By Jordan

~~~

The Prologue

by jordan

"One night in Bangkok makes a hard man humble--
Not much between despair and ecstasy."
--Chess

Something's wrong.

Walter Skinner pauses at the threshold of the anteroom to his office with a week's worth of travel vouchers in his hand hanging loosely at his side, the other hand about to reach for his breast pocket for some reason he's already forgotten, and suddenly he raises his head sharply and freezes in position.

He knows it in his bones, in all the flight-sensing parts of his body. It's the razor edge of the knife he feels, the chill of a man who senses a sniper in the trees, or a snake coiled to strike. Just a little ruffle of the hairs at the back of the neck, a tightening of the belly, a sting of adrenalin in the calf muscles in case he has to abruptly run for his life. Just enough to stop him dead in his tracks and bring a certain wakefulness to all his senses.

Eyes narrowed, he scans the corridor, looking for anything out of the ordinary. A few doors down, a secretary is typing on a keyboard in her office, the blue glow of her computer screen outlining the back of her head. By the water fountain, Fox Mulder and Dana Scully are talking in low voices the way they do, Mulder leaning against the wall looking bored while Scully reads to him from an open manila file and points at something for emphasis. Mulder bends to get a drink, Scully still talking to his back. A janitor with his squeaky wheeled cart is punching the button and looking up to follow the lighted progress of floors on the panel as the elevator rolls down on great silent steel bearings.

Gut feeling: danger. Serious, immediate, deadly.

But nothing even slightly out of the ordinary is happening in the hallway. Skinner gives a minute shake of his head and turns to his office again.

Hesitates again.

It's like coming home after a really good maid has done the weekly cleaning, everything the same, but somehow different. A chair moved at a slightly different angle, a book out of place on the shelf, the pattern on the bedspread facing in the wrong direction. Nothing anyone could point at and say, this is odd, but perceived on some deeper, primal level that Skinner has learned to trust absolutely.

He jams his free hand in his pocket, troubled and annoyed. At that moment Scully looks up and sees him and says something to Mulder, who straightens and looks around. Scully backs away; Mulder lifts his fingers in a silly little wave. They turn and flee the few yards to the end of the hall where the exit opens to the stairway, and vanish around the corner.

For a long moment he frowns into space, until the woman at the computer seems to feel him there, and looks around, then widens her eyes in alarm at his fierce glare and reaches out and gently closes the door. The elevator bell rings. The doors slide open. The wheeled cart rattles its way inside, and the doors close again.

Skinner breathes. The hairs on his neck begin to smooth down; the pressure lifts from his nerves. His pupils contract back to normal size. Startled out of his reverie,he turns and goes into the familiar safety of his anteroom, where his secretary glances up and then goes on with her work. By the time he sits down at his own desk and spreads out the travel vouchers in front of him, Skinner has lost the tingle, and even the memory of the sensation has faded away. Once in his paneled office, outside noises muffled by carpet and oak and brass and the muted but distinct aura of authority, it's barely a memory at all. Flashback to Nam; it happens now and again to even in the sanest of survivors. Doesn't mean a thing. He never gives it a second thought. Not now, anyway.

Much later, in that vague order of memory people label as "afterwards," he will think of this day again, and wonder if there was something he could have done to affect the outcome of the events that had already begun. But by then it will be too late, and he will work hard to convince himself that there was nothing he could have done to prevent Scully from shooting Mulder in the downstairs parking lot less than twelve hours later.

*****************
 

Title: A Cold Day in July
Author: jordan
jordan66@swbell.net
Rating: NC-17 (graphic sexual situations, language)
Category: Sk/Sc casefile, romance
Spoilers: ignore the show. This is what SHOULD happen.
Summary: Something left over from the past threatens to destroy Mulder, Scully, and Skinner, unless one of them is willing to quit thinking about the "truth" long enough to finally understand it
Archive: Feel free, but please let me know
Feedback: not the only reason I'm on my knees, but a good one
------------------------------------------------------------------------
A Cold Day in July

Chapter One: The Predator

by jordan

It had rained all day, and now the garish colors of sunset were refracted from every roadside puddle like the lenses of a broken kaleidoscope, flashing red and orange and gold in painful splinters of light as the tires of Walter Skinner's car sliced through them. His thoughts were too disjointed to follow to any particular conclusion, so he only drove, letting his fingers grip the reality of the steering wheel, the pressure of his foot moving him forward or letting him slide backwards in time as he covered the inevitable distance between himself and the darkness that lay ahead. Everything had seemed to funnel in since he got off the last plane, the temperature dropping so drastically that his body couldn't fully adjust and he was shivering even inside the newly bought parka, as if the world, now ruined, was cooling into some eternal dusk.

A dark job, a dark future, the history of the earth coming to some dark swirling conclusion around him, and here he was, going after one of the few people he truly believed had made the struggle meaningful, so that he could arrest her and bring her back to what passed these days for justice.

"She trusts you," Kersh had told him in the office yesterday, "She'll talk to you."

"Maybe there's some kind of reasonable explanation," Skinner had ventured.

No one spoke, but a general shifting of the half dozen men in the room passed for a consensual eye-roll. No one there was Scully's friend, or his, for that matter. Because this was an internal investigation, in his department, he should have been left out of it altogether. But Scully's phone call to him had forced them to let him play. Besides that, and let there be no mistake about it, this was a test of just how far he was willing to go for to save his own future.

"Reasonable? You saw the lab reports. And if she had some sort of reasonable explanation, why did she run after she shot him? Besides, look at what all we've uncovered in the past three days. You can't turn a blind eye to the truth just because she was one of yours, Skinner." Kersh turned to the television/vcr set up in the board room and played the grainy, black and white show one more time, one more time; just one more time. Skinner had seen it twelve or thirteen times in the past hour. Close ups, zooms, computer enhancing. It was the tape that had been taken from a security camera in front of the Hoover Building three days ago, in the early morning hours, and by now he knew it by heart.

First a pre-dawn jogger trotted by, pony tail swinging, headphones black against her pale hair. As she crossed the screen, headlights blinked once, and a car pulled up from directly in front of the camera and slowly pulled between the yellow markers of the parking space. The lights blinked again and went off. The door opened, and Scully got out. She walked across the screen like an actress seeking her mark, and came to stand directly under the pool of light from an overhead streetlamp.

A man in a long raincoat came striding out of nowhere, walking straight at her.. Mulder. Later, it would be learned he had taken a cab there from his apartment. Evidently a prearranged meeting, but unclear who had called it. On the tape, Mulder said something as he approached her. Four words, the lipreader felt fairly certain of: "What have you done..." but then he turned, and whatever else he was saying was only indicated by the bobbing of the back of his head. Scully said something. Mulder seized her arm roughly. She moved, not pulling away as one might expect, but into him. Into him hard. They were in some kind of childish shoving match, like furious lovers whose passion had burned to rage and then to violence. Mulder...

Skinner swallowed hard and turned his windshield wipers on. The rain was turning to sleet now. It had been almost ninety degrees when he'd left Virginia how many hours ago? Twelve? Fourteen? How had he failed to anticipate such cold in the Canadian mountains? That was the reason a sudden shiver ran through him, that and not the memory of that next scene, which had played and replayed in his head a thousand times since he'd first seen it.

Mulder had drawn back his fist. Even under the raincoat, even in the grainy film, you could see the bunching of muscles, the weight of the man behind the upraised arm: he was going to hit Scully as hard as he could. Man hard, against a woman the top of whose head would have grazed his chin if they'd been dancing together, a woman who had been not so long out of the hospital that she'd gained back her already frail weight. And would have, would have struck her down with all his strength, if she hadn't suddenly leaped backwards, drawing her gun and firing so rapidly they had to slow the computer down a couple of times to see it clearly.

It was quick even in the slowest motion, almost as if she'd been expecting him to go berserk like this. The swift smooth grab under her jacket, the flash of the muzzle, bang bang bang like a strobe light, Mulder doubling over and falling hard from the force of the impact.

In typical Mulderlike irony, two bullets had gone between his arm and his side, burning tunnels through his clothes but not touching the skin, while the third bullet had missed all vital organs and only caused so much blood loss because he'd been on the ground fifteen minutes before someone found him. It was the fall that had caused his head to crack against the sidewalk, knocking him loopy, and the resulting swelling was what had made him look so limp and heart renderingly helpless as he sprawled there on the pavement, sliding even then towards coma.

Scully, wiping blood from her white face, had wheeled, her jacket flapping winglike on either side of her as she ran to her car, vanishing in a dark rush of panic from the face of the earth, until yesterday morning, when she'd called Skinner and told him she had to see him. But only on her terms, and only if he came alone.

Skinner had seen Mulder before he'd seen the film. He'd run alongside the gurney in the hospital, even allowed himself a rare unguarded moment when he smoothed the younger man's hair back in a gesture of grief and tenderness while they were hooking up the fluids. Mulder's eyelids had trembled as if in a dream, and he whispered something. The attending officer and Skinner had both leaned down at the same time to hear him say it again.

In the faintest of voices, his fingers gripping Skinner's weakly, he had said, "Get...Scully."

Skinner realized he was approaching a hundred miles an hour on the long stretch of deserted highway, and he made an effort to slow himself down. Mulder lying there in a spreading pool of blood, Scully's weak, frightened voice on the telephone yesterday, Kersh's smug air of command as he was given authority in the case over Skinner-- none of them could hold a candle to the shock he'd felt when he saw that film for the first time, Mulder in that aggressive, enraged posture, about to hit Scully full force with his fist. That was the moment that replayed in his mind, that burned behind his closed eyes even in sleep, that haunted him mercilessly. It was the most un-Mulderlike act he had ever seen, a violation of everything he had believed in. There had to be some outside force acting on Mulder to make him do such a thing.

But toxicology had come back with nothing. Nothing in the bloodstream, not a drop of alcohol, no drugs, and everyone had reported his recent behavior as "normal," though with the same conditional smirking words always added: "well, normal for Mulder."

Long ago, Skinner had given up any Faustian notion of a perfect moment in life, the climax of existence when he could lean back and take a deep breath and say, this is it, we're all safe now, and I am satisfied with the world. That moment was never going to come. Life was change, and as much as he hated it, he accepted it and tried to move forward on the same philosophy he applied to a skidding car on an icy road; even though it went against all common sense, you turned the wheels INTO the skid, and only then could you hope to regain control of the vehicle at some point. If you fought it, you could be flipped, turned on your back like a turtle, rendered helpless in a world of predators, and then it was all over. He had damn near steered his life right over the edge of a cliff a couple of times by going along for the ride too long, first with CSM, then with Krycek. But he'd caught himself just in time, and that was the best he could hope for now, if he was going to get Scully through this alive. And if he had to become one of the predators to hunt her down and drag her through it, then so be it.

The sickness was in his blood like the tumor was in Scully's brain. Dormant, a sleeping evil that might awaken in an instant and cause them to do crazy things they'd never do otherwise. Like this insanity, going to find her, following these complicated directions, acting out this charade, and knowing at the end of it no matter what she said to him, what she did, he was going to have to bring her in, because that was his job.

For now, he was simply going to play the cards he had been dealt. Find Scully, formally arrest her for shooting Mulder, and bring her back to the bureau personally, so that there would be no chance of an "accident" during her apprehension. Then what? Confront her with the evidence they'd found in the past seventy two hours, the x rays, the bank account, the receipts. Let her explain what she could of those things.

But at some point there would come that moment, that instant, when he could grab the wheel and force it to obey him, some place where he, Walter Skinner, could change the course of human events and justify his existence on the planet. It was just a matter of recognizing that moment when it came.

And if it didn't come...Well, he was damned if he'd let Scully skid over the edge of that cliff, with or without him, no matter what she'd done that was so terrible, so shocking, that it had made Mulder raise his hand against her.

Bouncing back and forth between rage and regret, Skinner glared at the road as if it could feel his determination, the emotional stance he had to take for the job he had to do. No one would hurt Scully, not on his watch, but by God he would find her, he would bring her in, and he would get to the bottom of this, even if he had to wring the truth out of her with his own two hands to do it.

********************

Chapter Two: The Prey

by jordan

He found her in the bar by the motel. She'd wanted to meet in a public place, but although this fit the technical definition of "public," she sat at a table by herself, the crowd a wash of noise and color around her, like a still island in an ocean of bobbing humanity, utterly alone. She wore blue jeans and a plaid shirt, her sockless feet tucked into a pair of deerskin moccasins. Her hands were clenched on the table, eyes staring vacantly at the beer bottle in front of her.

Clouds of smoke drifted by like fog as he moved towards her, feeling strangely disconnected from his own body. There she sat, feet together and flat on the floor, wearing no socks in this freezing weather. She was unaware of him at this instant, just a woman sitting alone, all full of thoughts and feelings, hopes and desires and needs, a bystander who had been pounded and warped into a mold by God knew what forces until she had come to this moment, and whatever happened next in her future, whatever turn of events was to follow, was entirely up to him.

