--probably scores of times.  It's perfectly safe, and
although I can't guarantee the results, I've been able to make peace with
my daughter and grandson, and over half my subjects have likewise had
success.  And surely you know I don't charge anything.  I'm performing
_research._  All I ask is to be able to keep the data, anonymized of
course, and I ask also for your discretion."

"Because you'll lose your license if the AMA heard about this?" I demanded.
Mulder reached out to touch my arm but I shrugged away.  "Who pays for
this?"

"Private individuals," the man said in a tone meant to impress us with its
solemnity.  "You'd be surprised."

"I bet I wouldn't," I muttered, remembering Gibson Praise.

"I assure you," he said again, "it's perfectly safe.  I'll be happy to have
you in the room with us the whole time--in fact I asked your husband to
bring you because we believe it makes the return trip easier if a loved one
is there to coax the subject back and be there when he awakens."

My worst fears confirmed, I rounded on Mulder, unwilling to abandon our
charade but making him see the hurt, horror and shock in my eyes.  He
looked away.

Was I supposed to be grateful he hadn't ditched me this time? Because
gratitude was the last thing I was feeling.  I had a sudden, bizarre image
of Mulder lying on a granite slab beneath a heavy black pall, and I knew he
was dead but then his eyes snapped open and he said: "Scully, I'm so glad
you're here!"

I gave a violent shake of my head as if that could dislodge the vision from
my memory, but it clung there, an uninvited and stubborn guest.

I felt his hand on my forearm.  "Are you okay?" the real Mulder asked.

What the hell kind of question was that?

"I can see," von Deer said, "that you two need a little more time to talk
about this.  I'll step downstairs for a bit of coffee.  Would you like
something? The room won't be ready until noon anyway."

"I'd like some coffee," Mulder said; his voice was dry and a little
cracked.  "Dana?"

"No," I said, suddenly resentful at the sound of that name.  I barely
noticed as von Deer shuffled out of the room.

The anger boiled in me, expanding my chest and bubbling at the underside of
my skin.  I surged gracelessly out of my chair and, with a deep breath to
recover control, stalked over to the bookcase, as far from Mulder as I
could get.

I heard his voice, strained and soft.  "Dana," he said, and I almost
snapped at him for calling me that, but then realized he feared a tape
recorder, and his fear was probably well-founded.

Remembering the stereo I'd observed earlier on the far wall, I moved to it
and pushed 'play.'  Billie Holliday's raw and lilting voice tumbled forth,
and I cranked up the volume, moved back toward Mulder, who nodded with
approval.

"Scully..." he murmured, leaning down toward me to whisper over the music.

I cut him off with a raised hand.  "What the _hell_ were you thinking,
Mulder?" I hissed.  "Why didn't you tell me?"

To his credit, he looked miserable.  "I knew you wouldn't go along with
it," he admitted.

"Then how could you _do_ it?" I demanded.

"Would you rather I not have told you?" he whispered, too passionate to
achieve the reasonability he was aiming for.  "Would you rather I just
called you up on Sunday and said, 'Oh, hey, Scully, I just had a near death
experience and talked to my father, what do you think about that?'"

"Don't you mean, would I rather the hospital called me to tell me you were
dead or brain-damaged for life?" I stared into his hazel eyes, daring him
to guess which was worse.  "Was this what last night was all about?
Something to remember you by, 'just in case?'"

He looked surprised.  "Wha--?" he began, then comprehension dawned in his
eyes and was quickly replaced by something unrecognizable.  "Jesus, Scully.
No."  His injured expression suggested I'd just damaged a memory as
precious to him as it had been to me, but at the moment I didn't care.

"The sky is blue, and high above," sang Billie with enthusiasm. "The moon
is new, and so is love...."

I tore my eyes away from his and looked steadily out the window at the grey
wintry clouds.  "It's _bullshit,_ Mulder," I told him finally.

"Near death experiences featuring a light at the end of a long tunnel have
been described for over a millennium in every culture," Mulder replied.
"There has to be something to them."

"There is," I snapped. "Lack of oxygen.  When circulation ceases, the
retina is one of the first organs starved for oxygen, and nerve cells start
firing at random.  There are more nerve cells in the most sensitive part of
the retina--the fovea, so it appears to the subject that a bright spot is
generated.  That's why it happens to fighter pilots in dives--rapid
pressure changes deprive the blood of oxygen.

"Further," I continued, "endorphin production increases dramatically in the
last minutes or even hours before death, as a feedback response to quell
pain.  It's like a natural buzz--the subject feels peaceful and cogent,
though he probably isn't.  It's easy to imagine that he's reviewing his
life, another common feature of NDEs."

"How--"

"How do I know so much?" I snapped.  "I read up on it about a year ago,
when I spent some time researching ketamine, a drug which many believe can
induce NDEs, and which, maybe not surprisingly, bind NMDA channels.  Now,
why would I have been researching that?"

I let that sink in for a second.  "I don't understand you, Mulder," I said
softly.  "Why do you do these self-destructive things?"

"It's perfectly safe, Scully," he replied.  "Von Deer has never lost a
patient."

"How do you know? What he's doing is illegal.  We should be arresting him,
not supporting him!"

"He's been reported to the AMA twice by subjects who didn't see any
ghosts," Mulder answered.  "I checked him out thoroughly after hearing
about him through a friend of a friend of Frohike's--that Pamela McGinnis
woman.  Who was very pleased with her NDE, I might add.  The police
investigated him a couple of times too, but he has powerful friends, though
I don't think he knows it.  _Someone_ believes in his research.  And I'd
think you would too.  You've had a near death experience yourself, right?"

"That was completely different," I snapped.  "I was in a coma."

"But you believe in souls," he insisted.  "You believe that you were
waiting somewhere during that time."

I frowned at the window, angry that I'd ever told him and frustrated that
there was no reply I could make.

"The sky is blue, the night is cold," Billie told us, her voice quickening.
"The moon is new, the love is old."

"I didn't _choose_ it," I told him at last.

"I know," he said, soothing but firm.  "But this is _my_ choice.  If it
works, Scully, maybe we can learn something.  Maybe I can ask my father....
or maybe Samantha--"  His voice cracked almost imperceptibly on the final
word but I didn't relent.

"Mulder, the only conceivable reason the NMDA could seem to allow contact
with loved ones is probably because it's randomly triggering memories.
I've never heard of it being administered to a live patient--the effects
are completely unpredictable.  It could affect your memory, could give you
brain damage, anything.  As could the simulated death.  It's ridiculously
dangerous, and you can't trust anything you'd 'learn.'  This isn't the way!
I thought you'd agreed with me before."

"I'm not asking you to do it," he said.  "I'm just asking you to stay with
me while I do it."

"So I can talk you back to reality with tender endearments?" I demanded,
aware of the irony dripping off my tongue.  "I'm a little too angry right
now, Mulder.  How dare you put me in this position, where to refuse you is
to somehow betray you and to agree to play along is to betray myself?"

He winced.  "I didn't realize it would be that kind of a decision for you."

I stared at him, threatening and studying.  His features were earnest,
hopeful and apologetic, but I recognized the familiar determination that
lay beneath it all.  He was really going to do this.

"Please, Scully," he said softly, using that rarest of words.  "I'm not
asking you to participate.  I asked you along because if I'm going to do
something stupid like this I trust you to watch, to do the right thing if
something goes wrong, to bring me back."

"I've already given you my advice, and you're still doing the stupid
thing," I pointed out.  "What the hell do you need me here for?"

"Please, Scully," he repeated steadily, and I closed my eyes against the
power of those simple words.

---------------------------------------------------

12:31 p.m.

I hadn't said yes, but here I was, in this tiny surgical teaching room.
Dr. von Deer explained that he'd had a special second lock put on the door
to which only he had a key, and he conducted his infrequent experiments
only on the weekends, when no students were scheduled here.  Safest, he'd
explained, to do this in the hospital, where, if anything when wrong, he
could rush the subject immediately to the ER.  Life, he said, was always
more important than the research or his medical license.

But he'd never had to abort a trial yet.

Mulder believed him, and I just didn't know what to believe.  Yet I was
certain that this was very, very wrong.

Eleanor von Deer, a grey-haired nurse whose stark thinness and dour lips
were the very antithesis of her husband's jolly visage, moved about the
yellow room in blue scrubs, arranging and rearranging equipment.  Arthur
was busily adjusting the mesh net of suction cups over Mulder's hair; it
would record impulses from the various regions of his brain.  Before
adhering each cup, he'd fuss with the my partner's hair, then swab a bit of
grease onto his scalp and slap the cup down, sculpting him into a cross
between Alfalfa and Frankenstein's monster.

Mulder lay prone and naked on the gurney, a sheet modestly draped over his
hips and legs.  The EKG leads were already affixed to his torso and the IV
situated in his thigh, where it would be least likely to dislodge when they
defibrillated him.

I shuddered at the memory of the last time I'd seen that, four years ago.
Then, I'd been holding the paddles, and adrenalin had sustained me enough
to watch his body seize as the voltage pulsed through him, rising up and
then slamming back down into the table as we both fought for his life.  I'd
never forget the sound of his skin smacking the cold metal or the way his
fists involuntarily clenched with each surge.  I did not care to witness it
again--my nightmares were a more than sufficient reminder.

I stood several feet away, watching with my arms folded on my chest, as
anger and anxiety warred over every fiber of my body.  Why did I let him do
this? Why did I let him make me watch it?  Why did _he_ do it?

I didn't know what he expected to find.  An unprovable, inscrutable droplet
of 'wisdom' from the imbibed font that was his father? I knew better.  This
was not about truth, or even answers.

Mulder just wanted to know if it would work.  He wanted, as we all do, for
the world to be bigger than reality tells us it is, for confirmation that
we are not meaningless and random.  He has a greater capacity for hope than
I, and I admire and love him for it, but....

But.  There I stood.

I felt an unfamiliar hand on my arm, turned to see Eleanor at my elbow.
She was much taller than I, and it was vaguely disconcerting.

"Come have a seat," she suggested with a kindness that belied her harsh
features.  "I promise, he'll be fine and it will be wonderful for him.
I've done it thirty-eight times myself."

If that was meant to reassure, she'd missed her target, but I let her guide
me to the chair she'd positioned at his right side, and he turned his head
to look at me.  The movement forced van Deer to reposition one of the
suction cups.  "Please hold your head still," Arthur said, and Mulder
telegraphed me a chagrined smile while staring back at the ceiling.

Not knowing what else to do, I reached for his hand, and he squeezed back
with a grateful tightness I hadn't quite expected.  I shook my head slowly
at him, biting my lower lip.

"Well now," von Deer said, all doctorly efficiency.  "I think we're ready.
George?"

"Go ahead," 'George' answered with a cheerfulness only I recognized as forced.

Eleanor produced a syringe, moved to the crimp in the IV line, which hung
from a stand by Mulder's hip.

I swallowed; my throat was dry.  This was not right.

"Wait," I said, and she looked at me, holding up the needle.  The doctor
raised his eyebrows, trying to maintain the appearance of patience though
he was clearly tiring of me.

Mulder looked at me too, the same pleading that he'd exhibited upstairs
Arthur's office evident in his eyes.

"Wait," I said again, trying to collect my thoughts.  I wet my lips.  Then
the words tumbled forth before I could stop them.

"I can't be a part of this," I told him, wishing these two strangers
weren't here.  "I can't.  It's your choice, you're right, but it's mine
too, and I just....I _won't._"

I wrenched my hand from his grasp, trying not to look at his pained
expression.  I stumbled blindly to my feet and started for the door.

"Sc--Dana!" I heard him call after me, and the pain and betrayal in his
voice clamped a chokehold on my throat.  "Please.  I need you..."

But I walked out the door and didn't look back, unwilling to become a
pillar of salt.

---------------------------------------------------






Chapter 2

Spiritual Counseling Available

---------------------------------------------------

I walked away, my arms stiff at my sides, my right hand clutching the purse
that was heavy with my gun; somehow the responsibility of a weapon endowed
me with a greater sense of control than I might have otherwise felt.
Ironic, considering the current list of candidates for acquaintance with my
Sig was quite short and irrational, given that it included my partner.

I didn't really know where I was going, but I have never been a wanderer; I
moved like I had a destination.  Out of the small teaching wing, through
the double doors into surgery, I navigated around groggy patients on
gurneys and fast-moving doctors and orderlies.  I barely saw them.

Past the entrance to the emergency room and down an endless corridor, the
signs on either side of me seemingly written in a language I once knew but
had long ago forgotten: "Radiology," "Nutritional Services," "Urology,"
"Endoscopy."

I passed the cafeteria, and briefly deliberated whether this would offer
the best seclusion--it is sometimes easier to find solitude in crowds.  But
my feet kept moving, as if the choice of waiting room weren't mine to make.

The trite little gift shop tried to lure me in with cheery "It's a boy!"
balloons and tasteful flower arrangements, but I wasn't so easily ensnared.
I kept going, past the families with strollers and the elderly couples and
the noisy, squalling children.  And found myself at a plain wooden door
marked "Chapel."

I entered.

Someone had done a good soundproofing job; the sudden quiet was so complete
that one could have heard a pin drop--except the burgundy carpet and
draperied walls would have absorbed even that sound.

Four dark pews saluted the crucifix, which hung on the far wall to my left.
Below it and to the side was a rack of candles, improperly placed but there
was no room near the door and no windows, either.  Near the communion rail
stood a tastefully-carved confessional, and in the far corner to my right a
low cabinet sported several books.

The only other occupants of the tiny chapel were the woman and her son, in
that corner.  The woman was helping the boy, who looked about six, to write
something in the large white binder, and her words dimly registered in my
brain.

"Sound it out," she murmured.  "Haaa-piiii.  That's right.  'H'...'A'...."

The boy didn't look very happy.  He looked confused.  I wanted to see the
spines of the books propped on the cabinet, but was reluctant to intrude on
the mother and child.

So I moved away from them, crossed myself, and eased into the pew furthest
from the door, closest to the communion rail.  A church is thankfully one
of the rare places where not acknowledging one's companions is considered
polite.

I rested my elbows on my knees and leaned forward, trying not to imagine
the sound of the EKG, the beeep...beeep........beeep........beeep, and then
the endless, urgent tone.

How could he do this?

I had never told him the whole story of my experience, of the things I saw
in that coma.  For awhile after it first happened, I believed it had been
something marvelous, but in the ensuing years I have come to doubt some of
its elements.  I have strangely fractured memories--images and voices, a
few words--but nothing concrete.

I remember my mother, Melissa and Mulder.  I can at times convince myself
that I saw their faces, but it's not unlike one of those memories of young
childhood, of which you one day discover a photo.  Suddenly you wonder
whether you actually remember what happened or you just got the Polaroid
version.

I remember a few of their words, but nothing very concrete, and again, I
don't know which words were actually spoken and which imagined by me.  I am
certain I heard their voices.

I remember an overwhelming sense of peacefulness, and associated with that
is the sound of water, and the scent of the air just as autumn turns to
winter--my favorite time of year.  But I don't have any real recollection
of my surroundings.

And I remember the voice of a woman who called me by name and whispered for
me to come back.  She said it wasn't my time, and I believed her.  I
believe it now.

But what I remember most clearly from that time is my father.  The only one
of those people who was actually dead.  And I did feel as though I had
achieved a certain resolution with him, one we never attained in his
lifetime.  Sitting there in that anonymous chapel, the memory made me
uneasy.  I did not want to think there was truth in von Deer's claims, that
he had tricked heaven into giving him with his daughter what I'd had with
my father.

And if there were, was it fair of me to deny Mulder the same peace I'd
found? Since when did my role as his partner and protector conflict with my
role as his friend?

But I still do not know if the vision of my father was a true one, and I do
think it matters.

I believe our souls carry on after death, from which we should therefore
have nothing to fear.  I have certainly seen enough to convince me that on
rare occasion the living may even be permitted to communicate with the
dead, though it is very difficult to convince even myself that this
explanation is correct.

Equally difficult to believe, however, is the idea that these events can be
explained away by LTPs and New Age posturing.  There have been times in my
life when I doubted the power of miracles or when I doubted that God has
intentions, but my experiences with the X-Files have, if anything,
strengthened my beliefs in these regards.  I don't know if the white-haired
benevolent old man to whom I grew up praying really exists, but I do know
there is a powerful force beyond (or at the root of) nature, and that He
watches over and acts in this world, but never without reason.

If I did see my father, it was because God willed it, for a reason.  Not
because of my own selfish desires.

And if I didn't see him, then maybe it was for my selfish desires, and....
I tightened my jaw.  Were the answers never easy?

Miracles are not formulaic; you cannot obtain them by performing the
correct ritual, whether that ritual is a sacrifice or the stopping and
starting of one's heart.  To suggest otherwise is offensive not only to God
but to the ghosts one hopes to summon.  I have always resented the Billy
Grahams of this world with their $29.95 cookbook miracles: those who seek
the miracles are the least likely to find them.

But of course I could never persuade Mulder with an argument like that--he
didn't see this issue as religious.  I wasn't sure of it myself, and it
wasn't really something for arguing over anyway.  Regardless of the
spiritual implications of his daredevil routine, the scientific and medical
ones were sufficient reason to object.

I wondered if he was, at this moment, alive.  Should any person with sane
friends have to ask that question, and so often?

I almost laughed, but it wasn't funny.

My thighs were tingling, and I realized I'd been unconsciously digging them
into the hard wood of the pew.  My throat felt dry and sticky.  I got to my
feet, intending to leave the chapel and find a drinking fountain, anxious
for some function with which to occupy my body.  But instead of going to
the door, I found myself moving toward the flickering candles.

The mother was still quietly encouraging her son in the opposite corner,
but I couldn't hear her.  I wondered if she had lit a flame for someone,
why she was here.  Had she lost someone, or did she fear a pending loss?

If her loved one only _might_ be dying, then she had no idea what 'pending'
meant.  I knew all about 'pending.'  Every day spent with Mulder was
pending my loss--if not by this ridiculous NDE scheme, then by a bullet or
a bee sting next week.

I tried to suppress the self-pity, which I loathe, but I am far too
well-acquainted with its subversion, and at times like these I know
full-well that reason will not triumph.

I chose a new candle and made it bow before its neighbor, wick to wick,
until the white woven threads protruding from the cold wax glowed orange.
The automatic reflex of my lips shaping words was not as comforting as it
should have been.

_Blessed are all thy Saints, O God, who have traveled over the tempestuous
sea of this
mortal life, and have made the harbor of peace and felicity. Watch over us
who are still in our
dangerous voyage, for frail is our vessel, and the ocean is wide...and the
ocean is wide...for frail is our vessel, and...._

I couldn't remember the rest, though I was sure Augustine's prayer ended in
something about peace.  Something neither Mulder nor I will ever know
anything about, so perhaps it's not surprising that the words escaped me.

I stared into the flame for a long moment, and had begun to turn away, when
my eye snagged on a small wooden box beside the candles.

It was painted white, and in plain, stenciled black letters were the words:
"Prayer Circle for the Dearly Departed."

I had to lean in closer to read the small, awkwardly-phrased type
underneath.  "Saint Luke Hospital hosts a prayer circle of men and women
from local churches who gather once a month for non-denominational prayer
for those who have passed on and for their loved ones.  To be included,
please write the name of the deceased and the names of the bereaved on the
paper provided.  Address or phone number optional.  Spiritual counseling
available."

To this day, I have no idea what compelled me to open the box.  Perhaps the
names were perversely alluring to my currently maudlin state.  Maybe my
hands lacked something better to do.  Maybe miracles do happen when we ask
for them, just not the ones we asked for.  Or maybe--well, I don't know.

Neatly folded rectangles of paper were piled high in the box--the end of
the month must have been nearing.  I glanced furtively at the confessional
and then at the woman and her little boy, as if I were doing something
wrong, but the confessional was, of course, empty and the woman was about
to leave.

"Alexander Garbo," said one.  "Loving husband, brother, father.  Mary,
Jewel, Casey and Sam."

I folded it neatly and picked up another one.

"Kimberly Black died on January 9, leaving behind her husband Mark and her
two children Sandy and Mark, Jr."

"Please pray for Jerry Chartram."

"Jacob Hanover, age 19.  Mother--Lila Hanover, Sister--Karen,
Grandmother--Margaret.  Thank you."

And on and on.

Dozens of names passed between my fingers, written by people who _had_
lost--a much-needed reminder that I had no monopoly on pain.

I closed the box and crossed the room to examine the books on the wall.
The mother and her son must have slipped out while I was reading.

Bibles in several languages, a Torah, a Qur-a'n, a Book of Mormon, and a
Sukhmani were stacked side-by-side on top of the cabinet.  But what drew my
attention was the binder that the little boy had been writing in.  It was a
looseleaf, three-ring affair filled with white pages, and I knew the
childish handwriting on the top page must have been the boy's prayer.

"Dear God," it read.  "Please let my daddy get better.  When he is not
home, I am not happy.  I wish he did not have to feel sick.  Please let him
come home soon.  I love you.  Richard Purcheski."

I frowned.  On the one hand, it was endearing, and probably intended to
help the child deal with his feelings.  On the other, I wondered how much
of the words had been the prompting of the mother.  Children do not
comprehend death, and frankly I am not confident that they should, at least
not in the way we grown-ups do.

I turned back a page.  More adult handwriting, now.  "Dear God, two years
ago I prayed to you to remove my wife Deborah's cancer, and it was gone but
now it has returned.  Please allow her to fight off this disease again,
with your help.  May we grow old together.  Amen, Tim M."

Here, the loopy cursive of a young teenager.  "Please bless my uncle threw
his surgery tomorrow at 7:00 a.m. in the morning.  Please gide him, give
him his strength and health and happiness he had with his loved ones.
Please gide the doctor and nurses for the job their doing to him. Amen,
Jana Keller."

I do not believe that prayer can be used to sway God; that would imply that
God favors the fortunes of popular people with pious friends.  Prayer is
for the comfort of the one who does the praying, and, perhaps, for the
object of the prayer, if he knows it.

Mulder knows I pray for him; at least, I've told him so once or twice and
he knows me well enough to guess it wasn't a one-time deal.  I pray for the
usual things--safety and freedom from pain, resolution of hardships.  But I
also pray for small secret things, like that he gets some sleep the night
after he's shot someone (or almost shot me).  Or that sometime in the next
week or two he'll go eat cheesesteaks with the boys, which, though it's not
exactly _my_ idea of entertainment, is at least diversionary in name.
Sometimes I just pray he'll leave me alone for a few days (but the truth is
I'd be disappointed if he didn't _try_ to call and I think he knows that).

The ironic thing is that I think he prays even more than I do.  He prays
for my safety, for his sister's return, for an irrefutable scrap of truth
which doesn't come with pain attached.  He just doesn't recognize it as
prayer because his vocabulary is different.  So how could he not understand
that I would react as I did to his ridiculous scheme?

If he _were_ dead now, what would I do?

It was a question I'd asked myself before without resolution, and the
answer was no clearer today.  Life without Mulder is unthinkable, not
because it would not go on (it would), but because it is simply impossible
to imagine.

What hurt the most was not Mulder's stupid idea or even that he hadn't told
me what he was doing.  And though it hurt tremendously to know that the
stain on last night's wonderful and rare shared evening could never be
washed out, that was minuscule compared to the accusation in his words as
I'd left the room.

"I need you," he'd said, but what he meant was: "How could you abandon me?"
Somehow he'd managed to pervert his (also painful) knowing compromise of my
character into a betrayal of _my_ loyalty to _him._

My knuckles were white and cold from gripping the edges of the book, and
just as I forced my fists to unclench, I heard the chapel door open.

I turned my shoulders away from it and bowed my head so that my hair
curtained my face, hoping to make it clear to the newcomer that I wanted to
be left alone.

If I had done what he did today, he would have forcibly dragged me from
that room, free choice or no.  It seems an antiquated or even patriarchal
move to make, but is it any different from the assumption that I'd sit
there and hold his hand like some loyal, thoughtless Penelope waiting for
Ulysses? And, a quieter voice asked, _was_ it disloyal to leave him
(especially given my own indecision regarding von Deer)?

