By: pusher
pusher@unforgettable.com
 

"For the sake of duty, I have always driven to the edge of madness, to the
brink of feeling myself, one foot stepping off the ledge and plummeting my
soul into the unknown horrors of the evil of man, to identify with and
become those who thrive on the outskirts of human misery. You, you have
always brought me back from that precipice, prevented me from taking that
final step from which I can never return, you, who have always been there,
have always been my salvation, but I fear this time, however, you will not
be able to take my hand to lead me back."

He pauses, taking a deep, shaky breath, feeling the nausea rise from the
depths of his gut to his adam's apple as the room spins with the fury that
would make the hardiest sea salt lose his supper. Swallowing another couple
of Dramamines without water, the sickly sweet substance of the coat grating
against his inner larynx, he dully wonders how many of the funny yellow
pills he has ingested in the past few hours, seemingly too many to keep
count of, and turns back to the hiss of the gears rolling against the tape
of the hand-held recorder.

"I suppose what many had predicted of me was inevitable, perhaps I have
been lucky for too long and that this is merely fate coming to collect it's
toll for the previous times I have played with insanity but somehow managed
to cheat my way out..."

One month earlier:

An Arson Crime Scene in
Erie, PA

Blackened. Burnt. Devastation. The faint, musty odor of ash rising into the
air as a light drizzle of rain plinks silently down on the charred embers
of the house, completely gutted except for the impassively solid concrete
base, its only signs of a fire battle displayed in the angry, scorched
marks on its surface.

He stops in front of the yellow tape line and lets his eyes drift close as
he lifts his face up to the open sky to let the soft mist of water fall on
his features. The slight curve in his throat moves gently up and down as he
takes a deep, shaky breath and tilts his head back down forcing his eyes to
open, to assimilate the details of the crime scene.

Pausing from inspecting the remains of a victim, Special Agent Dana Scully
glances back at her partner standing forlornly in the overcast light, his
billowing black coat cleanly blending in with the sooty remains, a tall,
lonely figure rising out from the ashes. She wonders if that is how he
looked so many years ago, just a boy sitting among the ruins of his
friend's house, that lost, sick feeling of utter helplessness. Haunted.

Snapping off the gloves, she abandons her work to step back under the line.

"Are you all right, Mulder?"

The agent shrugs in what he hopes passes for a noncommittal expression.

"Why, do I look a whiter shade of pale?"

"You didn't have to come along. This isn't exactly helping your phobia."

Biting the inside of his cheek, Mulder suppresses the urge to snap at her
penchant for stating the obvious. When the NCAVC asked for her to
temporarily fill in for their unavailable medical examiner all the way up
in Amish hell, he somehow ended up tagging along like a goddamned Queequeg
despite the fact that this particular sight makes his innards tie
themselves into a knot. He even put up with the feeble,
'I-don't-need-you-to-constantly-hover-over-me-you-
overprotective-neanderthal' bullshit rant that she'd tossed at him,
probably out of sheer habit, because there was no way he was going to let
her be 'fine' on her own and go driving for half a day, then muck around in
this dump, not with the way she's been seeing things everywhere because the
last thing he wants to do is find out that she'd plowed headlong into a
telephone pole or the side of a building after wigging out from another one
of those ill-timed wraiths that had nothing better to do than pop up
uninvited at the Dana Scully mental house of horrors.

So fuck the Violent Crimes assholes if they think 'Spooky' Mulder is some
sort of unweaned breast-feeder umbilically tied to his partner, fuck the
fire and the poor, dead sap who ended up extra-crispy on this week's Chaco
Chicken menu, fuck the ghosts, the apparitions, the boogeyman and the car
he drove them here in. Fuck it all, even if it was all illogical and stupid
and he'd have week-long nightmares because of this.

But he doesn't say that.

"No, I'll be okay." A faint, reassuring smile.

She touches the side of his face for a moment, as if willing her strength
and calm to flow into him through that brief contact point.

"This won't take too much longer," she murmurs, and he watches her step
away from him, feeling the warmth flush still on his cheek where her
fingers had been only moments before.

And he remembers why he does these illogical and stupid things.

Christ. It's been three-and-a-half years, nearly forty months since the
Marsden case, but the twisting in his gut feels as fresh as the newly
formed ashes among the ruins, despite the unclear blur of events--

...Somehow getting the boys out of the burning house.

...Playing the dutiful agent and making his statement.

...Going straight home afterwards and vomiting in the toilet until there
was nothing left, then curling up into a little ball on the cold tile
floor.

He sighs, shifting his foot, hoping she finishes soon before he falls
victim to the willies creeping up his abdomen. Despite not caring about
what the ABIS crew thinks of him, he really doesn't want an audience to
witness the indignity of him slipping into a catatonic fetal position, even
though the idea seems incredibly attractive right about now.

(Then don't think about it, knucklehead. You're the damn profiler. Start
profiling.)

Clamping down on the queasiness spiraling out and threatening to run
rampant in his midsection, he scans the scene with the cold, detached eye
of years of Behavioral Sciences training, ticking off observations,
factoids, and statistics as the gears grind methodically in his head.

The placement...

--So obvious--

The position of the body...

--So simple--

Indicates an arson-homicide...

--So wrong--

Or a homicide using the cover of fire...

--Not the first--

Meticulously planned, executed...

--Not the last--

As if done so many times before...

--Like the show?--

An experienced killer...

--Hate men--

Using anger, murder as a fuel...

--Hate women--

An organized serial killer...

--Hate everyone--

Kill everyone.

"Mulder!"

That slightly sharp pitch, that particular agitated inflection rapidly
snaps him out of contemplation like a cold douse of water driving every
single dark thought, every anxiety and fear straight out of his head,
except for one. And that particular one brings him crashing through the
rubble like an enraged bear, heart pushing up his throat, blindly unheeding
of the angry shouts and glares of the other investigating agents, until he
is, at last, at his partner's side.

(Dear god, no, not now, not another sight, just let me just get her away
from this, get her away, get her, do something you fool, take the focus off
her, say something...)

"What is it, Scully?"

With shaking fingers, she lifts up several fragments of melted plastic
rectangles burnt into the blackened right hip of the corpse, mostly
destroyed except for a few letters of name, a partial credit-card number,
and a half-intact, curling picture on a driver's license. He carefully
wipes the charcoaled smudges off the ID with his handkerchief, nearly
snapping the card in two when he recognizes the face.

"Doctor Scanlon," she whispers.

Classroom 1
National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime
Quantico, VA

Click.

A contrast of white, metal, and a brownish-reddish blur splays itself
against the wall accompanied by the humming of the slide projector.