As Skinner moved forward, the air seemed to thicken and slow him down. The click of poolballs and the whine of country music faded, though he could still feel the pounding bass with every beat of his heart, and he imagined strange overlays of Scully there at the table, a little redheaded girl of five or six running with a kite banging the ground behind her, the Scully that was, and the Scully that should have been: a mother with a fuzzy headed infant tugging at her nipple, a laughing wife teasing her husband about being late for dinner. So much of her life had been stolen from her; she had been so unjustly drafted into this war, so much lost she could never have back now. It was a conscription to be cursed, but she had never once cursed it, and if she mourned those losses, she had done so in private.

His throat burned with sorrow, and he had to roughen up his resolve to keep that forward motion, to keep coming, one foot in front of the other, towards her.

Then he was standing in front of her, backlit by the barlights, and his shadow fell across her like the shadow of a raptor on a sparrow.

She looked up, startled.

Skinner hovered over her for a moment but he couldn't force himself to even begin to intimidate her; she looked so whipped, dragged behind something for miles and just left to die.

Nothing had prepared him for this, for every small corner of his heart to suddenly be filled with confused and conflicted emotion.

"Scully," he said.
 

She stretched her leg out and nudged the opposite chair with a toe in silent invitation, and he sat down across from her. The waitress started forward and he pointed at the beer on the table and held up two fingers, aborting her interference, and she nodded and turned back around. Skinner saw that the longneck on the table had lost its condensation, and had barely been touched.

"Are you alone?" he asked.

She nodded. "Yes, sir."
 

Sad little voice. Another song came on the jukebox, and Skinner said, "I don't think this is a good place to talk. Where are you staying?"

"There's only one place in town, right across the street."

He had seen it when he parked, a seedy little motel with the requisite flashing neon sign. The waitress thunked the bottles down in front of him with a hollow sound and he gave her a ten dollar bill without looking up.

"You two doin' all right, sweetie?" she asked. She was looking at Scully, who must have attracted her sympathy earlier. Scully nodded, her lips trying to smile. The waitress glanced at Skinner, a quick measuring look, and then went away.

He said, "Scully, are you all right?"

Clearly she was not, but she only looked down and sighed so deeply he saw her shoulders expand and collapse like a bellows. "How's Mulder?" she asked.

It was a relief to deliver the good news first. "He's going to be all right. He hit his head when he fell, and he lost a lot of blood, but the bullet didn't do a lot of damage. He was in a coma but he came out of it. He's still not able to talk much. I don't think he remembers what happened. You're damn lucky you didn't kill him, Scully."

Her head came up then, her eyes flashing fire. "Skinner, I didn't shoot Mulder. You've got to believe me. I didn't do it."

Tears, recriminations, pleas...he had expected almost anything but a bald faced lie. Not from Scully.

He said gently, "Scully, we got it on tape. I saw you do it."

She leaned forward across the table, her eyes fixed on his, and said, "I don't care what you saw. It wasn't me. I did not shoot Mulder."

"There's no point in..." He shook his head; he had to raise his voice over the sound of music and voices and boots clattering on the wooden floor. She was sick; he didn't want to shout at her or make things any harder for her than they already were. He just needed to get her out of there.

He rose and said, "Get your coat."

Scully got up, her eyes clouding briefly as she looked at her chair. "I don't have a coat," she said, as if only just realizing it herself.

"Jesus, it's freezing outside." The radio had said one of the worst storms of the season was blowing in, and Scully hadn't bothered to put on a coat?

She was sick, dammit. Her face was so exhausted, it looked like she barely had the strength to hold up her head. He stripped off his parka and spread it across her thin shoulders. She held the fur pieces of the collar together at her throat, the bottom of the jacket brushing the backs of her knees, and together they threaded their way through the crowd and out the door.

Skinner made a gesture for her to lead, and they made their way through the wet streets towards the buildings bathed in neon on the other side of the parking lot.

**************************
 

Although it had stopped raining for the moment, the night sky looked like a blackboard rubbed with chalk, and high up and far away, tree limbs groaned as the wind moved them in unaccustomed angles. Scully could feel the bite of cold through her jeans; her ankles ached with it. Where the hell were her socks? She couldn't remember dressing at all, much less searching for warm socks, which at this exact moment, she wished for above all other things.

Skinner walked a little behind her, his body position that of a guard, not a guardian, and she could feel the size of him inside the parka he had been wearing; it still smelled like him, and held his body warmth.

When they came to the door of her motel room, he took her key from her and opened the door, a small but meaningful gesture just to let her know who was in charge.

The room was small, shabby, making no pretense of being anything else but what it was: a temporary hole for illicit trysts, whores and johns, a tawdry excuse for a town brothel. Wallpaper peeled down above the headboard of the bed and on the bare drywall beneath someone had etched a message: "I fucked Donna K." Skinner waited until Scully sat down on the stained bedspread, and then he took the only chair in the room, which swayed a little when he sat down, and positioned his knees a little higher than his waist.

Scully said, "The room adjoining this is empty." She pointed at the bathroom door. "Apparently I rented them both." She gave a humorless little laugh. "The honeymoon suite."

Skinner got up, went through the bathroom door. She heard him open the door on the other side, pause for a beat of four, and then come back into the room and sit down again.

He said, "Why did you run away?"

"I didn't run away."
 

Skinner leaned back in the chair as much as he could, and folded his arms across his chest. "You didn't shoot Mulder, you didn't run away, we aren't having this conversation."

She looked up at him and saw something, maybe sympathy, cross his face. "I don't know what to tell you," she said. "I woke up in my apartment on Friday morning, sick. Throwing up, flu-like sick. I tried to call into work but my phone wouldn't work, and neither would my cell phone. Then Byers called me--"

"Byers?"

Scully made a vague gesture in the air. "One of the three friends Mulder has who help us sometimes. I think you met them in the hospital when Mulder..."

She stopped, almost saying, "When Mulder was shot," but she couldn't bring out the words. Skinner nodded. "I remember. The hippies."

"That's them." She went on. "Byers called me and told me that they were looking for me because they were saying I shot Mulder."

"You're saying you were in bed, alone, when Mulder was shot."

"I must have been."

"Scully, you're not being very clear about this."

"That's because I'm NOT very clear about what happened, sir. The guys knew...I don't know how..." She allowed a faint smile to curve her lips at all they'd done for her in the past twenty four hours, enough for her to forgive them ten times over all the trouble they'd caused her in the past. "They never believed for a minute I would do such a thing."

She looked up into his eyes with a sudden accusing glare. "I thought you would believe me, too."

"Scully," he said, "I saw the tape." He cleared his throat and said in a gruffer tone, "And I've seen the x-rays."

She looked at him blankly. "X-rays of Mulder?"

"Your x-rays. The results of the Cat Scan you had last month."

Scully stared past his shoulder for a moment, into space. When she looked back at him, she saw the pain in his eyes. "Skinner," she said, "I never had any Cat Scan last month. I have no idea what you're talking about."

He said in a flat voice, "The tumor, Scully. The thing in your head."

For the first time in a long time, Scully felt the threat of mortality loom over her. She touched her forehead, between her eyes, without being aware of what she was doing. Her head ached miserably, but...not like before. Not like with the nosebleeds, and the waking up choking at night with the taste of her own blood in her throat.

"Skinner, my tumor is in remission. I haven't had a scan since last February, and it was so reduced in size then I­"

"Stop it!" he shouted suddenly, getting to his feet so quickly he knocked the chair over. "Just stop it, Scully. I know everything. I've seen the x-rays and I know what it's doing to you, and I've seen the bank deposits and the letters in your handwriting and heard the tapes with your voice on them. There's no point trying to lie to me, dammit. I want to help you, but I can't work my way through all these goddamn lies!"

To the amazement of both of them, Scully suddenly yawned. She clapped her hand over her mouth, her eyes round with apology above her fingers. "I'm sorry. I can't seem to snap out of it. I've felt like I've had a hangover since..." She let the sentence trail off into an ellipsis, obviously fighting another yawn.

Skinner was silent for a few minutes, his eyes dark with thought. Then he said, "So you woke up alone in bed on the morning Mulder was shot. What happened after that?"

"I..." She blinked. "It's all...sort of...I don't exactly remember. Why do you keep saying alone?"

"Because if someone...blackmailed you into this, or forced you to do something entirely against your better judgment, Scully, I'd understand. I really would understand."

"I...But no one did, Skinner. I swear to God I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. I knew Mulder was shot, and I...after that...I'm not sure what happened between then and the time I woke up yesterday morning and called Byers."

Skinner righted his chair wearily, and sat down again, putting his hands on his knees. "Then if you don't remember, how do you know you didn't shoot Mulder?"

"I just know I wouldn't do anything like that."

"You're telling me you've been experiencing episodes of missing time?"

Her lips twitched in annoyance. "Now you sound like Mulder. It's not like that. I just...can't...I mean, it's patchy. I think I've been drugged. I saw a doctor in town this morning, and had a blood test, and I should get the results tomorrow. "

Skinner made a soft sound, no more than an exhalation, that told Scully everything she needed to know: he thought every word out of her mouth was bullshit. He felt sorry for her, but he didn't believe a single thing she'd told him.

"Here's what's going to happen, Agent Scully," he said. "I'm going to take you back to Washington, and we're going to put you in a hospital until we can get all this sorted out."

She said disconsolately, "You actually think I did it, don't you?"

"At this point, I don't know what to think."

"I would have thought that after all we'd been through, you'd believe me."

Skinner got up to his feet. "You say you rented the room adjoining this one? Why two rooms?"

Scully made a little throwaway gesture with her hand without looking up. "I have no idea. I don't remember even renting this one."

"Well, there's no way we're staying in this place. I passed a hotel a couple of towns back, maybe thirty miles south of here. We can get rooms on the company tab. There was an airport, too. I'll call and book a flight first thing in the morning from there. Get your things and I'll get the car."

Scully opened her mouth to say something, but he would not look at her again. She said, "Skinner, won't you even consider that I might be telling the truth?"

He glanced at her only briefly. "I'll bring the car around," he said.

And left the room.

When he was gone, Scully let her head fall forward into her hands as she rocked herself back and forth on the bed, past the point of tears. Her last best hope had been Skinner, even though her phone call this morning to Washington had been met with only coolness and hostility, and now she knew there wasn't a snowball's chance in hell of getting out of this thing in one piece.

Somewhere, in her heart of hearts, she thought Skinner cared about her as a person, respected her. The way his eyes always softened when he turned to her after one of Mulder's wild diatribes, and said, "Agent Scully? What do you think?" The way he'd risked his own security to help them. But now in his opinion she'd become the enemy, the unstable element, the risk factor. Now his eyes had closed over like a cop's giving a ticket, establishing an unbridgable distance between them. Now he no longer trusted her.

And she was on her own.

*****************************
 

In his car, Skinner sat for a few minutes staring through the windshield at the veined patterns of ice on the glass. Scully had looked like a little girl in the principal's office. If he had to bet his life on it, he would guess that there was not one guilty bone in her body.

That pale face looking up at him, the tired eyes, the way she'd suddenly yawned, like a child up past her bedtime. Questioning her had been about as much fun as beating a puppy with a stick.

No, dammit. Don't let your emotions get involved in this. She was there, she shot him, you saw it. Now she looked right into your eyes and lied to you. That's not the tumor talking. She's lying, dammit. What about that other bedroom? She "forgot" that someone else was with her? A man?

His fists tightened on the steering wheel until his knuckles turned white.

Krycek?

His gut tightened with fear and self loathing at the thought. But he remembered how powerful a hold they could get on even someone who thought himself invincible. Someone like...himself.

Why would she shoot Mulder? It was so not- Scully. He remembered the gentle touch of her hands when he was sick, the way she'd felt inside his shirt, her hand on his skin soothing him in a way he didn't like to admit.

Scully was not a violent woman. In her most furious moment, what would she do? Well, once she'd told him to go to hell. And once she'd kissed him on an elevator. He felt himself smiling in the darkness. Apparently she WAS capable of doing anything.

But seriously. Why would she shoot Mulder and then deny it? Someone else had to be pulling her strings, someone with a hold over her he couldn't even imagine. Someone who wanted to take her and Mulder down. And he didn't have to think very hard to imagine who THAT might be.

Skinner groaned out loud and wrenched the key in the ignition. The car started up at the same moment it began to rain again, an icy drizzle that promised sleet and snow in the near future. He would have to call and tell them he was coming in, but he wouldn't tell them where they were. No. He'd get Scully to a safe place first. Feed her, let her get some rest. Make her feel protected enough to tell him the truth. And no matter what that truth was, he'd take care of her, see she was treated right.

I won't let them hurt you, Scully.

But the haunting memory of those blue eyes told him they'd already hurt her, that he was only the bloodhound sent to tree the quarry. He'd done a damn fine job of it, too. She'd never have been found if she hadn't called him, willingly, openly, trustingly. And she'd asked for his trust, come to him for help...

...Or else was just banking on how much he cared about her and using him to get away with attempted murder...

Again, though he hated himself for thinking it, the vision of that other bed in that other room flashed in his mind. Someone had recently slept in that bed, while Scully's had been made up.