But I know it's not any simple anti-feminist issue, not for Mulder.  It's
just that I am me and he is he.  Him.  Whatever.

I heard the stranger's muffled footfalls approaching me.  Apparently this
person had not been educated in the rules of chapel etiquette.

But then I felt a familiar palm on my shoulderblade and I knew he was no
stranger.  It could not have been over this quickly, which must mean that--

"I didn't do it, Scully," Mulder said, his voice soft and sad, and I let
out a long breath.  His other hand came up to my waist, confining me there
at arms' length, as if afraid to embrace me but equally fearful I'd walk
away.

He hadn't done it.  He had told them no.  My head slowly rose of its own
accord, but I couldn't permit myself to look at him.  The immediate burst
of relief was followed by red-hot anger and then a confused....what?
Disappointment?  Surely not.  Surely I wouldn't feel this way just because
he'd confounded my expectations.

"You were right," he continued, still talking to the back of my head.  "I
shouldn't have put you in this position.  I'm sorry."

I didn't know what to say--whether to pound my fists into his chest or wrap
my arms around him, so I kept turning the pages of the binder.

"Hello! It's me again," I read silently.  "My dad Jerry was confined here
again 3 days ago, and now he's delirious.  He doesn't know what he's doing,
'cuz of the medication that they give him.  Please help him get out of it
and the rejection of the kidney to get better.  Help my family and me to be
strong.  I love you, Jesus. - Cassidy Chartram."

"Scully?" he asked, deeply concerned.  His hand traced a light circle over
my shoulder.  "Scully, are you okay?"

My partner had just misled me, used me, the told me he was going to
volunteer himself for death, and now I was supposed to forgive him just
because he was here?  Yet he was only here because I had goaded him by
withdrawing the only thing I had that Mulder valued: my support.  Oh sure,
I'm fine.  I'm perfect.  I'm okay.

But I didn't say a word, and I didn't turn either, which undoubtedly made
him think I was trying not to cry.  The inevitability of his suspicion, and
that I _knew_ it, made me even angrier.

"You can yell at me now," he suggested.  "Or maybe say you told me so.  Go
ahead."

He would have loved for me to yell at him, because anger is a language that
Mulder understands.  He craves my anger like an alcoholic craves straight
vodka, because even when it hurts it reassures him I'm invested.  What
he'll never understand is my sorrow.

But of course I would never say that aloud.  I hardly knew what I meant.

Finally, he sighed, tried another tack.  "What are you reading?" he asked,
leaning over my shoulder so that I could feel his warmth through my back.

My eyes returned to the page: "My God, Oh my God, please hear my cry.  I
know in my heart you are with us all, please reach down and touch the hands
and hearts of the doctors, help me bring Jacob home.  He's a good boy.
We're in your hands now.  I love you.  Lila Hanover."

In a strange, unexpected moment of clarity which had nothing to do with
Mulder, it hit me.

I wrenched myself free of Mulder's grasp and, carrying the binder, crossed
quickly back to the candles.

"Scully?"

But I ignored him.  I opened the little white box and drew out the topmost
scrap of paper.

"What are you doing?" Mulder said, and I heard the edge of uncertainty in
his voice that suggested he was questioning _my_ sanity.  Ironic,
considering.

Didn't he understand that, if I said anything at all, it would be so brutal
or so teary that we'd both forever regret I'd said anything? But I was only
secondarily aware of him now.

I looked at the paper in my hand: _Ricardo Cabarillo._  Flipped through the
pages of the binder until I came to: "Dear Jesus, please protect my father
through this night.  The accident was bad but I know you can save him and I
know he deserves to live.  His family needs him.  Please, it's not his
time.  I know I do not come to you often enough, but I swear I will if you
help make him better.  Thank you for all you have done for me and my
children.  - Ana."

I set Ricardo's name aside and folded down the corner of the page in the
notebook.  I heard Mulder approaching behind me, and then his hand entered
my field of vision, tipped down the lid of the white box to read its
purpose.  I could hear him breathing.

Here was a scrap of paper for Bernard Keller, here one for Deborah Murdoch.
I turned down the corners of the corresponding pages.

"Scully?" he asked for what seemed like the hundredth time.

"I think I want to talk to the priest," I told him, distracted.

"About what I did?" Mulder asked, and I resented the incredulity in his
tone, but only favored him with a cool stare.

"No," I answered, and gestured at the box. "About _this._  I think we may
have a case on our hands."

His mouth relaxed in relief at my apparent lack of injury and I resented
that too but this wasn't the time to discuss it.

I picked up another name, but didn't find it in the binder.

I could tell when his shoulders straightened from a slouch that he'd caught
on, and abruptly he took out a handful of names.  "Peter Coutts," he read
aloud, and I glanced at him, then began flipping rapidly through the pages.

"No," I said.

"Valerie Skank?" Mulder suggested, and I found her, marked the page.

He unfolded another note.  "Bluffton is the kid's name, no first name for
the grandmother."

I found no Blufftons.

We went through the entire box that way, and when we'd finished, nearly
half of the deaths were in the pile and about eighty percent of the pages
in the binder from the last month was turned down.  I looked up at Mulder,
who was biting his lower lip in thought.  "Well, Scully," he said.  "I
don't think I'd want any prayer circle affiliated for this hospital praying
for me."

"And I was just about to write you in," I remarked, only half-joking.
"Let's get the hospital's death records.  They'll be much more complete,
and we can compare dates to the dates in the binder."

"Not to mention check out causes of death," Mulder added, and I knew we
were Agents Mulder and Scully again.

So much for a weekend vacation.  Thank God.

---------------------------------------------------
2:45 p.m.

Some gratuitous and well-rehearsed badge-flashing earned us a printout
listing all the hospital deaths within the last three months, both
inpatient and outpatient.  We co-opted a booth in the cafeteria, despite
Mulder's unmentioned but obvious concern that von Deer or his wife might
find us here and realize we'd lied to them.  Secretly, I wanted them to.  I
wanted to see the look on that old man's face when he became acquainted
with the business end of my badge.  But neither appeared.

Mulder sat across from me and combed through the abducted binder to make a
list of the names within and the dates of the entries.  In many cases, he
had to guess, and sometimes couldn't get a name at all, as when "Carol"
mentioned her "husband," but even then he often still had a date, or could
guess at it from the pages it was sandwiched between.

I took each page as he finished it and ran my finger down the pages of the
inch-thick printout, marking the name if I found it and adding date and
cause of death to Mulder's list.  I was able to match every single name
he'd listed, and in the ambiguous cases I was still able to make an
educated guess based on the note's date.  It took almost two hours, but
when we finished, 256 subjects of the 303 prayers (not counting occasional
duplicates) were shown to be dead.

"It might not mean anything," I cautioned as Mulder pored over the pages.
"In hospitals, people don't pray for loved ones who are well."

"No," Mulder said firmly, and I nodded my agreement.  "The dates are too
consistent.  Almost all of the patients died within one or two days after
the prayer entry.  That can't be coincidence."

"Yeah," I said, drawing the word out.  I'd considered this carefully.
"Plus, only two people on the list from the last month, excluding the last
two days, are still alive, whereas two months ago the survival rate was
much higher."

"You think it's an escalating serial killer, huh?"

"Don't you?"

"How could he have done it? We're talking about 256 potential deaths in the
last twelve weeks, and no one at the hospital has caught on?"

"Well, some of the deaths could be just coincidence," I pointed out.

"Sure," Mulder acknowledged.  "Okay, let's say as many as half are
coincidental.  That leaves 128 deaths.  Still a pretty high rate."
"Someone could be drugging them," I suggested.

"And nurses wouldn't have noticed this suspicious person shooting up
patients' IVs?"

"It could be a nurse," I replied.  "Or, more likely, someone in nutrition
services, someone who delivers or makes the food.  Cyanide, arsenic,
iocaine...there're dozens of ways it could be done."

A woman at the booth behind Mulder glanced back over her shoulder with a
horrified expression and I ignored her but lowered my voice. "Many of them
wouldn't turn up in autopsies, and autopsies weren't even done on most of
those patients."

"Yeah," Mulder said with a frown.  "Many of these just list 'respiratory
failure' as cause of death.  Not very explanatory."

"It's a catch-all for 'we don't know,'" I answered.  "But no one was
surprised when these people died.  They were cancer, AIDS, geriatric
patients...the kind one prays for.  'Respiratory failure' indicates that
the doctor presumed the disease killed them."

"Some of these did have autopsies, though," Mulder noted.

"Yes, the healthier ones, where death was more unexpected.  One of them
died after childbirth, and there were a couple cases of food poisoning, one
bronchitis, things like that.  Unusual but not unheard of.  Still, the
autopsies apparently produced no significant findings, because the cause of
death is still 'respiratory failure.'"

Suddenly, something caught Mulder's eye and he flipped fast through the
pages, scanning them from top to bottom.

"What?" I asked.

"The times of death are all at night," he observed, looking up at me.

"I noticed that," I answered.  "Which seemingly supports the idea of a killer."

"But not one in food service."

"If the drug were administered at a consistent meal, say, lunch, and didn't
take effect until night..."

"The patient wouldn't feel the effects before that?"

"Okay, maybe it's in a time-release capsule."

"And the patient wouldn't notice he was eating a pill?"

"It could be snuck into his meds."

"Then it would be harder to control time of death, and besides, not all
patients have meds."

I shrugged, not seeing his point.  "So? Maybe the killer uses a variety of
mechanisms so as not to be detected."

"Maybe," Mulder said.  "Or maybe not."

I gave an exasperated sigh at his cryptic sage routine.  "Look, Mulder,
this isn't really our case anyway.  We haven't done any paperwork, and
we're supposed to be consulting in Seattle by Monday.  It should start with
the local police--"

But he knew I wasn't too serious.  "You gonna give the local police this
list? They'll laugh.  No one else will see this as evidence--250 deaths
sounds far too ridiculous.  We'll do the paperwork _after_ we're sure
there's a case."

"You're already sure," I pointed out, with more acid than was warranted.
Wouldn't want him to forget I was angry.

But he just grinned.  "You're right."

---------------------------------------------------

4:45 p.m.

We had been fortunate: Father Thomas was in his office that day.  He was a
pleasant middle-aged man with a thick but alluring South American accent;
he explained early in the conversation that he had grown up in Peru but had
requested that the church find him a flock in the United States after
serving in Lima, Mexico City and Rome.  Not the sort of priest one expected
to find at a hospital.

I asked him how long the prayer book had been in residence in the chapel,
and, still confused about why the FBI wanted to talk to _him,_ his answer
was a little defensive.

"I added the book myself when I arrived here three months ago," he said.
"It seems to have been a very positive addition to the chapel.  Many people
are using it."

"We noticed," Mulder remarked.  "Funny that the people who get prayed for
seem to wind up dead."

I winced at his forthrightness, but I knew he was only interested in
provoking and studying a reaction.  From my vantage point, the result was
confusion mixed with horror.

"What is that supposed to mean?"

"Just an observation," Mulder answered, and he dropped our list onto the
desk.  "See those names? They're from the prayer book."

Thomas scanned the list from top to bottom, his lips moving silently as his
eyes widened.  He flipped to the next page and the next.  I folded my arms
on my chest, waiting.

"But...but...people die.  It happens.  And people who are sick enough to so
desperately need prayer..."

"Not that many people die, Father," I said.  "And not within two days of
the time their prayer was written."

Thomas crossed himself reflexively and gave me an almost plaintive look.
"You think someone is _doing_ this?"

Mulder opened his mouth to reply but I was quicker.  "We don't know."

A sharp knock at the door stopped Thomas before he could speak again, and
he shook his head to clear it, called out: "Come in."

A young woman entered, her cheeks streaked with tears.  She looked
nervously from Mulder to me, biting her lip.

"Katie," he said, his voice edged with undisguised concern.  "What is it?"

"He's back in ICU, Father," the woman sniffled, and I caught Mulder's eye,
signaled for him to follow me as I made for the door.  He followed with the
reluctance of a hound called off the hunt, but not before snatching back
the list.

In the hallway outside, he leaned his elbow against the wall and propped
his head on his hand.  I sidled closer to him.

"Do you think he has something to do with it?"

Mulder's eyes unfocused.  "No," he said after a moment.  "No, I think he
was genuinely surprised.  There's definitely a religious theme here, but
he's not the type to be involved.  I can't quite put my finger on it."

"Someone playing devil, intervening to show that God won't?" I suggested.

"I thought of that," Mulder admitted, as usual oblivious to having stolen
my thunder.  "But it doesn't completely fit."

"Why not?"

He shrugged, still looking through me.  "I don't know," he confessed.  "It
just doesn't."

Did he have any idea how frustrating that was? I was not in the mood today
for the enigmatic Fox Mulder, and even though I knew it wasn't deliberate,
I had to bite down hard and look away to keep from demanding he demonstrate
his rationale.

But I knew from years of experience without a manual that there was nothing
else I could say, so after a long hesitation I finally asked what I didn't
want to know.

"What happened after I left?"

His eyes found mine as if surprised I was standing there, much less asking
such a cryptic question.

"When?"

I already regretted asking.  "This morning."

"Oh."  He shrugged.  "They gave me the opiate, took some preliminary
readings.  I stopped them before they injected the NMDA.  I combed my hair
and came after you."

Implicit was the observation that he hadn't had to look too hard.  But this
was beside the point.  "You took the opiate?"

"Yeah.  It was a small dose."

"So you were drugged when you found me?"

"Not too heavily."

I leaned my head against the wall, defeated.  "Mulder," I groaned.

"What?"

"How do you feel now?" Straightening, I hooked my hand around the back of
his neck and dragged his head down toward me so I could better see his
pupils.  He came willingly, and I cupped his cheek to pull at the skin
below his left eye with my thumb.

"I feel fine," he said.

His pupils looked dilated.  I wished I had a penlight.  Maybe I could
borrow one--

At that moment the door opened and I dropped my hand fast as if I'd been
caught doing something wrong, but it was only Katie, coming out of the
room.  She'd bent her head to hide her tears with her hair, and she crossed
the hall back into the chapel without looking at us.

I walked back into the office with Mulder in tow.  Father Thomas stood at
the window, staring out into the grey afternoon.

"Running an interfaith chapel in a Catholic hospital isn't easy," he said
before we could speak.  "You have to play all angles, provide every
traditional formality as well as every modern psychological ritual.  I
thought the prayer book was just a good idea, and I don't want to believe
what you've told me. But if you're right, or even if you're just
investigating the possibility, I think we have no choice butto remove it.
Thank you for telling me."

"No, don't remove it," Mulder said, from behind me.  "I have a better idea."

Abruptly nervous, I looked back at him, one eyebrow already on its way up.

---------------------------------------------------





Chapter 3

Minenfield Voran

---------------------------------------------------
9:45 p.m.

It was too late to object, but in our haste to execute the plan we'd had no
time to talk alone until now.  Had he intended that? I liked to think the
negotiations had been mine, but sometimes I suspected Mulder of trying to
make me think that when it wasn't completely true.

I let the irritation in my voice underline the concern. "Mulder, I don't
like this at all.  Why does this have to be _you?_"

My back was turned to him as he undressed for the second time that day.
"Well, Dr. Scully," he answered in his most reasonable tone, "I figure
you're a lot more qualified to look after me than I am to look after you."

"You realize that using an officer as bait to trap a killer goes against at
least a dozen bureau regulations."

He ignored me.  "We'll call up some boys from the Buffalo office tomorrow
to keep an eye on me so you don't have to stick around the whole time if
you don't want to.  You can turn around now."

I did.  Mulder was sitting on the edge of the hospital bed dressed in a
silly-looking blue gown, his clothes folded neatly beside him.  "No," I
said.  "I don't trust that.  I want to keep an eye on you myself."

"Scully, I'm touched."  He laid his palm dramatically over his heart.
"You've never offered to share a hospital room with me before."

"Quarantine," I pointed out.  "But I didn't want to do it then and I didn't
say I _wanted_ to do it now."

He had turned to pick up the pile of multicolored check-in literature on
the bed beside him, but the acid in my tone made him glance back at me.  He
knew I hadn't forgotten the morning.

In a syrup-coated voice he pretended to grumble: "Well, at least in Q we
got HBO." He tapped the TV channel listings on top of the paper pile.  "How
do you feel about ESPN?  ESP-en, Scully.  You ever really think about that?"

What I was thinking about was my almost insurmountable desire to be back in
my own home with the past twelve hours erased.

Though we hadn't told him the whole story, only saying we needed it for an
undercover investigation, one of the hospital vice presidents had been
sufficiently impressed with our credentials to provide us with the tiniest,
shabbiest room the hospital offered.  If I learned nothing else on this
trip it was that health care really has become as much a bean-counting
industry as the federal government.

The view from the window was of a white cement-block wall about six feet
away.  Two thinly-blanketed beds were separated by a curtain.  Not exactly
where I'd expected to spend my weekend.

I was very glad that Mulder hadn't asked _me_ to write the prayer.  It
would have been dishonest somehow, to have to make up words for how much I
cared about him just to further a ruse.  Thankfully, he seemed to know
that, though I couldn't help but wince when I saw he'd signed the note
"Samantha."

"Heavenly Father, You are the Greatest Healer in the world," he'd written,
imitating the style of the other prayers.  "Please hear my prayers for my
brother, George.  He has so much to live for and you have the power to help
heal him.  Please be with the doctors and nurses and our family in this
time of need. Your servant, Samantha Hammond."

Okay, my reaction was not just a wince, more like a recoil.  Mulder saw it,
of course, and looked down at the floor.

"I think it's important that there be at least a little honesty," he
muttered, and I didn't ask him why,because he'd only tell me he didn't
know.  Nonetheless, it seemed perverse somehow, like attending a loved
one's funeral dressed as a clown.

He was listed in the hospital database as George Hammond, diagnosed with
pneumonia and a secondary nosocomial staphylococcus infection.  I was
listed as Carl Castle, and I was also supposed to be suffering from staph.
Hopefully, if we had a night visitor, he wouldn't realize my name was by no
stretch of the imagination 'Carl' until he was looking down the barrel of
my gun.

At least, that was the plan.  My idea of the plan.  Mulder's vague
suspicions suggested he might have had other ideas, but nothing concrete
enough to share, and I couldn't grasp even his intuition this time.  Mulder
is like a book, but not in the usual way that phrase is intended: sometimes
I can open him up and read every page, but other times it's as if some
magician has cast a spell to lock him closed and I can't see a single
sentence.

While he'd gone back to the condo to get our things, I'd spoken with a
handful of nurses who'd been acquainted with some of the patients on our
list, careful not to tell them that we were investigating more than the one
death I asked about.  No need to induce hysteria.

Tim Gallagher in CICU claimed that Carol Farquar's death had been
completely unexpected--though she'd suffered a heart attack two days
earlier the doctors had thought she was safe and planned to move her out in
the morning.  Gracie Bovak had thought nothing of Dale Jenner's death--the
man had been slipping in and out of oncology for months.  No one had seen
anything suspicious.

There was a sharp tap on the door and our nurse JoAnn entered before we
could invite her in.  She was a "floater," a floor nurse who moved from
wing to wing almost daily, filling in wherever she was needed.  From the
dossier of personnel files which the vice president had provided me, I'd
selected one floater from each of the three shifts to be at least partly in
on the plan, and in true HMO tradition we'd chosen our doctor from a
similar list.  Dr. Bannerjee knew only that we were FBI agents and that she
didn't have to do anything about us but let us forge her name on our
charts.  She'd agreed eagerly, excited to help in an undercover
investigation.  That made me a little nervous, but there was nothing to be
done about it now.

A rotund African-American woman of about fifty-five with a with an enormous
pair of tortoise-shell spectacles, JoAnn had the disarming ability to pose
as anyone's cookie-baking mother (what, I imagine, most people would
incorrectly label optimal training for an R.N.).  But her appearance was a
clever disguise; within thirty seconds one began to suspect she'd gotten
her qualifications acting as an army drill sergeant, which in fact she had.
It was one of the reasons I'd picked her.

"Mr. Hammond," she barked, though she knew Mulder's real name.  "Get your
skinny white butt underneath those blankets right now.  You are not getting
out of that bed unless it's to piss, and even then, you call me first."

Mulder gave me a panicked look but I didn't bat an eye, making it clear
he'd get no help from me.  Unfortunately, he knew my glare, and it only
made him grin.

"Yes, _ma'am,_" he said to JoAnn, punctuating the words with an invisible
salute and swung his legs up under the covers.

Her expression softened into a hint of a smile and I blinked in
disappointment.  Apparently no one is immune to Muldercharm, which I
suppose should have made me feel better about my own weakness.  But it
didn't.

I was grateful, though, when she turned to me and asked: "So how real are
we getting here? Are we gonna hook him up to everything?"

I shook my head.  "We just want to make it look good.  Heart monitor and IV
are all we need, I think.  The heart monitor should be treated as real.
But just tape the IV to his hand and leave the needle capped so he can move
fast if he needs to."

"You're not expecting violence, I hope.  I won't tolerate any risk to
anyone here," she warned.

"Neither will we," I assured her.  "And no, we're not expecting violence,
but--"

"But you can't tell me anything more than that this is undercover," JoAnn
finished, and I nodded.  "Well, that's fine, but I will tell you I tried to
find out who George Hammond is and couldn't."

I realized she was assuming that 'George Hammond' was the bait in the
sting, which he was, but not in the singular way she supposed.  Good.  We didn't need the a serial killer rumor spreading."I imagine there are lots of G
eorge Hammonds," Mulder said mildly, and I knew he was advancing her
suspicion deliberately.

She moved over to the IV stand, tapped the blue plastic housing on top of
the pole.  "This ain't gonna look right if it's not plugged into him," she
said.  "It's programmed to watch the drip rate, and if there's no
dripping...."

"You can put it in," Mulder said.  "It's just saline and a needle."

"So someone can come along with a syringe full of potassium chloride and an
easy route of administration?" I asked, aware but unable to prevent the
sharpness in my tone.  "No.  We'll have to jury-rig it somehow."

The three of us spent the next thirty minutes fiddling with the IV until
JoAnn found the satisfactory solution: she added a Y-clip to the tubing and
spliced a third plastic coil into a closed circuit which excluded the
needle entirely, cleverly making the IV bag drip back into itself.  After
twisting the tubes up, the ruse was apparent only upon close examination.
Only our trusted nurses would notice that it never needed changing.

Then JoAnn gave a brief, practiced spiel about the use of the call button
and left.  The small room was suddenly very, very quiet.

I wasn't ready to be alone with Mulder, not now.  The vision that had leapt
into my brain that morning, the one of his lifeless eyes staring into mine
while a lifeless mouth spoke lifeless words--"Scully, I'm so glad you're
here!"--still lurked in the back of my brain where it seemed to have taken
up permanent residence.    And I was still hurt, still angry.  If we were
alone together for too long, there was a dangerous possibility that I'd
actually tell him how upset I was.  I'd learned long ago how pointless
_that_ was.

Instead of looking at him, I went to the window, tugged the Venetian blinds
shut.  Unwilling to cross back to his side of the room, I parted the blinds
with two fingers and peered through the slats.

Scant moonlight glinted blue off the snow outside, but there was nothing
more to see.

He said my name, quiet and serious, and I snapped the blinds back together
a little too violently.

I turned to look at him; he was sitting up in bed, knees drawn up and back
pillowed on the headboard, watching me with a darkened eyes.

"I'm sorry," he said, when he decided he had my attention.

Angry that he'd seen my pain though I hadn't chosen to reveal it, and even
more angry that he thought my expected forgiveness would make everything
better, I took a long deep breath, then unzipped the shoulder bag on my
bed, the one he'd brought from the condo.  Fished out my bag of toiletries
and a pair of pajamas while he watched without comment.

"I'm going to take a shower," I announced, and headed for the bathroom.  I
could feel his eyes burning holes in my back.

---------------------------------------------------

11:45 p.m.

I stood naked in the tiny, sterile bathroom, my arms folded over my breasts
and my wet hair tickling my shoulders as I waited for the mud on my face to
turn dry and uncomfortable.   On the other side of the thin bathroom door,
I could hear soft voices on the television and the creaking of the mattress
every time Mulder so much as breathed.  The masque was already starting to
feel like pins and needles, inaccurate acupuncture.  Usually I find these
rituals relaxing in their forced meditation, but tonight I resented the
quiet time: I didn't want to think.  Sometimes flawless skin exacts a high
price.