Doctor Scully squints slightly at the picture and fiddles with the focus
switch as the picture grains slowly sharpen to form into the blackened,
curled corpse from the crime scene. Taking advantage of the few extra
seconds to compose herself, the agent forces her mind to click into lecture
mode, to steady her nerves and voice, and to push out what the discovery of
this particular victim has meant to her, and that she is about to
systematically take him apart before the agents of the Arson and Bombing
Investigative Subunit.

"Though certain forms of identification reveal the deceased to be one Kevin
Scanlon, male, aged forty-two, positive ID can not be confirmed until we
obtain dental records."

Click.

The next slide reveals what could be classified by the untrained eye as a
squishy, pinkish, leaking mass oozing out of an overbroiled steak, blown up
to all six-and-a-half feet of grisly glory.

"An autopsy revealed the absence of any amount of carbon monoxide or smoke
residue in what remained of the alveolar mass in the lung. This indicates
that the victim was dead prior to the fire, and may have been dead for
quite a while."

As her voice rattles further on the details of her findings, her eyes scan
out over the dark, shifting shapes, attempting to make out the one that is
her partner.

"...further analysis included the discovery of fragments of metal..."

An authorative 'click' advances the next slide.

"...embedded in the neck,"

Click.

"...the sinus cavity,"

Click.

"...and gums."

"Maybe they're alien implants," a voice sneers out, accompanied by a few
nervous chuckles.

A muffled splash immediately follows, its heels nipped by a sodden "Hey!"

"Sorry," a familiar tenor drawls. "I'm a bit clumsy in the dark. Be
careful, I also have a tendency to drop my gun as well, which could be
tragic since the decocking lever's stuck off."

More sniggers.

Agent Scully clears her throat loudly, glaring at the faint outline of
silhouettes in front of her, before continuing in a voice expert in its
ability to lower the temperature of the room by fifteen degrees, as another
slide pops up on the wall.

"These were the objects recovered." She points to the triangular one
gracing the upper left-hand corner of the picture.

"The tip of what appears to be a butter knife wedged above the posterior
atlas of the spine."

Moving across the frame, she points to the smaller, pointed object,
obscured in deep brown rust and goo, on the right side.

"Part of a nail file buried up in the superior nasal meatus."

Her hand drops down to the remaining blackened and crusting object left.

"A one-centimeter screw drilled into the gums right below the third left
molar."

"Ah, what are your theories, Agent Scully?" That same sneering voice,
though notably chastened.

"The sheer crudity of the work denotes extreme delusional and compulsive
behavior. This person may be so-called 'experimenting' on the vicims or
believes he himself is an abductee and is acting out these fantasies in a
similar fashion."

A long, uncomfortable silence hovers in the air, broken only by the hum of
the slide projector, as no one dares to mention the name that instantly
leaps into mind. Scully takes a deep breath, letting the words spill out
before she can choke on them.

"We may have another Duane Barry out there."

Another long pause.

"Thank you, Agent Scully."

The machine dies with a weak rattle, settling the room into darkness
moments before the fluorescent overhead lights snap on. As Scully adjusts
her eyes to the sudden brightness, the formerly oblique figures seated
before her sharpening into clarity, much like the first muddled slide, and
silently rise to file out of the room. She notes, in passing, one
particular agent awkwardly attempting to hide the wet, brown stain cooling
in his lap with his binder, has developed an intense fascination with the
main hallway.

After the door shuts behind the last person, she zooms in on her partner
sitting innocently in the rear, the wire frame of his spectacles covering
the most outrageously dishonest, little-boy look ever spread across his
face. To his credit, Mulder has the minimal grace to appear only slightly
smug in light of his unusually successful effort at bullying someone.

"Mulder..." She sighs, eyeing the incriminating empty styrofoam cup on the
left corner of his desk. Well, at least he hadn't resorted to his standard
male-rape threat, though he probably would have figured out a way to work
it in had it gone far enough.

"I hope you aren't going to accuse me of wasting a perfectly good cup of
lukewarm coffee on Agent Milchaud."

"Accusation usually infers at least a modicum of innocence."

He pauses in his attempt to look indignant, instantly switching tactics.

"You wouldn't hurt a guy wearing glasses, would you?"

* * * * *

Special Agent in Charge Bob Wasserman of the ABI Subunit covertly watches
in mild trepidation as Spooky Mulder sits there quietly at a vacated desk,
apparently lost in his own little universe, studying the contents of the
recent file quickly being dubbed the 'Stake-n-Bake' Case.

Never said the boys weren't quick in their ability to spew off stupid nicks
at the drop of a hat. And it was probably the same self-contratulatory
group that originally gave the Spookster his charming little moniker as
well, though, as the ASAC continues to observe the agent, something about
this particular guy's demeanor doesn't exactly strike him as the demented,
starry-eyed, foo-fighter-chasing crank snickered about in Behavioral
Sciences, who, despite all the derision, name-calling, and downright nasty
little-sister jokes, carries a profile accuracy rating still historically
unsurpassed by any one else in the Bureau.

So when Spooky Mulder volunteers to do a monograph, no one turns him down.

Not even Milchaud, despite stumbling out of the classroom over a
half-an-hour ago, with the contents of a McDonald's eight million dollar
lawsuit lovingly splattered on him. In all honesty, the agent's ill-timed
remark wasn't too far off from what everybody was thinking. He'd just had
the unfortunate stupidity to say it out loud.

After going through the contents of what seems to be six or seven times,
Spooky finally closes the folder and puts his face in his hands. Tiredly
rubs his eyes, then fishes out from his coat one of those Tylenol sample
packets he sees sitting by the bucketfuls in hospitals and doctors'
offices, and pops the capsules in his mouth, swallowing them dry. Then
drops his face back behind that wall of fingers.

Just then, the Mrs. walks in and all eyes, meaning to or not, automatically
swing to her. It isn't too often that Violent Crimes gets a female presence
to grace it, especially one with legs you could just die for a lick behind
one knee, that jaw-dropping combination of the most vivid blue eyes and red
hair he's ever seen, and guts steely enough to uflinchingly crack open the
most putrescent ribcage of a two-week old drown victim. All that combined
plus the unfettered testosterone and male locker-room mentality inherent to
the section, and you can tell when Agent Scully's been around that day by
the dozen or so graphic dominatrix-doctor-roleplaying fantasies floating
about the general pool the same late afternoon.

Her eyes flicker around the room, cursorially passing over everyone,
searching for something. Evidently you have to be psychotic or dead for
Doctor Scully to even spare you a second glance, and then it's being faced
with either a gun or scalpel in hand, neither option particularly arousing.
Which is how her other non-obscene unofficial moniker ended up being 'Freak
Magnet.'