"Fuck this," he growled out loud. He revved the car up ferociously and drove around to the back entrance of the motel.

He got out of the car and went to the door, which Scully had left slightly ajar. He went inside and saw his parka on the bed, and picked it up absently. She needed it more than he did. Where the hell was she, anyway? He walked through the bathroom door into the other room, saying, "Scully? Are you okay?"

But Scully was gone.

**************************

next, Chapter Three: The Chase (yes, there are handcuffs)
Chapter Three: The Chase

A Cold Day in July

Chapter Three: The Chase

by jordan

It took Skinner all of five minutes to accept the fact that Scully had made a run for it. Not to understand what had happened; that came in a flash of crystal clarity. But to actually believe it took several sweeps of the second hand, while he walked back to the car and got in, shut the door, turned on the engine. There was only one antidote to the pain that had begun to seep into his bloodstream like poison, and that was rage. Pure, unadulterated, betrayed, RAGE.

With a savage curse he jammed the car into gear and spun out of the parking lot. The Taurus struggled for traction, its rear tires smoking on the wet pavement, and then it fishtailed out of the lot and over the esplanade with a transmission-jolting thump, and onto the road. He swung around to the back of the motel and blazed down the street, swinging wide and spinning to the right, almost making a bootlegger's turn in his haste to u-turn down the second street. As he hit the end of that block and spun again, he saw that the third street was lit by the front sign of an all night drugstore, and there was Scully, just disappearing around the corner and into an alley.

Skinner drove the car to the opening of the alley and parked to block it, just in case. He got out and slammed the door so hard that it caught the seatbelt and swung open again. He made no attempt to be subtle about anything. In the shadows between the two buildings, he caught a glimpse of her red hair, the plaid shirt bouncing as she ran. He set off at a steady pace, no hurry, the way he'd warm up for a run, knowing that she was bolting and using all her energy in the first sprint.

The chase was even shorter than he'd anticipated. The alley led to a dead end, a chain link fence. There were some boxes, a dumpster, a tipped over trash can strewing the ground with litter. Scully was at the far end, just reaching the fence.

Surely she wasn't going to...

He should have known better. She made a frantic leap and seized the chain link, pulled herself up. It was a ten foot climb, at least, with razorwire at the top. She'd have made it, too, if the rain hadn't slicked the wire so that she had trouble finding footholds.

Skinner caught up to her and jumped up to grab her ankles. His hands closed on the bare flesh, and he jerked her down. She gave a cry that pierced him like an arrow, and fell back. He meant to catch her with his body to break her fall, but she turned like a cat in midair, and came down knees first, slamming into him with unexpected force.

They went down together, her sharp bones digging into his midsection, and he felt the air knocked out of his solar plexus with an involuntary, "Oof!" He doubled up, clutching his stomach, and Scully rolled like a quarterback, gained her feet, and started running towards the car.

In the few seconds it took him to recover and get up again, Skinner lost ground. Scully reached the other end of the alley, bent to check for keys in the open car, but he'd taken them with him. She simply used the floorboard for a foothold, hoisted herself onto the roof, and slid across on her stomach.

But by then Skinner was in full pursuit again, and he slid over the roof with far more grace and determination than her terrified leap displayed. He landed fifteen feet behind her, ran her down in the street, and tackled her at the knees, bringing her down hard in the puddles along the curb as he gripped her thighs and rolled over with her.

Amazingly, she still tried to fight him. It was more a slapping of hands against his body, highly ineffectual, but it infuriated him so much that he reached around behind him and pulled the handcuffs from his hip case, and wrestled her over on her stomach, twisting her arms up and back with practiced ease, cuffing her wrists together behind her.

He rested, panting, for a few seconds, with his knee in her back, careful even then not to put too much weight on her, until she gave up all at once and lay with her cheek in the mud, breathing in sobbing hard plumes of white smoke.

Then he got to his feet and grasped the handcuffs and jerked her upright. She gave a cry of pain and he hardened his jaw against it, pushing her back towards the car with the short, sharp prods between her shoulder blades he would have delivered to anyone he had to fight in the streets and drag back to jail like a common criminal.

Scully slid inside the car when he opened the door, no more than a wet bundle of clothes and defeat, and slid as close to her door as she could, pressing her face against the window glass. Skinner was too furious to speak, too furious to ask her about the holes in her story, how she could have made a call to Byers if her phone was out that morning, why she didn't remember renting the suite when he had seen the imprint of her body in that other bed, on the filthy sheets: WHO THE HELL HAD BEEN WITH HER?

His breath, like hers, came in short bursts of steam, and he wrenched the steering wheel too hard as he spun back around, clipping the rear quarter panel of the car against the brick wall of the alleyway. It had been his idea to switch cars carefully so no one would follow him, and the cost of that little clip was going to come out of his own pocket.

Back at the motel, he got out, slammed his door shut, went around to Scully's side and jerked her door open. Every movement he made was just short of violence, the rage trembling in a blazing mist around him. He marched her back across the parking lot like a real prisoner, his fingers closed hard around her upper arm, hard enough to leave a bruise. Their shoes squelched on the walkway and the occasional gusts of sleet burned their bare faces as they went back to the door he'd left ajar, and he pushed her inside and kicked the door shut behind him.

Scully stumbled, and half collapsed into a chair. Skinner stripped off his wet tie and jacket and threw them onto the bed. He was too angry to look at her, too angry to even begin to ask her any of the things he was determined to find out before this night was over. The truth. She would by GOD tell him the truth this time.

He went to the dresser and put his hands on it, bent a little at the waist, and stared at himself in the mirror. He was white with fury, his eyes dilated, lips almost blue from the cold and from being compressed so tightly. He could see her reflection in his periphreal vision but still had to fight for control so hard he couldn't look around.

He heard his own voice, hoarse and unfamiliar. "I thought I could trust you," he said. "I guess I was..."

Whatever he was going to say faded out of his mind when he raised his eyes to look at her at last. His own body in the glass, wearing a white shirt, looked so big, so solid, the shoulders taking up the full breadth of the cheap little hotel mirror, the cords of his neck standing out; he looked like a bull with his head lowered to charge. But just beyond his arm, behind him, she sat looking back at him, soaking wet, her hair plastered to her skull, eyes enormous and black with fear and despair.

Her clothes...soaking wet...with her arms twisted behind her, her breasts jutted against the sodden plaid shirt, and he could see her as clearly as if she were naked. The long column of her throat, that unexpected swell of breasts...naked... Naked and helpless and afraid. Of him.

Something primal and ugly rushed screaming through Skinner's bloodstream; in a split second he was so aroused he could feel his erection throb like a toothache against the fabric of his trousers. He was literally afraid to blink because he knew that if he did, the fantasy would be there, whatever fantasy it was, and terrible and sick as it might be, there was the chance that he wouldn't be able to look away from it.

Neither dared to move for a long, agonizingly clear moment.

Then a slow trickle of blood slid down the corner of Scully's mouth to her chin; she had bitten her lip all the way through, either in the struggle or now, now, because of the monster she saw in front of her, and the spell was suddenly broken.

Skinner reached into his pocket and got the carkeys and fished the handcuff key loose; his hands were clumsy because they were shaking so hard. He went to Scully and winced when she winced away from him. He knelt in front of her and reached around her with both arms to click the key in the lock and free her wrists of the handcuffs, which he let fall impotently on the floor while he took her hands and chafed her wrists where the bite of metal had left red welts.

Surprisingly, Scully sagged forward, against him. He let himself close his arms around her, trying to ignore the press of those breasts through his own wet shirt, and held her, hard, his eyes squeezed tight, his chin on the top of her head. His shivering was so powerful she made a small motion as if to comfort him, a sort of consolation pat on the shoulder. Under any other circumstances, it would have been funny.

No matter what else he was, he wasn't this. No matter what else they made him do, through blackmail or deceit or the love of his country, they couldn't make him do this.

"Scully," he murmured. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry."

She clutched at the front of his shirt with both hands in a brief, convulsive gesture, and slowly pulled away from him, nodding, her eyes on the floor.

"I'm just...so..scared..." she whispered.

"Jesus." He straightened, looked around the room like a man lost and taking his bearings. He strode into the bathroom, looking for a tub, but there was only a small aluminum shower stall. He pulled a towel from the rack, took it back to her. "You need to get out of those wet things," he said. "Get into the shower, get warm." His voice struggled for authority, and found it. "Get yourself together and then come talk to me. We can work this thing out. But Scully..."

At the sound of her name, she raised her eyes to his face. He saw the bruise on one cheek, and wished he was dead. "Scully," he repeated, in a softer tone, "Don't be afraid. I won't let anything happen to you. I..." he made sure she was looking at him, made sure she understood that he knew he was one of those things that could happen to her. "I won't let ANYTHING happen to you," he promised.

She nodded and got up; she had to hold onto the back of the chair to do it. He couldn't watch. He went through the bathroom into the adjoining room and closed the door behind him.

The other room, which he had only glimpsed before, had more of her things in it. There on the pillow, a red hair. There by the wall, a suitcase. Yet it felt curiously empty, as if ...he couldn't put his finger on the feeling. There was too much else on his mind.

He sat on the bed and after a moment leaned forward with his head almost to his knees. From the bathroom there was the squeal of the faucet, the sound of running water. He wasn't afraid of Scully trying to get away again. He'd seen the toll the struggle had taken on her, the smear of exhaustion under her eyes, the stiffness in every movement.

Sitting hunched over on the bed, he clenched and unclenched his fists repeatedly, hating himself for what he had done. He would NOT turn her over to the enemy, he would NOT betray her. He would be neither the devil's advocate nor the devil himself. And he would not be Mulder, with his fist raised against her. Let her take a pistol and point it at his head. Nothing would make him hurt her again.

Nothing.

He got up, moved restlessly around the room. It was exactly like the other room, except for the things in it. Why this room seemed empty, and the other room full of Scully, he couldn't quite figure out, but the sensation was strong. Calmer, more in control of himself, he began to look around for something he could hand her through the door to wear. He opened the top drawer of the wobbly dresser, looked inside.

There were packages of pantyhose, the kind that came in aluminum looking tubes, and socks, folded together. Brand new socks, thick and warm. Some had price tags still on them.

Skinner stared at them for a few seconds. Then he went to the closet and opened the door. Inside, hanging on the rack, was a heavy insulated jacket, expensive Gore-tex, the kind advertised in the higher end catalogues for campers and hikers. Big, but only because it was sold oversized; it would definitely have fit Scully.

Below it, hiking boots for small women's feet. High grain leather, hook laces to the ankle. And another suitcase, or whatever they called those women's things they carried their toiletries around in. Why hadn't she taken it into the bathroom with her when she took her shower?

Slowly, reluctantly, Skinner knelt in front of the toiletry case. He picked it up; it had surprising heft for something the size of a purse. He unzipped it and pulled the top up.

Inside, nested neatly among loose lipsticks and bottles of bright red nail polish, were bundles of cash, rubber banded together in brown wrappings fresh from the bank, in demoninations of hundreds. At least, at a casual glance, twenty thousand dollars' worth of cash, innocently sleeping in the dark of Scully's closet.

Behind him, he heard the shrill scream of the water being turned off.

And then silence.

****************************

Chapter Four: The Attack
 

A Cold Day in July

Chapter Four: The Attack

by jordan

Something was wrong.

He knew it as surely as if he were standing on the other side of that door, thinking whatever thoughts Scully was thinking. Something was howling at his instincts to pay attention, to look out.

He put his hand on the knob. All was still within, deadly quiet. He turned it until the latch was freed, then opened it a crack and moved back and to one side quickly, with the instinct of long training. He'd packed his gun in the glove compartment; this was the first time in years he wished he hadn't lost the habit of always wearing it.

"Scully?" he ventured softly. "Are you okay in there?"

As he already knew, she was not in the bathroom. He stepped inside quickly. The mirror was fogged and his glasses steamed almost at once. He took them off and put them in his breast pocket. Her folded jeans and the plaid shirt drooped like wilted flowers over the closed toilet lid, topped by a few scraps of underwear. Plain cotton white, he noted. Slowly, with infinite caution, he moved like a jungle cat around the corner of the open doorway, into the other room.

There on the bed, curled under his parka, Scully lay sleeping. It looked like she had tried to pull the bedspread back and just didn't have the energy to finish the job. Instead, she'd tried to pull it up from the bottom, and because it was thin and she was naked, she had drawn the big parka over her like a blanket.

Skinner went to the bed, drew the rickety chair up beside it, and sat down. She slept deeply, motionless, the parka barely moving as she breathed. Her freckled face was relaxed, the long lashes trembling against her pale cheeks. The bruises were darkening; she'd look bad for a couple of days. Well, as bad as she could look, being Scully.

He fretted briefly, wanting to get up and push the strands of damp auburn hair back from her face, to tuck the jacket around her so she'd be warmer, but one bare shoulder and the towel that lay pooled on the floor at his feet told her she WAS naked, and he was afraid to touch her, except to pull the blanket from his side of the bed and lay it gently across her sleeping form.