"I didn't do it, Scully," his voice repeated in my head for the thousandth
time, and God, I wished he would shut the hell up.  Why does he invade
every second?

Maybe because I let him, and today, letting him was dangerous.  I tried to
school my thoughts back to the 'case,' to the loosely calculated statistics
which undeniably indicated a pattern.  But the only thing I could think was
that this could not be the best way to corner the killer, and that was
Mulder's fault too.

Some subconscious neurological process resolved these trains of thought
into the sudden image of Mulder howling a girlie scream from his hospital
bed as a comically proportioned serial killer raised a knife over his
chest.  I would then burst from the bathroom, naked but for the green-brown
mud plastered on my face and the gun in my hand, like some avenging angel
out of a surrealist painting.  I suppressed a chuckle and the masque
cracked.

Good enough.  I leaned over the sink to scrub it away.

Mulder was risking his life again, but this time I was going along with it.
Why was this any different from this morning?

Not because it was a case, no.  It was, I reasoned, because I suspected we
were dealing with a real, concrete person--the kind that could slip into a
room, inject something or drop something in a glass of water and slip back
out again.  This kind of enemy I could not only see on approach, but defeat
with a gun.

Let it _never_ be said that I don't support my partner.

But Mulder thought it was something else.  I didn't know what, and I didn't
think he did either.  Something more ephemeral than a renegade and
disenchanted hospital employee.  An X-File.  Was I only playing along
because I didn't believe him?

I ran a comb through my damp hair, then shrugged into my blue cotton
pajamas.  Opened the door and was frozen by the blast of arctic air from
the main room.

The head of the bed was elevated, and Mulder lay propped there, his eyes
closed and jaw slack.  A moment of irrational panic gripped me, and I moved
quickly to his side, but he heard my approach and his eyes fluttered open.

"About time," he grumbled.  "What, were you washing each strand of hair
individually?"

I exhaled, ignoring him, and anxious to hide my momentary concern I turned
my face toward the TV.  Jay Leno was yapping about breath mints and chewing
gum with some overly-ebullient actress I didn't recognize, and, rolling my
eyes, I reached across Mulder for the remote and banished Jay with a click
of my finger.

"We need to think about suspects, Mulder," I announced, moving around to
the other side of the room.  My side.

He leered at me.  "Oh, serious conversation? I don't know, it's a little
hard to take you seriously in those cute flannel pajamas."

He should have seen the masqued naked woman.  "Do you think it's really
coincidence that we're here, Mulder?" I asked, as if I hadn't heard.

"Ah, paranoid Scully reveals her true colors."

I rolled my eyes.  "I'm serious.  What are the chances that we'd bump into
something like this on a weekend off?" I paused to let that sink in, then
answered my own question.  "Pretty low.  I think we artificially selected
for it by coming here in the first place.  Because what else is unusual
about this hospital? Arthur von Deer."

"He's not involved," Mulder said, immediately serious.

"Why do you say that?" I asked.  "He's interested in both death and
spirituality.  And with a conservative estimate of one hundred victims in a
few months, we're talking about something very systematic here.  Something
which might be data collection."

"It's not him," Mulder repeated stubbornly.

"How do you know?"

"It just doesn't fit," he said.

"You've said that about every suggestion I've made.  What exactly is the
mold you're trying to fit people into? What's the profile?"

"I don't have one," he confessed.  "Not yet."

I wasn't in the mood for Mulder's touchy-feely Spidey-sense.  "Then I think
we should interview von Deer tomorrow."

"You're only looking for an excuse to shut him down."

"I don't need an excuse.  If I wanted to shut him down I could have flashed
my badge this morning.  The reasons for my suspicions are sound, Mulder,
and--"

"I think you're letting your feelings and prejudices color your judgment,
Scully," he interrupted, and his matter-of-fact tone angered me.  He _knew_
that was one of the most serious accusations he could make, yet he tossed
it off as casually as he'd remarked on my pajamas.  At least before, when
he'd said things like that, he'd done it gently, cautiously, and on this
case _he_ was the one with the bias.

"Just what are you implying?" I demanded, sitting back on my bed and folding my arms over my chest.  "I wasn't implying anything," he said calmly.  "I th
ought I was being quite clear.  You're angry at me and by extension at von
Deer, but you're sidestepping that, using your perfected mask of
professional detachment as a shield for your motives in this investigation."

_Mulder_ was lecturing _me_ about using a case as an excuse to pursue an
agenda? "My motives?" I echoed.  "How can you sit there so blandly accusing
me of something like that? It's your agenda that brought us here."

"Yes, it is," he said with a nod.  "And I said I was deeply sorry, but you
won't acknowledge that.  You're avoiding what happened this morning, and I
don't want this to bite us in the back when we're facing down a potentially
dangerous case."

"We have work to do," I snapped.  "I've put it behind me."

He grinned, but not nicely.  "You're such a terrible liar, Scully."

"Don't get all mushy on me, Mulder," I said icily.  "I wouldn't want to
lose my 'professional detachment.'"

"No danger of that," he snorted with a smirk, and I almost exploded but
then a flash in his eyes betrayed him and I suddenly realized I'd been
seeing the whole conversation through a smudged pane of glass.

Clarity descended.

"You're goading me," I said, disbelief coloring my voice.  He lowered his
eyes and I knew I was right.    "I'm not a suspect, someone to...to be
_manipulated,_ Mulder.  What are you trying to prove?"

"I'm not goading you," he said, but his denial was two beats too late.

I nodded to myself, surprised I hadn't seen it earlier.  He was trying
again to make me surrender to my anger, because it was easier to deal with
than my disappointment, or, worse, my pain.  Because he thought I could
yell at him and he could take it, and then everything would be okay.  He
was wrong.

He saw my certainty and his shoulders sagged with defeat.  A long silence
settled over the room, the air between us no longer crackling.  "I just
want to know what I'm supposed to do, Scully," he said finally.  "You're
angry when I ditch you, and you're angry when I don't.  It seems to me that
the problem isn't what I do with respect to _you_ but what I do in general."

I sighed.  "Mulder, you know that's not true.  I'm angry because you
brought me here under false pretenses.  You knew how I would react, so you
deliberately maneuvered me into a situation where you thought you could
count on my instinct to support you to override my judgment. You were so
focused on your own agenda that you didn't stop to consider the position it
would put me in."

"Scully, I left!" he protested.  "I didn't go through with it."

"And that's supposed to make me feel better?" I asked, cocking my head at
him.  "It makes me feel _responsible,_ Mulder.  You've all but said I was
responsible for your decision to walk out of there; the obvious conclusion
is that if I'd stayed I would have been responsible for that too.  That is
not a burden I'm prepared to accept."

"What--are you saying you _wanted_ me to go through with it?"

I took a deep breath and considered for a long moment, refusing to let him
push me but already trapped.  "I'm saying," I said finally, hesitated,
began again.  "I'm saying that I...that going off half-cocked and doing
crazy things like this is what you do, Mulder.  Maybe that's inextricable
from who you are.  Maybe I don't want to see you lose something of
yourself, your belief.  I don't want to see...that."

My words unbalanced him, and I could see the heat draining away from his
eyes.  He'd been prepared to accuse me of not accepting who he was; he
wasn't sure what to do with what I'd given him instead.  He studied his
knees, worrying at his lower lip as he considered how he should respond.
But I charged ahead before he could speak, and my voice was threateningly
uneven, like the sea before a storm.

"On the other hand, I don't want to see you dead.  How am I supposed to
reconcile these two things?"

Mulder heaved a long, slow sigh and turned his head to meet my gaze.  "I
don't know," he confessed, his voice low and a little husky.  "But,
Scully--as longas you...as long as you feel.... I don't want to hurt you,
Scully.  I can't."

Oh, this was going too far.  His honesty summoned tears to my eyes, and I
couldn't bring myself to say what I probably should have--that he hurts me
more often than he knows.

It's a widely-spread myth that the way to keep from crying is to blink
rapidly, but I've known better since I was a girl: it's best to keep one's
eyes open wide.

"But," Mulder continued, "I can't win here, Scully.  If I do these sorts of
things, you're hurt, and if I don't...well, here we are.  It's a lose-lose
situation."

"It shouldn't matter," I said softly, trying to ignore the tiny part of me
that wanted it to matter.  "You should do what you believe regardless of
how it makes me feel.  You have to be true to yourself first."

I meant that.  I did.  Sometimes I feel like I exist only to hold up a
mirror for Mulder, to show him through my faith in him that he is
beautiful.  This wouldn't bother me if Mulder occasionally peered around
the glass to remember who is holding it.  I may be Mulder's "one in five
billion," I may make him "a whole person," but where does that truly leave
_me?_

But should I be surprised that this is the nature or our relationship, when
these are the things I say, that it 'shouldn't matter?' Apparently I am a
character-actress: there's only one role I can play.

"Not wanting to hurt you--that's true too," he said, and his voice was
barely above a whisper.

"Mulder, I don't want to hurt you either, but...."  My voice trailed off.

This was far more than either of us had bargained for.  I felt a tear slide
down my cheek and when he saw it he winced, turned his head away.  "But you
manage it," he said to the bathroom door.  "You walked out of that room.
You wouldn't compromise."

What was I supposed to say now? Assure him that it wasn't because I felt
less for him than he for me? Or tell him the alternative: that I was simply
stronger than he? Tell him that it hadn't been easy, and thus multiply his
guilt for having put me in that position in the first place?

The correct response, I reasoned, would be the true response, regardless of
how it made him feel, but I didn't even know which was true.

The paradox was as unfamiliar to him as it was to me, though it had been
creeping up on us for years.  We hadn't seen it coming but I knew we'd
always sensed it, like red eyes following your back in a childhood
nightmare that disappear whenever you whirl around to confront them.

Though those who know us believe that Mulder and I are polar opposites, we
are in reality more similar than we are different: stubborn and ruthlessly
upholding our beliefs above all else.  We had both known defeat, but until
now, we had never known surrender.

He wiped at his eyes with the back of his hand and I wanted to go to him,
comfort him, but perhaps that was exactly the problem.  I wanted to tell
him that I would never think less of him, but such words would be
tantamount to saying he _should_ compromise his beliefs for me, and,
actually, neither was true.

I wanted to tell him that I was not fragile, point out that he'd bruised me
a hundred times but I'd never broken, but to say that would suggest I
wouldn't care enough should he wind up hurt or dead, and again, neither was
true.

Once when I was sixteen years old my father was stationed in West Germany
for two months, and he took Mom, Charlie and I with him.  We mostly stayed
at the base, but vacationed one week at a small country club just south of
Neustadt, near the East German border.  The facility had once been a Nazi
resort, but all signs of that were now erased, and the beautiful, verdant
countryside could hardly be imagined to have hosted such powerful, terrible
men.

A placid mountain lake reflected the surrounding evergreens and played
mirror to the incredible purple-and-gold sunsets.  Brochures in the main
building advertised "Wollen Sie am morgen zu ausuben? Laufen Sie 5K
ringsherum der See!"  _Want some morning exercise? Run 5k around the lake!_
I couldn't read the rest of the text, but it sounded like a good idea and
Charlie and I set out to try it one morning.

We found a poorly cleared trailhead and began to jog.  He was faster than
I, but I could run longer,  and he knew that if he ran on past I'd overtake
him eventually, so he stayed by my side.  We ran and ran, over dirt-paved
hillocks among black walnut trees and loudly chirping birds, and I truly
felt it was the most beautiful place I'd ever been.

But as the morning wore on, we still found ourselves overlooking,
essentially, the same part of the lake we'd started at.

"This has to be more than 5k," Charlie finally huffed, stopping to pant
with his hands on his knees.

I stopped as well, bent to stretch my aching muscles.  "Yeah," I agreed.
"Much more.  I think we've already done seven or eight."

"Maybe we're on the wrong path," my brother suggested.

"Do you want to go back?" I asked.

"Nah.  Just a little further.  Let's see where it goes."

So we kept jogging and, fifteen minutes later, we came upon a sign hidden
under overgrown branches.  It was a large metal sign, like a highway road
marker, but it had been planted facing away from us, obviously intended for
people approaching from the other direction.

I raised my eyebrows at Charlie, who shrugged and walked around to the
front of it.  I followed.

"Vorsicht!" It read.  "Minenfield voran.  Eintragen Sie nicht!"  And, just
in case this was unclear, both English and French translations followed.
"Caution!  Land mines ahead.  Do not enter!"

Charlie and I had just jogged across a minefield.

We panicked, we deliberated, but finally we decided to go back the way we'd
come, because we frankly had no idea where we were.  My throat was dry, my
steps cautiously measured, and it took us two hours to walk back, but
nothing happened, and we never told our parents.

I remembered now how that had felt, to have stumbled across that warning
sign after we'd already long since crossed the invisible line and journeyed
far into unknown, dangerous (if beautiful) country.  I felt that Mulder and
I had made the same mistake, except that here and now I had no idea how we
could find our way back to safety.

"Scully?" he said, stirring me from my reverie.  I was relieved that
neither of us were crying now, but my partner, perched on the side of his
bed, still looked grey with misery.

Why hadn't our trail been better marked? Why hadn't we stopped to ask
ourselves where it was leading?

"I'm tired, Mulder," I told him, and he nodded.

"Go to sleep then," he suggested.  "We'll talk about suspects in the morning."

A long, reluctant pause filled the room.

"We should close the curtain at least partway," I said absently, with the
small part of my brain still concerned with the case at hand.  "In case
someone tries something."

He nodded again and I got up to pull the curtain, dividing the room, but
leaving a gap near the heads of our beds, large enough that I could still
see him and small enough that it would not be noticed.  Just before I
retreated to my side of the room, Mulder stretched out his hand to me,
opened his mouth to speak, but no words came out.

I started to reach back with the intention of clasping his hand, but before
I could get very far he drew back anyway.  "Good night, Scully," he said.

I crossed to my side of the room and flipped off my light.  "Good night," I
answered, and burrowed under the covers, after checking to be sure my gun
was safely ensconced beneath my pillow.

Through the window, the winter moon cast a cold rectangle of light across
my blankets.  I lay still for a few minutes before I heard the high-pitched
whine of Mulder's television clicking on; he must have been using earphones.

Or just staring, like I was, at pictures without sound.  So much for not
looking back.

---------------------------------------------------






Chapter 4

Not Exactly A Lie

---------------------------------------------------
Sunday
3:33 a.m.

The mousy footsteps would not have been loud enough to wake most people,
but I was alert before the door was clicked shut.

I groped under my pillow for my gun, withdrew it with only the softest
rustling of the sheets.  I placed the intruder mentally at the foot of
Mulder's bed, separated from my line of sight by only an inadequate curtain.

The stranger did not move.  I listened for breathing.  Mulder's was shallow
but even, and I heard the soft smack of his lips parting; I felt sure he
was awake.  Playing the dutiful worm on a hook, waiting for the intruder to
bite and trusting me to reel him in.

I couldn't make out the third set of lungs in the room, perhaps because I
was less in tune to their rhythm than I was to Mulder's.  But I knew he was
there.  I suddenly saw the foolishness of our alignment--we'd wanted to put
Mulder near the door, but the moonlight was behind me; I would cast a
silhouette if I sat up.  We should have rigged a nightlight on the other
side of the curtain.

Sixty seconds passed in indecisive silence, and then I heard another
footfall.  Moving toward or away from Mulder? I couldn't tell.

Enough.  No nurse would have stood there so long.  I was not adverse to
risks but there were limits.

In one fluid motion, I swung my legs over the bed, threw back the curtain
and clicked the safety on my Sig.  "Stop right there," I said, and my
voice, so divorced from sleep, sounded like it could not have emerged from
my mouth.

In the pale grey light, beside my partner's bed, stood Father Thomas.

Mulder's eyes had snapped open at the sound of my voice, and now he leaned
up on his elbows without a glance at me.

"What are you doing here?" he demanded, recognizing the priest.

The young man's eyes stared me down like headlights, but I was no deer.
"I'm sorry!" he said, squeaking almost imperceptibly on the last syllable.
"Please put the..._that_ away."

I made no move to lower my weapon.  "Tell us why you're here."

"I just...I'm sorry.  I haven't been able to sleep, after talking to you
today.  I didn't want another death on my shoulders, and so I came here to
pray for you."

Mulder snorted and sat up with a casualness in which only I saw the
strategy.  He swiveled to face Thomas so his back was presented only to me,
careful to leave me a clear line of sight.  "I could do without the
prayers, thanks," he said dryly.

"What do you mean, 'another death?'" I asked.

"Please, Agent Scully," the priest said.  "Guns make me very nervous.
Where I come from they aren't just for defense."

"Nor where I come from," I muttered, but I lowered the weapon.  The safety
stayed off.

Thomas reached for the light switch above Mulder's bed, but Mulder seized
his wrist, and again I saw the strategy: he didn't want me blinded.
"Answer the question," he said, his voice like polished steel.  "Why do you
feel responsible?"

The small man pulled his hand away, bringing his wrist to his torso like a
cradled kitten--Mulder hadn't been gentle.  "It was my idea," he said, as
if saying that snow is white.  "The notebooks, I mean.  I should have
noticed what was happening.  I had terrible dreams tonight...I just needed
to know you were all right."

"How did you find us under these names?" Mulder asked, and I tried to
fathom from his tone whether he considered the priest a threat but couldn't.

"I saw your prayer, of course.  I came in to check that no more had been
added, like you wanted me to."

Mulder turned half-away from the priest, swinging his legs back under the
covers.  It was tantamount to dismissal.

"Well," I said, "now you know not to startle FBI agents.  Thank you for
your concern, Father, but it's best if you stay away from the
investigation."

"I see that now," he said, and even in the dim light his features looked
contrite.  "I'm sorry."

He turned to go, but just before stepping out the door, mumbled something
that sounded like "God be with you."

When he was gone, I flipped the safety back in place and tucked my gun
away, searched out Mulder's eyes with a question on my lips.

He frowned at me across the darkness, perplexed.  "I don't know," he said,
before I could ask what he thought. "Maybe.  But he's not coming back
tonight."

I swung my legs up under the covers and lay back.  We left the curtain
open, but I slept restlessly throughout the night.

---------------------------------------------------
7:02 a.m.

The sound of the shower woke me, and it bothered me that I hadn't heard
Mulder get out of bed, but perhaps my nervous senses were attuned only to
noises more suspicious than the familiar sounds of my partner.

The morning nursing shift had arrived, and I was reassured when our new,
specially selected nurse rushed into the room only seconds later, alarmed
that Mulder's heart monitor had been disconnected.

I assured the nurse that Mulder had never been a cooperative patient and
that there was nothing to worry about, but to please keep up the vigilance.
The young man beamed with pleasure at both the compliment and the implied
authority, made a few notes on Mulder's chart, and left.  I was so far very
satisfied with my nursing cadre.

Breakfast arrived, catered by a college student dressed in polyester that
matched the pink tray she plopped in front of me.  As soon as she'd left, I
filled three glass vials from my evidence bag with samples from Mulder's
eggs and tea, and the nurse returned shortly with a fresh breakfast for my
partner that he'd bought from the cafeteria.  We had agreed that Mulder
wouldn't eat anything specifically intended for him, and if we found
nothing suspicious in a day or two, I'd feed the meal samples to a few rats
and monitor the effects.

The eggs tasted like wet styrofoam but I slurped them down anyway.  By the
time I was finished, the shower had stopped and Mulder emerged from the
bathroom, dripping wet and clad only in a towel.  He was using the other
towel, the one I'd used last night, to furiously sandpaper his hair.

"Sleep well?" he asked.

"I would have if it weren't for your snoring," I lied, determined to start
this day off better than we had yesterday.

He tossed the towel--the top one--at me in mock indignation.  "I do not."

I wadded up the towel and tossed it back, hard; he caught it.  "Put some
clothes on and plug your IV back in," I told him.  "You've already got the
nurse worried."

"This"--he held up the fresh hospital-issue gown that had been folded in
the bathroom--"does not qualify as clothing, Scully."

"It's better than the towel."

"You don't like the towel?" His hand went to his waist and I saw what was
coming, turned away in time, but I knew he hadn't missed the color rising
in my cheeks when he chuckled.   I felt my own lips curl in the faintest
hint of a smile.  I've seen Mulder naked more times than I can count but
presentation is everything.  In more ways than one.

I heard him shrug into the gown and climb back in bed, then I got up to
help him with the IV.  I took his left hand in mine and taped the capped
needle into place, then replaced the heart monitor on his index finger.
Its green-on-black readout stirred back to life, mimicking with a thin
digital string the dance of the strong muscle in my partner's chest.  I
thought his fingers tightened briefly around mine before he pulled
away--apologizing, forgiving, reassuring--but I may have just imagined it.

I eased back onto the edge of his bed.  "Mulder, I don't think it's useful
for us both to spend all day sitting here."

"I agree," he said.  "All of the deaths occurred at night anyway.  I was
hoping to interview that woman--Mabel Terman--one of the few who made the
prayer book and didn't die."

"I was talking about me.  It'd be suspicious if you just walked out for a
few hours."

"I wasn't planning on walking out--that's what telephones are for.
Besides, you know how much I love sitting in bed all day long dressed in
paper.  Who knows when I'll get another chance?"

"With your track record it won't be long," I said.  "So, what--you want to
talk on the phone while I do...something else?"

"That's what you had in mind, wasn't it?"

"Yes, but I'm not comfortable leaving you here alone."

"I'll be fine, Scully.  My gun's in the drawer."  He pointed at the bedside
table on which his breakfast tray rested.  "What were you planning to do?"

I tucked my hair behind one ear. "The most recent death was two days ago.
The body's probably still in the morgue."

He nodded, approving.

"What about Father Thomas?" I said.  "Did you believe him last night?"

Mulder tapped one finger against his belly.  "I think he knows something,"
he said after a pause.  "I'd like to talk to him again, but I don't want to
do it over the phone."

"I think he was genuine," I said, and immediately searched Mulder's eyes
for a hint of derision, waiting for him to note my defense of a priest.
But he didn't.

"He was nervous," Mulder said, his eyes focusing on some point just beyond
my head.  "But not because you were pointing a gun in his face--in fact, he
wasn't nervous enough about that."

"He grew up in Peru in the seventies, which wasn't exactly the safest place
with the Shining Path around," I said.  "He's undoubtedly seen guns before."

"Why is he here? What's a young, successful, multilingual priest with a
global curriculum vitae doing at a Pennsylvania hospital?"

I shrugged.  "He said he wanted to come to the U.S.  Priests get little say
in the parishes they're assigned to."

"I'd just like to know the whole story," Mulder said stubbornly.

I sighed.  "Set up an interview with him this evening, then," I said.  "I'd
like to be there for that."

Mulder opened his mouth to protest, I'm sure, that one interview was hardly
enough to occupy his entire Sunday, but I watched him consider the events
of the previous day and arrive at the conclusion that it was better to
appease me.  My lips fell into a slight frown, annoyed.  Wasn't this
exactly what I'd been talking about?

"I'm getting dressed," I announced, standing.  "Eat your breakfast--the
eggs are delicious."

I went to my side of the room and pulled the curtain shut, then stripped
off my pajamas and replaced them with dark pants and a sweater.  I should
have asked the nurse for a set of scrubs--it would make me less obtrusive
coming and going and if I managed to get permission for this autopsy, I'd
need them anyway.

I wasn't sure what to think of Father Thomas either.  The man struck me as
odd in a way I couldn't quite describe, but I chalked that up to cultural
differences.  Mulder was right: he was worth talking to again, but I still
believed we were looking for something more systematic and sinister.

I didn't feel entirely comfortable leaving Mulder alone all day, and not
just because I feared our serial killer would present himself.  I flirted
briefly with the idea of calling in someone from the Philly office or the
local P.D. to stand outside the door, but I doubted any typical officer had
the well-honed paranoia necessary to protect Mulder--unless the killer
walked in brandishing a butcher knife, an extra man wouldn't be much help.
And if Mulder decided to depart from the original plan, which was my other
fear, no two-bit rent-a-cop was going to stop him.  Regardless, this
operation was a violation of so many well-justified protocols that no one
in his right mind would go along with it.