No, that's wrong, he amends. The only attention she ever pays to anyone is
to her partner and when her radar finally locks on to him, she heads in his
direction, pointedly ignoring everybody else in the room. Wasserman
supposes pairing up accident-prone Spooky with the good doctor was sheer
budgetary brilliance that the bigwigs are still slapping each other on the
back for, considering the number of times the agent manages to land himself
in the hospital. A bullet-charmer, as accounting affectionately labels it.

Spooky lifts his head up as she puts a hand on his shoulder sitting at the
corner of his desk and murmuring something to him. He listens, then murmurs
something back. A nod. A glance.

Oh, how the rumors flew about this particular pair, but they had, for the
most part, been totally unsubstantiated, though, he notes, he has never
seen partners communicate quite like that. Then again the same speculations
concerning Dana Scully and Jack Willis had made the gossip mill six years
back, all of which had never been quite confirmed either.

And Lord-Jesus-fucking-Christ, Spooky suddenly swivels his head right
towards him with this weird, speculative look, as if the guy's actually
heard what he's been thinking all this time, and to make it worse, his
partner's also following the line of his sight and is now also looking at
him as well.

Wasserman drops his eyes down to the papers in front of him, suddenly quite
interested in the contents of the newest 302 to hit his desk. Feeling the
focus shift, he lets himself glance back up as the Bullet-charmer and the
Freak Magnet both get up and turn to leave, the former pausing briefly to
pick up his folder and let her pass in front of him, his hand unconsciously
traveling to the small of her back, and as their footsteps fade down the
hall, the ASAC lets out a long breath he didn't know he was holding.

* * * * * * * *
(2/11)posted to ATXC: 6/26/97
* * * * * * * *

"All right, Mulder, care to tell me what happened back there?"

Fingers drum on the steering wheel in an internal rhythmic pattern, mutely
answering the question as his foot presses slightly harder on the gas
pedal, sending the Taurus grumbling up to a protesting sixty-five.

Dana Scully doesn't expect a long oratorium, just something, a word, a
grunt, a stupid joke, anything to dissolve the silence of what looks like
is going to transpire into another one of her partner's black moods, a
condition showing up with disturbing frequency these days.

Mulder was always moody, but rarely mercurial.

She would attempt to tell a blonde joke herself, but for some reason, they
all come out as 'Question: Where does Detective White do when she wakes up
in the morning? Answer: Why she goes home, of course,' the punchline
inevitably fizzing out before the setup even finishes, which is probably
unfair in light of it all, because Mulder's told a gazillion groaners on a
regular basis.

"What do you mean?" he finally answers.

"You practically shoved me out the door back at Quantico, trying to get me
out of the place like it was on fire." Ugh, not a good analogy, she
mentally berates herself, watching him reflexively twitch at the last word.
"What's going on?" she concludes lamely.

"I didn't care much for what Wasserman was thinking."

"What?"

"Never mind." Then, silence again. And that drumming.

Mulder shifts in his seat, feeling Scully's eyes drill into the side of his
head as acutely as one of her cranial saws, boring in past the skin, past
the bone and meningial layer, exposing the cavity and attempting to pick
out the pieces inside the mess of cobwebs and cosmic sludge of his brain.

What can he say to her that won't get him committed for sure? His
perception of people, what they think, they feel, suddenly it seems all so
obvious, their actions, every movement, every twitch, unconscious glance or
fidget, it's like he's suddenly looking inside of everyone, and
unfortunately, they seem to be all shouting, assailing him at once.

Except for Scully.

Stupid thing is, metaphysical connection or not, he still can't read what
the hell is going on in her head half the time. And he finds it extremely
odd and endlessly frustrating that except for her regrettably bad ability
to act, he can't pick out her thoughts like he can do with just about
anybody else, considering he'd eagerly give up a limb to be able to snoop
at the details of her mind.

(Shut the fuck up, Mulder.)

Christ, there'd been two psychos who'd tried to lobotomize her, all in a
span of less than six months, and here he was, asshole supreme, now trying
to do the same thing mentally. That fucking rage of curiosity was wholly
the fault of the bitch Pandora, her weakness tirelessly driving his
thoughts 'round in an endless moebius strip.

He eases on the gas, dropping the velocity a fraction below the speed
limit, clearing out that pointless mental loop.

Enigmatic Doctor Scully, indeed.

A rustle of clothing catches his eye as she arches her back, stretching.
The subsequent glance downwards reveals a pair of experimentally wiggling
toes freed from the confines of sensible shoes. Which can only mean--

"Maybe I should drive," she offers.

"I'd rather not."

"We'd get back faster."

Dana Scully, Magna Cum Laude graduate of the Evil Knievel school of "we
don't need no stinkin' brakes" driving, who feels it ultimately necessary
to spend as little time possible in connecting the distance between two
points, who can get from Annapolis to the office in under an hour and a
half, despite rush-hour traffic, the little speed demon who picked her
teeth with the bones of drag racers after she'd chewed them up for a snack
now wants to commandeer the vehicle to the dismay of one Fox Mulder.

>From a simple physical inspection, no one would never think that the inside
of one of those dainty feet contained at least twenty pounds of pure,
unadulterated lead. Hell, if there was anything that would've turned Mulder
religious it would be her driving, finding the attraction of the instant
prayer irresistible once when she hit the New Jersey turnpike at seventy,
sending the poor Taurus screaming through the U-turn like greased fucking
lightning on amphetamines.

And then she has the gall to wonder why he insists on driving most of the
time.

"That's because you're oblivious to things like speed limits and stop signs
and pedestrians."

"You're exaggerating."

"Well, maybe not pedestrians. You do make at least a half-hearted attempt
to miss the ones who try to get out of the way."

Still, it is rather cute seeing those tiny bare feet work authoratively on
the pedals, even if it is only out of the corner of streaming vision as
they're being propelled forward with enough g-force to slam his eyeballs
into the back of his skull.

"That's getting old, Mulder. Just like your obligatory need to hum 'The
Little Old Lady From Pasadena' every time I get behind the wheel."

He weighs the decision of her ankles against his lunch of sunflower seeds
and a change of boxer shorts then taps on the accelerator again, bringing
the car up once more to sixty-five.

Attention drawn from his driving abilities down to the contents of the case
folder, Scully flips through the documents, one by one, eyes slightly
narrowing into a frown as she brings the report closer to her face.

"You're squinting again."

"Hm?" "

Where are your glasses?"

"I dunno. Somewhere in the office, I think."