It was late, late, late. Yawning, Skinner went back out to his car and got his bag, brought it in. He took a long shower, scrubbing the mud and the blood off, soaking in the hot spray until the water turned luke warm. Then he changed into blue jeans and a blue workman's shirt, pulled on a thick sweater. He fully intended to sleep in his clothes and get out at first light, get the hell away from this town and this damn unnatural cold, get back to the blazingly hot streets of Virginia. Beyond that, he had no idea what he was going to do.

When he went to check on Scully again, she'd barely changed position. He longed to stretch out beside her on the bed, but of course he would never do such a thing. Logically, he should go back and sleep in the other bed, but there was something about that room that repulsed him.

So he sat in the falling-apart chair, his head nodding, and watched Scully sleep. It felt vaguely like stealing; she was defenseless under his gaze, but he so rarely had a chance to look at her all he wanted, he just stared at her like a man would stare at a treasured painting.

Where'd you get the money, Scully? Why did you lie about having a coat? Why go to all the trouble of going to the bar, or running away, in nothing but that thin shirt. What were you trying to convince me of? None of it made sense, unless...unless, of course, she DIDN'T have a coat. But she did. He'd seen it. Socks, too. Nice, thick, warm socks.

He got up and turned the heat a notch higher, came back to sit with her again.

Scully, Scully. Who's been with you? Who slept with you in that other bed? Whose filthy hands did you let touch your body? What made you do all these things and run away from everyone you know, everyone who cares about you?

The disturbing image of Mulder with his fist in the air was never far from his mind. Yet he remembered and would have sworn to something Scully had said a long time ago, when doctors warned her that Mulder might be dangerous. "Not to me," she'd snapped, with perfect confidence in her partner. That same absolute certainty, the trust Skinner wished she would place in him. Because if she did, if she ever placed that kind of faith in him...

He remembered, with some shame, how she had felt twisting under him, her lithe body athletic and surprisingly strong as she fought him so desperately. With this sort of reaction, how deserving was he of any woman's trust? He crossed his legs and willed his erection away; she was a lovely, naked woman asleep on a bed, and it was a natural response. Any man would wonder what it would be like if that parka happened to slip a couple more inches there, for instance, a bit to the right...

He got up quickly and readjusted the blanket over her bare shoulder. Scully never stirred. Maybe he should take her pulse. His hand moved of its own volition and brushed the now dry and soft hair back from her face, over the sweet curve of her cheekbone, behind her small, perfectly configured ear.

Rapt, he stroked his thumb down the edge of her face, gently, gently, to where her chin rested against the pillow. Bare of makeup, the freckles unusually visible because she was so pale, she had that clear, open, honest look he loved so much. There was the bone structure of her face that gave her the girl scout demeanor, proud and strong, but also a fullness there, a softness to the lips, something in the shape of her eyes, that made her sensual, not cute, but beautiful. The bruise on her cheek stood out like an oil smudge; he had a flashback of her lying with her face turned towards him, pressed in the mud while he held her down with a knee in her back. The mixture of shame and desire made him move away from her, but instead of going back to the chair, he knelt by the bed, still staring, still wondering.

After awhile, his head leaned forward further and further until it touched the blanket, and his glasses slid down and fell onto the sleeve of the parka.

He was dozing when something happened that seemed like a magician's trick; Scully's voice, high and furious, brought his nodding head upright with a jerk.

"You stupid sack of shit!" she cried. "Why can't you just leave me the fuck ALONE?"

Shocked awake, he looked down at her in confusion. She stirred under the parka, rolling over onto her back, eyelids twitching. Talking in her sleep? When she opened them and saw him above her, his face so near, her eyes widened, first in surprise and then in pure, unadulterated horror.

"Oh my God!" she rasped, her voice still thick with sleep. Then she shouted, "SKINNER!"

Too late, he realized she wasn't looking at him, but beyond him, and he tried to push himself up off the floor and the bed at the same time and turn, but he'd lost the second he needed to turn fully and confront whatever it was she was looking at.

Something hit him hard, on the side of the head, and he fell back against the wall, hearing Scully shouting, shouting, and he rolled over beside the bed as his own parka came down on top of him, effective as a net in that small space between the bed and the wall.

He made it to his hands and knees when an unseen foot kicked him with ruthless force, just between the legs. Something hit him again through the parka, on the back of his shoulders, but he only cupped his hands over his crotch and pitched forward with a grunt of sheer agony.

Then the gates of night opened and darkness flooded in.

******************

When Skinner began to shift around towards consciousness, Scully was hovering over him like a medivac, and the moment he woke she said, "Skinner? Sir? Can you hear me?"

He blinked up at her, and she handed him his glasses, held his hand steady while he put them on.

He mumbled something and fought to sit up on the bed. She put an arm under his back and helped him; jeez, it was like trying to lift a horse. Getting him up on the bed had taken her a full fifteen minutes. Well, twenty, because she'd had to run into the other room and pull on some clothes when she realized she was still undressed from last night's shower.

But despite the situation, lack of sleep, and a growing, gnawing hunger, Scully was feeling better by the minute. Bruised, sore, aching muscles, and some injury under her rib, a lat muscle probably, that might be torn, but other than that, her mind was clearer than it had been in ages. She could THINK again, and it was a wonderful relief, like having bandages removed from her eyes after days of blindness.

Felt better, almost for sure, than the big ox she was trying to help shove upright in bed. He looked AWFUL.

She examined him, making him lean forward so she could look at the top of his head, even though she'd tended to that wound during the night, checking for fresh bleeding. There was none. Good. When he fidgeted, she spoke to him as she would to Mulder, like an impatient mother; "Sit still."

"Shit," he growled, but he let her touch him, probe for tenderness, swelling, her fingers fluttering around his neck and under his ears with infinite gentleness.

He had been lying curled up on the floor with his hands over his groin, and Scully drew back, peering into his eyes to make sure the size of the pupils matched and were dilated properly for the lighting conditions, and asked casually, "Are you, uh, hurt anywhere else?"

He gave her a slightly alarmed look and said "No" so quickly, so dismissively, that she thought it best to drop the subject. Fine. No ice pack for YOU where it might do the most good. Let him limp. After the manhandling he'd given her last night, he deserved it.

But Scully was Scully, and when she saw the flash of pain in his eyes as he leaned back against the headboard, she was instantly sorry. She said, "I'll see if there's any aspirin in the medicine cabinet," and started up, but Skinner caught her hand and stopped her, pulling her back gently to the bed.

"Scully," he said, "If there was aspirin in there, you'd know it, wouldn't you? Wouldn't it ha ve to be you who put it there?"

"You'd think so, wouldn't you?"

Reluctantly, he let her fingers slip from his, his face drawn in that familiar, "I don't like this" scowl she knew so well.

There were indeed aspirin in the bathroom, and Demerol, and Darvocet, and Valium, and a whole slew of powerful drugs Scully recognized with a sick feeling; the prescription bottles all had her name on them. She selected a bottle of hydrocodone and slipped a bottle of Darvocet into the pocket of her jeans; it might make him feel better, and it might slow him down a little at the same time. God he was fast. And strong. She looked at herself in the mirror, touched the bruise on her cheek gingerly. Damn him.

She started to close the door to the cabinet, then paused when her eye caught the label on one of the larger bottles. Dilantin. A script specific for seizures. She turned the bottle upside down and looked at the pills thoughtfully. Except for the Dilantin, and a bottle of clear gel caps that was unlabeled, she'd taken all of these pills at one time or another during her frequent hospitalizations. Most of them produced some mild nausea, other side effects...she was fairly certain that none of them had been used on her. What, then?

There was an empty plastic coke bottle on the sink base, and she rinsed it out, then filled it with water from the tap. Her mouth was acrid and sore, especially where she'd bitten her lip through, and she drank from the bottle herself before refilling it and returning to her sullen patient.

In the other room, Skinner had both feet on the floor and his fists on the blanket on either side of him. He was glaring out the window at the greying clouds. "It's five in the morning," he complained. "Was I out all night? Scully? Who did this? When are you going to tell me what happened?"

"Take one of these," she offered, holding out the coke bottle and the bottle of hydrocodone. "It'll make you feel better."

Skinner took the bottle but didn't open it. His eyes were bloodshot and he had the stubble of a beard shadowing his jawline. "Stop stalling and talk to me," he said.

Because there was only the one chair, which now drooped at an alarming angle, Scully sat on the foot of the bed. "Sir, I know you're going to have a hard time believing this, but I think I know what's going on. At least...I think I know how I got here."

He watched her face, his eyes moody, mouth set in a tight line. But Scully was beginning to find her way around Skinner. She didn't remember much of the previous night, not in detail. But she did remember when they were wrestling on the ground, how he had used only enough force to restrain her, how he had dropped down on her in the classic police hold, his knee on her back, but had kept his weight off her even though it had been a balancing act. She remembered, too, that when he had taken the handcuffs off, he had somehow known the way her wrists were burning, and had rubbed them, massaging the circulation back into her fingers. No, he'd had every opportunity to really hurt her, and had stayed his hand each time.

She took a deep fortifying breath. "Last night I woke up and saw someone behind you. A woman. She had to reach really far back to hit you with that chair, and I realized she was no taller than I am. She was wearing one of those ski masks, but I saw her eyes. I know who she is."

Skinner was all attention. "Someone you know, Agent Scully?"

"No, sir. Me. I mean, someone who looked just like me. A clone. A twin. A morph." She shrugged. "I don't know. Someone who's gone to a lot of trouble to make people think she was me. Look, I know it's hard to accept, but I know for a fact that the technology exists. I've seen it myself, and so has Mulder."

"A clone. A twin. A morph." His tone was disbelieving, sarcastic, but not hostile. Something had changed about Skinner, though she couldn't put her finger on what it was.

"Exactly. Someone who, for whatever reason, framed me by shooting Mulder, and then brought me here. Someone who has kept me drugged for days now. But it was me who called you, Skinner. She must not have known about that. She must not have expected you to come. You scared her off."

The corners of Skinner's lips curved up in a rueful smile. "Yes, I seem to have terrified her."

"No, seriously." She allowed some of the gratitude she felt to show on her face. "She hit you twice and I think she kicked you, too. And you got up again. Then she..."

Skinner looked at her sharply. "Then she what?"

"She...she had a gun, sir. She pointed it at me, at my head. And she said some things, mostly just obscenities, and I..."

"You...?"

He followed her gaze to the nightstand by the bed, which seemed curiously denuded. There was a round spot where the base of the lamp had been, and Skinner looked across the room and saw parts of the lamp sticking out of a wastepaper basket.

"I threw the lamp at her," Scully said.

Skinner shook his head in amazement. "I got up a third time?" he asked. "I don't even remember that."

"I don't think you were even conscious."

He opened the bottle and shook a pill into his hand, drank deeply from the water in the coke bottle, and then the tablet, making a face as he swallowed as if it hurt his throat. He took a few more swallows of water, then said, "I'll take your word for it."

"While you were out, I looked through that room," Scully nodded towards the open bathroom door, indicating the adjoining suite. "I found the money, and the clothes, and the passports."

"Passports?"

"Four of them, all with my picture and different names. They were under the mattress. Forgeries. Anyone searching this place would think I was planning to shoot Mulder, steal some money, and then skip the country. Don't you agree?"

He only watched her, not speaking.

"And you still don't believe me," she said angrily. "You still think I'm making all this up."

He gave her an honest answer, though it wasn't the one she wanted to hear. "I don't know what to think."

"Dammit, Skinner! I could've been halfway across the country by now if I'd wanted to get away."

"Why didn't you call the police after we were attacked?" he asked. "Why didn't you call an ambulance?"

Scully got off the bed. "Because I know I look guilty as hell. Those are probably my fingerprints on the chair legs, too. God, Skinner. You're as pig headed as Mulder;"

His voice was full of authority. "Agent Scully, don't forget who you're talking to."

"Who?" she demanded. "My supervisor? Not anymore, though, right? Now you're just my jailer, and I'm your prisoner. Isn't that how this is all shaping up?"

"Scully, will you quit changing the goddamn subject every two minutes and tell me what you remember of the past few days? You're telling me you were drugged all this time, since before Mulder was shot?"

"That's exactly what I'm telling you. This is the first time I've been able to manage a coherent thought since...since..." She frowned. "Well, I don't even remember when it happened. I just remember talking to Byers, and he told me to get out of my apartment and go somewhere safe for awhile."

"So you came here."

"No! When I woke up...I remember I woke up and I went across the street to that bar. It was morning then. I asked them what town I was in and they all looked at me like I was crazy. They thought I was just some drunk who'd fallen asleep in the place. So I came back here and called you. I mean...I called Byers and got him to get me a clean line to you so I couldn't be traced. But after that..." She rubbed her eyes with one hand, as if trying to press her eyelids back into her head and force them to give her some vision of what had happened. "I don't know."

"You think someone who wanted to pass themselves off as you, shot Mulder, then made a break for it, then ­" Skinner let the sentence die, getting to his feet. He swayed a moment, with his head down, holding a hand over his forehead above his glasses. "Shit," he muttered.

"You okay?"