What did that say about me?

---------------------------------------------------

I'd thought it was going to be a good day, at least by comparison to the
day which had preceded it, but by midmorning I knew I'd been wrong.

The list of deaths we'd made hadn't mentioned that the body in the morgue
was just eight years old, a victim of AML--acute myelogenous leukemia.
Christina Yates.

By eleven o'clock, the chief pathology resident had agreed by phone that I
could use the facilities, but I still had to get permission from the
parents, on their first Sunday morning without their daughter.

This was not the kind of thing one could do by phone.  I pulled up on the
street just as they arrived home from church--grandparents, parents, and
two brothers.  In an intellectual sense, I am glad that this is part of my
job at times: it prevents me from ever becoming jaded about the lives of
victims.  But it drains me; it boils water through my mind, percolating the
memories of my own loss through me, bitter and fresh.  As I stepped out of
the car, preparing to introduce myself to this bereaved family, I felt the
cold vacant space at my side with unexpected acuity.

I buttoned my trenchcoat, wishing I'd brought something other than these
black tennis shoes.  I wanted the family to know I was taking this
seriously.  They had noticed me just as they reached their front porch, and
now the father crossed the lawn to meet me, his brow furrowed. "Can I help
you?" he asked.

Somehow, smearing the fresh snow with my footprints seemed disrespectful.
I walked around to the driveway, met him halfway, and produced my badge.
"Mr. Yates," I said, considering my words carefully.  My breath floated
across toward his face, and even this struck me as potentially offensive,
so I moved to the right.  "I'm Dana Scully, with the FBI.  I'm very sorry
for your loss."

Mr. Yates turned around to the audience on the porch, waved his hand. "Take
the kids inside," he said, and his wife ushered the family through the door.

I told him that it was a routine investigation ordered by the Justice
Department at many hospitals.  He consented more easily than I'd expected,
and though I felt guilty for lying to the man, it would have been worse to
announce that we suspected foul play and yet had no answers.  _That_ was my
burden to carry.

Armed with the consent form, I returned to the hospital, where an intern
had prepared an autopsy bay for me.  I briefly considered going to see
Mulder, but since he'd been calling me every half-hour at my request, I
could think of no good reason to go.  So I changed into scrubs and walked
into the room.

These bays are all alike--you always feels at home once you know the
blueprint.  The only thing that changes is the body on the table, but even
that body is always a familiar structure--an optic nerve and a spinal cord,
a duodenum and a pancreas, a tibia and a diaphragm--all in ordered
positions relative to one another.  For every victim, the answer is
necessarily, thankfully different, but when one understands the map, one
can always find the destination.

I remembered my first cadaver in medical school--we'd been required to name
them so that we would not forget that the assembly of tissue and bone
beneath our virgin scalpels had once been a living, breathing person whom
others had loved.  Most of my classmates had called their cadavers after
literary figures or people they'd known once.  I'd named mine Jerome, but
not for any reason.  It had seemed contrary to the purpose of naming to
call him anything merely for its significance to me, like naming a child or
a pet.

Not that I don't believe people can be things with respect to one another.
I am glad to be my parents' daughter, my siblings' sister, my partner's
friend.  Jerome was my cadaver, I guess, but what was I to him?

At least I had the chance to be something to this little girl on the steel
table before me.  I could bring her justice.  But that didn't make it any
easier, particularly when I feared that her life had been claimed merely by
a tumor after all.  Nature commits as many tragedies as humans do.

I pulled the sheet back to her waist.  I hadn't been prepared for a child,
not today, and when I saw her soft, dark curls and cheeks still round with
baby fat, I had to cover my mouth to stifle a sound.   I was suddenly very
glad that I was alone.

But I remembered Jerome, and how the first incision--the first
violation--had been the hardest.  When beneath the skin of his forearm I
had discovered the layers--epidermis, fascia, muscle--then I remembered my
textbook and the body that lay before me became a puzzle, a problem, no
longer a person.

To be perfectly honest, I think it's better that way, for everyone
involved, despite what the medical schools try for.  Death and the dead are
two very different concepts.

And that's how I made the first incision on Christina Yates.  At least I
knew her real name.

Mulder called five times during the autopsy, each time increasingly abrupt.
The last time, all he said was: "Still alive," and then hung up, and his
flippancy about the subject did nothing to improve my mood.

But I found nothing unusual about Christina's death, and I did a complete
examination and torso excavation.  I took blood and tissue samples as well:
if she had been dosed with some lethal drug it would have degraded to
sub-trace amounts by now but the by-products might turn up.  I handed the
lymph biopsies over to the resident who kept checking on me "to make sure I
had everything I needed."  He obviously didn't have enough to do--he could
parafin-embed them himself and we would have the results tomorrow instead
of waiting for the technicians on Monday.

Mulder's impeccable sense of timing caused him to call again just as I
finished stitching the small body back up, and this time he had something
to say.

"I talked to Mabel Terman for the past half-hour," he told me.  "Her
husband had written her into the prayer book when she was in surgery after
a car accident.  But she went home a few days later."

I tucked the phone against my shoulder and flipped to the second page of
Christina's chart.  "Did she have anything to tell you?"

"Well, she didn't see anything suspicious.  But she also wasn't surprised I
was calling."

I scrawled my signature across the bottom of the page.  "What did you say?"

"I told her I was with the hospital, following up on her stay.  Apparently
she'd had an unusual experience which she'd told her doctor about, so she
thought that's why she was calling."

I waited a second for him to continue, and when he didn't, said: "Mulder, I
don't want to play twenty questions here.  What did she say?"

"She said she'd seen a light at the end of a tunnel while on the operating
table," I recognized the engineering of his tone, factual to disguise his
reluctance.  "She claimed to have floated out of her body, looked down on
herself on the table, even heard the doctors' conversations.  Then the
light, but she didn't go toward it.  She said she knew it wasn't time for
her to go."

I put the tablet down and took the phone in my hand, walking away from the
autopsy table.  "Who was her doctor?"

"A Dr. Tannis."

"Did she know von Deer?"

"No."  Well, at least he'd asked. "But it doesn't necessarily mean
anything, Scully.  Seven percent of patients who lose consciousness in
trauma describe this kind of experience."

"If coincidence are just coincidences, why do they feel so contrived?" I
asked, echoing his own words of years ago.

"Yeah.  Well.  I called him too, just to ask if he'd known anything about
the patient."

"You called von Deer? Without talking to me?"

There was a brief silence while he deliberated how to respond to that, but
finally he chose to ignore it.  "I honestly don't think he'd ever heard of
her, Scully.  I pretended to be a potential customer who'd known a previous
customer as well as Mabel Terman.  Asked what he thought about her case."

"You probably just alerted our prime suspect to the investigation, Mulder."

"How could he be responsible, Scully?  She was on an operating table, with
six people working on her, and she'd just come from the E.R.  She wasn't
alone for a second, certainly not long enough for him to administer
something even if he wanted to."

"He could have an accomplice," I pointed out.

"I checked.  None of the attending personnel had any connection to von
Deer.  He only does outpatient work anyway."

"Mulder, you and I both know that connections don't have to be on paper.
I'm serious about this--you should have consulted me.  I was beginning to
wonder whether this was a case after all, but I'm pretty damn sure there's
something worth investigating, and now you may have jeopardized it."

"Since when do we check with each other on every step in a case, Scully?"
If he was angry, I couldn't hear it through the weariness.  "You were busy,
and talking to von Deer was a much more logical next step than many other
steps I've taken without your complaining."

"I'm not complaining--I'm criticizing.  There's a difference."  I reached
up to massage my left temple, which was beginning to throb.  "You have a
preconceived bias about this suspect; there may have been questions I
wanted to ask, and I'd rather form my own impression of him."

"You have a bias too," he said, but his protest was weaker.  I opened my
mouth, sulfur on my lips, but he spoke first, acrid irritation soaking his
words.  "I know, I know, we would have balanced each other out.  It's what
we do best.  Fine.  I fucked up.  Sorry."

There have been times when I wished Mulder would apologize, or admit he was
wrong, but somehow the fantasy hadn't played out like this.  "You don't
have to be sarcastic."

"I'm not being sarcastic.  I'm just trying to find new and creative ways to
say I'm sorry and frankly it's about as enjoyable as learning how to plumb
your own toilet on 'This Old House,' which is the other thing I did today.
I'm not behaving any better or worse than I ever have in the six years I've
known you, Scully, so I don't see why this is all coming to a 'head' now.
No pun intended."

"I'm not behaving any differently either," I replied.  "The difference is
that you're hearing me now."

He was quiet for a long moment, but finally, enunciating each word, he
said:  "I always hear you."

I considered suggesting that he _listen,_ but I really didn't want to
discuss it further.  "So you really think he doesn't know a thing," I
stated instead.

"I do," Mulder said, with all the confidence of a boy scout pledge, as glad
as I was to move on.  "I thought about profiles a lot today too, and I
think the pattern we're seeing here is not motivated by method, or data
collection, as you suggested, but by passion.  Arthur von Deer is not a
passionate man, not this kind of passionate.  It's a very intense love--the
killer believes he's bringing his victims peace--or a very intense hatred,
where the killer himself has lost loved ones and now believes that others
should have to suffer as he did.  That's why I don't believe the nutrition
services theory--whoever this is wants to see the fruits of his labor.  He
wants to be there."

"Didn't von Deer say he'd lost a daughter?"

"Yes, but he's reconciled her death and his relationship with her.  This is
what he believes he's offering people--that chance to come to terms with
loss."

I wanted to ask if that was really what Mulder had hoped to get from the
doctor, but it seemed best to steer clear of all things personal.

"What about Father Thomas?" I asked.

"Can't get a hold of him.  He was at the parish church this morning, but
now no one knows where he went."

"Does he fit your profile?" I asked, playing the dutiful Watson.

"I don't know," Mulder said.  "I want to talk to him again.  I believe he's
capable of passion, but I'm not sure he's capable of murder.  I did request
a dossier on him from the Vatican, though.  Which reminds me--I had it
faxed to admitting.  Could you pick it up?"

"Yeah," I said.  "I was just finishing up here anyway."

"Find anything?"

"Nothing unusual.  Typical childhood leukemia."

"Oh, christ.  It was a kid?"

Had I not told him that? Maybe not--we hadn't spoken much all day.  I could
hear the renewed guilt in his voice as he assumed I must have been upset,
and I resented that too.  Thankfully, the pathology resident chose that
moment to walk into the bay again, biopsy samples in hand.  His fresh young
face still bore the suggestion of baby fat, though he was far too old.
Cherubic fair curls and an eager-to-help expression enhanced the illusion.

"I have to go," I said into the phone.  "I'll see you in an hour or so."

I hung up before he could reply and took the cardboard envelope from the
young doctor, gave the slides it contained a cursory glance.  "Thanks," I
told him.  "I'll take a look at these.  Could you give me a hand with the
body?"

He nodded, and I crossed the room to put the slide envelope on the counter,
then turned back to the autopsy table.  The resident was gently smoothing
the child's hair back, and when he realized I'd seen him, he snatched his
hand away guiltily, then checked himself with a sad, self-deprecatory
smile.  "Sorry," he said.

The last word I wanted to hear.  "Don't be," I answered firmly.  I crossed
the room and drew the sheet up over the body, pausing a moment to memorize
Christina's face before covering it.

He noticed my hesitation and asked, wistfully, "Does it ever get any easier?"

I looked up at the young man across the child's body.  "No," I said.  Not
exactly a lie.

---------------------------------------------------
8:34 p.m.

Mulder was propped up against the headboard watching television when I
entered the hospital room.  I tossed Thomas' dossier onto his lap and put
my hands on my hips.

"You don't look very sick," I observed.  "You've probably scared the guy
off by now."

Which, actually, was fine with me.  I hadn't liked this scheme from the start.

"I'm taking a break," he answered.  "Pretending to be sick is hard work."
He patted the mattress by his hip, inviting me to sit and thereby evading
the scathing comeback I'd been preparing about _real_ work.  Smart man.

In more ways than one.  I wanted to sit beside him, and, truth be told, I
wanted his hands to find their way to my shoulders and knead away the long,
draining hours spent in the autopsy bay, as they'd done dozens of times
before.  Such a simple thing, that touch, but profound enough that we knew
better than to ever speak of it.

But this time, I would have to wonder if it wasn't the latest form of
'apology,' and so I sat on my bed instead.  If he noticed the slight, he
gave no sign.

He put on his glasses and read the dossier I'd already skimmed while I
reviewed the autopsy reports of five other purported victims.  One head
trauma, one myocardial infarction, two 'respiratory failures' and one
emphysema.  They had nothing in common--ages, sexes, races and backgrounds
all varied as much as their medical histories.  Tox screens had been
performed on three of the victims, but had turned up nothing unusual.

Shared characteristics can tell you a lot about a case, but sometimes their
absence can tell you just as much.  A cross-section like this would make a
believable data sampling, despite Mulder's rejection of that theory.  And
the absence of evidence narrowed the field of possible M.O.s considerably.

The only problem was mechanism.  If it was a drug, why hadn't the
toxicology reports discovered it? A few poisons were undetectable by
standard pathological exams, and the potassium chloride von Deer used to
stop the heart was among them.  But the elevated saline levels _should_
show up both in the blood and perhaps via histological analysis of the
cardiac tissue, things which were not normally examined during autopsy but
which I had checked for.  And the swiftness of death didn't fit with most
other tox-evading poisons.

"I think our suspect must have a great deal of medical knowledge and
access," I said.  "It's the only way he could be doing this undetected."

Mulder looked up from the folder.  "Unless we're looking at something more
supernatural," he pointed out.
I blinked.  "An X-File? I have yet to see evidence for that.  I think
you're looking too hard."

"Maybe not hard enough," he answered.  "Even if we could come up with some
drug which could in theory kill this many people this reliably, the problem
of administration still isn't solved.  How could he get to every one of
these patients without someone noticing?"

"Well, it's not as if these rooms are guarded."

"No, but even if it's some trusted employee who wouldn't be noticed going
in and out of a room, the distribution is ubiquitous.  Nurse, doctor, or
janitor--they're all confined to specific specialties.  You won't see the
neurologists in the CICU, right? Unless we're looking at something much
larger than one person, someone would have noticed something by now."

"One: maybe someone has," I said.  "We haven't exactly been advertising for
witnesses.  Two: you're leaving out food service, which has access to all
rooms.  But I don't think it's anyone in nutrition per se, just that this
is the mechanism of delivery."

"I still think it's important for the killer to be present at the time of
death, but we'll know that soon enough.  When do you think we should try
the rats?"

"Tomorrow," I said.  "But if that doesn't work out, Mulder, I think we
should turn this case over to the local authorities.  It's too amorphous
and you and I are too invested."

He frowned.  "Amorphous is our specialty," he chided.  "But as for
'invested'--"

I cut him off.  "Mulder, it's been a very long day.  I don't want to talk
about that right now, and anyway, I think we've both said all we have to
say."

His hazel eyes, magnified through the glasses, studied me owlishly for a
few seconds, and then he nodded.  "Okay."

I was actually a little disappointed that he gave in so easily, but there
was no point in sharing that.

"This dossier isn't very helpful," he said.  "Quite the little Latin
scholar, our Thomas, and he obviously requested this position for no
obvious reason, but there's nothing more useful here.  I'd like to talk to
him again."

"Tomorrow," I said.  "But tomorrow's Monday, and we're supposed to go to
Seattle.  We can postpone a day or so, but we can't spend too much longer
up here."

"We'll see," was Mulder's only reply, and it didn't reassure me.

I really did intend to stick to my resolve on that point.  Our nurse JoAnn
came in to check on us, assured us that everything was going well, and,
finally, exhausted, I went to bed.

As I fell asleep to the whine of Mulder's muted television, I reasoned out
our position.  If this were a real case, then the statistics could be
proven by someone taking more measured steps.  Solving it might require a
large team with far more time (and, I admitted, medical expertise) than we
could offer.  And given that the tension in our working relationship could
be directly linked to a suspect in this case, it was unprofessional of us
to continue the pursuit.

I fell asleep planning to talk to the local authorities tomorrow regardless
of what Mulder wanted to do, but then morning came, and my nighttime
reflections all amounted to nothing.

Mulder wouldn't wake up.

---------------------------------------------------







Chapter 5

A Ghost of a Memory

---------------------------------------------------
Monday
6:56 a.m.

I rolled out of bed and opened the curtains, congratulating myself on my
generosity in hoping that the soft light would wake Mulder more pleasantly
than I would.  He was lying on his stomach, hugging his pillow with one
arm, hair tousled like a boy's.  Easy enough to let him sleep, so I
showered with the bathroom door open a crack.  I spent the entire shower
expecting an innuendo at any moment but it was a small price to pay for the
extra security.

He was still asleep when I emerged dressed in yesterday's pants, combing my
fingers through my damp hair.  I sighed.

"Mulder," I said as I passed him, crossing to my side of the room to pack
away my toiletries.  Sometimes I feel like I never left college--I cart
these myriad plastic bottles to and from strange bathrooms so often.

I zipped the vinyl case shut and looked over my shoulder at my partner.  He
hadn't moved.  I repeated his name, louder this time.  "Mulder."

The lazy sound of his lungs filling and collapsing pervaded the room, but
he didn't stir.

I went to his side, clasped his shoulder firmly.  "Hey," I said in a
gentler voice, hoping this approach would be more fruitful.

He didn't move.  Mulder, who wrote the book on insomnia and shallow sleep,
didn't move.  Okay.  That was simply unbelievable.  I put my hands on my
hips.  "Funny, Mulder.  Come on.  Get up.  I can see your eyeballs moving."

The last was a lie, but he wouldn't know.

Still, there was no response.  Deathly cold fingers wrapped around my
stomach, wadding it up like so much soggy newspaper, and despite the steady
rhythm on his heart monitor, I dropped my fingers to his throat to make
sure it wasn't lying.

Beat.  Beat.  Beat.  Slow but steady.

I leaned over to his ear, slid my hand over his back to rub between his
shoulders, hard, as if the friction would reanimate him.

"Mulder," I murmured into his ear.  "Open your eyes, Mulder, I'm serious.
Fox Mulder, get up now."

His first name rolled unnaturally off my tongue, as if it didn't really
belong to him, but there's something to besaid for the instinctive reaction
to mothers.  It didn't help, though.

Something was very wrong, and in one instant I regretted every action I'd
taken in this case, especially having gone along with this hare-brained
scheme.  I pressed the call button for the nurse.

Could someone have come into the room last night? How? There was no way we
would both have slept through it.   (Had I been too tired? Had I missed
something? Don't think that, no time now.)

Administration.  There had to be a route of administration.  Mulder hadn't
eaten anything that had been intended for him, so it had to be gas or
injection, and since I wasn't affected, it had to be injection.  The IV was
the obvious choice, so either the killer had _known_ the IV was a fake (but
then he would also know that Mulder wasn't who he claimed to be--that
didn't fit the M.O.), or the killer always used an alternative route.  But
Mulder wouldn't have slept through being stuck with a needle.

Nonetheless, it was the only lead I had, so I pulled back the blankets and
started with the soles of his feet.  They were calloused but free of marks.
I ran my hands over his calves and then his thighs, my fingers searching
for swelling while my eyes searched for redness.  His arms, his neck--save
for the old scars, his skin was unblemished.  I unfastened the hospital
gown to check his back and buttocks, but still nothing.  I was about to
roll him over when JoAnn entered.

"There a problem?" she asked.

Suspicious of anything now, I frowned at her.  "What are you doing here? I
thought your shift ended at six."

"I'm doing twelve-hour shifts this week," she answered curtly.  "What's the
problem?"

"My partner's unconscious."

Her brow furrowed and her eyes narrowed.  "Sure he's not just a heavy sleeper?"

I was about to remind her, not very nicely, of several items on my
curriculum vitae, when she crossed to the opposite side of the bed with an
authoritative swagger and bent over Mulder's face.  Apparently her comment
was just her brand of bedside manner, and I tried to be forgiving, I really
did.  She tapped her hand against his cheek three times with pressure
somewhere between a pat and a smack.  "Mr. Mulder," she barked, loud near
his ear, and even I, two feet away, winced.

She looked up at me.  "Did he take any medication?"

"No," I said, trying to keep my tone urgent but unpanicked.  "He wasn't
exposed to anything that could have done this.  I know that.  Were you
awake all night? Did you see anyone strange on the floor at all? Anything
out of the ordinary?"

"Not a thing.  Do you really think--"

I cut her off.  "Call the E.R.," I said.  "Tell them we're bringing down a
patient.  Now."

She opened her mouth to protest, but I was already unplugging the tubes and
wires and my sharp tone must've invoked some military instinct, because she
obeyed even though I could see her hesitation.  Five minutes later we were
in the elevator, and though it dropped to the ground floor fast, it was no
match for my rhythm of my heart.

What could I have missed?

---------------------------------------------------
11:32 a.m.

Everything in the waiting room smelled like plastic, even the people.
There was a surprisingly large number of people for a Monday morning,
including two young children who kept chasing each other over and under the
chairs, oblivious to the many miniature dramas playing out around them.
Their mother was too busy crying to stop them, and I wanted with a palpable
desperation to escape from all these passive audiences and _do_ something,
but they'd already thrown me out of the room twice.

Four doctors, and they couldn't figure out what was wrong.  A tox screen
had already come back clean, his EEG showed alpha activity, his heart rate
was slow and getting slower but not yet crawling.  Preliminary metabolic
tests suggested his metabolic rates were declining and there was some
concern for his kidneys, but no one could say anything definite.

At times like these, it's best to keep moving.  My body and mind both know
this routine by heart; it's like walking a tightrope.  You take each step
as it's necessary, letting your body balance you on autopilot, and even
though you want to hurry, you don't permit it.  You look to neither side
and, most certainly, you do not look down.

I did not want to let myself consider the possibility of losing Mulder this
way, nor did I want to ask whether I had failed him somehow; if I did lose
him, there would be plenty of time for that later.  But it was difficult,
pacing here in this plastic room, not to think about the hard floor below,
or the absence of a safety net.

So I was more relieved than anxious when Dr. Bannerjee, one of the few
physicians I've met who was actually smaller than me, summoned me back into
the room.

Mulder lay still on the gurney, exactly as I'd seen him before, but decked
out in more wires than a Christmas tree.  They stood out in dark relief
against his skin, crisscrossing his body into a mosaic of pallid flesh.  I
resented the respectful silence of the doctors as I moved to his head,
indulged my hand briefly with the sensation of his hair.  I wanted to
scream at them to stop acting like he was dead, to stop giving me the right
to grieve, but instead I only took a step backward and looked expectantly
at Bannerjee.

She stood with her arms folded around a chart, her long hair wound into a
bun so tight it pulled the skin back from her face.  I appreciated this--it
told me she was precise and I trusted that.

"I understand that you'll want to hear everything," she told me, and I
nodded.  "We've got him on maximum pressors, since his blood pressure's
been falling as his heart rate declines.  They seem to be slowing the
decay, but not by much.  We tried the heating pad for awhile, because his
symptoms vaguely resemble those of a hypothermic victim, but it didn't seem
to be helping.  We took throat and rectal cultures, did a full blood
workup, but there's absolutely nothing unusual so far.  Of course, we may
have to wait a day or two on the complete culture results, but we'd have
expected fever and rise in neutrophil count if this were some kind of
infection, and we're just not seeing that.  There seems to be brain
activity, though, and we'd like to do a perfusion MRI and a transcranial
Doppler ultrasound to determine the region of damage."

"Damage?" I asked, hoping that my voice didn't sound as panicked to her
ears as it did to mine.  "There's no evidence of head trauma, his pupils
are normal, and he has no history of seizure."  At least, not when
undrugged, I added silently.

"The drop in blood pressure may indicate an aneurysm, Dr. Scully.  He
presents catatonic, but his EEG is inconsistent with that--could also be
post-stroke paralysis."