But he's noticed that she's also taken to doing her field notes and reports
without them too, and he's pretty damn sure it's not vanity. He's also
pretty damn sure she hasn't gotten any contact lenses lately, either. Well
at least it isn't any sort of major vision impairment she's afflicted with,
just a mild bit of nearsightedness, something that affects him as well.

That slightly myopic way of viewing things.

"I heard you offered to do the profile for this." She flips through the
pages.

"Surprisingly enough, Wasserman didn't seem to have any problem with it."

"And you thought everyone in Violent Crimes considered you a nutcase."

"Only you know where I store my nuts, Scully." A smirk.

"Oh, have you finally gotten them shipped back from England?"

"Ouch."

Four years of endless verbal fencing with her permanently glib partner has
sharpened Dana Scully's repartee to a level that would boggle the mind of
any unfortunate soul who stumbled upon their exchange, but she silently
wonders if she would be able to carry on a regular conversation without a
hint of innuendo or morbid humor ever again.

Probably not.

Smiling inwardly, she pauses at an unfamilar picture. It is not of Scanlon
but of another charred, decaying figure, rotting among the ashes. Several
more of the same series follow in suit.

"Where did you get these?"

"Where did I get what?"

He sneaks a sidelong glance only to be hit with a look the effects of which
could be described as mild sunburn. Agent Mulder wisely resists the urge to
chuckle.

"That is, or rather, was Garvin Hewitt from New Hampshire, also died two
weeks ago in a fire as well. The coroner stated there were pieces of metal
lodged in the victim's body but attributed it to flying shrapnel when the
place went up."

"It is more than a likely possibility."

"It also seems that Hewitt was also an active member of the local MUFON
Branch there."

"So you think the person who killed Scanlon is the same one who killed this
guy."

"The MO and the idea behind it seem familiar. VCS had this particular one
on file, but I can guarantee you there are probably more similar unsolved
arson-homicides in the VICAP database. Given the nature of the cases, these
could be deemed an X-file, so Skinner will most likely give us the green
light to take it from them."

Scully looks at him for a long moment, contemplating things in her head,
then, slowly, deliberately, closes the folder.

"No."

He nearly goggles at her reply, the car swerving for a second as suddenly
numb fingers fight for control of the steering wheel.

"It's Violent Crimes' case, let them handle it."

"But," Mulder sputters, "Finding this killer might bring us some answers
about your abduction, there might be something this--"

"This has nothing to do with my..." the sentence trails out as she swallows
trying to dislodge the final word stuck in her throat.

"This is just some sick sonovabitch with an implant fetish."

"A sick sonovabitch with detailed knowledge of alien abductions?"

"A sick sonovabitch who just might have read Jose Chung or Whitley
Streiber."

The car comes to a screeching halt up on the bank, kicking up clouds of
gravel and dust. Inside, Mulder looks straight out ahead into the
disappearing road.

"You said it yourself, we may have another Duane Barry on our hands."

"In case you've forgotten, Mulder, Duane Barry was also insane! What's
going to happen if we do find him? Are you going to listen to another set
of bedtime abduction stories? And then what? Considering how trigger happy
you are these days, it makes me wonder, are you going pull another Wild
Bill Hickock? Are you, Mulder?"

"I never asked you to cover my ass." He manages through gritted teeth,
feeling the blood rush from his arms, his legs, his torso, all in a
maddening race up into his head. Two more minutes and the damn steering
wheel will probably end up in his lap.

Despite the overwhelming need to slap her partner silly, she stands her
ground, damping down on her rising hysteria, willing herself only to gaze
calmly, icily at the man seated next to her. She has stared down bigger,
much more intimidating men than Mulder in her time.

"It wasn't only _your_ ass I was covering, Mulder."

Cold. Rational. Like a mental smack to his head. He leans back into the
chair, closing his eyes, taking a long, deep breath. She was right, she was
always right about things like this, but shit, didn't she understand?
Didn't she know that this possibility, any possibility just might be
something...

Her voice again, but softer--

"I know what you're trying to do, what you're hoping to find with this. But
you're only grasping at shadows this time, Mulder."

"Some shadows turn out to be more substantial than you think."

"Some. But not this one."

He sighs.

"Look, I've already agreed to write this up. A bit of research into VICAP
this weekend can only help the boys, right?"

His calmer tone belies the stubborn look of his face and set jaw. There
will be no way to talk him out of this. One more argument at this point and
he will most likely go off half-cocked on his own in another ill-timed
ditch, trying, in his thoughtless way, to save the world. Which means she
will have to chase after him, hunt him down, then kick his stupid,
inconsiderate ass up and down the street after she saves it once again.

And she is so, so tired of that.

At least she had managed to wring a concession out of him this time, even
if he will most likely forget it by Monday morning. Well, not forget,
noting his eidetic memory, but rather, a selective amnesia.

Very selective.

Hearing no further protests from her, he starts up the car, drawing off the
bank as she silently gazes out of the window watching the receding light.

It is not the fantastical, outlandish cases that disturb Dana Scully as do
the mundane ones. Of all the Eugene Tooms, Virgil Incantos and Leonard
Betts that roam the fringes of reality, the worst monsters are the human
ones, the Luther Lee Boggs and John Mostows, the ones that hunt not out of
physical need, but for mental pleasure, these are the ones that take a toll
on her partner's mind.

Each picture, each profile invades his mind, slicing a bit of Mulder away
with each case, mentally devouring him as much as the cancer does to her
brain. Suddenly, investigating bovine exsanguinations in Arkansas doesn't
seem like such a bad idea after all. Suddenly, it seems much more feasible,
a much safer alternative for them to investigate, ridiculous quest or not.

She had seen Jack Willis fall into the same obsession, the same trances
Mulder falls in now, fixated on suspect, completely oblivious to everything
else except the need to enter the perpetrator's mind, become one with the
monster. She had learn to profile from Jack and had always considered him
to be the best, until the evening he came over to her apartment, muttering
something angrily about what Spooky had done.

"Spooky?"

"Spooky Fox Mulder, headcase and wonderboy of Violent Crimes."

There had been a string of armored truck robberies within in the past three
months, the guards all dead with no witnesses and few clues. Investigative
Support deduced that former guards who worked with the companies were in on
the heist, having intimate knowledge of pickup times, patterns, and routes.
So while the boys were doing background checks on security guards, Robbins
jokingly tossed the file to Mulder, who was working on a particularly
harrowing case involving a pedophilic child killer, at the time.

"How about an instant cure, Spook?" He joked. Mulder flipped
disinterestedly through the files for about fifteen minutes, then tossed it
back with a completely wacky theory.

"The mechanics?" Dana echoed dubiously.