"Scully, all I'm sure of is that we've got to get out of here. I don't know what the story is and I'm not even going to try to put it together right now. I just know that we're both in imminent danger if we stay here and I need to get you back across the border before someone calls the goddamn Mounties."

"This is one thing we won't need to argue about," she agreed.

"Look, it's freezing out there­go and get something warm on. Take the money, the passports, whatever else you can from in there; it's all evidence."

She hesitated and he said, "What's the matter?"

"I know you're right but...I feel like I'm stealing something."

Unexpectedly, Skinner smiled. "Too much goddamn girl scout in you, Scully, and not enough larceny." He made an abrupt, demanding gesture. "Get a move on. Let's go."

"Okay." She started towards the other room, saying, "Let me drive, though. Are there chains on the tires?"

"I'll drive. Why do you..." he gave her a startled look. "What the hell was in that pill you gave me?" he demanded.

"It's only a pain killer, but the roads are going to be dangerous. It won't make you drowsy, just mellow, but I'd rather..." She stood for a second looking at him, his stubbly face, the raw look of weariness in his eyes, the grim set of his mouth. He was possibly the least mellow person she'd ever seen.

"Okay, you drive," she said. Turning away, she muttered, "I should have given you two of the damn things."

*******************

Chapter Five: Cliffhanger

A Cold Day in July

by jordan

Chapter Five: Cliffhanger

Scully sat hunched over her plate in the back booth of the diner, chewing with enthusiasm. The situation was so weird she had given up trying to place it within the context of her personal vision of reality. If someone had asked her half an hour ago, "Are you hungry?" (As in fact Skinner had) she would have said no. Now she simply could not get enough food down her fast enough.

Skinner had insisted that they stop somewhere for breakfast before they left the small town, even though they saw men boarding up store windows and people coming out of the market with baskets full of bottled water and sacks of canned goods in fortification for the coming storm. The car radio informed them that it was a freakish event for July,but not unheard of in that neck of the woods.

Scully thought it was a bad idea to stay one more minute in that town than they had to, and was all too aware of the boys fixing up the bar windows staring at her as she passed, their goat eyes stripping her, then looking nervously away as the tall man beside her stared them down. It was really annoying.

"Just coffee," she told the waitress, and Skinner, looking at her with that hard set of his mouth as he returned the menus to the waitress, said, "Bring us two of the breakfast specials."

But apparently he hadn't taken into account that this was logging country, and the working man's breakfast was designed for big, hungry outdoorsy men.

More surprising was the fact that when the food began to come, it was perfectly cooked and beautifully presented and both Scully and Skinner plowed into it as if they'd been starved for weeks.

There were fresh eggs with yellow-orange yolks, the whites perfectly round, and fluffy pancakes with mounds of sweet blueberries baked into them, and thick pieces of toast that tasted like they'd been cut from freshly baked bread, with pats of sweet cream butter dripping down the sides. The coffee was heavenly, the syrup redolent of pure maple, and big glasses of freshly squeezed orange juice came with the meal. Scully was intimidated by the hunk of country ham on her plate, the steaming pile of crispy golden potatoes, until she began to eat. Then she and Skinner stopped arguing, stopped talking altogether, and devoted their full attention to the feast in front of them.

Scully couldn't remember when she'd last eaten. She only knew that as she had never tasted anything so good in her life, and she was ravenous. At one point, she glanced up and saw Skinner looking at her, a glint of amusement in his eyes behind the glasses.

"Good," he said.

She nodded. "No kidding."

When they finally finished, Skinner excused himself and went to the bathroom, and Scully leaned back, almost groaning with the pleasure of being full of good food and warm and safe again.

Safe? Skinner was about to drag her back to face a panel of inquiry full of questions she couldn't answer. All the "evidence" they were bringing back would only incriminate her. The only thing she had on her side was the fact that she was voluntarily returning instead of running away, when she could have kept going. At least in their eyes. Not that THAT proved anything.

But safe, yes, in a weird way. As long as Skinner was with her, she felt protected, almost invulnerable, from everything. Now if she could just find someone to protect her from Skinner, everything would be perfect. He was just so damn...Skinner.

A shadow fell over the table, and Scully looked up to see the waitress looking down at her, giving nervous glances at the bathroom door. "Honey, that fellow gave me a note to give you when he left."

"That man...?" Scully nodded at the booth opposite her where Skinner had been sitting, but the waitress shook her head. "No, that mountain climbin fellow. He come in here every day for a week lookin' for you, honey, and then the durn fool asked Winston if he'd help him look for you. Winston just laughed at him, of course. We didn't think you'd be comin back. But anyway, he left you this." She took a piece of folded paper out of her apron and slid it across the table. "Some men just can't take no for an answer, I guess," she said, "But honey," her eyes flicked to the bathroom door, "I sure can't fault your choice on that one."

When the waitress was gone, Scully unfolded the note and saw in neat, rounded handwriting:

Dana,

I know we agreed, but I wanted to try to see you again anyway. I hope everything is all right. Please, I just want to talk to you.

Dave

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the door to the restrooms open, and she tucked the note into her purse. Skinner didn't sit down, but took out his wallet and fingered through the bills. "Are you ready?"

"Yes."

As Skinner paid the bill, the cashier said, "Y'all be careful out there, now. They've already closed some of the roads to the north."

"We're going south," Skinner said.

Scully was looking at the counter, which was filled with men hunched over steaming breakfast platters, wondering if someone who looked like her had done anything else that she, Dana, would end up paying for. Who was Dave? Who was Winston?

The second question was answered in the next moment, when a man wearing a dark blue jacket with a badge pinned to it came into the diner, stamping snow from his boots and making a lot of bluster. "Mornin' Winston," the cashier called.

Skinner only nodded tightly at the lawman's smile, and Scully made it a point not to look at him at all. She had an absurd urge to take Skinner's arm as they walked across the street, to show him some sort of gratitude for not getting local law enforcement involved.

But then he unlocked her door and opened it and closed it after she got in, and she was irritated all over again; he always had to be in control, always had to let her know that he was in the position of power. "Don't forget who you're talking to," he'd said, back at the motel. Not for the first time, she wished she had the courage to slap his face.

She glanced at him as he started the car, wondering what he'd do if she tried. WHACK! An amazingly satisfying fantasy.

Skinner said, "Put your seat belt on."

With a sigh, Scully pulled the nylon strap across her shoulder. What was the point?

The road out of town was a long, even uphill stretch, winding around the side of a mountain. Skinner kept the car in a low gear and gave it steady gas, and Scully settled in for a long ride. The sky was an odd, greenish color; it was like looking into the depths of the ocean, and there was no other traffic on the highway, but for all the space, the overall atmosphere was one of claustrophia.

Skinner reached over to turn up the heater, looking at her briefly. "Are you okay?"

"Yes."

"Feeling better now?"

"My head is clear, but I still can't really remember much. It's like...Yesterday morning when I woke up and called you, I remember just sitting there in a kind of fog. I don't think I ate all day. I just knew Mulder had been hurt, and I needed to talk to you."

"You called me? Then what?"

"Oh, wait." A small furrow appeared between her brows. "No, that's not what happened. I called John Byers. I..." She rubbed her forehead. "Maybe that wasn't yesterday."

"That's okay," Skinner said. "On Monday morning, I got a call that Mulder had been shot. They found him in front of the building and as soon as I got to the hospital, I called you. But I got a signal saying your phone had been disconnected. Then Kersh called me and told me he wanted me to come in for a meeting right away."

Skinner's face as he stared through the windshield was as bleak as the weather. "They were all there waiting. On an hour's notice, an internal investigation had been put together and was ready to go. They showed me the tape, and­"

"What's this tape you keep talking about?"

She saw his face contort, and had a sick feeling it was about more than Mulder getting shot. He said, "You and Mulder met at five in the morning, and had some kind of argument. We don't know what it was about. Then he was about to hit you, and you protected yourself by drawing your gun and firing." He swallowed. "Three times."

"I swear on my life, Skinner, that wasn't me."

He held a finger up for silence. "Then you ran away, and they found Mulder, and called me. It turned out that an internal investigation had been going on for some time; that was how they got the panel together so quickly. I..." He gave her an almost apologetic look, "They were investigating me first to make sure I wasn't involved."

Scully's eyes met his, and he looked away. She said, "I'm sorry. I mean, I'm sorry this has happened, sir, but I can't apologize for what I didn't do."

"They showed me bank deposits in your handwriting, with your fingerprints on them, making large deposits over a period of about four weeks. They played tapes for me of phone conversations recorded from your apartment; you were soliciting bribes, Scully. You were using information from F.B.I. internal files and selling information."

Although she wanted to put her hands over her ears and cry out like a child, she forced herself to listen calmly. "What else?"

"That's enough, isn't it? An investigation, then it appears that Mulder finds out what you're up to and confronts you, you shoot him, and you disappear with a large amount of cash." He gave his head a short, sharp shake, like a wet dog.

"But Skinner, don't you see how crazy that sounds?"

"That's the other thing, Scully. They showed me pictures of what looked like x rays, scans, whatever, of your tumor. It had grown and shifted, and apparently there'd been some damage to your frontal lobes."

"That's ridiculous." Scully stared at him, willing him to look at her, and finally he turned his head reluctantly. "Skinner, you can't undo frontal lobe damage. Once it's done, it's done. If I was going insane from an organic growth, I wouldn't get better. I'd just get steadily worse until my basic functions were affected and I couldn't breathe. Then I'd die."

"Basically they said that's what was happening to you."

"Do I look sick to you?"

He didn't answer. The car was working hard as the grade of the incline increased, and he shifted it down another gear. The scene outside was awesome, mountains and valleys below, and the green sky so close to the earth it was like the belly of a giant animal trying to scratch itself.

"Why did you call me?" he asked suddenly.

"Because..." She struggled to remember. Had it been Byer's idea? Why had she called Byers?

Then suddenly she DID remember, with aching clarity, sitting on the edge of the bed, looking down at her bare feet and shaking for some reason, maybe reaction to the drug, and she remembered seeing a backpack on the floor, a huge one, and hearing sounds coming from the other room where two people were having sex.

She'd picked up the phone, wanting to talk to Skinner. But afraid to call him at the office, and having no other number, she'd called the office of the Lone Gunmen, and when they heard her voice they all tried to get on the line at the same time, barking questions like a pack of Chihuahuas.

And then in a little while the phone ringing somewhere far away, and a click, and Skinner's voice. "I need to talk to you," she had said. But she couldn't have told him where she was, because she didn't know.

"How did you find me?" she asked.

He rolled his eyes. "How the hell did THEY find you? You must have been on a traceable line to them, though not to us. They had tickets, routes marked out, everything hand delivered, all kinds of bluffs, within a couple of hours. I couldn't trace my route here again if my life depended on it. Those men should be working for us."

Scully smiled. "Don't be too quick to offer them a job."

"I didn't know where I was going myself until I crossed the Canadian border. It was a wild ride."

"But you came."

"Kersh suggested I bring you in myself. He was convinced you'd run from anyone else."

"What did I say on the phone?"

He shook his head as if he couldn't remember. "You just sounded sick and terrified, which was consistent with the pictures I'd been seeing of the inside of your head."

"So you came to arrest me."

"I came to take you home."

"But I'm under arrest now, aren't I?"

Skinner actually squirmed a little in his seat. "You're in my protective custody."

"Semantics, Skinner. Call it what you want. Do you think I stole that money in the back seat?"

"No."

Her eyebrow arched. "No?"

"There are a lot of holes in your story, Scully, but I don't think a person's basic nature changes, and I don't think you're a thief."

"Well, do you­"

Skinner whistled his breath out from between clenched teeth in sudden alarm. "Fuck me!"

"What?"

His foot pumped the pedal violently. "I've lost the brakes!"

"What?" She leaned over as if there were something she could actually see. "What's happening?"

They had reached the crest of the road and had begun their downward descent, and now they were going a little faster than Scully thought was a good idea. "Put it in gear!" she cried.

"I'm losing everything, the steering, the brakes...Shit!"

She could see the tendons in his wrists writhe with strain as he manhandled the car without power steering, keeping it on the road. He eased it over towards the railing, and there was the sickening screech of wood on metal as he tried to slow their momentum by dragging the car along the barrier. But the pull of gravity was too strong, and each time he eased off, the car picked up speed again.

"Scully, we're going to have to make a jump for it. Get out!"

Skinner threw off his seatbelt, but Scully fumbled for hers with nerveless fingers. "I can't..."

Skinner had his door open, his body braced, but he looked back and saw she couldn't get out. He slammed the door shut again and fought the steering wheel back on the road. When it was rolling along on the pavement, he reached over with his right hand and tried to find her buckle. The two of them scrambled at it frantically for a few seconds.

Scully heard a click. Skinner shouted, "NOW!" and slid over to the right; his door flew outwards with an almost human groan as the hinges were ripped back, and then he was gone, and the Taurus, drawn by forces stronger and more inexplicable than any man could understand, smashed through the guard rail, which impeded its forward motion just enough so that when it went over the edge of the cliff it actually hung for a few seconds, rear tires in the air, before giving a shriek of tearing fiberglass and plummeting a hundred feet into the snow-covered rocks below.