"There haven't been any arrhythmias, right?  A stroke is extraordinarily
unlikely."  For a moment, the image of spending the rest of my life caring
for a permanently paralyzed Mulder flashed before my eyes, but I jerked my
head up, pulling my focus back to the tightrope.

"That's true, but we can't rule it out since the early morning timing is
consistent with cerebral thrombosis.  This case is unusual in many
respects."

She had no idea.

"There was no evidence of aneurysm in previous victims," I said, and
Bannerjee frowned.

"This is what I'm not clear on, Dr. Scully.  You believe this has happened
before?"

"Yes--it's what we were investigating.  I have reason to believe it's the
same phenomenon."  I folded my arms over my chest.  "Please, run the MRI
first.  The calcium channel blockers had no effect?"

"Not that we can observe, and neither did the betapin or capazide.  We're
at something of a loss, here, Dr. Scully, and although he doesn't appear to
be in danger yet, he's definitely declining.  If you have information on
other patients who may have suffered from this, I suggest you provide us
with it immediately.  Though it may be standard operating procedure for the
FBI, I don't approve of secrecy when lives are at risk."

"Neither do I," I muttered.  "Listen, Dr. Bannerjee, I believe others have
fallen victim to something similar to this, but my examination of their
records has revealed nothing of--"

I was interrupted when the door banged open and a P.A. stuck her head
inside.  "Dr. Bannerjee!" she cried.  "We have another one!"

"Another what?" Bannerjee asked.

"Like him!" The assistant pointed at Mulder's prone figure.  "Just arrived,
room two.  Here's the chart--the name's 'von Deer.'"

Vindication had never tasted so sour.

---------------------------------------------------
12:12 p.m.

I followed Bannerjee through the swinging doors, and no one paid sufficient
attention to me to stop me.  Room two was just down the hall and I expected
to see von Deer arrayed like my partner when I entered but he was standing
beside the table, frantically jabbering at the young nurse at his side.

"I don't understand it," he was saying. "I can't explain it--I'm a
neurologist and I've never seen anything like it.  She just won't wake up!"

A glimmer of understanding penetrated the dark helplessness of my brain.

"You're a neurologist, Mr.--Dr.--von Deer?" Bannerjee interrupted, crossing
the room.

"Yes, at this hospital! I--" He saw me.  Squinted, as if trying to remember
where he'd seen me before.

I wasn't going to wait for him to recover his senses.  I flipped my badge
out of my back pocket.  "Dana Scully, FBI," I said.  "You're going to have
to come with me, sir.  Now."

Bannerjee turned on me.  "Dr. Scully, I hardly think--"

"FBI?" von Deer cried at the same moment.  "Weren't you just in my office--?"

"Yes, I was," I said, silencing them both.  "And my partner is now in the
same condition as your wife, so you and I have a few things to talk about.
Let Dr. Bannerjee take care of her and come with me."

The naked fear and uncertainty in his eyes was unjustifiably gratifying.
"But, Eleanor..." he began.

"She's not going anywhere," I said, and slipped my hand significantly into
my purse.  There are times when the depths of my determination frighten
even me.

He swallowed.  "I need to fill out the forms," he said, his voice creaky
with age and nervousness.  "Then we can talk."

I gave him a short, curt nod and gestured for him to precede me from the
room, determined not to let him out of my sight.

"I don't understand," he said to me once we were out of the room.  "Your
husband--"

"He's _not_ my husband.  He's my partner."

Von Deer attempted to execute a rueful laugh, but it came out more like a
strangled groan.  "I figured you people would come try to shut me down
sooner or later.  Why not? Everyone else has."

I edged him toward the admitting desk.  "Everyone who?"

"The police, the AMA, the Pennsylvania Attorney General...never gets beyond
a preliminary investigation, though.  You'd be surprised who some of my
subjects are.  The hospital director doesn't even--"

I cut off this now-irrelevant monologue.  "Dr. von Deer, my partner and I
are investigating a series of suspicious, unclassified deaths at this
hospital.  Ever heard of Christina Yates?"

He stopped, frowned down at me.  "No," he said, with a faintly puzzled
expression.  "You mean, you weren't investigating me?"

I declined to answer, instead pointing him to the admitting counter.  "Fill
out the forms for your wife," I told him.

A ghost of a memory passed through his eyes and he sighed sadly.  "Ah,
Eleanor...." Then my earlier words registered with him.  "But you say your
partner is in the same condition?"

I turned to the nurse behind the desk.  "This man needs paperwork for his
wife in room two."  My tone was sharp enough that she didn't even look to
him for confirmation, just handed him a clipboard.

I was watching him fumble for his insurance card when a hand landed on my
arm.  I was so drawn so tense that I almost pulled my gun as I whirled
around, but before I saw him, his handsome accent identified him.

"Agent Scully," said Father Thomas.  And then he looked past me.  "Arthur,
what are you doing here?"

I stepped back, taking a more strategic position from which I could face
them both.  "You two know each other?"

Von Deer looked reluctant to explain, but Thomas cleared his throat and
said, "I've...been a patient of Arthur's for about a month now."

"Oh, really?" I smirked.  "Perhaps you've been involved in some of his
more...experimental therapy?"

Thomas' eyes widened and he looked to von Deer.  "Does she--?" He left the
sentence hanging.

Von Deer nodded.  "She knows."

"Oh, this is very good," Thomas said, bringing his hands together.  "Agent
Scully, Arthur's treatment is exactly what I was going to suggest to you,
to help you in your investigation, but I didn't want to betray Arthur's
confidence.  And now I hear your partner has been admitted.  I'm so
sorry.... Please, how is he?"

My eyes widened in horror; all these people were crazy!  How could we have
been so stupid, lying Mulder's neck out on the chopping block like that?
"What do you mean--his treatment would help the investigation?"

"I thought"--the priest glanced at von Deer, who regarded him calmly--"I
thought that if you could speak with the victims....I'm sorry.  I have been
very interested in Dr. von Deer's work for many years, and I just see so
much potential application, but...but what happened to Agent Mulder?"

"That's what _I_ would like to know," I growled, staring at von Deer.
"What exactly were you and Eleanor doing to put her in this condition?"

"We weren't--we were just sleeping!  I thought she was sleeping in, and
then she just wouldn't wake up..." His jaw went momentarily slack and his
eyes focused on some point over my head.  "Wait," he said, reaching for me.
I stepped back with distaste.

"My God," he murmured.

"Is Eleanor all right?" Thomas asked stupidly.

"How did the others die?" the doctor asked me, urgent now.

I was reluctant to tell him what we knew and what we didn't, but hesitation
was worse.  Whether he was guilty or not, I needed to make him feel we knew
he was.  "Well," I said, "it seems they just die in their sleep.  Sound
familiar?"

"My God," von Deer repeated.  "I think I understand.  Please, Agent Scully,
I need to speak with you alone.  Let's go to my office."

With significant effort, I refrained from reminding him who was in charge
here, but I made sure he walked in front.

---------------------------------------------------

I followed him into his office, and he closed the door behind us, moved
automatically to the chair on the opposite side of his desk. "Please, sit,"
he said, gesturing at the empty chair beside me.

I eased myself stiffly into the chair, coiled like a spring.

"When did the deaths begin?" he asked, and despite myself I admired his
grim resolution.

"Three months ago," I said.  "When the prayer book appeared in the chapel."

"The chapel," he breathed, and I leaned forward.

"What's the significance of the chapel?"

He shook his head, looked down at his blotter.  "Eleanor goes there a lot.
I used to pick her up for dinner there, after..."

"After what?"

"After she found out about my affair.  I think that's what did her in.  You
know, I used to do it all the time, when we were younger, and she never
cared, just laughed it off.  Said that boys would always be boys.  But
after our daughter died, well, we needed each other in a different way
then."

My distaste for this man had just plumbed new depths.  "You mean, you were
a lifetime adulterer."

He smiled sadly at me.  "You make it sound so...gauche, Agent Scully.  We
had an agreement.  An open marriage.  She had her share of flings with the
young doctors, I with the young nurses.  It wasn't so unusual then.  Not as
unusual as you young people think."

"Get to the point," I growled.

He spread his hands apologetically.  "There isn't much of one.  I met a
young nurse about a year ago, and Eleanor had grown so difficult to live
with...things just happened.  I've come to terms with my daughter's death.
I've spoken to her.  I've made things right between us.  But Eleanor--she
never did."

"I thought she'd tried your 'therapy' dozens of times."

"She has," he acknowledged.  "More than anyone, orders of magnitude more.
But she's never spoken to our daughter.  She didn't want to."

"Why not?"

"I don't know.  It's too painful for her, I guess, but she won't tell me
that.  She's grown so distant from me in the last many years, I don't even
know her anymore.  Thirty-seven years together, and this is all we're left
with.  I don't know her..."--his voice grew softer and his eyes
lowered--"and that's why I'm afraid she might be responsible for your
partner's condition."

I was a hair's breadth away from choking this man with his own tie.  "What
do you mean?" I asked, clear and incisive.

"She always told me that she was interested in NDEs, but I think she said
that only for my benefit.  She read a lot about transcendent consciousness,
about New Age spiritualism, and I think that's where her interest in my
research lay.  That was fine with me--I needed her as an assistant and
whatever sparked her flame was good for both of us.  But she spoke once or
twice of crossing the border to the spirit world at will, and now I'm
beginning to suspect she may have achieved that."

I frowned.  "So--what? You think she's luring patients to their deaths by
talking to their...their souls? Just to get even with you?"

He sighed.  "No," he said, his voice husky.  "To get even with God."

Christ.  No wonder Mulder found this man compelling.  He was a profile
waiting to be written.

"The only thing I don't understand," he continued, "is why she would target
your partner.  He wasn't even a patient..."

"No," I admitted.  "He was.  We even added a prayer to the prayer book for
him--that's how the victims were selected."

"My God," he whispered.  "My God.  When my daughter died, she...all Eleanor
did was pray."

"Why are you telling me this?" I asked.  "Aren't you afraid you're
betraying your wife?"

He swallowed, and there was a long silence while he considered his
response.  "Agent Scully, I betrayed my wife a long time ago.  And in the
intervening time she's betrayed herself.  I believe very strongly in the
sanctity of human life; that's why understanding NDEs is so important to
me.  If she is violating that..." His voice trailed off and he wiped at the
back of his eyes with one hand.

"It doesn't make sense," I said, emotionally oblivious to his display.
"The other deaths occurred quickly.  If this had happened before, why
didn't you notice?"

"I don't know," he admitted, trying to imitate my professional tone but
failing. "My theory would be that the others were all genuinely closer to
death, and so it may have been easier to help them or convince them to
cross to the other side.  Your partner isn't ready to die yet, so perhaps
they are engaged in a serious struggle on the border between the living and
the dead.  If that's true, you have to admit it would have fascinating
implications for our understanding of consciousness, as well as my
research."

I clenched my fingers into fists and leaned forward menacingly.  "That's
hardly my largest concern at the moment," I snapped.  "Your 'research' is
not only scientifically questionable but morally reprehensible, and it is
directly responsible for this entire situation.  My partner may be dying,
and if he does, I swear I'll kill you, no matter whose fault it is."

This time, von Deer didn't even wince at the threat.  Instead, there was a
long silence, as he considered answering and I considered hanging him from
the windowsill.

He cut through the tension first.  "Are you close to him?" he asked.

I blinked.  That had been unexpected.  "We've been partners for a long
time," I said, wary.

Von Deer was nodding slowly, his eyes distant and unfocused.  "Then I think
you have to go get him."

My words whipped across the room like lightening, startling him out of his
odd trance.  "What do you mean?"

He leaned over the desk until our faces were mere inches apart.  "Agent
Scully," he said, enunciating every syllable as if pronouncing a foreign
language.  "Would you die for him?"

In less than a second, my mind replayed for me every adrenalin-pumped game
I've played out with Mulder, every life we owe one another.  "He's my
partner," I repeated, because that was all the answer there could be.

Von Deer nodded, satisfied.  "Good," he said.  "Because that's what you
have to do."

His words sank in, and the oh-so-recent vision of my partner, the one
engendered in this very room, resurfaced.  Looking through me with dead
eyes as he lay on a table of granite, he said in perfect Muldervoice,
"Scully.  I'm so glad you're here!" and then convulsed obscenely, as he had
beneath the defibrillator in Alaska before my very eyes years ago.  I
shivered.

"You're crazy," I hissed at von Deer, who watched me like a mouse in the
shadow of a hawk, apprehensive but eerily certain of survival in his
stillness.

I heard Mulder's voice in my head, taunting me gently.  "I think if you
looked up from your microscope, you'd find what's really missing is a
motive.  Are you still afraid to believe?"

I dismissed the apparition and rose from the chair.  This was no time for
reflection on the past.

---------------------------------------------------






Chapter 6

Neither Flinch Nor Smile

---------------------------------------------------
8:56 p.m.

Had Mulder's condition improved, I would not have even considered von
Deer's "plan," but when the Bannerjee went home at eight, leaving my
partner confined to the care of ICU nurses, my assessment of the situation
grew considerably more urgent.  Four neurologists had examined both Mulder
and Eleanor von Deer, but no one could explain or help them.  They had made
phone calls and solicited email consultations from around the world, but no
leads had surfaced.

The MRI and transcranial ultrasound had revealed no embolisms, but his
metabolism continued to slow, and his heart had stopped once.  So had mine,
but when they managed to restabilize him mine came back online.  The doctor
had put him on tissue plasminogen activator as if he _were_ a stroke
victim, despite the inconsistent blood gas and EEG--she didn't know what
else to do.

"I'm sorry," Bannerjee had told me.  "I think we can only wait now.  Maybe
someone will have come up with something by morning."

"If he continues failing at the same rate he is now," I said, "he'll be
dead by morning."

"Let's hope not," she said, in an expertly condescending doctor-voice.
"I'm going to do some reading and make some phone calls tonight, and if I
think of anything, we'll be sure to act quickly."

I wanted to shake her, to scream at her to understand that the man on that
gurney was _Fox Mulder,_ how could she even think of going home? How could
she be so complacent?

But I didn't, only too aware that to her, Mulder was just another number,
another puzzle, another victim.  Like cases sometimes became to me.

So I tried another tack. "I certainly hope so.  If a federal agent dies for
no explainable reason in this hospital, you're going to have one hell of a
public relations problem."  I didn't mention that the what the public would
do would be nothing compared to what I would do.

Instead, I cursed myself for not having taken that neurology rotation nine
years ago, for having gone along with this stupid plan, for having ever met
Mulder in the first place.  No.  I exhaled deeply.  Not that.  Never that.

Damn him.

I'd tried to slip unnoticed into the ICU, but even my badge-flashing and
doctor-voice couldn't get me through that barrage of nurses, who were
obviously quite accustomed to obstinance.  "I don't care who you are,
ma'am, your presence could endanger any of the patients here.  Now, do I
have to call security?"

"I _am_ security," I told her, before turning on my heel and stalking away.

I returned to the library, where I'd spent a few hours earlier in the day,
and resumed my MEDLINE search, now limiting it to studies conducted before
1975.  That's where Dr. von Deer found me again.

He had been with me off and on throughout the day as the team of doctors
tried to engineer treatment avenues for Mulder and Eleanor, but we hadn't
spoken directly to each other since that morning.  I still harbored
suspicions about his own innocence in all of this, and as far as his
lunatic explanation went, I simply didn't know what to believe.

"They won't let me see her," he told me, his voice hitching.  I felt no
sympathy.

I stood up from the computer, placed my hands on the back of my chair.
"You realize," I said, and the words flowed like molten steel from my
mouth, solidifying instantly upon contacting the air, "that I fully intend
to see your research shut down and yourself in prison even if he lives."

He looked at the floor.  "I don't care.  My wife is dying," he mumbled.  "I
know you don't believe in my work, Agent Scully.  But...but I wondered if
you had considered my suggestion."

I had tried not to.

"The doctors don't know what to do because we're not dealing with a
pathology here," he continued.  "We're dealing with something that is
beyond what we know, that can't be referenced or categorized--"

"Shut up."

The words were out of my mouth before I knew they were coming.  How unfair,
to invoke Mulder himself like that.

"I'm sorry," he said quickly, looking up.  "What did I say?"

I didn't answer.

"It's the only way to save your partner's life, Agent Scully," the man
repeated, soft and urgent.

Still, I said nothing.  Instead, I remembered in the space of a second
every argument we've ever had, every debate we've ever played out, every
single damnable time he'd seemed right but I couldn't prove it. Mulder
never believed me, but he has almost always believed _in_ me.  Did I have
to believe to do this?

At some point in linear thought, philosophy succumbs to baser instincts,
and I think I had crossed that bridge.

I sighed, and the air became lead.  "What do I have to do?" I asked, resigned.

Who was compromising now?

---------------------------------------------------
11:31 p.m.

Shortly after the new nursing shift arrived in the ICU, von Deer and I
entered, twin orderlies in polyester blue scrubs.

"We're here for Fox Mulder and Eleanor von Deer," the newly demoted doctor
told the woman at the nurse's station.

"Oh, right, for the hypobaric treatment?" she asked in the cheery tone
possible only for those who'd been at work less than an hour.  "Dr.
Bannerjee just called.  Rooms 5 and 6."

Actually, I, not Dr. Bannerjee, had just called, but I wasn't going to
correct her.  I went to retrieve my partner while von Deer went after his
wife.

Mulder's complexion was more pallid than when I saw him last.  His lips
were white, his breathing shallow.  The nurse's station had a clear view of
me through the glass window on the wall, and for this reason alone I
suppressed the irrational desire to touch him.  This was probably a good
decision in more ways than one; I knew the cold feel of his skin would only
amplify the cold settled in my stomach.

The IV was real this time, and so it had to come with us.  My first attempt
to push the bed out of the room was thwarted by the need to drag the IV,
but after another false start I found the right way to do this, guiding
both the bed and the IV stand in my right hand.  I hoped the nurses hadn't
noticed.

I followed him and his gurney in silence through the now-quiet hospital,
and soon we entered the same room we'd used Saturday morning, when Mulder
had lain on another gurney.

Von Deer pulled his wife's bed up next to Mulder's and then he retrieved a
third gurney from the corner.  The room was starting to look like a morbid
parody of a parking garage.

"I'll leave you alone to get undressed," he told me then.  "I'll be just
outside."

I nodded.  He trailed his fingertips along his wife's limp arm as he walked
toward the door.

Then I was alone with the two unconscious figures.

I moved to Mulder's side and swallowed.  "Listen, partner," I whispered,
leaning down to his ear.  "Seems you've been doing a lot of laying around
on the job.  How about giving me a hand?"

To emphasize the point, I closed my hand over his, hoping to feel his
fingers miraculously press back.  His flesh was cold, colder than I'd been
prepared for.

"Please, Mulder," I whispered.  "Don't keep this up just to prove a point,
okay? I'll say you were right about it all if you'll just come back."

Okay, so I was lying, but Mulder's impossible to bargain with anyway.  He
won't compromise over anything.  Except maybe me.

"Mulder, it's Scully," I told him, my breath stirring the short hairs above
his ear.  "I'm trying something crazy, partner.  You'd be proud of me.
Come back to me now and I won't have to go looking for you."

I had meant to say something more severe, that my life was in danger, but
that wasn't a confession I was prepared to make. It was too hard to say.
After all these years of playing a caryatid pillar to his tired Atlas,
would he even believe me if I told him I needed him?

True to form, he didn't stir.  I leaned forward to kiss his brow, soft and
long.  When I moved away from him, the memory of his papery skin on my lips
came with me.

I unholstered my weapon and lay it near Mulder's hip, then shucked off my
jacket and folded it over on top of the gun.  Blouse and slacks followed.
Von Deer returned just as I settled myself on the vacant gurney and was
pulling the sheet up over my underwear-clad body.

He wheeled the crash cart over to my side and then went to retrieve the
heart monitor.  "I suppose it's out of the question to ask if I can connect
you to an EEG," he commented, and my fireball glare was answer enough.

"I believe that's a 'yes.'"  He gave me a nervous smile, but I didn't
return it.

He finished assembling his supplies while I watched.  A strange serenity
had settled over me now that my had all but sealed my commitment, and when
von Deer gestured at the sheet and said, "May I?" I nodded calmly.

He peeled back the blue sheet and gently turned my leg to find a vein in my
thigh.  I grimaced involuntarily when I felt the needle enter; the pain was
sudden and sharp, a promise of violation to come.  He adjusted a knob on
the IV, and I knew that the opiate was now flowing into my blood.

"You'll have to remove your bra," he told me.  "I don't want it to get in
the way of bringing you back."

The trick to being naked in front of people is to neither flinch nor smile;
they will inevitably end up more embarrassed than you.  I can accomplish
that easily; however the prospect of being naked in front of this man was
somehow more deplorable than placing my life in his hands.

Nonetheless, pulled myself up enough to unsnap my bra, and he placed on top
of the pile of my clothes.  If he'd let his eyes linger anywhere I might
have ruined all our plans by killing him then and there, but professional
efficiency was all I could detect in his demeanor as he attached the leads
to my chest in an Einthoven's triangle--one on either shoulder and one just
above my navel.

"I'm going to add the NMDA now," he told.  "You may begin hallucinating,
but the KCl will come shortly thereafter.  You'll feel a brief, instinctive
moment of panic, and then you'll feel nothing.  Are you ready?"

"Do it," I told him.  My head already felt lighter, though, and my voice
sounded smaller than I had intended.

He loaded a syringe from a brown vial, then stuck the needle into the IV
and depressed the plunger.

A minute passed, and I felt nothing.  Von Deer seemed to be getting further
and further away, though I could not see him moving.  When I turned my head
toward my partner, whom I knew lay only five feet away, it seemed as if his
bed was miles away, and I started to say something to him, but before I
could open my mouth a roaring overtook my senses, like a wave breaking over
me.

Was this what it felt like to die? Odd, you'd think I would experienced
that before now.

---------------------------------------------------







Chapter 7

Nothing Can Bring Me Closer

---------------------------------------------------

Dana Scully opens her eyes and falters, almost losing her balance.  She
puts her hand out to alter her center of gravity and sees that her arm is
clad in a maroon suit jacket.  Where that came from, she doesn't know.  She
appraises her body quickly--yes, she is most definitely dressed, and in a
suit, no less.

She knows where she is, of course she knows.  The office.  The basement
office, before the fire.  A quick glance around the room tells her it was
before more than that.  All the newsclippings about their cases, the photos
behind Mulder's chair--these things have been replaced by much older
pictures which she feels she should recognize but doesn't.  Werewolves and
UFOs.

She is standing in, not only the pre-fire office, but the pre-Scully
office.  To her right are the familiar filing cabinets, and, on an inspired
hunch, she jerks open the top drawer, looking for her own name.  It isn't
there.

"Scully."  Mulder's voice startles her. When did he enter the room? She
whirls--he is standing in the back corner, in what he once called her
"area," his body partially masked in darkness.  "Scully," he repeats.
"What are you doing here?"

"What do you mean?" she asks, closing the door and stepping toward him.  He
steps back and she stops, uncertain.  "I--I came after you."

"Go away, Scully," he orders.

She takes another step forward, he another step back.  "Is that what you
really want?" she asks.   "Mulder, where are we? Is this--?"  She isn't
sure how to finish.

"I'd think that would be obvious," he replies.  "Don't you recognize it?"

"Yes, but--"

"Why the hell are you here?" he interrupts, and now he moves out of the
shadows, skirting her widely as he makes for his desk.  "I thought you
didn't believe."

"I--I--in near death experience, you mean? I don't, at least, not by this
method."

Mulder quirks an eyebrow at her.  "Yet here you are.  Pretty irrational
move, then.  So the perfect Dana Scully isn't as perfect as she thought,
huh?"

Scully's brow furrows and she folds her arms, frowns at her partner.  She
thinks he's younger, somehow, though she can't be sure.  "I came to help
you, Mulder," she says, as if that should explain everything.

"I don't need your help," he says, imitating her that-should-be-obvious
tone.  "Go back to wherever you came from.  There's the door."

He points behind her, extending one long, tapered finger.  She follows his
gesture with her eyes and blinks several times.  The door is not the wooden
door she'd expected to see but a shiny chrome elevator door which opens
directly on the office.