"Sick part is," Jack sighed, "He was absolutely right. They would rig the
truck to break down, the guards would radio an emergency into dispatch, but
the calls never made it through. Instead they were intercepted by these
guys who sent out their tow trucks, and that's how they did it. Afterwards,
they fixed the trucks so that there seemed to be nothing wrong. We picked
them up at another attempted heist today."

"You don't sound too happy."

"Three months investigating this case and this guy comes up with a solution
in fifteen minutes. Yeah, I'm a little ticked. I'm not the only one though.
Patterson shit a brick when he found out his guys had been upstaged by the
Spook."

"I gather he's good, then."

"Best damn profiler the ISU ever had the unfortunate luck to lose. At least
by reputation."

"Better than you?" She arched an eyebrow.

He simply looked at her, a curious mixture of wonderment and jealousy.

"Spooky is better than the perps themselves."

It took a lot to impress Jack, and evidently this Spooky had managed to
without even setting out to do so. She was even more curious to know how
such an agent could be held in such equal amounts of derision and awe.

"You're not his type, dear." Jack teased.

"Should I be relieved or should you?" She teased back.

Dana Scully proceeded to to a bit of research on Special Agent Fox Mulder,
at first looking him up in the Bureau's database. He had graduated with an
B.A. in Psychology from Oxford before entering Quantico. His Academy class
records were impressive, excelling in forensics and psychology, his natural
forte. At the worst, specifically in physical pathology, he was passable.
Probably a fainter, she snorted reading the last part.

His pistol range qualifications, however, were not quite as stellar. He
barely met minimum. Consecutively. Looking further, she realized it wasn't
just because of bad aim, but also, he simply stopped shooting after making
the requirements.

Just packed up and left.

In the archives, she found an article in the December '88 issue of the FBI
Review detailing the Monty Props case. She read the monograph, finding it
chillingly accurate, filled incredible detail practically down to his shoe
size. His career had been skyrocketing at Violent Crimes, one success after
another, despite his apparent heavy stomping of more than a few
bureaucratic toes.

Then, inexplicably, in 1992, he transferred to a relatively unknown and
abandoned division and more or less disappeared.

Disappeared into the X-files, she finishes silently, feeling the sway as
the car makes a left into the familiar urban evening streets of D.C..

A babysitting assignment for her that somehow managed to weave itself into
the very being of their lives, of creatures that go bump in the night, of
nine lost minutes, of government conspiracy and extraterrestrials, of
abductions and experiments, of cancer and of dying. Life and death
inexorably wrapped in the embrace of truth and lies.

Life. Death. Truth. Lies. Black. White. Right. Wrong. Years ago they would
have been obvious. Today, all the former extremes have overlapped and
blended, former edges blurred into an ever diluting expanse of grey. A
purgatory of sorts, her being suspended indefinitely by a tenuous, thin
line, twisting, shaking, waiting with breathless anticipation for the break
to finally come.

To fall or to rise, she doesn't care.

'Oh, there's plenty of room in that cold, dark place for liars, Scully,'
the hollow voice of Luther Lee Boggs purrs, and she shivers as his cold,
dead fingers brush fleetingly against her cheek.

The Mutual UFO Network -- New Hampshire Division
Rye, NH

His shoes tread softly against the unpolished floor, then stop. Pausing,
waiting, letting the presence of the room invade his pores.

Like a woman it draws him to her inner sanctum, opening herself up, and
allows him to plumb its depths, to investigate its mysteries. It caresses
his mind with possibilities, covering his eyes with the hazy gauze of
elusive information, and whispers yet to be divulged secrets into his eager
ears.

The scratched floor tells the story of constantly moved furniture, the
folders tell another about chemical esterases and nucleotides. No windows
to see outside of this world, no disturbances from without, only the
comforts of ascetism and compulsive tidiness, work as joy, pleasure, life,
the mysteries of the universe infinitely more alluring than the touch of a
lover.

Garvin Hewitt's desk.

Deconstruct a man to recompile his killer.

He dives through books, through folders, and stacks and stacks of papers,
picking up notes and random scribblings but finding nothing that will give
him a taste of the other's mind. He lifts the telephone off the stack of
phone books piled beneath it. Gripping them by the spine, he first shakes
the yellow pages, then the white, until a shiny piece of plastic rolls
dislodges from its hiding place to clatter hollowly onto the floor.

Another compact disc. The Atlanta Symphony Orchestra with the Robert Shaw
Chorale performing Orff.

Find me.

Catch me.

Kill me, it taunts.

Arrogant little shit.

He opens his leather-bound field journal and tucks the disc into its
recesses.

Two days later, Special Agent Fox Mulder delivers the profile.

* * * * *
(3/11) posted to ATXC : 7/4/97
* * * * *

A Chrysalis.

The pupae. Transformation into the surreal.

With each kill the it is refreshed, rejuvenated.

The worm asks and the worm receives, its joy the ultimate pleasure, its
fury, unbearable pain. It feeds on misery, is aroused by suffering, and
grows stronger and stronger with each one taken. The worm feeds the
Chrysalis the nectar of souls it drains, hardens and polishes its shell to
a brilliant obsidian. Wrapped in their symbiosis, monster and angel dance,
kiss, make love in the beauty of death.

>From the Chrysalis will emerge a new being, a demigod awakening, shaking
off the embracing silk of hibernation and trading its old, wrinkled skin
for a sleek body of steel and wings of ether and fire.

It will be magnificent.

Dana Scully's Apartment
5:30 AM

The buzzing of the alarm jars the breath of almost sunrise, its incessant
shriek joined by the cacophany of accompanying peeps from a few ambitious
avians noisily fluffing sleep off themselves against the window sill. In a
reflex born through years of swatting snooze buttons, a hand shoots out
from under snug covers, instinctually striking its prey, the offending
clock, with unerring accuracy, cutting off the synthesized bleat in
mid-sputter.

With a deep, sleepy sigh, Dana Scully tosses the covers back, preparing to
step out of the warm recesses of her bed and brave the chill morning air,
when a barely audible moan drifing from the far left corner of her bedroom
captures her attention.

Instantly snapping awake, she whips her Sig out of its holster situated on
the nightstand and levels it at the general direction of the intruder--

Another apparition.

This time, a girl, a little one crying noiselessly except for that
strangling, weak wail, the ethereal moan from a pale, translucent form, a
lifeless likeness with upward-turned flat, dead eyes and wordlessly moving
lips flapping open, shut, open, shut.

Intense, almost garish, red blood gurgles out of its ear and oozes down the
neck to stain the shoulders of shimmering white cotton pajamas, slowly
spreading across its front like sticky maple sap on a hot summer day.