 

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next chapter: Cold Hands
This chapter will be posted on June 14 or 15, depending on when my beta reader comes out of her coma...

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A Cold Day in July

Chapter Six: Cold Hands
 

by jordan

Tuck and roll, tuck and roll, tuck and roll, tuck and­

When the drag of Skinner's weight finally counteracted the impetus of his forward motion, he came to a stop, his mouth full of snow, his glasses hanging from one ear, his head spinning from the wild spill he had taken almost halfway down the steep incline. He felt dazed and sick, though he hadn't been injured in the fall. He couldn't waste time on checking for injuries anyway, or on thoughts of the car or of his immediate situation: where the hell was Scully? Scully, her white face, her big scared eyes, falling away from him as he jumped out of the car. Had that click he heard been her seatbelt coming loose or the car hitting something?

Had she gotten clear?

He got up on his hands and knees, spitting out some of the slightly bitter snow, swallowing the rest. The car lay below him at the end of a long deep groove where it had gone off the cliff, but it had come to a violent stop at a mound of boulders, and the hood was crushed in all the way back to the windshield, which was crazed into a million veins, chunks of glass lying in rounded pieces like pale green diamonds in the snow. He hoped to hell she'd gotten out, because there was no way anyone could survive a crash like that.

His gaze fastened on something...he wiped his glasses hurriedly and looked again. From the back of the car, at an angle he couldn't determine, there was an outstretched arm, a strikingly white hand, the fingers widespread as if in agony.

The world careened sideways, and Skinner clutched at his stomach as if he'd been punched hard. Even before he could stand up, he was crawling towards the wreckage, then staggering, then running. He should have stayed in the car with her. He should have made her jump first. He should have made damn well SURE that seatbelt had come off­

Flashback: in town, in the car, his gruff command, "Put your seatbelt on."

He stopped and threw back his head, eyes clenched shut, and roared at the top of his lungs, "SCULLY!" accusing the earth, the sky, the world, but most of all, himself, because if only he'd trusted her, if only he'd trusted his heart, she­

"What?"

He opened his eyes and saw her making her way down the hillside towards him, brushing snow from her backside and looking considerably less shaken than he was. As he stared at her, somewhere in the distance a dog or a coyote, hearing the echoes of his cry, began to howl.

"Scully!" He began to slog up the hill as fast as he could in the thick soft snow, as she stumbled towards him, gravity shoving her forward and dragging him back.

"Oh, great," she said, "Now you've got the wolves after us."

When he reached her he scooped her up with both arms and swung her around with pure relief, then hugged her hard against him. "Skinner, put me down!" She had her hands on his shoulders and was squirming like a cat trying to escape a fond embrace. But she had to smile at the look of relief and delight on his normally taciturn face.

"Don't worry," she said, when he set her back on her feet, "You won't have to explain the loss of your prisoner to your superiors. But next time let me take my own damn seatbelt off; you had the buckle turned wrong way around."

Skinner drew back and gave her a stern look, then before she could say anything, moved forward quickly, ducking his head, and gave her a quick, firm kiss on the lips.

"Now I understand why you did that in the elevator," he said.

Scully's face was a study of comic surprise. His grin was quick and it flashed by fast, but it was as devilish as anything Mulder could come up with. Then she looked past him, at the wreck, and saw the arm and hand. "Oh my God!"

When they reached the Taurus, they saw that the arm was extending from the trunk of the car, the only part of the vehicle that hadn't sustained catastrophic damage. Still, Skinner had to strain to get it open. When it finally popped up all the way up, they gazed down on the very dead, very pale corpse of a man in his thirties, with a shockingly dark beard against his white skin. His body was contorted into a curled position, both arms up as if to ward something off...or to push open the trunk.

Scully said, "Oh, God, Skinner, he couldn't have been alive when we were driving, could he?"

"No, no...he'd have made some noise." He looked at her with a shudder of horror. "You're the doctor," he said. "You tell me."

Scully moved forward gingerly and began to examine the body. Skinner reached over her and dragged out the heavy backpack and sleeping bag that had been stuffed in with the dead man. Scully glanced at it oddly. There was a smaller nylon zippered bag under the body, and she pulled it out and handed it to Skinner as well.

"No, he's been dead awhile, I think," she said, with undisguised relief. "The cold has kept him from too much degradation. He could have died last night or last week. But it looks like this is the cold, either sustaining rigor mortis or causing it."

Rummaging through the backpack, Skinner had found a wallet and was shuffling through it, muttering. "Plenty of cash here. This was no robbery. Ah. Here we go. David Hollister, San Jose California."

Scully let out a short, sharp gasp. "Dave!"

Skinner looked up at her quickly. She had both hands over her mouth as if the one word had somehow escaped on its own. He said in a cool tone, "Scully, do you know this man?"

"No."

A light snow had begun to fall, and Skinner bent over the pack again, choosing not to pursue the matter for the moment. "There's a lot of useful equipment in here if we're stuck out here for awhile," he said. He zipped the pack back up and dipped his arms into the straps to shoulder the load. "Strap that sleeping bag on top for me, will you, Scully?"

She was staring at the dead man. She had the hood of her parka up, her red hair blowing in bright contrast against the pale snow, and when he saw her from that angle, something caught at his heart, a sharp, unexpected pain. Something so lovely, amidst all the violence and death. He said, "Scully, if you know something you're not telling me..."

By the quick look she shot him, it was obvious that she did. But she shook her head and hoisted the sleeping bag to strap it onto the top of the pack, and some of his annoyance eased when he realized that at least a lie showed so clearly on her face there was no mistaking it.

"Get the other bag there," he said, nodding, and Scully obeyed, picked up the small pack and strapped it around her waist, under her coat.

"What now?" she asked.

"We'll have to try to hike out of here, I guess. Let's get back up to the road, anyway. It's all downhill back into town, and maybe a truck will come along to give us a ride."

Scully nodded doubtfully. The snow flurries had stopped for the moment, and they stood as if marshaling their resources, their breath fluttering out towards each other like balloons in a cartoon strip, but blank and empty.

Skinner said brusquely, "Well, we'll freeze to death if we just stand around like this. We'll have to get it all sorted out when we get back to­"

Watching Scully, he saw an odd thing. A black line appeared on the shoulder of her jacket, and a little puff of feathers flew up into the air. Delayed by the distance and the snow and the altitude, the sound of the gunshot followed a second later.

"Get down!" Skinner made a dive and bore Scully down in front of him, hunching his body over hers. There was metallic noise and he looked up to see a bullet hole magically appear in the front door of the Taurus. He pushed Scully ahead of him around to the front of the car, into the cover of the rocks, to the tune of half a dozen more shots.

Shooter on the hill, up ahead. Smallish bore rifle, maybe a thirty thirty, a hunter's weapon. Flat report, not the boom of a shotgun or the firecracker sound of an AK-47.

Scully cried in dismay, "You're hit," and only then did he realize there was a sting like the lash of a whip on his neck, and he put his hand up and brought it away bloody. "I'm okay," he said. "Stay down."

He crawled around the front of the car and to the opposite side from the bullet holes, and pulled himself up to the passenger door to look through the windows. There on the hill a dark clad figure with a rifle was scanning the hillside. At that distance, Skinner couldn't see if there was a scope on the weapon or not. He didn't think so, but no point in taking chances.

He jacked open the door and climbed onto the seat, keeping low. There in the glove compartment, which had come open on impact, was his Sig, and two full clips, tucked snugly in his holster like a sleeping rattlesnake. He pulled the leathers out and slid back down and around to where Scully was.

Checking the clip, he said, "I don't suppose you know where your gun is."

"Not a clue."

He could have bitten his tongue; he remembered exactly where Scully's gun was when he'd last seen it, in a ziploc bag on Kersh's desk, bundled with the ballistics report and fingerprint results showing that it had been the gun that shot Mulder, and that it had been in her hand when last fired. Now, however, was probably not a good time to bring that up.

Skinner took his glasses off and rubbed them thoughtfully on the sleeve of his parka. He felt himself slowing down, his mind crystal clear now; he was under fire, and he had to protect Scully. Life could be reduced to the simplest of terms at moments like this. Kill the bad guy, save the girl. No problem.

Scully was staring at him. "You're not by any chance enjoying this, are you, sir?"

He put his glasses back on, looking up the hill. "No," he said, in an entirely unconvincing voice.

Another spatter of bullets. The shooter had stopped to reload. A rank amateur. Still...

He turned to Scully and said, "If we can make it down to that gully below, we should be okay. We'll have plenty of cover down there."

"Skinner, we'll freeze to death out there."

"Well, we sure as hell can't stay here."

She hesitated a second longer, then gave him a tight nod. "Okay."

He stood up, then, a perfect target, except that he assumed a marksman's stance and fired two rounds up the hill. He had the immense satisfaction of seeing something spark against the metal railing and the shooter duck back.

As soon as Scully jumped out of the cover of the boulders, the rifle opened fire again, but whoever was shooting was standing back now, using the crest of the cliff as cover, and couldn't hit anything except by accident. Skinner shoved the handgun into his holster and took off after her.

The downhill rush was faster than he'd anticipated; the angle was increasingly steep as the hill descended. Skinner knew the dangers of snow country from childhood visits to his uncle in Utah. When he was eleven years old he'd stayed up there one Christmas vacation with his parents, and watched his uncle break horses for a living. The owner of one of the horses had insisted on taking it out for a ride on a bright blue day, despite his uncle's strong warnings. When he didn't come back, Skinner and his uncle had out searching the only sensible way to search in the snow, with snowshoes and a pike to gauge depth. Skinner could still remember the way the man looked when they found him, both eyes black, broken nose, chipped front teeth. Apparently he'd been galloping the horse across what he thought was a smooth stretch of fresh snow, but it turned out to be a thin white covering frozen over a narrow gorge that went down thirty feet or so. The man had apparently died of the cold, not his injuries, and for a long time Skinner had had nightmares about how it must have been the last few hours of that man's life. They never did find the horse.

More dangerous, more immediate, was the danger of frostbite, the loss of fingers or toes or earlobes. Both he and Scully were wet, and the temperature would drop as night drew near. Their clothes would be meager defenses against the bitter freeze that was inevitable, and even as he slid down the slope he imagined his blood crystalizing into ice.

In the midst of these gloomy thoughts, Skinner's worst fear came true, and the snow simply gave way under them, and they fell. He shouted for Scully, and she gave a cry of fear as she plummeted down, but fortunately the fall was no more than ten feet, and they landed on a soft bank of snow next to a wide, paved road.

Scully was up first, and hurried to help him, the big pack counteracting his balance. On his feet, Skinner looked around, unable to believe their luck. There were wide, recent tire tracks on the road, and a line of telephone poles along one side of it that seemed to point the way to safety.

"Let's get the hell out of here," Scully said, he nodded wearily.

Two hours later, they had traveled about five miles. The snow that had come in playful gusts and flurries earlier now settled down to a somber, steady beat of wind and ice. The heat of their moving bodies had kept the freeze at bay so far, but it was becoming increasingly obvious that no one was going to come out in that weather, and that they couldn't keep going for much longer. If they stopped, they would die. Skinner knew that much for certain.

Twenty minutes later, Scully lurched into him. She had to shout over the wind so he could hear her, "I think I see something."

"What? Where?"

"Over there!"

She pointed with a gloved hand and he blinked painfully, holding his hand over his eyes to see what she was pointing at. Then he made it out; the angle of a roof, almost but not quite hidden in the snow. "It looks like a building," he shouted back. But Scully was already heading for it.

It was a building, a small linesman's shack, no more than fifteen by twenty feet, and looked long deserted from the size of the holes in the ceiling. They circled it until they found a door, but it was four feet deep in snow, and they got in through a broken window.

Once inside, both slid to the floor and leaned against the wall, groaning relief to be out of the wind and noise of the storm. Skinner took off the pack and unzipped it. He rummaged inside, brought out a candy bar and handed it to Scully, who tore the wrapper off greedily, then hesitated.

"What?" he asked.

"Is there another one?"

Skinner turned his head to look at her. "Yeah," he said, his voice oddly off key. "Yeah, go ahead, there's plenty of food in here."

Before he could finish the sentence, Scully was eating the chocolate, making rapturous faces and sighing. "I'm so relieved," she said. "I was starting to worry about that whole cannibalizing thing."

"Well, we're not out of the woods yet, so to speak." He chewed his candy bar slowly, trying to extract as much flavor as he could from it. "We need to start a fire and get out of these wet clothes."

"Into what?"

He reached into the bag like a magician reaching into a hat, and pulled out a thermal shirt. "A little small for me, a little large for you, but heaven sent," he said. "He's got about three of everything in here, too."

Scully looked around the room. It was almost dark inside, and the roof groaned with the weight of the snow. She drew her knees up to her chest; they couldn't see into the shadowy corners, and there was no telling what was in there with them.