She lets this anomaly slide.

"I'm not leaving without you," she tells him, trying to sound more
confident than she feels.

Mulder leans his hip against his desk, smirks at her.  "Oh, isn't that just
beautiful.  Loyal Agent Scully once again saving her partner from himself.
I'm all torn up, see these tears in my eyes?"

She takes a step toward him.  "Mulder, you've been hurt somehow, you're
very sick.  I don't know what you think this place is, but you need to come
with me, we need to go back.  This isn't real."

He cocks his thumb and forefinger at her and winked.  "Thanks for the
advice, Mom, but I'm really not in the mood for your patronization today,
hard to believe though that may be."

Scully frowns in consternation.  "What are you talking about, Mulder?"

"I'm talking about you, darling," he replies, and now he takes a step
toward her and she wants suddenly to move away from him but fears her high
heels might give out--she feels like she is teetering just standing there.
"I'm talking," he continues, "about dear, perfect little Dana Scully.  All
she wanted to do was to make her daddy proud, and so she'll put up with
anything, even me.  Then when I screw up she can sigh condescendingly and
forgive me anyway because that's what perfect little girls do, isn't it,
Scully? Did you learn that from your mom?"

"Mulder!"

He takes another step toward her, grinning now.  "What? Did I say something
mean and insensitive? Oh, I'm so sorry.  But you'll forgive me, right?
Otherwise I'd be very disappointed."  He enunciates his words with a sad
shake of his head, like that of a parent regarding an errant child, then he
snaps his fingers.  "Hey, Scully, what's that thing on your neck?"

Just as he voices the words, she feels it against her throat--cool, scaly
skin--and her hands grope instinctively for her neck, but now it has moved
inside her blouse.  She cries out, an embarrassing, childish cry, and rips
her jacket off, tearing buttons.  She can feel it, slithering beneath her
left breast, trapped against her skin by her bra, preparing to bite her,
and all she can think is that she has to get it _off._

She struggles, trying to tear off her blouse, but she can't figure out
whether it is a pullover or a button-down. "Mulder, it's a snake!" she
cries, but he is laughing at her.  "Mulder, help me!"

"Mulder, help me!" he mimics, laughing harder.

"Shit!" she curses, and finally manages to tear the blouse away just as the
snake slithers out of her bra cup and down her sternum.

"Don't move, Scully," Mulder warns, no longer laughing.  "It'll bite you if
you move."

Her eyes wide and her chest heaving with fear, she watches the thing travel
down her belly to her navel, where it flicks its tiny, forked tongue at the
edges.  It has the strangest colors--blue with stripes of red, and it was
no bigger than a garter snake--she tries frantically to decide if she has
ever seen a picture of such a creature and whether it is poisonous.

She has seen it somewhere, she is sure of it.

Mulder's gaze is fastened to it, his eyes a little glazed like she imagines
they are when he sits alone at night with his fly open and the blue
television flickering.  Has she really imagined that or did the image just
birth itself? "Two steps forward...." he whispers to himself, and licks his
lips.

"Mulder!" she hisses, struggling to keep her breathing even, to keep her
chest from heaving, as the snake tickles her navel.  "Help me!"

"It'll bite you," he insists.  "It'll bite us both if we move.  It's very
poisonous."

Scully's eyes flicker around the room, looking for something that might
help.  Her bra is sticking to her flesh, outlining erect nipples, and she
has an abrupt, ridiculous flash of shame at this immodesty.

"You know what, Scully?" Mulder says, as casual as if they are discussing
the weather.  "You should stop to consider whether I want your help, before
you come rushing in to rescue me.  Maybe I'm so sick of your martyr routine
and your pathetic, repeated attempts to show what a strong person you are
that I'd rather die than be subjected once again to your holier-than-thou
judgment, which inevitably come part and parcel to the Dana Scully Rescue
Package."

The snake moves away from her navel, curls down to her waistband and begins
to circle her waist.  She bites her lip and closes her eyes, willing
herself to breathe slowly.  Somehow it's worse when she can't see it, can
only feel its rough skin caressing her own.

"You know who I'd rather be rescued by?" Mulder continues, "I know it
sounds crazy, but hang on, hear me out.  The Energizer Bunny.  It may be
pink, but at least it's got some personality, at least after it's all over
we can trade shades and high-five each other and frankly, since I think
it's your goal in life to prove you're battery-driven too, well, the
quality of the rescue is likely to still be the same, right?"

Scully swallows; the snake winds back into view, still traveling along her
waistband.  Its beady red eyes focus straight ahead, seemingly unaware that
it's traveling on a living being.

"That's what you're trying to be, isn't it, Scully?" Mulder continues,
folding his arms over his chest and smirking at her discomfort.  "A
machine? A lithium creature of perfect rationality.  Invincible and
infallible."

The snake noses at the front of her waistband, and she stiffens as she
feels its head move between her skin and her underpants.  "Mulder..." she
pleads, fists clenching.

He grins.  "What? Never had a snake in your pants?"

These words break the spell, and she seizes the snake with her right hand,
tears it away and casts it aside before either it or Mulder can react.  It
hits the floor, bounces once, and quickly slithers off between the filing
cabinets.  Scully exhales deeply with relief, then rounds on her partner.

But he speaks before she can.  "You know what, Scully?  You _are_ better
than me.  You _are_ stronger than me.  You've proved it a hundred times
over, okay?  I'm straw and you're steel.  Fine.  Feel good now?"

The angry words die on her lips and her eyes widen in horror and pain.
"No," she says, folding her arms over her breasts.

"Why?" Mulder continues, ruthless. "Because I've stolen the pedestal of
martyrdom from underneath your feet? Because it can no longer be about
Scully making Mulder all better, look what a strong woman she is to even
put up with him?"

She closes the distance between them in a single stride and reaches up with
her hand to cover his lips, to stop his cruel accusations.  But before her
fingers touch him, he lashes out with the back of his fist, connecting
solidly with her jaw.  She sprawls onto the floor with a cry of pain.

Instead of helping her up, instead of expressing remorse, Mulder laughs
again, straddles her body and puts his hands on his hips.  Laws of gravity
no longer seem to apply, as the desk, the cabinets, the chairs--everything
but the two of them begin slowly to lift up into the air. Scully cups her
jaw with one palm, tears of shock and betrayal rising like acid to her eyes.

"Don't be a crybaby," Mulder tells her, nudging her cheek with one shoe.
She grunts, slaps his ankle away, and he smirks.  "Look, you came here on
your own.  There's the door," he says, pointing again.

With that he turns and walks away, somewhere behind her head.

And she isn't in the office anymore.

Scully sits up slowly, taking in her new surroundings.  A vast, sand-soaked
desert has taken the place of tile and plaster. The setting sun casts blue
and purple shadows in the otherwise golden sand, and a chill breeze stirs
the dunes into low-swirling clouds of dust.

She looks around: she is alone, but to her right the elevator doors still
shimmer, though no wall stands behind them.  She looks down: bra and pants
have been replaced by a long dark blue gown.  She's already cold.

She pulls herself to her feet, rubbing at her still-throbbing jaw as she
considers her predicament.  Mulder had told her to leave, pointed at the
door.

Scully turns her back on the strange elevator and sets out across the
dunes, a nomad in a foreign land.

But she knows this place.  She has dreamt of it, though it was darker in
her dream.  Emptiness, loneliness, detachment: these were the colors of her
dream-desert.  Strange--they are not all that different from those of the
office she has just visited.

Her toes sifting through the cold sand remind her of a day on the beach
with her family when she was just a little girl.  An Okinawan beach in
wintertime, when the water is warmer than the air.  Her mother had told
them it was too cold to swim, but Bill and her father had gone splashing
into the water anyway, and she'd gazed longingly after them.  She'd crept
into the breaking waves when her mother wasn't looking, and Bill had
tattled on her, said she was too little.

Mom came running down to the water's edge and tried to grab at her slippery
child's body, but she'd run further out into the waves, where her father
stood watching with bemused indecision.  She'd seen her father's smile,
widening to a laugh, and that's when a wave broke around her hips, sending
her sprawling.  She tumbled under the water, swallowing a mouthful of salt
as she screamed.

She'd imagined this must be what clothes felt like in a washing machine,
tossed about, soaking water in through every pore, panicked and gasping for
air but tasting only salt.  Then her father's strong arms had captured her,
carried her in swift, long strides onto the sand--the cold, cold
sand--where he sat her down and thumped her back, one arm around her
shoulders.  She coughed and sputtered, crying for the pain behind the
bridge of her nose, and Bill stood over her, hands on his hips.  "I told
you you were too little," he said, and she cried harder.

She can feel that same pain now, though it might be a ghost of a tumor, for
all she knows.  There are many ghosts here; she can feel that.

The stars make their debut now, twinkling balefully on the horizon.  She
can't see the elevator door, and her tracks are quickly covered by
windblown sand as she walks.  The dunes seem higher now, and though their
smooth shadows are beautiful, it's a desolate beauty, in a way like her own.

She pauses at the top of a slope to get her bearings, and, if she looks
into the setting sun, she thinks she can see a place where the sun merges
with the horizon, bending and reflecting as if striking water.  Water?
She's thirsty, very thirsty.

She hurries down the dune, stumbling once or twice as she trips on the
gown.  It can't be a mirage; not hot enough.  But laws of nature seem to
have changed here; she isn't sure what to believe or expect.

So she's unsurprised when, after the sun has vanished and she's traveled
another mile or so, her feet meet with the edge of what seemed to be a vast
ocean.  Waves lap gently, unintrusively, against the shore, and she kneels,
dips one finger in the water and tastes...

Salt.

"Starbuck Ahoy!"

The voice startles her--she leaps to her feet and cranes her neck
frantically up and down the coast, trying to pin down its source.  She
knows the voice, though, knows what she'll see.

"Here, skipper, I'm right here!"

She squints through the darkness out across the water.  Dimly, she can make
out the lines of a small sailing skiff, a little two-seater with a single
mast, but no sail.  It hovers less than twenty yards off the coast.  The
voice comes from a silhouetted man standing in the stern.

"Dad?" she calls, hesitant.  "What are you doing?"

It seems, frankly, the most natural question in the world.

He laughs, the full big-bellied laugh she remembers so fondly from her
childhood.  That laugh had grown sparser over the years, as if the loss of
his hair and his children had taken some merriment with them.  "I'm
sailing, honey!" he calls.  "What did you think?"

"The sail's not up, Dad," she replies, a hint of teasing in her voice.

He shrugs.  "No wind."

Scully realizes that she has taken several steps into the sea; it's
drenching the hem of her gown.  The water laps at her ankles, warm and
inviting.  "Dad," she calls,  "I came here looking for someone.  Do you
know where this place is?"

"Did you find him?" the captain asks.  "The person you're looking for?"

Scully rubs an absent hand against her jaw.  It no longer throbs, but
pain's memory is still sharp.  "No," she says.  "I don't think so."

"Well, what's he look like? Maybe I've seen him."

"He's my partner," she says.  Her hand cuts small circles in the air as if
hoping to grab the words to describe his height, his hair, his eyes, but
she can't seem to remember the language.  "He's....um....he's my partner,"
she repeats lamely.

"You mean your FBI partner? The crazy one? You're not still working with
him, are you?"

Scully draws herself up straighter.  "Yes, I am."

Her father doesn't speak for a moment, and she imagines she can smell his
disapproval just beneath the salty breeze.  "Dana," he says at last, "You
were always your own girl.  I've always been proud of you for that."

Scully folds her arms over her chest; she can hear the unspoken 'but.'
"What are you saying?"

"Well, honey, I just never saw you following some man around while he
chases after whims and delusions.  You know that old saying: 'behind every
good man there's a good woman?'  Well, it seems to me you're trying to be
that woman, and the man's not even good.  I thought I'd raised you better
than that."

A dozen sarcastic replies pop into Scully's mind, but she chooses
automatically deferential words.  "Wasn't Mom always that woman to you,
though, Ahab?"

"Your mother _is_ a good woman," he concedes.  "But you're a different kind
of good woman.  One who could not only keep up with the boys, but who
_wanted_ to.  And now you're still keeping up, but only so you can keep
chasing after this partner of yours."

"It's not like that," Scully says, so quiet that he shouldn't be able to
hear.  "I'm choosing my own path."

"Are you sure it's the right one?" Ahab asks her.  "I know you joined the
FBI because you thought it was the right way to make a difference, but how
much of a difference have you made?"

"We've saved lives, Dad."

"How do you know? Your 'solutions' have been elusive, crazy.  And at what
cost? Did you save your sister's life?"

Scully's hands snap to her ears, then she forces them down again, clenching
her fists.  She raises her face to the midnight blue sky as if hoping an
answer will be written there.

But he does not relent.  "Starbuck," he says.  "If he wanted you to come
for him, he would have found you by now.  That's how this place works.  Why
keep chasing after little green men when you could be changing the world?
Come with me, Dana.  Come with me, I'll take you home."

"But you're"--she gestures at the water separating them with a floppy hand.

"Well, swim out here, honey," he says, a beneficent smile in his voice.  "I
know you can do it.  And I've missed you, Starbuck."

"I can't leave Mulder," she whispers, but she takes a step out into the
water; now it laps at her calves.

"He left you, Dana.  He left you.  Take your life back in your own hands.
Come with me--there's so much I've wanted to tell you."

Scully feels her eyes prickle with tears, and she wipes them away as if
batting at a fly.  "No," she repeats.

The water laps now around her knees, though she can't remember taking a step.

"Dana!" her father says, now the stern officer.  "Come out here right now."

Scully feels a cord that runs from her ankle to her neck stiffen and snap.
"No!" she cries.  "How would that be any different from following Mulder?"

"Because I'm your father," William Scully replies, in a faintly puzzled
voice that squeezes a fist around her heart.

Nonetheless, Scully turns around and begins slogging back to shore.  It
seems much further away now than she remembers--had she really waded out so
far?

"Starbuck!" her father calls after her.

"Go away, Ahab!" she yells back, determined to keep moving.

"Starbuck," he calls again, but the sound is fainter now.

Yet the shore lies no nearer, and the water has grown utterly still.
Stumbling over the awkward gown, she tries to move faster.

The light has changed somehow--gone from dark blue to dark green, and in
the blackness she can no longer make out the shore.  A sickening, swampy
smell invades her nostrils.

She turns around, squints through the darkness, but her father's boat is
gone.  In its place hangs a low overgrowth of wet vines and bushes.  She
gasps and whirls again, throwing out one arm for balance.  The jungle-like
vegetation surrounds her now, and she hears a cacophony of bullfrogs,
insects and more malicious, unidentifiable creature-noises on all sides.
The noise does not seem to have begun just then--she has the eerie
sensation that she's only just begun to notice what's always surrounded
her.

Which way had she been going? Which way lay the elevator door?  Turning
slowly, reversing her path, she decides it must have been off to the right,
and so she begins moving to the left.

It's much harder to walk now--the muddy bottom sucks at her ankles and
toes, and it's like walking on nails, each step ginger for fear of what
might lie underfoot.  The leaves beside her rustle with a foreboding
_swoosh_ and she freezes, one foot in midair.  She thinks she sees yellow
eyes staring at her through the tangle, but as soon as she looks directly
at them, they vanish.

Scully shivers, hugs herself.  The stench has worsened; now she can smell
decay and the misplaced acridness of formaldehyde on every breath.

She hears another rustling to her left, and this time she turns faster,
catches sight of a pale human hand releasing the a branch so that it snaps
back to hide the hand's owner.

"Who's there?"

No answer.  She considers moving on, but instead, with a determined shake
of her head, she clears a muddy path toward the leafy tangle, pulls it
aside and looks.

Only dark, drooping vines and thorny branchlets greet her.  She stretches
out her hand, can barely make out her own fingertips.

Steel fingers clamp down on her shoulder and she jumps, biting back a cry
of fear.  Instinctively, she whirls and kicks at the same time, preempting
her attacker, but her foot connects with nothing and the hand stays on her
shoulder.  She grabs at the fingers and is shocked when they come away in
her grip.  She's clasping a pale, severed human hand, the wrist a bloody, tattered stump.She gasps and drops it, stepping backwards as it sinks into the m
ire at her feet, fingers still clutching clawlike as if their owner is
reaching up for help.

Something inhales deeply behind her and she whirls, cries out at what she sees.

It's a man, or at least, it once was a man.  Naked, white flesh drips with
green muck from the swamp.  Mud mats the remnants of both facial and pubic
hair, and his eyes are grotesquely sunken, his jaw obscenely slack.  "Agent
Scully, right?" he hisses.  "Remember me?"

She shakes her head mutely, stumbling over a submerged stone as she tries
to move backwards.  Her right arm gropes at the bushes for some kind of
weapon, anything.

"I'm surprised," the thing continues in a sibilant whisper.  "I'd think you
would remember.  After all, you did this to me."  He points at his belly,
and for the first time she notices the small, oozing green hole there.  A
blue snake, perhaps three feet in length and as thick as her arm, slithers
out of it, then skitters away down his leg.

Scully bites her lip to keep from screaming, but it's sufficient impetus to
wrench free a dead log from the tangles.  She brandishes her weapon in
front of her with both hands, holding it like a sword even though the wood
is clearly rotten and will probably shatter on impact.

"What are you talking about?" she demands.

"You don't remember?" the zombie whines.  "I'm Michael Stambaugh."

"Oh God," she breathes.  The Clyde Bruckman case.  The first man she
killed.  But there'd been no deliberation then, and there can be none now.

"Get away from me," she says, and the thing takes a step closer, raises its
skeletal hand as if to clap her on the shoulder.

She strikes at the approaching limb, and both her weapon and the arm
shatter.  The thing screams, but suddenly it is no longer Stambaugh's
voice, but--

"Melissa!" Scully cries, reaching for the body as it fell.

Melissa Scully screams, struggles against her sister's grip, but with only
one arm and no hands, her writhing is useless.

"Melissa," Scully repeats, bending with her sister's weight.  "Melissa, you
have to stand up, come on, you have to--"

The woman gibbers helplessly, and then Scully sees the green fluid oozing
from her sister's forehead.  "Missy, hold still, please!" she begs,
gripping the older woman around the waist.

But something pulls on her now, sucks greedily at Melissa's ankles,
inexorably dragging her down despite Scully's efforts.

"No!" the agent cries, dropping to her knees in the muddy water.  "No.  Get
_up,_ damn it, stand up!"

The force keeps sucking at the helpless, blathering woman, and now the
water splashes from above her breasts.

Desperate, Scully plunges one hand beneath the murkiness, fumbling around
as she tries to find the thing that has captured her sister.  Nothing but
mud greets her fingertips, and now Melissa's chin is beneath the water, her
eyes wide with terror.  "Get up, get up, get up!" Scully cries, now holding
only to her sister's cheeks.

Skin slides against skin, and Melissa sinks beneath the murky depths.  For
a second, Scully can still see her pale features, eyes and mouth wide,
distorted by the water, but then even this vanishes, as the woman slips
from her grasp.

"No!" Scully cries, swinging her arms wide beneath the water, hoping to
catch an ear, a strand of hair, anything.  But Melissa is gone.

Scully kneels in the mud, the water lapping at _her_ breasts now, and a sob
tears from her lips.  She failed Melissa again.

The mud begins to suck at her knees, and Scully doesn't care.

Cold, slick murkiness enfolds her thighs, and the water has risen to her
shoulders, but Scully still swings her arms uselessly through the
surrounding water.

Only when it tickles her chin does she remember.

Melissa is dead.

Suddenly frantic, Scully begins to thrash about, trying to release her legs
from the muck but her struggles only make her sink faster.  She clasps at
the slippery roots of a bush to her right as if groping for a lifeline, but
she can't quite reach, and then the water closes over her mouth and nose.

She tips her head back to take one last gasping breath, then dives beneath
the waters and stretched her body as far as it will reach toward that root.
She fumbles to the right and then the left, terrified she's lost her sense
of direction, but then her fingers brush against something solid.

Catch it.

Her lungs screaming for air, she pulls hard, hears the mud around her waist
fight back with a vengeful sucking sound.  Her muscles beg for mercy, but a
second later she wraps her other hand around the root and pulls with both
arms.

The mud releases her in a single stroke, as if it is giving birth, and,
trying unsuccessfully to cough and breathe at the same time, she drags
herself toward the brambles.  Her hair clings to her cheeks and she is
painfully aware of the muddy, smelly water filling every body cavity.
Fearing what might happen if she sits too long, she hauls herself onto
wobbly legs and keeps moving, no longer caring which direction is which.

"Dana," says her mother's voice, and Scully whirls.

The swamp is gone.  She stands in a long, steel-lined corridor that
resembles the set of a sci-fi B-movie.  She looks down at her hands; though
the scratches and mud from the brambles still remain, her clothes have
changed again--she now wears a blue Sunday dress she thinks she might have
owned in high school.

"Dana," her mother repeats.  "Please don't do this."

"Where are you?" Scully asks, turning slowly.  "I can't see you, Mom."

But her mother doesn't seem to have heard.  "Dana, I know you can't hear me
but I need you to know I'm praying for you.  You can't leave me like this.
You're my only daughter now."

"I can _hear_ you, Mom!" Scully cries, taking a few steps down the
corridor.  "Just tell me where you are."

"Darling, I know you thought you were doing the right thing, and it was a
brave thing, but now I just need you to wake up, okay? We've been through
this before and you came back to me then.  Please, please, come back to me
now.  I'm right here."

Scully turns and walks several steps in the other direction.  "Where do you
think I am?" she asks.  "Am I unconscious? Who called you?"

"Dana, you need to come back now.  Your brothers are here.  Your partner is
here.  He's fine.  He wants you to come back too."

Scully stops, runs her tongue across her lips.  She knows this is wrong,
but she doesn't know why.  "Who's doing this?" she whispers, then, louder:
"You're not my mother!"

"Dana..."

"Shut up!" Scully screams.  "Shut up!"

Silence.  Her words fall dead against the walls, though it seems they
should echo.

"It won't work!" she announces.

She glances back and forth, up and down the hallway, trying to decide which
way to go.

"Dana," Margaret Scully says again.  "I love you, honey."

Scully runs to the left, feet pounding on the steel floor, retreating from
that slippery, saccharine, lying voice.  The hall curves to the right, but
no doors decorate interrupt its smooth walls and there is no end in sight.
She can't even tell where the light came from, or why she casts no shadow.
She runs until her ankles ache, until her lungs burn, until her sides
scream with pain.  And when she can't run any longer, when her shoes have
carved bloody half-moons into the back of her heels, she sinks to the
ground, coughing, her cheek pressed against the cold wall.

She doesn't know where she is, she doesn't know where she is going.  She
shuts her eyes tightly, grits her teeth against the terrible sound that
threatens to rise from her throat.  This isn't the afterlife--this is hell.

But the hell has only just begun.

Scully opens her eyes to new scenery.  Metal walls still surround her, but
instead of sitting curled against the wall, gravity has rotated ninety
degrees and she lies curled on a steel table, a short white gown barely
covering her body.  Beside her, a waist-high table boasts an array of shiny
surgical instruments.

_No._

A rough hand grabs her shoulder, pulls her over onto her back and snaps a
cuff around her wrist.  The bright light overhead blinds her, and she tries
to scream but she can't.  Cuffssnap down over her ankles, spreading her
legs.

_Oh, no.  Oh, God, no._  She knows what comes next, though she can't say how.

Animated Japanese rapidfires over her head.  A needle plunges between her
legs, ripping her open as birth never will.  A drill-like whirring descends
over her belly and then white-hot fire but still, she can't scream.

Have they drugged her? Gagged her? She can't remember.  All she knows for
certain is the pain, seismic tremors of pain originating at her center and
radiating out to the tip of every limb.  Blinding, horrible pain which
should trigger shock, should force her nerves to switch off, but never do.

_mother..._

Why is it familiar? She has never remembered...did she dream about it? She
hopes not.  She wants this to be an imagining, not a memory, she wants this
to not be real, but most of all she just wants this to stop.

_please..._

Like a wand of fire, some burning thing fills the space between her legs,
and it pokes and prods at her.  She tries to move against the bonds, but
paralysis has frozen every muscle, but unfortunately, has left the nerves
untouched.