Then, the wraith slowly combusts, flames emerging from behind her body, and
like a rapidly melting candle, tongues of yellow and orange lick away at
the young flesh, devouring first the long brown hair and eyebrows, turning
white cloth into blackened curling soot that sticks to its skin with
blistering vengeance. The fire works its way around to the eyes, melting
and dripping dangling out of sockets by a long blue cord, fingernails,
fingers, lips, ears, face, burning, charring the epidermis, worming into
the soft meat, charring muscle and fat inside the crisp, black shell.

Grinning madly, the apparition opens its mouth to speak, but only a burst
of fire erupts from the core of that gaping maw as the raging heat envelops
everything, stripping everything down to browned skeletal remains, bones
shaking, wobbling with the intensity of an unstable skyscraper of cards. A
sigh emerges from its lipless grin, pleading, begging, beckoning before the
irresistible force of gravity finally collapses it into a pile on the
floor.

Then, ever so slowly, it fades out, banished by assailant daylight, as the
doppler blarings of fire trucks and police cars scream by on the outside
avenue.

Clutching her knees to her chest, the gun resting tightly against her
shins, Dana stares vacantly at the now empty corner for a long, long time.

Humbert Warehouse/Storage Co.
Annapolis, MD

Escalating fetishist.

That is the first thought that flits across Mulder's mind even as he pulls
up behind the flashing lights of police cars and endless streams of splayed
yellow tape being rolled over the damply smoldering kindling, the idea
hitting just before the usual one strikes, the one that tells him exactly
what kind of a dumbfuck he is for showing his terrified-shitless mug at yet
another impromptu barbeque. He pops open the glove compartment, drawing out
rarely used Serengeti shades classically favored by the infamous MiB's and
drops another two Extra Strength Tylenols, though what he really wants
right now runs more along the lines of prescription beta-blockers. Slipping
the sunglasses on, he takes a deep breath and opens the door and stands,
forcing his knees not to wobble as he strides up to the crime scene.

Those from the local PD who happen to look his way might think Special
Agent Fox Mulder is a vain little prick, a GQ cover boy stopping on the
sidelines, unwilling to get his charcoal Armani suit (marred only by a
hideous chartreuse-and-grey striped tie) and London Fog trench coat dirty.
And then there are those sunglasses. Those obscure, smoky lens reflecting
the ashes of scenery and nothing of its owner, the effect transcending the
ordinary into way-too-slick FBI chic.

They would see the shades and wouldn't see the dark, hollowed rings under
his eyes, looking as if he had come off the loser in a week-long boxing
match with sleep, they wouldn't see the red, puffy eyelids of histamines
working overtime, the bloodshot, yellow eyes of millions of screaming
capillaries and bled tear ducts, they wouldn't see the look of despair
flowing out only from his pupils, spilling into his irises and corneas, nor
the effort only revealed in those eyes of his superhuman effort to maintain
control over the rigidly impassive mask he has on display.

All they would see is Fox Mulder standing very still, silently clutching
his case folder to him, like a priest his bible during a particularly
harrowing exorcism.

* * * * *

It could have been two minutes or two hours, but Dana couldn't tell.

Still huddled, frozen in place, her thoughts stuck in replay mode, she
doesn't have the benefit of at least the few minutes respite of a videotape
rewind, as that scene plays in her head over and over and over again, a
morbid football game constantly rehashing the winning touchdown from only
one angle--the child bleeding, the child burning, bleeding, burning,
bleeding, burning...

The shrill squawk of the phone punctures the air and the image jiggles in a
mental glitch.

One. Two. Three rings. After the third, the answering machine picks up with
"This is Dana Scully, please leave a message." The standard beep follows,
then a mumbled curse before the ubiquitous dial tone of a frustrated
hang-up. Five seconds later, Scully's cellular phone chirps. Relentlessly.
Ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen times.

After about nineteen or twenty, she finally picks up. "Scully?"
breathlessly spills out of the phone's speaker before she even gets it to
her ear.

"Yeah."

"Scully...there's been another one." She swallows hard before asking the
inevitable.

"A little girl?" Dead silence. As if the entire world had suddenly
forgotten to breathe.

"Where?" She finally asks.

"Humbert Storage. That's six blocks from you. I'm there right now."

"I'll meet you."

"Scully, maybe you shouldn't--" The click of her phone cuts his words off.

Pressing the "end" button a little too hard, Mulder bows his head slightly
forward, pressing the cellular against his forehead before letting out a
deep, bitter sigh.

Ordinarily he would be thinking of other little girls, Samantha, Amy
Jacobs, and all those children who had the hearts cut from their pajamas,
struggling with an impossible, and ultimately ridiculous and moot theory of
how he could have prevented this tragedy from even taking place, mentally
lashing himself for not somehow, being able to stop this.

But right now he is thinking of Scully, having traded in his old habit
self-flagellation over his sister for a newer one involving his partner, a
fresher set of livid wounds to pick at. He thinks of her enduring hours of
driving every day just because she couldn't live in D.C. anymore, of her
choice to be nearer to her mother and the sea, and of all the restless
ghosts who have now begun to find her again.

She hadn't considered moving from her apartment in D.C. after Eugene Victor
Tooms broke in and tried to eviscerate her, sans fava beans and a nice
chianti.

She hadn't considered moving even after returning from her three-month
abduction, compliments of Duane Barry.

She didn't consider moving until the evening of the twenty-seventh of April
in 1995.

He remembers following Scully through that door with the 35 on it, sweeping
the area for listening devices and any residual signs of Krycek, scouring
the kitchen, the bedroom, the bathroom, only to come back out to see her
still standing in the living room looking down at the grisly set of
rust-colored stains on the floor.

The very spot where Melissa Scully was gunned down.

Then she turned around and walked out.

"I--I can't go back in," she told him. "All I see is the blood, and
then...I imagine her lying there."

So while she spent the rest of her downtime awaiting reinstatement at her
mother's, the movers loaded up her furniture-- her bed, her couches, and
that claw-footed bathtub and carted them from D.C. all the way up to her
new home in Annapolis.

She lost her entire deposit because the bloodstains didn't quite wash out,
but never went back to dispute the claim, and Mulder somewhat jealously
wondered how she manages to move ahead, to go on with such resolute
determination, remembering all to clearly how he himself had wanted to
simply die when he thought Samantha was lost forever.

But Scully has always been stronger than him. He recalls how frighteningly
easy it was to give up, to fall into despair, when she was in that coma, a
feeling that should have been replaced by effused joy when she recovered,
but somehow, instead, managed to convert itself into a private shame locked
deep within his soul. A shame that can never be expunged because it is
constantly reinforced with the knowledge that she has never given up on
him--not in Alaska, when she brought him back from the dead, not when
everyone else resigned him to fate as a boxcar fajita in New Mexico, not
even when he'd had the gun to her face and she was screaming at him to
fight it...