"Here." Skinner was handing her up the shirt, a pair of thermal long johns, and some sweatpants, heavy with insulation. "You can change over there. I won't look."

Skinner's eyes had begun to adjust to the gloom as he changed into long johns and sweatpants that were too big for him in the waist, but the right length by an inch or two. There was actually a fireplace in the room, but it had been packed with snow long ago, and was useless. There were the remains of what looked like a bunk bed, just a headboard and some springs, and a rattan chair, and a lot of empty jars and cans and beer bottles strewn around. He imagined hunters using the place as an overnight respite; it was too far out of town to have the usual marks of an abandoned building­empty syringes and full condoms.

In a heavy thermal shirt and her own parka, the sweatpants rolled up half a dozen times, Scully looked like a little icicle. The cold and exhaustion had begun to take its toll on her, and he remembered she'd been drugged for the past several days. Well...according to her.

Skinner rolled out the sleeping bag and pulled down the heavy duty zipper. Here at last was a really useful piece of equipment. He had found some long burning candles and matches, and had lit one and stuck it on the floor. The small flame burned bravely, illuminating all but the furthest shadows.

"Come over here," he told Scully. "You'll be warm in this."

For once she didn't argue, but climbed into the bag and let him zip her up.

"Mulder has this theory about cold and sleeping bags," she murmured drowsily.

"What theory?"

"Never mind."

"Try to get some sleep, Scully. We may have to hike out of here in the morning."

"What are you going to do?"

Good question. He shrugged. "I'll let you know when I figure that out myself."

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Late afternoon faded into evening. Scully dozed, woke, dozed again. She was exhausted. Hungry, too, but unwilling to get out of the sleeping bag to eat anything.

She rolled over and saw Skinner hunched against the wall, his knees drawn up, his arms around them. He was staring bleakly into the candle flame, shivering.

"Oh, for God's sake," she said, pushing her hand up through the opening in the bag to get to the zipper. "Get over here."

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next: Chapter Seven: Warm Heart
 
 

A Cold Day in July

Chapter Seven: Warm Heart

by jordan

Being inside a sleeping bag with Scully was a mixed blessing. First, there was nothing to do with his hands that wouldn't earn him disciplinary action in any court of law in America. Second...Well, first was bad enough. It was a tight fit in there for two people, even though they'd taken off their parkas and boots.

But he was Walter Skinner, and he was in charge of the situation, and keeping Scully and himself alive was his job. He fitted himself behind her, spoon style, and put his arm around her waist, his hand pressed against her midsection, neutral territory, although his hand was large and her midsection was small, and if she shifted north or south they were going to be in big trouble.

They lay together, their bodies tense, each of them afraid to move, but Skinner was all business, adjusting his position as if she wasn't a woman but a just a means of survival, and on a basic survival level, it worked. Where he was pressed against her, a blissful warmth flooded him, his shoulders, his chest, his stomach, all the way down to his feet, where his toes had been going disconcertingly numb.

The negative aspect of the basic survival level was that his basic reproductive organ enlarged painfully, and nudged at her back like a friendly dolphin.

If she felt it, she made no sign, but then, what sign could she make? Skinner closed his eyes, flushing, glad that at least she couldn't see his face. He thought that he could never go to sleep in this position, that the awkwardness and embarrassment of the situation would keep them up all night.

He said, "Are you okay?"

She made a small murmur of assent. "I'm fine. It really is a lot warmer."

"Can you sleep?"

"Yeah. I can sleep pretty much anywhere. Always could."

Surprisingly, he found himself nodding off almost immediately, lulled by the warmth and comfort of a human body next to his, something he hadn't experienced in a long time. The last woman he had been with had been a girl he picked up in a bar, a great lay who had unfortunately had turned out to be a whore sent to ruin his life...

Ah. There you go. The memory of that incident alleviated his erection at last. Slowly, he began to relax, as much as he could, into what he thought of as a sentinel's sleep, one eye open. Maybe one eye cracked...Anyway, a light sleep, where he was never fully unaware of his surroundings or the potential danger there.

God, her hair smelled nice. Women's hair did. Just a woman, just hair, just a nice scent. Shampoo, not nature. No reason to want to bury his nose in it like a dog and inhale so deeply that he'd breathe her into his very soul. He wanted to absorb her inside him, to feel their bones melting together, to internalize whatever was the very essence of Scully, and give her his strength in return. He wanted to make his reflection in her eyes mirror who he really was, the self that no one else knew, or would value if they did know. He wanted to conquer dragons and have her admire him for it. But because she lay stiff and resistant in his arms, because she watched him with suspicion and held back so much of the truth about herself, he knew that it was never going to happen, that her eyes would always harden against the unwelcome entry of his reflection, and because of these things he and Scully would always be worlds apart, and dragons would roam the face of the earth unchecked.

Still, it gave him enormous pleasure to know that his life was sustaining hers in the cold, cold world, and that when she had been in the worst trouble of her life, he'd been the one she'd turned to.

He could feel it the instant when she fell asleep. That tight two fisted grip she had on reality loosened, and then she let go of it altogether with a long soft sigh, after which she cuddled against him, welcoming the hand that drew her closer. Their breathing, their heartbeats, gradually found a common rhythm, and they slipped in and out of consciousness as comfortably and naturally as the rise and fall of tides.

Skinner dreamed of deadly dogs made of ice with glassy fangs that pressed their slobbering faces against the window, but couldn't come in. If Scully dreamed, he knew nothing of it; she never moved except now and again to shift her legs against his, causing a delicious agony in him that made him mildly surprised that steamwasn't rising from the sleeping bag.

And once, oddly, to grip his thumb with both hands and clutch it for a long time against her stomach, the way a falling person might grab on to a rope, or perhaps the way a desperate person might clutch at straws.

****************
 

Scully woke in the night to see the candle had burned about halfway down, the shadows of the room had moved in closer. Skinner slept heavily behind her, one hand possessively cupping her breast.

She moved it down and he muttered a protest in his sleep and repositioned his arm so that it was at his side, lying in the narrow gap between them, his hand on her hip now, but the fingers loose and nerveless.

How long had it been since someone had held her in the night, and warmed the dark and alone places she'd only discovered these past six years, since one by one she had lost so many of those she loved so dearly in the wake of the Quest? Since it had cost her her dreams, her beliefs, her hopes for the future? It was a real enough quest, and one she could never turn away from now. Mulder's knowledge and hers made her responsible, the way her medical knowledge made her responsible when someone was injured. It was an accountability she had never flinched from, even when she'd been dying because of it, but it had sucked the life out of her even if it hadn't killed her outright,and she'd lost the ability to be comforted, to be warmed, to accept a man's strong arms holding her all night. Or maybe just forgotten it...

Say what you would of Skinner, he would protect her with his life. When that first shot came, he had flung his own body over hers. When the car was out of control, he could have jumped, but instead he'd come back inside to help her. There'd been no hesitation, and no expectations of gratitude afterwards. He took his duty seriously, and his honor meant as much to him as honor had meant to...Scully sighed, feeling his arm rise and fall on her waist as she did...as much to him as it had meant to her father.

A profound depression had begun to darken her spirit. Much as she had hoped to be able to confide in Skinner, something just wouldn't let her. He hadn't seen the nightmarish things in the snow she'd seen when she'd been dragged off to be digested by some hellspawn she still didn't completely understand; he hadn't seen his own image attack him with a gun. He'd never seen an actual morphing, never even met Eddie Van Blundht, although he'd read the report. But you had to be there to appreciate something like that. What did she have to verify her story? She didn't even have a story, for God's sake. Just random memories that had been flashing around all day. All Skinner had seen were fingerprints and facts, smoking guns and hard cash, and evidence that would certainly convince her she was guilty if she'd been in his place. With all the sane, logical evidence against her, how could he be expected to believe her?

Yet she bitterly resented the fact that he didn't. In such a confusing world of shifting realities, all they had to go on was faith, faith in each other. She resented him handling her like a package, like a duty he had shouldered for Kersh and now manfully refused to put down. She resented his bullying, the way he ...what was the word for it? Patronized her? No, not patronized... Tolerated? Led on? Was he being nice to her now because he thought that this would be the way to get her to tell him the whole story he thought she was withholding?

Under it all, she detected a current of pure unexplainable irritability; something about Skinner just plain pissed her off.

Who the hell had been shooting at them from that cliff? It could only be the woman who had burst into the room that night, the woman who had looked so much like her it could have been her twin. THAT had been a nasty shock. What did she want? The money? Why was she trying to ruin her life? And why had she shot Mulder?

Poor Mulder. He'd be worried sick about her. If only there was some way to get word to him. Where was her cell phone? Why couldn't she remember anything past that morning someone called to tell her Mulder was shot? And even that was a haze. It seemed like...maybe there'd been some missing time before that, too. Times when she had become so sleepy during the afternoons she'd gone home to take a nap and then...slept all the rest of that day, and all night. God, who knew what that morph/clone/twin thing had been up to during those naps, what crimes had been committed in her name?

The sad fact was that there was probably no way out of this mess, that her career was ended, both as a doctor and as a Federal agent. Very likely she and Mulder would never work on another case again, and that made her want to just curl up and cry.

So many nights had been spent like this, feeling sorry for herself to the point of tears, but then finding sleep as a respite, getting herself together to go into the office the next day, somehow going on with her life because that's what you did, what you were expected to do. Because Mulder was there, too, doing the same thing. But now that she thought of it, on any one of those dark and lonely nights, wouldn't it have been some sort of consolation to feel this warm heavy arm around her, to hear someone else breathing in the darkness, and to know that she wasn't so alone after all?

A terrible, secret thought came into her mind then, unbidden, though she'd tried hard to forget it. What an awful time to think of it now! She made a face and groaned at the memory, and Skinner moved his arm back around her and drew her closer against his chest in his sleep. This man was born to cuddle, she thought wryly. What a waste.

It had been after that incident where he'd been found with the dead prostitute. Scully had done the autopsy, examined the evidence. She had tried to remain professional when she was doing the ever-so-careful exam on the genitals, noting the minute evidence of latex, the redness, the swelling and other indications of recent sex. He'd used a condom. The condom itself had been entered as evidence, a smear of Skinner's sperm made for a DNA comparison. Bending over the microscope, she had heard the lab techs talking quietly in the other room, laughing about something, and one of them had said, "No kidding. The son of a bitch must be hung like a bull."

And God help her, she had been turned on. From out of nowhere, she, who had learned to suppress so much of that side of herself, ignored or denied those feelings so often, had stood there pretending to look down the tube of the microscope while her body burned with a slow heat that was both pleasurable and frustrating, but above all, shameful. Not just Catholic shameful, but for God's sake, this was a murder investigation. How utterly, terribly inappropriate to think of her boss, her starched, stern faced, ever so proper boss, bare chested and thrusting on top of a woman in bed...hung like a bull...

No. No. No. It was just the proximity of a large attractive male...like less than a millimeter away...and that curious little nudge she'd felt in the small of her back earlier, well, not so little ("hung like a bull") and the fear that was corroding her common sense, and the dire danger of their situation all combining to make her have these crazy thoughts. And the drugs, too. It might take several days to get them completely out of her system. Her mind still wasn't working as clearly as usual, her full self control hadn't been restored. She would be strong now, push these thoughts away, think instead of her mother, and how good it would be to spend a few days at home when all this was over...that is, if she got bail and had some time before the trial...

Tired as she was, it was still a long time before Scully could get to sleep again. She lay thinking dark thoughts in the darkening room, and when the morning came, the snowstorm continued unabated, and there was no light to break the gloom in her heart.

*****************

Next: Chapter Eight:The Trap
 

A Cold Day in July

Chapter Nine: Heat

by jordan

It was hard to tell exactly when the storm turned, but sometime during the early afternoon the interior of the shack began to lighten. There was no cessation in the constant whispering sound of snow, certainly no rise in the temperature-- if anything, it got colder as the ceiling of clouds lifted--but something in the air changed, something that said the weather was turning.

Scully couldn't stay out long. She thought she wanted to be alone to cry, but once outside, the sudden slap of the cold air seemed to fortify her. She leaned against the side of the house, her arms wrapped around herself, and watched her frigid breath take shape in the air, After a few minutes she knew she would have to go back in and face him. How, she couldn't imagine. Back in there with S kinner, his hands on her under her jacket, she had been so aroused that it had almost been too late to stop. And he knew it. He had to have known it; she'd kissed him like some hormone crazed teenager. It had to be the most humiliating moment of her life.

She thought back over all she and Mulder had been through. No... Eddie Van Blundht; that had been the lowest note in her litany of humiliations. Even worse than Ed, or that small town sheriff... Each time she let a man get close to her even in terms of proximity, she ended up beaten senseless, drugged, humiliated-- and now her boss, Skinner, for Gods sake, had kissed her, and felt her up, not because he wasn't an honorable man, a gentleman, but because she had practically begged for it--

She closed her eyes and rocked herself, groaning a breath of white smoke as she pushed her back against the wall of the house as hard as she could. Mulder would never, ever, ever let her hear the end of this if he found out. He would laugh his ass off, then tease her, then smirk at Skinner, and she would just have to bite the bullet one more time, keep a straight face while he had that...that expression he wore. Once again he would display that maddening freedom of feeling, of decision making with his own best interests always taking priority, that she had always so admired, even envied, in him. Mulder wore his passion on his sleeve in bright colors for all the world to see, while even under her dark somber clothes Scully wore plain white underwear most of the time.