_God..._

It stops as suddenly as it began, and she feels the thing withdrawn, the
bonds loosen.  She flexes her fingers; she can move, but the only move she
can make is to roll over onto her side with a soft moan, curling her knees
to her chest.

The light is gone, and with it the steel table.  She opens her eyes, and
after a second, she can make out dim outlines and a digital clock.  She is
lying in a bed, curled on her side.  She breathes in, a deep, cleansing
breath.  It was all a dream?

Pleasure has replaced all vestiges of pain, and she becomes gradually aware
that the sensation arises from a hand on her naked skin, stroking her side
slowly from shoulder to hip.  She wants to close her eyes and relish this
welcome feeling, but she is afraid it will vanish if she does.

She makes herself turn her head in slow-motion, hoping her tempo will
prevent the sudden change of scenery she already anticipates.

"Hey," says a familiar, friendly voice.  A bedroom voice.

"Mulder?" she murmurs, drowsy, then, as what he is doing to her registers,
her voice rises several decibels.  "Mulder!"

He withdraws his hand and she rolls over on her back, tugging blankets up
to her armpits.  Her partner lies on his side next to her and she feels his
foot graze her calf.  "Are you okay?" he asks.

"Mulder, wha--what are you doing here? What am I doing here?"

Even in the darkness she can see his wink.  "What--are you experiencing
missing time?" he asks.

She sits up on her elbows, swings her head from left to right.  A motel
room.  Could be anywhere.

Her eyes rest on Mulder again and narrow.  "You hit me," she says, and
immediately wishes she could've rehearsed that.  She'd intended to say
something much worse.

"When?" He sounds genuinely aghast.  "What do you mean?"

"Just awhile ago.  In the office.  But I'm not sure it was you."  God, it
sounds stupid, even to her.

Mulder rubs his hand over his face, then reaches out to imitate the gesture
tenderly against hers.  "Scully, normally I'd demand to know when and where
and start looking for bounty hunters in every corner, but right now I think
you've just had a bad dream."

"No, it was...Arthur von Deer.  Pennsylvania.  I was coming after--Mulder,
what the hell are we doing in this bed?"

He flicks his thumb along her cheekbone.  "Do you want me to leave?" he
says, contrite.

Scully has no idea how to reply to that, but he appears to take her silence
for a negative answer.

"Who is Arthur von Deer, Scully? Are you sure it wasn't just a dream?"

"No!" she says, irritated at his patronization.  "He was...he was a
doctor...."  She can't remember.  Mulder had been in danger, and there had
been an old man named von Deer.  His fault.  But she remembers clearly the
haunting events of the last several hours.  Or minutes. Or days.

"It was so strange, Mulder," she says, chasing the memories in her mind but
they won't be pinned.  "I dreamt of you, and of my father--he told me to
stop following you.  And my sister, she was there too, sinking down
underneath the mud...I couldn't save her in time.  Then I was lying on the
table in the train car, and they had tied me down, they were doing horrible
things and it _hurt_--"

"Oh, Scully," Mulder interrupts, his fingers straying to her lips to
silence her. "I'm sorry.  I should have woken you.  I could tell you were
dreaming but I didn't know--"

His hand trails lower, over her neck, squeezes her collarbone warmly.
Scully wets her lips.  What is happening here?

"The whole thing couldn't have been a dream," she insists.  "It was too
real, as real as you are now, and there was a whole case, a lot of people
dead, but I don't remember...."

Mulder leans over her and silences her with a kiss that starts out soft but
grows harder, and Scully realizes this is no comfort-kiss.

"Mulder," she murmurs around his lips, bringing her palm to his chest with
the intention of pushing him away.  But he captures her hand in his,
holding it between them, and keeps kissing her, until she no longer wants
to protest.

He rolls over her and props himself up on his elbows.  Fingers tangle in
her hair; he nibbles at her lower lip, then moves away along her jawline,
kisses his way down her neck.  When his mouth curves over her carotid
artery, she arches her neck up and wraps her arms around him, pulling him
closer.  He reaches between them to cup her breast, rubs her nipple with
his thumb, and she gasps.

"Mulder?"

But he doesn't answer, not with words.  She feels his hard length against
her thigh, and with excruciating slowness he grinds his hips into her until
her legs part of their own volition.  She sighs with pleasure as he slides
into her, filling her inch by inch, and he squeezes her breast again
softly.

"I'm sorry I didn't wake you," he repeats, and how can he think about
contrition at a time like this? His body replaces the pain from that
unwelcome violation in her dream, erasing the terrible memories with a
soothing, rhapsodic rhythm.

She runs her hands over his muscled back, head tilted toward the ceiling as
if in prayer.  He moves inside her, grating, stroking, filling, breathing
harder.  Why have they never shared this before now?

Of course, from the way he acted, he seemed to think they had, but never
mind that, don't think about that, not now.  Only this.  Only this feeling
and this moment.  Now.

He bites her shoulder as he comes, and the combination of pain and pleasure
brings her so close to the edge she almost cries out, but then he is
straining against her, almost as if he were trying to crawl back into the
womb, and she wraps her arms around him and kissed his hair.

He bites her harder.  This time, the pain is greater--he breaks the
skin--and she cries out.  But instead of the apology she anticipates, he
begins to suck.

"Mulder!" she says, breathing heavily.  "Mulder, get off me."

But he ignores her, still thrusting into her, his mouth fastened to the
wound he made.

She pounds on his back.  "Mulder! You're hurting me!"

He lifts his mouth for a fraction of a second, rasps out: "Say it," then
reattaches his lips to her neck.  He is still coming, still gouging her
like an awl.

No, this isn't.  Is not.  Not.  Like before, like her mother, like her
father.  She pulls at his hair, scratches at the side of his face.  "Get
off me!" she cries, louder now.

"Say it!" he repeats.  She can feel the blood pouring out of her body and
into his, her heart pumping her blood down his greedy throat.

"Say what?" she demands.  She grinds her hips into the mattress, trying to
reach her hand between their bodies, but his skin clings to hers like
half-dried glue.

He raises himself up above her and grins down.  Even in the dark she can
see the slick blood that rims his mouth.  "'My body and my blood, given for
you,'" he replies, his voice gentle, almost tender.  "Say that."

She gasps in horror, then tries to grab at his face, but he pins her upper
arms with his elbows and locks the sides of her face in an iron grip,
lowers his mouth to hers.  He kisses her, and she can taste her own coppery
blood mingling with his as she bites down viciously on his lip.  He doesn't
even wince.

She scratches at his arms, rakes claw marks down his sides, but he only
kisses her harder.  He fills her completely from mouth and vagina, invading
every corner and pore of her body, and her writhing attempts to escape only
seem to drive him on.

She raises her hips and he moans around her lips.  She reaches beneath her
buttocks, fumbling for the space between her legs and he nuzzles his
approval.  Finding the tiny soft sac hanging between her thighs, she closes
her eyes--a prayer--and squeezes hard.

Mulder screams and rolls off of her.  She leaps away immediately, racing
across the floor in hopes that someone's gun--she doesn't care whose but
can she do it?--is in its place on the dresser, but his voice turns her
around in mid-stride.

"Scully," he wheezes, cupping his groin in his hands.  "Where's your tattoo?"

Despite herself, she cranes her neck around to look down her back.  The
tattoo should be to the right of the blood flowing freely now down her
back, but her skin is unblemished.  She gasps, rakes her gaze back to
Mulder.

But he's gone, and in his place reclines an enormous blue snake, at least
ten feet long, coiled on the bed.  It flicks a delicate, forked tongue her
way and slithers onto the floor.  She dances quickly out of its way as it
makes for the door.

She takes one last look around the room, and then, despite the pain in her
neck, between her legs, and throughout every muscle, she says, "Fuck this,"
and she chases after it.

She passes through the hotel room door and into a large mountain field,
morning-bright with crystal dew.  When she turns to look back, the door and
the hotel room are gone.  She's clothed again in a suit, and the blood has
stopped flowing.

Doesn't matter.  Fuck this.  She races after the snake.

It outpaces her quickly, but its winding trail through the horsehair grass
is easy to follow.  A deer lopes across her path, but she doesn't stop to
stare, only runs.

The canyon surprises her, and while she tries to stop, her ankle twists on
a loose stone and her feet leap out from under her, tumbling her down the
steep slope and she knows she should scream, should feel pain, but she only
thinks, "NO" and the bruises do not appear.  Her hands go instinctively for
her head, and she rolls roughly over the hillside, coming to a stop at the
bottom, where she promptly vomits.

No!  Where is the snake? She's lost it, lost it, lost--

Heaving to catch her breath, she almost lets out an agonized scream of
frustration and pain, but then she sees him.

He is kneeling in the sand at the side of a narrow creek, Armani-clad,
hands on his thighs as he stares into the water.  Every line in his body
marks his desolation.

Like a hunter creeping up on its prey--or perhaps prey creeping up on its
hunter--Scully moves toward him.

"Mulder?" she says.  Her tone is soft, but every muscle coils, prepared to
strike or run.

He whirls around, surprised, and a moment's exultation crosses over his
features only to be replaced by wariness.

"Who are you?" he whispers hoarsely.

Mulder? Her heart skips a beat, and she wets her lips, steps closer to him.

"I'm Scully," she answers.  "Dana Scully.  Your partner."

He scrunches his forehead as if trying to remember.  "I--I--partner?"

Her confidence is growing now; something in the desolation lurking in his
grey-green eyes makes her belly melt.  "I'm your friend, Mulder," she
assures him.  "At least, I think I am.  I'm a little confused now, too."

He looks back down into the water, drags his finger through it, watching
the successive V's which trail behind it.  "I think I remember," he says,
and the set of his shoulders tells her everything.

"You think I hurt you, don't you?" she breathes, taking another step.  She
is starting to understand.  "You think I did something horrible to you."

His silence is answer enough.  She closes the distance between them, but he
leaps to his feet as she approaches.  "Don't come near me!" he orders,
holding up his hand like a traffic cop.

Scully looks away from him, at the trickling stream.  "Damn you!" she
shouts at the water, at the canyon walls.  "What the hell are you doing to
us? Come out, _now!_"

She reaches for her gun, is absurdly pleased to find it at her hip.  Mulder
reaches quickly for his own and she turns to him.  "No!" she says,
extending a hand.  "Not you.  I'm not drawing on you."

He lowers the weapon but doesn't replace it, watching her.

"I don't know what you saw, Mulder, but it wasn't me.  It wasn't.
Someone...something...is doing this.  Somehow."

"Why are we here, Scully?"

Relief that he knows her name, that he asked her this question, washes over
her.  She already feels stronger.  "I don't remember," she admits.  "We
were on a case.  There were a lot of people dead.  That's all I remember."

He nods, seemingly willing to take her word for it.

"We are not who we are," he says, and she nods.

"Yes."  The phrase sounded right to her too.

"But how do you know who I am?" he asks.  "How do I know who you are?"

She opens her mouth, closes it again in consternation.  "I--think I know
you," she says.  "I hope I'm right."

Again, this seems to satisfy, so she turns her back to him, looks down the
canyon.  "I know you're watching!" she cries.  "Come out!"

As if on cue, they both hear it.  "Fox!" cries a child.  "Fox!"

Their connection broken, Mulder tears off at a run, following the creek,
and with a cry of protest, Scully follows.

"Wait, Mulder!" she calls.  "Wait!  It's not your sister!"

But he is always faster, and she stumbles on the slippery rocks.  She races
around the bend, and here the stream widens, rushing foamy and rough over
the fractured granite.  She arrives just in time to catch sight of a small
girl carried around the next bend by the water, waving one hand as she
screams, bobbing beneath the surface.

Mulder clambers over the boulders, precariously teetering on the slickness
over the rapids.  "Mulder!" Scully shouts.  "Mulder, come back!"

He turns toward her voice, his face a mask of grief and horror.  He looks
back down the creek, arms dangling like a marionette's.  Boneless, he sinks
to the boulder beneath him and bows his head.

Scully eases herself over the rocks, ignoring the foamy tongues licking her
feet, moving as slowly as she thinks she can afford to, until at last she
reaches her partner.  She kneels behind him and wraps her arms around him,
presses her cheek to the muscles of his shoulder.  He is warm and solid,
and the familiar scent of his perspiration and cologne draw her closer to
him.  She nuzzles her nose against his neck, holding tight to his torso,
and she's not sure who she's doing this for--her or him.  It doesn't seem
to matter.

"I can never reach her, Scully," he says sadly, and she has to strain to
hear him over the roaring water.  "But I keep trying."

Scully raises her head, puts her mouth near his ear.  "She's not Samantha,"
she murmurs, quiet and insistent.  "It's not her.  She's not real--none of
this is real."

He turns, a slow, delicate maneuver intended to keep her arms around him,
and at last she sees his face, his cheeks drawn and hopeless.  "Then how do
I know you're real?"

Indeed, that is the question. She can't explain it.

"You...you just have to believe it," she says at last.

Mulder brings his hand up to her cheek and she flinches, remembering the
doppelganger that made that very gesture not long ago.  He hesitates, but
she makes herself lean into the caress, holding his gaze with her own.

He stares deeply into her eyes for a long moment, then, seemingly
satisfied, he tips his head forward.  She meets him halfway with the
faintest brush of lips, trailing from his mouth to his cheek as his breath
stirs her eyelashes.  Where only cold coal had been before, the familiar
warmth of shared fire now smolders, and below them the stream-turned-river
still rages.

They pull apart as one, tensing in mutual anticipation of some terrible
surprise, but only warm arms and breaths surround them.  Scully smiles with
both mouth and eyes.  "Do you believe me?" she asks, a hint of teasingin
her voice.

"Yeah," he answers, grinning back. "I believe you, Scully."

She twists to get her feet beneath her, pulling him with her as she stands.

Mulder inhales sharply, his eyes drawn by something over her shoulder, and
she whirls around, hand automatically reaching for her gun.  But not two
feet away from them, in the center of the canyon wall, stand two very
non-threatening sliding elevator doors.  Open.  She can see the
chrome-coated interior shadowed within, where there should have been only
rock.

"We have to go," Mulder says, gripping her hand and tugging her toward the
doors.  The mood is broken and his earnest urgency should be contagious,
but Scully follows in jerks, like a child being dragged to the doctor.

"Mulder, I don't think--"

"What?" he says, stepping inside the elevator.

She is suddenly aware that her back itches.  Hurts.  Burns.  "I don't think
I can," she whispers.  She pulls her hand out of his grasp to reach behind
her, and the instant their connection severs, the doors slide shut, even as
both cry out in protest.

A fraction of a second later, the doors vanish altogether, as do the canyon
walls, the roaring river and the boulder on which she stands.

Her feet now rest on spongy soil in a large, exceptionally manicured
garden.  She hears a sound behind her, and she whirls around just in time
to see the enormous snake slither lightening-fast out of the tree.  It
lunges for her neck like a cobra, and when it strikes, twines itself around
her body like a boa.









Chapter 8

A Tunnel Is Also A Line

---------------------------------------------------
Tuesday
12:41 a.m.

Mulder blinked, squinting in the bright lights. There was noise--a high,
keening monotone which evoked fire alarms and air strike drills he
remembered as a child.... His head felt like a beer-bellied construction
worker had cleaved it in two with a jackhammer, and he wished the noise
would stop.

Gradually, below the awful noise, Mulder became aware of a man's voice,
chanting in a low mutter, "Come on, come on, come on, come on, come on...."

Mulder frowned. Something important was happening, something he should be
paying attention to. His lips felt tingly and numb, and he raised his
fingers to them to confirm that they were still there. They were, but his
mouth wasn't working right.

"Come on, come on, come on, come on, come on...."

The fuzzy white above him shimmered and resolved itself into an overhead
fluorescent lamp.  When he realized what it was, he squinted his eyes
closed, willing his pupils back to their normal size.  Every muscle creaked
like well-worn cane as he turned his head to the side, toward the incessant
beep and the chanting man.

"Come on, come on, come on,  come on...."

Mulder forced his eyes open, and though the image before him wavered in and
out of focus, now close, now far, he knew that blurry red, the pale flesh
tones. Scully.  Instinct took control of his muscles, and a second later he
was sitting upright, his head throbbing from the too-fast motion.  He felt
a painful jab in his left wrist, realized he'd just dislodged an IV and a
thin trail of blood meandered down the creases decorating the back of his
hand.

The chanting stopped, and as Mulder's vision cleared, he identified its
source--Arthur von Deer, eyes and mouth wide in a cartoonish mask as he
gaped at the resurrected agent.  In his hands were two defibrillator
paddles, but Mulder could see the machine attached to them wasn't charging.
The endless, electric wail was coming from the heart monitor near Scully's
head.

Mulder's first coherent thought was to tackle the man and pound his fist
into that jolly old nose while introducing his knee to the doctor's groin,
but as he lurched forward off the gurney, slipping on weakened legs, he
realized he was not sufficiently coordinated to execute this plan.  Six
feet of daunting tile and his partner's gurney separated them.

"What did you do to her?" he rasped; at the same moment von Deer cried,
"How did you wake up?"

Scully's eyes were half-shut, her skin deathly pale. He was only dimly aware that she was half-naked--her skin slathered with clear jelly from the defib
rillator and suction cups attached to her chest like organic bionics,
rendering what should have been beautiful freakish.

"Why aren't you--?" Mulder made a rough gesture at the paddles von Deer
held.  "Help her!"

But the doctor didn't move, only stood there staring, pale.  "My research
is my life," he whispered; Mulder had to strain to hear.

He swiveled his head from side to side, looking for something with which to
convince the frozen man, and his eyes found the dark pile of Scully's
clothing on the sheets on which his hip rested.  Clothes.  Gun.

His hand snaked under the pile and fingers closed around the familiar butt
of a Sig.  Thank God for unspoken communication.  He brought it up to aim,
the muzzle level with von Deer's chest, and the doctor flinched.

"Please," he croaked. "If you can promise me you won't shut me down, I'll
do it--"

Mulder's reply was a shot fired over von Deer's left shoulder.  The old man
gave a yelp and ducked, far too late.

"Do it!" Mulder shouted, his long-dry throat wringing out the words.

Terrified, the doctor hurried to flip on the machine, and a second keening
joined the first.  Two seconds later he applied the paddles to Scully's
torso and she seized suddenly, her breasts jiggling obscenely as she
slammed into the metal table, but the heart monitor kept wailing. Mulder
choked back a scream, lurched forward across the floor.  His legs obeyed in
the face of his rising panic, and he closed the distance between them in
two strides.

"What did you _do?_" Mulder demanded. "What the _fuck_ did you do? I'll
_kill_ you, you cocksucker, I'll--"

"She wanted to!" von Deer protested.  "To come after you!"

Understanding hit Mulder like a slap across the face, and he finally
stumbled across the distance between them, reached for his partner. The
hand with the gun fell onto her belly and the other onto her brow, as if
with his own hands he could do what the defibrillator had not. He leaned
down until her bleached, parted lips were just inches from his face.

"Scully?" he croaked. "What the hell were you thinking?"

He jerked his head back up to von Deer, raised the gun while leaving one
hand on her forehead.  "Again!" he ordered.

---------------------------------------------------

She can barely breathe, and she can't move. The snake's hot breath kisses
her face as its tongue flickers over her nose, tasting her exhalations.

"Let go," Scully whispers. "Let go, I want to go back."

She is not at all surprised when the serpent answers her. "No you don't,"
it hisses, and the sound does not seem to come from its mouth, instead
reverberating inside her head. It tightens a coil around her calves. "If
you wanted to go back, you would have."

"I _do_," she insists through gritted teeth, straining against the scaly
weight around her chest.

"To what? To your partner? To the man who uses you, takes you for granted,
holds you to a hypocritically high double standard and appreciates you only
for how you save him? You want to go back to that?"

"It's not...like that," Scully gasps.

"You're a terrible liar, Dana," the snake whispers, spiraling around her
body without ever loosening its grip. "Or is it 'Scully'? Tell me, what do
you call yourself? Is it 'Dana' or 'Scully'?"

She furrows her brow in thought--it has her stumped. "I don't..." she says
after a moment, twisting to relieve the pressure on her rib cage, "usually
refer to myself...in the third person."

"Ah," the serpent sighed, as if it had just elucidated a profound truth.
"But, really, _Scully_, you're lying to yourself and doing a bad job of it.
You value your independence, and you respect it in others, don't you?"

Scully doesn't answer--she is concentrating on breathing. The snake flicks
its tongue over her eyes and she shuts them tightly.

"And yet," the creature continues, "your career is driven by a
relationship, a man who depends on you for definition as you depend on him.
Admit it--you like that."

"I...I like my career. I like...my relationship with Mulder....usually."

"But you know it's not right that you do."

She feels the serpent's jaw against her brow as it tasted her hair, and she
shudders.

"Scully," Mulder's voice speaks into her head, urgent and frightened.
"Scully, please come back. I need you...."

The creature's laughter bounces off the walls of her mind. "See?" it says,
sibilant and jubilant. "There he goes again."

---------------------------------------------------

"Please come back. I need you," Mulder whispered fiercely, her hair
trickling like water through his stroking fingers. "You can't leave now,
not like this, Scully."

"It's been three minutes twenty-five seconds!" von Deer cried.  "Too long!"

"Again," Mulder snarled, still clenching the weapon but unafraid of the
other man.  His indecisive attempt at passive homicide was nothing in the
face of Mulder's determination.

He focused on Scully's pale cheeks, her perfectly still eyelids. "Scully,"
he whispered, bending close to her. "There's so much we have to do. I can't
do it without you. Don't leave, please don't leave...."

The words poured out of his mouth, awkward and inelegant; he didn't even
know what he was saying. If she didn't wake, he--

He refused to complete the thought.

"Clear!" von Deer said, an automatic order, and Mulder leapt back. The
doctor pressed the metal blocks to her chest and again she seized, arcing
off the table and shuddering like a doll. Mulder couldn't bring himself to
watch, and when he turned away he saw the third gurney, recognized Eleanor
von Deer's unconscious form.

But curiosity was not the highest priority at the moment. He leaned back
over her face, sliding one desperate hand along her ribs. "Not like this,
Scully. Not like this."

---------------------------------------------------

"Not like this," Mulder's voice insists inside her head. "I'd never forgive
myself."

"It's always about him, isn't it?" the snake smirks. "Always Mulder."

Scully stares up at the leaves over her head, concentrates on drawing in
air. "No," she breathes.

"Oh, don't be ridiculous, you've said so yourself."

"You have to come back and tell me how wrong I was about this case,
Scully," Mulder continues, and underneath the teasing is a desperation
she's rarely heard. "How wrong I was to come here in the first place. Come
on, don't disappoint me."

Case?

"Don't disappoint him, indeed," sneers the serpent. "That's why you argue,
isn't it? But why bother--he's always right anyway. The only thing he needs
you for is a shoulder to cry on and a battle standard under which to fight.
Hail Mary, full of grace."

What case?

Mulder's litany continues. "I'm here, Scully. I'm waiting for you. I'm not
going anywhere. What do you need from me?"

Scully can't think--there are too many voices in her head and her vision is
starting to recede as the serpent suffocates her. She can no longer see the
trees, only the light over her head.

"How about another chess game?" Mulder continues. "I only let you win last
time, Scully, I bet I could kick your ass in a rematch. Come on."

Case. There was a doctor. A doctor and a Mulder.

"He keeps things from you," the snake reminds her. "He yells at you for not
telling the truth, he derides your beliefs, and yet he keeps terrible
secrets from you. He calls it protection, and that's exactly what it is. If
you cracked, he'd fall."

The light grows brighter, the blackness grows blacker. The fovea, most
sensitive part of the retina. And two men with animal's names. She _has_ to
remember.

"--please come back, please Scully please--"

"--takes you for granted. All men do--"

why is she here?

"You were right," Mulder whispers. "It _was_ von Deer."

Scully takes a deep breath, and this time the snake's body gives as she
pushes her ribs against it. "Tell me," she says, and she can see again,
"what do you call yourself? Is it 'Eleanor' or 'von Deer'?"

The snake is gone, and Scully can breathe.