The 'I want to believe' poster in the office is right on target: a poor,
wishy-washy, self-doubting, passive statement that concentrates all of what
is Fox Mulder into one little sentence.

Pathetic.

He sees the tiny approaching figure that is Scully walk up the street and
flash her badge to the police, looking only slightly unkempt, as if she had
rushed in dressing. As she nears, he also notices that this is the first
time in a while that she hasn't bothered with make-up. Just a brush through
the hair, a bit of lipstick, and out the door. Add that to the light
sprinkling of freckles he hadn't realized he missed until now, and she
might have stepped out of a time portal from a few years back. But moving
closer and the faint lines around her forehead, her mouth, become visible,
her cheekbones and chin jut out more tightly, her haunted eyes reflect
years of horror and pain. That combined with the aura of the Doctor and
agent, the air of serious, dignified intellect that steely refuses to give
any indication of how rattled she is, and she has suddenly come a long way
from the woman who initially drew back sickened at Pfaster's cosmetic
corpse de-enhancements.

For a minute he considers offering her his sunglasses, but wordlessly hands
her the case file instead.

Opening the folder up, Scully finds her partner's report at the very top,
neatly penned out instead of typed. Glancing through the pages of detailed
description, it is an almost dizzying marvel to see how his mind has worked
this particular miracle, how that eidetic memory has linked all of the
clues together and somehow, impossibly, rendered a profile out of the
gibberish of clues and half-suppositions.

"The suspect is a caucasian female--" she reads aloud.

"Scanlon didn't seem the type to be into manicures," he drones tonelessly.
"Go on, I love listening to myself write."

"--late thirties to early forties. Tall, nearly six feet and incredibly
strong. She believes that something or somethings are calling to her,
encouraging her to commit these atrocities. Though her actions display some
knowledge of the subject of extraterrestrials, the probability of her being
an abductee is unlikely."

"Like you said, Scully, all textbook knowledge."

"The suspect may have been married once, but is no longer. She also has no
children or pets--"

"Five to one, feral cats are afraid of her."

"--and is unemployed, but reasonably well off and able to travel at will,
most likely through a recent inheritance. She has suffered a trauma, a
great loss, something that drove her to commit her first act of murder, and
once that step was taken, developed a taste for it--"

"She obviously never discovered Pez or gardening as a hobby."

"The burning of the victims for her involves a two-fold reason, the first,
as a way to destroy evidence except for what she wants to be discovered.
The second is a symbolic process, a ritual of her rebirth from destruction,
like a phoenix rising from the fire."

"Just think of Sylvia Plath with a Chuckie Manson complex."

She looks up at Mulder's face partially hidden behind the shield of
Serengetis, above the shades, beads of cold sweat standing out on his
forehead, below, mouth twisted into a smile reeking of sarcasm.

To her knowledgeable eyes, looking absolutely ill.

He has changed subtly, but definitively. The demeanor, while always dark,
has deepened, as if someone had pulled the plug containing his tightly
wound emotions and hooked them up to a neural amplifier. His humor, once
gentle and self-mocking, is now harsh and scathing. He is constantly moody,
argumentative, condescending. He is Mulder with every demon, every vice
loose and on the rampage, the id working in overdrive to propel him forward
ever so closely to the lip of some unidentifiable chasm.

"Agent Mulder," a forty-ish, slightly balding, paunchy police detective
interrupts, ducking under the ubiquitous yellow line down to trudge towards
the pair, his badge flopping loosely against his belt.

"We found the child's body, or rather what was left of it. You think this
one might be related to your case?" Scully's eyes flicker to her partner in
surprise.

"Depending on how the coroner's report turns out," he answers cooly, though
one bead of sweat dislodges itself to roll down the side of his face.

The detective nods and then heads off to speak to the ME. Mulder gestures
faintly to the folder in Scully's hands, answering her unasked question.

"I was going to drop it to Violent Crimes today, but this..." his voice
fades momentarily before regaining strength. "This changes things."

"Mulder, I find it hard to believe Skinner will even let you touch this
one, especially in light of your last outing with a child killer."

"Believe what you want, Scully, I don't want to argue semantics. I'm going
to do this either with or without you. Which will it be?"

Another bead of water rolls down Mulder's cheek, but not from his forehead.
As he turns and takes five steps away from her, reflexively clenching and
unclenching his fists, Scully thinks of Sisyphus, his strained, tired
muscles pushing the boulder uphill, millimeter by millimeter, inch by
painful inch, only to have it inevitably slip from his grasp at the moment
of possible victory and roll all the way back down, crashing back to the
beginning. She thinks of the broken man and his eternal burden of
punishment, of anticipation and futility.

Then she thinks of Mulder and his boulder, his burden, dedicating himself
to a case that, in one movement has become personal, another sister to save
or avenge in his eternal act of penitence, a fumbling attempt to somehow to
patch that gaping tear rent across his soul. She can not fault him for his
crusade, even though every one drives the wounds deeper, sacrifices his
mind, his body, his soul in the ultimate bargain for a flicker of
redemption.

And what she has seen today, the horrible plea of the anguished child's
spirit, crying out against this monstrosity, seeking vengeance, justice.
Closure. Those images have etched themselves permanently into her memory,
refusing to be ignored or shut away.

Mulder offered her a choice, but does she really have one? No.

"Skinner will probably chew me out again if you get yourself hurt," she
says lightly, though her answer weighs heavily in the air.

The back of her partner's head nods curtly. Then softly, almost shyly,
without turning around, Fox Mulder breathes,

"Thanks, Scully."

* * * * *
(4a/11) posted to ATXC 7/8/97
* * * * *

Annapolis PD Basement Morgue
12:55 PM

Clicking into professional mode has never been particularly difficult for
Dana Scully. Whether it is the suit, badge and the weapon on her hip that
define the Special Agent or the clinical scrubs and latex gloves that work
as the props of the MD, she settles quite comfortably in either of the two
roles, much more so than the one of simply being Dana.

Tonight, the pathologist is on stage, the cold, sterile air of the room
setting the background for clinical activity like candlelight to a romantic
evening and she goes through each step in her ritual of transformation.
First, the scrubs: light green shirt, pants, booties and gown, then, a
mask, a pair of gloves, and a second pair over them, finally, the goggles
fitting in place over the bridge of her nose, and Doctor Scully is right at
home. She walks in the room just as the pathologist's assistant glances up
from snapping his second set of polarids at the upper quadrant of blackened
remains. The sight of the tiny bones takes her back to the vision of the
early morning, throwing her internals into a sudden triple somersault
before she forcibly pushes that picture out of her head.