How the hell was she going to go back in there and face him again? Skinner had always treated her with respect, no matter what else he'd said or done. Even last night, in the sleeping bag together, he'd downplayed any sexual connotations, , and now, now he would never look at her the same way again. She hadn't realized how much that image he had of her meant to her until now that it was gone. Tears came to her eyes, but she blinked them back.

Damn him! He'd just been trying to call her bluff, just been trying to piss her off, and she'd kissed him like...like...like...

She banged the back of her head against the house a couple of times, feverish with self loathing. Where the hell had all those erotic feelings come from? She'd held everything in check for so long, been so collected, so cool, so in control of the situation, until she felt his mouth on hers, and then because it was so unexpected, because she'd been shutting her eyes t o all the sexual possibilities of their situation, it caught her totally off guard, and all resolve collapsed, all anger turned to uncontrollable need; now how could she ever look at him again, or think of him without remembering how he'd made her feel?

A sudden thought occurred to her. Oh, no. Oh, no.

Scully hid her face in her hands, horrified by the flash of insight. The real reason she was so upset with him was because he'd made her lose control, because the worst thing she could imagine in the world was losing control of her feelings, and that was exactly why she had been so angry with Skinner in the first place. All the time she'd been accusing him of being a control freak it was because she saw in him what she hated so much in herself.

Oh, God.

Her teeth were chattering so hard she was afraid she'd chip them; on a purely biological basis, she had to go back inside. Dragging her new self knowledge like a bowling ball chained to her ego, she crawled back over the window sill.

Skinner was sitting by the fire, staring into it, his expression so full of misery that when she first looked at him she forgot everything else but a stab of compassion and shame. He must have been so disappointed in her.

She cleared her throat and he looked at her quickly. "Pretty cold out there," she said.

"I think we can keep the fire going until the storm passes."

"It's not snowing so much now," she offered, coming to sit on the floor beside him.

He looked at her with eyes that couldn't shutter out the pain. "Scully..."

"Sir," she interrupted, putting her fingers on his sleeve, away from his body, "Listen. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry for everything. I...I just can't remember what happened to me. Back in Georgetown, I was getting dizzy spells, and I went to a doctor on a visit to my brother's, a specialist, and he gave me a series of tests and that's how I know the tumor is in remission. His name is Jerald Ambrose. I've got his number at home. You can contact him when we get back and see my test results. He said the dizzy spells might be because I had low blood pressure, but my department physical showed I was in good health. But I got sleepy a lot, and slept sometimes in the afternoons and all night. Now I'm thinking I must have been drugged even then. I woke up in that motel room and I couldn't remember anything. Nothing. So I tried to call Mulder but his phone just rang and rang, and then I called the Gunmen, trying to find him. It was Byers who answered, who told me what happened, who figured out where I was, and who suggested I contact you." She paused for a breath. "I think I remember that backpack being in my room. I think I heard people making love in the other room. Maybe Dave was her lover, maybe her partner. I swear I don't know. I know how lame it all sounds but I just can't remember. And I don't expect you to believe me. How could I expect you to believe me? I know it was unreasonable, but it just...it hurt me and it frightened me, and I thought if I couldn't convince you, how the hell could I ever convince anyone of the truth?"

He said, "Well, now that I've had some time to think of it, I can see some big holes in logic if someone is trying to blame you for these things. For instance, you were with me almost every minute night before last, and hardly had time to sneak out and stuff a full grown man into the trunk of the car, much less cut the brake linings just enough so that the fluid would leak out on our ascent up that road. And even if you'd done those things, you wouldn't have arranged to be in the car when it went over the cliff. I've got to pretty much rule out the partner theory, too, since whoever was shooting at us from that hill seems to have wanted you dead more than me."

"I don't know. Was she shooting to kill us or just to scare us away from the car so she could get the money?"

Skinner raised his fingers to the thin red welt on his neck where the bullet had grazed him. "My bet is on shooting to kill."

"Someone must have been passing themself off as me, and trying to discredit me, and that's not the worst of it..."

"What?" he prompted gently. "What's the worst of it, Scully?"

She couldn't meet his eyes, but stared at his sleeve as she spoke. "You're having trouble believing someone is running around here who looks just like me and trying to kill us. I know that this ‘someone' exists because I saw her that night in the motel room. She pointed a gun at me. She called you names, she called me names. She hit you with that chair. But she didn't kill me. I threw a lamp at her and she ran away. Why go through all this, Skinner? Why would she want to discredit me, make it look like I had shot Mulder and stolen money and fled the country? What sense does that make? I mean, what could she hope to gain from it?"

"To discredit the X-files, maybe?"

Scully's voice held more resignation than bitterness. "I'm not the X-Files. It's Mulder. He'd just get a new partner and go on. They've never seen me as much of a threat except that hurting me would piss off Mulder."

"Maybe..."

She waited, but he was silent. She said, "Maybe what?" He looked into her face. "Scully, I was once approached with an offer I couldn't refuse. A kind of blackmail. I went along with it...I could have lost everything. But it was just a way of getting a hold over me so that I was just as dirty as the Cigarette Smoking Man, in my own way. Most of what they've done to me has been an attempt to discredit me, one way or another. Maybe they knew you wouldn't go along with it like the rest of us."

Scully said spontaneously, "Oh, no, sir. Not you."

He gave her a strange look, half gratitude, half denial. "Maybe they were trying to get at Mulder through you, and set up the whole elaborate ruse to make it look like your thinking had deteriorated to the point of insanity, and that would be their excuse in getting rid of Mulder."

"Then why wasn't Mulder killed? What a perfect opportunity for his enemies to take him out and get off scot free, with me taking the blame for it."

Skinner's shoulders moved up and down briefly. "I've wondered that myself. I saw the tape, and it really did look like..." "Like what?"

The fire crackled noisily, and Skinner fed it some more pieces of wood. "It looked like Mulder was about to hit you. But...Mulder would never hit...YOU."

"Not and live, no."

"No, Scully..." He was looking at her with revelation in his eyes. "He said, ‘what have you done--' and then we couldn't make out the words. What if he was saying, ‘What have you done with Scully?'"

Her fingers gripped his wrist in excitement. "You do believe me, then?"

"That's not the point. It--"

"That IS the point?"

He shook his head ruefully. "No, Scully. The point is, I don't care anymore. I can't get my hands on the facts, I can't make sense of your story or the story the evidence is trying to tell us, of the money or the dead body in the car or whoever it was that broke a chair over my head the other night. But it just doesn't matter right now. I'm on your side.

That's all that matters. I know I made an ass of myself and I'm sorry. Extenuating circumstances, my ego, whatever caused it. I know I keep acting like your enemy. But before God, Scully, I am not."

"Thank you," she said softly. "It means a lot to hear you say that. But it's still not enough. I just want you to believe me."

He looked into her eyes. Scully felt a rush of sensation, imagined his hands on her breasts again, and felt the color rising in her face. She bent her head and closed her eyes to hide it. Please, God, make me a better person than this...

They were silent again. The snow had hushed itself, and the room was even lighter now, but colder, too. There was a creaking sound as if something was moving around on the wooden roof. Scully looked up, startled. "What is that?"

"Snowdrift. Enough of it piles up and then it slides down under its own weight."

Skinner got up and stretched, and Scully looked at him despite her better intentions. He was a magnificently built man, those wide shoulders and tapered hips and that perfect ass. Scully! s he chided herself, and then thought stubbornly, well, it IS.

She knew she was Eve in the garden now; having tasted of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, she was going to have t o bear the awful burden of sexual awareness from now on.

He looked down at her. "Scully, it occurs to me that maybe the reason we can't make sense of this situation is because there isn't any sense to be made of it."

"I don't understand."

"Well, look. Whoever shot Mulder obviously didn't have a plan. Maybe it was someone trying to pass herself off as you and he caught on and confronted her. Then why didn't she shoot him and kill him? She had the gun, she had the opportunity, she had you tucked away as the culprit, drugged up so you wouldn't remember what happened. She knew you couldn't defend yourself with witnesses or even a clear memory of where you'd been or what you'd been doing." He looked thoughtful. "She fired the gun three times and only really hit him once, and didn't do so much damage with that shot. On the tape it looked like she just panicked."

"So she didn't want to kill him."

"If she wanted to simply take over your life, then why keep you alive? Why not kill you and just assume your life? Why go to all this elaborate ruse of discrediting you first?"

Scully rubbed her temples wearily. "I don't know. It just goes round and round and I can't seem to get a grip on it."

He crouched in front of her. "Maybe that's because there's no grip to get. I saw those x-rays. Or whatever they were. I saw the circles drawn that indicated the cancer was spreading at a rapid rate and they told me the frontal lobes and the temporal lobes were both involved."

"So you think this clone person might be going insane?"

"Well...it's the only thing that makes sense of so many things that DON'T make sense. Someone going crazy might start a half dozen brilliant plans and then be unable to see them through, or start some complicated scheme and then get lost herself in its complications."

There was something overhead that groaned again, and Scully twitched, rolling her eyes up, her nerves still raw. "You don't think the roof will collapse, do you?"

"No, it's too steeply pitched, designed for that. The snow will slide off. The worst that could happen is one of those trees might lose a limb or something, but we're safe in here even if that happens."

"I don't feel safe," she said, without thinking first, and saw the impact in his eyes. He stood up again.

"Well, you are," he told her. "Safe as houses, as the saying goes."

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean..."

He waved a hand at her. "Don't. If we keep apologizing to each other we're never going to be able to talk about anything else."

"The storm is breaking up," she told him, hoping to change the subject. "I could feel it when I was outside. The weather is finally starting to change for the better"

He half smiled down at her. "I feel it, too," he said.

**************

They boiled water, made stew for lunch, and watched the shadows falling across the room until it was time to light the last candle. They didn't have much to say to each other, each one thinking the exact same thing, the cold, the sleeping bag; Skinner kept stoking the fire, trying to make it warmer in the room, trying to avoid the inevitable. It stopped snowing altogether at about four in the afternoon, but then it was too late to try to l eave the shack; the dark could catch them out there with the unseen enemy who might or might not still be looking for them.

With the onset of evening they were both increasingly nervous, moving further apart instead of closer together, and still the darkness crept into the room, and the cold, and the wind began to rise, fluttering the velvet curtain and blowing out the fire a couple of times.

When their breath became white frost in the air, when they finally had to let the fire go out and close the door, Skinner finally said, "Scully...it's dropping below freezing in here."

She nodded, keeping her chin down as if trying to hide the shuddering of her body. She took off her shoes slowly, as if dreading what was to come. Skinner felt sorry for her but he didn't know what to say.

Finally she got into the sleeping bag and looked up at him with such worried, tormented eyes, he said, "Look, I can sleep out here. I'll be all right. I'm not tired anyway."

"Don't be ridiculous."

"I'm not. It's not snowing now and someone could possible find this place and I really should stand guard anyway."

"Skinner," she said softly. "It's all right. Really. I'll trust you, if you'll trust me."

The firelight in her eyes was his undoing. "Just for awhile," he said. "Just until we warm up a little."

*************************

Night and dark. The slow creeping groan of the snow as it slid closer and closer to the edge of the house, then sounds like footsteps that were clumps of snow falling from the angle of the roof to the side of the house. Skinner checked the door, checked the window, even went outside briefly, though it was so dark that with the candle he felt like a moving target.

He tried to kill time, hoping she would fall asleep. But the cold finally won out, and he pulled off his boots and parka and unzipped the bag, waking her briefly, and lay down behind her, and zipped himself in.

Night and dark. The flicker of the candle, and strange creaking sounds of the freeze outside, shifting, sliding, dripping, crackling. The roof groaning under its burden of snow.

She was shaking all over, from nerves or cold he couldn't tell and didn't want to know. Where their bodies touched, his chest to her back, his upper thighs to the backs of hers, the chill gradually dissipated. Still, they lay stiffly, afraid to touch anywhere except where was strictly necessary. But the cold was more intense than their embarrassment, and when Skinner felt the fine tremors of her shivering, he put his arm around her and drew her against him with a firm hand, making decisive movements, nothing slow or sensual about them. All business, no indication that anything had ever happened between them before this.

"You okay?" he asked.

She nodded, her hair tickling his chin. "It feels colder than it did last night, doesn't it?"

"It probably is. The cloud cover kept the temperature up a little, like a low ceiling in a room. Now it's clearing, and we'll probably get a really hard freeze."

"But we'll be able to get out of here tomorrow, won't we?"

"Yes. Definitely tomorrow, at first light."

It was a goal to be prayed for, just to make it until morning. It was heaven and hell to lie here beside her, knowing he might never hold her again like this...

Like tonguing a