The garden has vanished, and she lies on the floor in an entirely black
room. A bright light from an indeterminable source illuminates them from
overhead, and she can't see the walls, but somehow blackness surrounds her.
A few feet away, seated on the floor with her knees drawn up to her chest,
sits an old woman, her long grey tresses swept over a plain black gown.

Scully raises herself up on her knees and then onto her feet. "It was you,"
she breathes. "It was you every time. It was all an elaborate hoax."

"It's no hoax," the woman replies, bitterness dripping from her tongue.
"We're here, aren't we?"

"But the ghosts," Scully insists. "They were never real."

The old woman snaps her head up, rises up on her knees. "How can you say
that? Didn't they know everything about you? Didn't they know--"

"They knew how to make me hurt. _You_ knew how to make me hurt. You knew
what I feared and you brought it to life. I don't understand how, but...."
Scully's voice trails off at Eleanor's self-superior smirk.

"In sleep," the older woman says, "our spirits are free to wander--it's
just a matter of knowing where to go.  Who needs drugs and NDEs?"

Scully nods and takes a step toward Eleanor. "Did you pretend to be your
daughter for your husband? Or was that a lie--was he in on it? You gave the
subjects what they wanted, but the unwilling patients--you treated them
like you've treated me, didn't you? And all because your daughter died?"

Eleanor leaps to her feet. "Don't talk about my daughter!" she snaps. "You
know nothing of my daughter."

Scully doesn't know how to respond; she fishes deep within her brain for
Mulder's wisdom and takes another step toward the woman. "Tell me," she
suggests.

"He was right about you," Eleanor says. "You _are_ a martyr. Don't try that
routine on me, you bitch. My pain is _none_ of your business."

"And neither is mine yours," Scully answers. "Just because you lost
something important doesn't justify your taking it from everyone else. But
you can't really take it, can you? You can just try to convince people to
give it up themselves. How many people did you talk into leaving their
lives?"

Eleanor laughs and it is not a pleasant sound. "But none of it is real! You
said so yourself. There's no life after death--_this_ is all there is. And
we--I--made it, not God. All those stupid prayers in that hospital--those
people are raising their voices to emptiness! When I go to their loved ones
they are _ready_ to die, begging for nothingness. And you're finding you're
not so far from ready yourself, aren't you?"

"I'm ready to die whenever the time comes," Scully replies. "I don't fear
death. But the time isn't now."

"Stop lying to yourself," Eleanor snaps. "You're terrified of death. You're
terrified of the ghosts of your past--you're scared to look them in the
eye. And yet, between you and your partner, you have more
unresolved...issues...than any ten people I've ever met, and rather than
face those contradictions, you'd give up at the first chance you had. It's
a charming paradox, really. But even more charming is your stubborn belief
that you have nothing to fear from death. You honestly believe there's
something better behind all this, but I cross this boundary nightly, and
let me tell you, I'd have seen it by now. Loretta isn't in some happy place
growing wings and playing harps."

"That's her name?"

"What?"

"Loretta. She's the ghost you fear, isn't she?"

Eleanor's eyes narrow, and the next words out of her mouth are very
un-oldladlylike. "Fuck you."

They both hear a new sound; neither turn. A child's footstep on marble, and
then the little-girl voice: "Mommy?"

Both women freeze, and Scully closes her eyes. Is this to be the next
torture? Has Eleanor now conjured up Emily from the secret depths of
Scully's pain?

Every muscle drawn like a steel cable, Scully turns around to face the
owner of the voice. But it is not the child she fears.

A small towheaded girl, no more than ten years old, stands about five yards
away, clothed in a pink babydoll nightgown.

"Mommy?" she says again.

"Shut up!" Eleanor screams, clenching her fists. Scully looks back at the
woman, realizes she screams at the agent as if she can't see the child.

Scully spreads her hands, disavowing responsibility.

"Stop that!" Eleanor orders.

"I'm not doing anything," insists Scully. "Look, Eleanor." She points at
the child.

"Why won't you look at me, Mommy?" asks the little girl, her voice and eyes
both brimming with tears. "Every time I say something to you, you won't
look."

Eleanor claps her hands over her ears, closes her eyes. "No, no, no, no,
no, no!" she moans.

Scully closes the distance between them, wrenches the older woman's hands
off her ears to make her hear.

"Remember your grandson, Peter?" the child says, and now she was a young
woman, her hair short and amber. "He misses you, Mom."

"You _bitch!_" snarls Eleanor, spitting at Scully.  But Scully only seizes
the woman's head between her own hands and turns it. "Look," she says. "You
made me look. Now _you_ look."

Eleanor clamps her eyelids into wrinkles, struggles against the younger
woman's powerful grip, but at last her eyes snap open and she saw Loretta,
who now clasps the hand of a small boy. Peter, she'd said.

Eleanor chokes on a sob, torn by her inner battle, and with sudden violence
she smacks Scully's arms away and runs to the pair.

All goes dark--blacker than the blackness in deep caves where all creatures
are colorless and eyeless--and Scully is alone.

She swallows nervously, runs her hands over her skin to reassure herself
that even in this darkness all her parts are still here.

"Okay," she says, an almost-undetectable waver in her voice. "I'm ready to
go home."

---------------------------------------------------

The doctor lowered the paddles to the crash cart. "It's no use," he said,
rubbing the back of his arm across his face.

Mulder reached across Scully's body to grab the man's arm, his right hand
bringing the gun up to bear. "Do it again!" he shouted. "She's not dead!"

Von Deer shook his head sadly, refusing to be intimidated. "Please, Agent
Mulder, it's been over four minutes. She's gone. I'm sorry. I'm so...." He
wrenched himself out of Mulder's grip, turned away.

Mulder could have screamed, could have fired, but instead he dropped the
gun on the mattress before him and seized his partner's cheeks, distending
her features. "Scully," he said fiercely. "Don't give up. Please don't give
up. You have to come back."

Nothing happened. Mulder grabbed her shoulders and shook her. "Scully!" he
shouted.

But she only hung there pale and limp below him, her bloodless lips
slightly parted.

A strangled sob wrenched itself from Mulder's throat, but he didn't look
away from her eyes. "Dana Scully," he cried, an unexpected power in his
voice. "Dana Scully."

"It's no use," von Deer repeated, both fire and fear gone from his voice,
but Mulder didn't hear.

"Scully." He spoke her name like an invocation.

---------------------------------------------------

Scully thinks she sees a light--distant, narrow and dim--and with tentative
steps, she begins moving in its direction.

Scully thinks she hears Mulder's voice, filled with love and desperation,
but she can't hear the words and she might imagine it anyway. But it seems
to have come from behind her, and so she turns, walking with her head bent
and one hand extended to ward off unseen boundaries.

When her hand collides with cool metal, she hears the sound of an elevator
door closing.









Chapter 9

Salves All Wounds

---------------------------------------------------

The first thing I realized on opening my eyes was that the distorted,
flesh-colored blur inches from my eyes was Mulder's face. I knew this
because he was talking to me, or rather talking at me, in some unknown
language of rapid-fire endearments, and when he saw my eyes open, he cupped
my ears as if I were a teacup and dropped his forehead to mine, breathing
into my mouth. An odd gesture, but forgivable, considering.

The second thing I realized on opening my eyes was that I was mostly naked,
but there wasn't much I could do about that, as I could barely wiggle my
fingers.

I heard von Deer's exhortations somewhere off to my right; he was
repeating, over and over: "I don't believe it. I don't believe it. It's a
miracle." On and on like that, and when my partner pulled away from me I
could see the other man, standing several feet away and gaping at me.

I had to tell him something, but I couldn't remember what it was.  It
seemed very urgent, though, and the words were just beneath my tongue, yet
I couldn't find them.

He didn't give me much time, because his face suddenly went very pale as if
he'd remembered something he was supposed to have been responsible for, and
he quite abruptly departed from my field of vision.

Mulder ripped away the leads attached to my chest--they peeled off like
leeches and the heart monitor, which had been beeping steadily, was
silenced.  I seemed to have recovered the use of my right arm, and I used
it as a lever on Mulder's elbow to pull myself up.

As soon as he realized what I wanted, he helped me into a sitting position,
awkwardly drawing the single sheet around my hips--there wasn't much he
could do for the rest of me--but he kept on grinning like an idiot so I
wasn't too scandalized.  I brought the fingers of my left hand clumsily up
to the space between my breasts, grimacing at the thick jelly caked to my
body, but he pulled my hand away, his eyes locked on mine.

"You came back," he said.  "I knew you'd come back."

I nodded.  Of course he did.

"I remember"--his eyes grew darker--"I remember leaving you. I didn't mean--"

My brow furrowed.  "What do you mean?"  And then it dawned on me.  Mulder
had been unconscious.   I seized his upper arms.  "Mulder, you're awake."

"Yes," he answered, as if it should be obvious.  "You brought me back.  You
don't remember?"

I blinked several times.  Fragments of images, seen but not quite grasped,
flashed through my mind like a fast-forward slideshow.  Water, and no air.
"I remember..." I said, trying hard, "I remember a light.  And I was moving
toward it, then I wasn't."

He tried to hide his disappointment but I could see it behind his eyes.
"What?" I asked.  "What am I _supposed_ to remember?"

But a moan interrupted us, and we both turned to see Arthur von Deer bowed
over the still figure of his wife, pumping with both hands just below her
sternum.

"Eleanor!" he cried.  "Please, you can't die, you can't--"  He stopped the
compressions and bent over her mouth, breathed into it, then rushed back
around to her chest.  Mulder kept a grip on my arm, didn't move to help,
just watched with an expression of grim sympathy.

The old man tried again to breathe for her, but instead he fell forward
over her neck, sobbing brokenly.

"It's no use," I whispered, though I didn't know whom I was talking to, or
why I was so certain.

I watched the demolished doctor crumple inward, sinking to the floor, still
clasping his dead wife's hand.  Then Mulder's body blocked my view, and his
arms tightened around me.  He crushed the air from my abused body, and his
fingers marked my tattoo with leapord-spot bruises, but I leaned into him
gratefully, wanting nothing more in the world at that moment than to know
he was real.  Somehow I freed my arms enough to hug him back.

Never let it be said that I do not support my partner.

"Scully," he whispered, his voice raw with disuse.  "I'm so glad you're here."

He pulled back to look at me, and his eyes were very much alive.

---------------------------------------------------
4:15 p.m.

After meeting with the hospital president but before my 4:30 appointment
with the neurology chief of staff, I found a few moments' peace in a faux
leather lounge chair in the hospital lobby.  A children's choir sang on the
other side of the large room, and a small crowd of staff and
wheelchair-bound patients had gathered there to listen.  Little did they
know of the small hallway behind them, above which hung a sign: "Interfaith
Chapel."

They were singing a Faure Ave Maria which I recognized, an impressive piece
for such a young group, and though their cadence was imperfect, it soothed.
Anything would have soothed me now--I hadn't slept or even rested since I
woke to find Mulder unwakeable.

Mulder had taken von Deer to the police station for processing; he hoped to
negotiate the situation so that the police would call us a consultation,
giving us a reasonable explanation of our activities for a supervisor.  If
that didn't work out, we'd come up with something else--though wrapping up
a case like this was an inevitable headache, it was trivial compared to the
kinds of invisible strings we'd pulled countless times before.

Even Mulder agreed there was no way we could try von Deer for murder of all
those patients; not only did we have no hard evidence, but it was entirely
possible he hadn't been involved at all.  I wasn't even satisfied with his
blanket assertion that Eleanor had been responsible--the data were
certainly suggestive but he could provide neither mechanism nor evidence
except to repeat that he had woken when I'd 'come after him.' I had at
first suspected he was only trying to make me feel useful in saying that
I'd helped him, but there was an honesty I knew well in his eyes when he
told me, "No, Scully.  You brought me back."  The timing _was_ suggestive,
and if he believed it, maybe that's all that mattered.

But could I even call the case solved? Maybe not, but we'd certainly
succeeded at shutting down a menacing and dangerous 'research' program that
gave science a bad name.

I felt the couch sag as someone joined me, and found myself surprised to
see Father Thomas.  He smiled his greeting, then jerked his chin at the
choir.

"They sing well, no?"

"It's nice," I agreed.

He leaned forward, hands dangling between his thighs.  "I think I made a
mistake, Agent Scully.  My own zealotry blinded me to the obvious."

What was he telling me this for? "I haven't seen much about this case
that's obvious," I remarked.

"I don't mean the deaths," Thomas replied.  "I mean the experience.  I
should have known it was not what I believed it to be."

"What did you believe it to be?"

"I have always been fascinated by death, Agent Scully.  I think it's part
of what drove me to the church.  So much of our faith--any faith, not just
that of Catholics--is centered on death, and yet even religion provides no
satisfactory answers.  We are the only animals who know we must die, and on
that fear we predicate the existence of the soul, but no faith can tell us
what that truly means.  This was my chance to learn it.  Yet what I thought
I was learning--it was all an evil lie."

"I don't understand," I said.  "What did you learn? Von Deer claimed to be
able to produce ghosts--but all I saw was a light."

"Perhaps you didn't have enough faith," he replied.  "That happens, sometimes."

"I have no doubt whatsoever of the existence or immortality of my soul," I
said firmly.  "But you said it was all a lie--why should faith matter?"

"You can have faith in lies, too.  Perhaps I had too much." Thomas said.
He ran a hand through his hair.  "I wanted to believe so badly that I
forgot miracles don't come to those who look."

He turned his gaze on me, his black eyes intense.  "Have you ever looked
for a miracle, Agent Scully?"

I stretched my hands across my knees, tracing the lines of my fingers with
my slow, tired gaze.  Their number, their knuckles, their nails, an
occasional freckle--perhaps without the combination of both faith and
knowledge a man can't see that the miracle is right before his eyes.

"I don't look for miracles," I said at last.  "I look for answers."

"Sometimes they're the same thing."

I considered that.  "Yes," I agreed, after a pause.  "Sometimes they are.
But a soul--that's _only_ a miracle."  I didn't explain that my fingers,
for example, are both.

The children's choir finished the song and mild applause came from the
onlookers. Thomas settled back beside me.  "I'm glad we met, Agent Scully,"
he said.

---------------------------------------------------
7:23 p.m.

Mulder caught up with me--or maybe I caught up with him--outside the
hospital cafeteria just as the staff was pulling black iron mesh across the
doorway.

"Guess we missed our last chance at hospital food for awhile," he
commented, raking a sideways glance over my body that I assumed was
provoked by my sagging posture and the dark circles under my eyes.  I was
bone-tired, and I let him know with an evaluative glance at his rumpled
clothing that I could see his exhaustion as well.

"Let's hope so," I answered, turning away.  "You cleared up our paperwork
at the PD?"

"More or less," he answered, and I decided I didn't really want to know
what that meant at the moment, so I skipped to the important question.

"What did von Deer have to say?"

Mulder grimaced.  "He said he was responsible for all of it."

"You think he was lying," I said.  It was not a question.

"Yes, I think he was lying.  I think he was protecting his wife."

"Why would he do that? She's dead."

Mulder shrugged.  "Why should that mean anything to a man who deals in
death? He told you he thought she'd learned from her many experiences as an
NDE subject how to move between the worlds of spirit and flesh.  Who's to
say she can't still do that? Maybe he's afraid of her."  He paused, waiting
for my reaction, but I wasn't in the mood so he skipped ahead in the script
and continued.  "But I think he just doesn't quite know how to live without
her and wants her memory honored.  He blames his neglect for her insanity."

"He said that?"

"No.  But he said he should have been more supportive of her after their
daughter's death."  Mulder snorted.  "_After_ confessing to having murdered
two-hundred-odd people in the interest of science.  Never mind the fact
that there were no lab journals or EEGs on any of those individuals.  But
the clincher, what really convinced me, was that he _wouldn't_ admit to the
crime he _did_ commit--trying to kill you."

I blinked.  "I don't understand."

Mulder drew closer to me as a trio of old ladies passed.  "Scully, he was
stoic and remorseless about the whole two-hundred deaths thing.  It was an
act.  But when I accused him of not resuscitating you, he burst into tears
and tried to deny it."

"I don't think he had planned it, Mulder," I said, considering.  "I don't
think he lured me down there with the intention of killing me."

"I don't either," Mulder answered.  "But once it started, he started
debating with himself.  Should he ditch the FBI and his wife, cut his
losses and run for Mexico? Or suck it up and take the heat? He was wavering
when I came to--I made the decision for him.  Taking the blame for his
wife--that's noble, and he could do the silent strongman routine. But when
I confronted him with what he'd actually done, his guilt broke him."

"Are they charging him, then? There's still no explanation for how the
deaths were--"

"They're a police department, Scully.  They have a confession, so who cares
about mechanism? But they're not charging him over what happened with
you--I didn't report that.  Your decision to come after me wasn't exactly
standard procedure, Agent Scully."

His teasing smile elicited a faint grin from me.  "Is it ever?" I asked.

His hand found mine and squeezed it; the warmth of his fingers traveled up
my arm and into my breast like an electric current, communicating
everything which we knew better than to say.  I squeezed back, then stepped
away.

"So, back to D.C.?" I asked, trying to sound eager.

"It's practically a blizzard outside," he said.

I snorted.  "So what do you want to do about it? I'm not staying _here_
another night."

He shifted uncomfortably and stuffed his hands in his pockets, for all the
world imitating an awkward high school boy afraid to ask out the girl he
likes.  "There's always the condo, Scully."

I tossed him a glare filled with mock-severity.  "Mulder, I don't think
we've been going out long enough for that. Next thing you know you'll want
me to meet your parents."

That elicited a self-deprecating chuckle from my weary partner.  "I was
just worried after Friday," he admitted.

My smile faded and I nodded.  There really wasn't much to say, and 'I
should've known better,' didn't sound quite right.  So I just said: "Let's
go to the condo, Mulder."

He drove and I slept.  I woke when I realized Mulder had either parked and
left the engine running or that we were sitting at a stoplight run by
America Online.

I gave my surroundings a groggy appraisal and determined that we were in
fact at a Safeway.  Mulder must have decided we needed groceries, and even
though I was starving, I really hoped he knew he was cooking or we weren't
eating.

Outside, big clumps of snowflakes floated to the ground and where they
stuck to the car window I could trace their lines of symmetry with my eyes.
I rolled down my window, stuck my hand out to welcome their cold kisses.
The night, quiet and devoid of portent, made me feel like I was trapped in
one of those snowglobes, and the image was not an unappealing one.

Then the door handle rattled, and Mulder invaded my universe again.  I
rolled up the window.

"Good morning," he said, handing me a plastic bag.  "When's the last time
you ate, anyway?"

"I honestly don't remember," I replied, opening the bag to peer inside.
Milk, butter, macaroni and cheese.  Two cans of green beans and one of
chicken soup.  A frozen pizza that looked like heaven in plastic wrap.  Two
cans of ginger ale and a carton of orange juice.

"I wasn't sure what you'd want," he said in response to my incredulous
look.  "But hey, to top it all off we've got--"

He reached dramatically into his coat and produced an ice cream pint.  It
was too dark to read the label.

"Ben and Jerry's?" I asked, in a smaller voice than I'd intended.  Good
thing Mulder's usually oblivious to my subtler aspects; otherwise he might
realize that if he did things like this often our dynamic might take on a
whole new dimension.

He waved the carton in front of my nose.  "Cherry Garcia," he read,
underlining the label with his fingertip.

"How can you think about ice cream when it's this cold out?" I asked, but I
wasn't serious.

"Well, you don't have to eat it," he replied, tossing it into the bag in my
lap.  "All the more for me."

Half an hour and three wrong turns later, we finally found the condo again.
We went inside and I headed straight for the shower while Mulder cooked.
Or heated things, anyway.

My breasts were still slick with a thin coat of jelly from the
defibrillation paddles, and there were a few suspiciously finger-shaped
bruises on my ribs and upper arms.  Ghostly reminders of my partner's
desperation; I didn't mind them.

If I've learned anything in my life, it's that hot water, the promise of a
good meal and Cherry Garcia salve all wounds more effectively than one
would rationally expect.

---------------------------------------------------





Epilogue
---------------------------------------------------

We returned to Washington the following morning, despite Agent Mulder's
protestations that the roads were unsafe.

"It would be a shame," he'd said, "to go through all we've been through
only to die in a car accident."

"With your track record, Mulder, you're not going to die in a car
accident," I'd assured him.

"You're probably right," he admitted.  "I'm much more likely to die in some
violent, dramatic way, I guess."

"No," I said.  "With your track record, you'll die of old age."

He got my point and squeezed my shoulder.  "Not without you, I won't,
Scully," and left me to puzzle out the multiple meanings buried there and
deliberate whether I should be pleased or disturbed.  I'm used to that.

Mulder still hasn't told me what he remembers from that strange night when
I died, and in a way that disturbs me as well.  But this, too, is a
familiar pattern.  There's something reassuring about even the things I
don't like about Mulder--it reaffirms that he's still himself and that I'm
still me, despite the threatening intertwinedness of our lives.  He
protects and I resent it, he refuses to see the whole of me and I am hurt.
I dismiss and he resents it, I close myself off to him and he is hurt.
This is who we are, and there are no easy answers.

Perhaps I'm forever destined to walk these circles; that I got the tattoo I
deserved has not escaped me.  But at least I'm not afraid to recognize the
circle, to acknowledge the past.  Thus we live.

---------------------------------------------------
End

Started: 09/13/98
Finished: 11/7/98


Feedback gratefully welcomed at: nascent70@usa.net









Notes.

Neurobiology.  A neurobiologist I ain't, but I'll tell you what I know
because I'll feel guilty for misleading otherwise.  NMDA receptors,
ketamine, phencyclidine and long-term potentiation (LTP) are all real.  The
idea that LTP is involved in memory is pretty widely accepted; however, the
extension of that into a matrix-based neural network is purely my own
invention.  NMDA receptors are of the ionotropic receptor family, and they
bind glutamate and glycine to facilitate passage of calcium ions in the
absence of magnesium (which blocks the channel).  In the hippocampus, when
glutamate is released from the presynaptic terminals, the postsynaptic
neuron is depolarized, and the magnesium is freed, opening the channels.
Calcium then binds Ca-binding proteins like CaMKII and PKC to change
phosphate levels inside cells and increase EPSPs, resulting ultimately in
LTP.  LTP can last anywhere from 10 minutes to days.

Both ketamine and phencyclidine bind inside the NMDA channel and are
released when the nerve cell depolarizes.  They produce amnesia and
dissociation, and are really used by people trying to induce near death
experiences.

Potassium chloride really will stop the heart (it's used in lethal
injections), but I don't think it's a reaction you could stop, though I
pretend like it is here just for drama.  You could never sop up a
monovalent cation (potassium) with a divalent chelator, and my science
editor suggested a couple of other chemical mechanisms, but I just really
wanted to use the word 'chelator' in a story.  Sorry, Fly!

The drugs and techniques used by the hospital as they attempted to
resuscitate Mulder are not used correctly.  Betapin and capazide are (to
the best of my limited knowledge) used in stroke prevention, and calcium
channel blockers and tissue plasminogen activator are used for recovery.
The perfusion MRI and diagnostic transcranial Doppler ultrasound were both
appropriate, but since both are relatively new techniques, it'd be
surprising for this hospital to have them.

So my chemistry/physiology isn't quite on target and I took some liberties
with the real purpose of LTP, which isn't known.  Most of the stuff I took
from Ganong's _Medical Physiology._



Near Death Experiences.  Most of my NDE info came from
http://www.calweb.com/~kevinw/, run by  Kevin Williams, who answered lots
of questions for me.  You can also learn a lot at http://www.nderf.org/.
Viva la web research!



Music.  Billie Holliday's "Lover Come Back to Me" (Billie's Blues) appeared
in the first chapter.
R.E.M.'s "Leave" (New Adventures in Hi Fi) snuck into the title of the
seventh chapter--one of the few times I listened to music while writing.
Check it out.  Really.  Suffer the dreams of a world gone mad--I like it
like that and I know it.  That's what keeps me down.


Nudge, Nudge, Wink, Wink.  Yes, you may have recognized a few fanfic/RL
anecdotes in there.  They are included without permission but with the
utmost respect intended toward those involved.