No. Now is not the time for squeamishness.

"You were right, Doctor Scully." The PA points to the seared, gooey mess of
cracked bone and baked cerebral matter, formerly the little girl's head.
"There had been some sort of pointed object inserted into her left ear,
probably driven into the brain. How did you know?"

"An educated guess," the agent replies shortly. "Did you find anything
else?"

"Just a few fragments of metal," He gestures with his chin towards a tray
on the instrument table. "But they might have been picked up while the body
was being gathered."

Inspecting the contents of the tin tray, she recognizes half a dime and an
obscure metallic piece with grooves and ridges identifiable as part of a
key.

"Where did you find these?"

"Well, the first one there," indicating the dime, "Was sticking out of the
neck. The second one I found while opening up the cranium. Fell out of her
nose."

She nods, then beckons him step closer as she wedges her hands into the
mouth, left yanking down on the mandible, right pulling up against the
maxilla, prying the jaws open in one swift movement.

"Give me a light in here."

The PA turns on his flashlight then tips it down into the mouth as Scully
fishes around inside, tracing the gumline with an index finger.

"What are you looking for?"

"The third piece of-- Shit." A sotto curse, jerking back her hand as blood
oozes through the minute puncture in the latex and settles into a red,
trembling bubble atop her finger. Snapping off the gloves, she tosses them
into the hazmat container making a beeline for the sink. "There's something
in the gumline below one of the left premolars," she calls back over the
hissing of the faucet.

"A broken tooth?"

"No, it felt like some sort of pin prick."

He looks at the agent for a moment, then picks up the flashlight again,
squinting into the oral cavity.

Ten minutes later, as the third metal object, a broken syringe tip, plinks
onto the tray amidst the whirlwind of pops from the instamatic flashes,
Scully punches in the numbers on her cellular.

"Mulder," bounces back to her on the first ring. "Where are you?"

"Well, after you banished me from the morgue..."--he had protested all of
fifteen seconds before scooting out of the Police Department--"I decided to
head down to Quantico and have a nice chat with VICAP."

Probably for the best. While having her partner suddenly start to babble
incoherently during the middle of an autopsy is one of those things
Scully's learned to deal with, she doubts the PA would have been quite as
accepting.

"Did you find anything?"

"It was mostly a one-sided conversation. I answered all the questions but
the computer wasn't terribly keen on putting out."

"Perhaps you should have taken it out for dinner and drinks first."

A chuckle. "So that's what I've been doing wrong. But it did finally give
me one more name to add to the case file."

"Looks like it's going to be two names, Mulder." A pause. "Christ," he
mutters. "Any ID on the girl?"

"No, not yet. The police are still searching through their records for
recent missing child reports. I'm going to wait around to see what turns
up."

"All right. I've got yet another mandatory brain-sucking session with Karen
Kosseff anyway. You still think Skinner's doing this just to spite me?"

"Now you're being paranoid."

"Guess I'm all back to normal then."

And then he is gone. Skinner had obviously been unconvinced about how the
initial session turned out, because per the AD's new orders, Mulder now
attends the Employee Assistance program once a week. Walking out of the
office, pure annoyance souring his features, he always returns with a smug,
self-satisfied look, as if he is alone on some giant personal joke.

Part of her is intensely curious about the sessions, wondering if Mulder is
playing mind games with the social worker as he has done so frequently in
the past with the other agents of the bureau. It certainly wouldn't be
beneath him. And it would be easy to find out.

One call to the Lone Gunmen and Byers could tap into the computer system--

No. She shakes her head mentally. Despite her intense suspicion, she will
not go to such means and violate her partner's rights.

Office of Karen Kosseff
Employee Services

"Tell me about your partner, Agent Mulder."

That question hits him out of somewhere in the outfield, reminding him of
the first time he attempted to catch a pop-fly. He had been eight, and his
father had cracked the ball high up into the air, so high it might have
disappeared into the sun. He remembers retreating, squinting up in the
glare of daylight, glove raised, ready, only to be smacked in the head as
he misjudged the velocity and approach of the downward rocketing leather.

"Scully?" he echoes, unconsciously shifting in the chair situated across
Karen Kosseff, as he rapidly analyzes her words.

Translation: Scully has obviously mentioned him to the Social Worker
before, the only reason why the subject is even being broached right now.

"I do believe you work with Agent Scully, right? This your third session,
and so far you haven't mentioned her once. How has she affected the way you
work? How has her illness?"

Other than the fact that he's a total wreck every time Scully sees one of
those ghoulies or has a nosebleed or shows up even five minutes late for
work because he doesn't know that she hasn't just suddenly dropped dead in
the street or in her car or in the hallway outside the office. Other than
the fact that he's been going nuts for the past few months because she's
been isolating herself from him, from her family, and Jesus, what a fucking
idiot he was, babbling about premonitions and death and Harold Spuller when
all he really wanted to do was ask her to tell him something about her
health, anything except that she was fine, because she wasn't. Other than
the fact that Scully can't talk to him about what's going on with her and
yet she can pour her heart out to this Karen Kosseff, this Social Worker, a
complete fucking stranger who doesn't know what the hell's been going on
these past four and a half years and won't know because their partnership's
none of anybody's goddamn business, this same stranger who now expects
_him_ to spill his guts.

Other than that, he feels great. Just fucking peachy.

"It's difficult sometimes," he murmurs. "I get worried."

"I understand perfectly. Cancer is something that not only affects her, but
her family and friends as well. You."

"Yes."

"Agent Scully mentioned that there were no survivors from the group of
cancer patients she was acquainted with."

"There is _one_."

Karen stops. Looks at him. Surprised by the sudden vehemence of his
reaction, an anger flaring in his eyes, before eyelashes drop over them and
raise back up to reveal their normal hazel calm.

"You believe Dana will survive this."

"I have to."

"Why do you have to believe this?"

"Because she does."

Question, answer, parry, feint, thrust. An elegant fencing match using
words instead of foils--each verbal move by her anticipated, calculated,
then ducked, obfuscated, and returned. No one can be on the receiving end
of endless numbers of runarounds without learning at least a few of the
basic tricks, and Mulder's picked up his education from the government's
best. He answers Kosseff's questions with a solid wall of appropriate
responses, weaving his spell of classic-but-recovering PTSD while garnering
information about Scully's sessions from whatever tidbit she lets slip.

As the rest of the hour dribbles by, he peripherally eyes the PC at her
desk, noting the telltale ethernet token ring looping out of a rear ISA
bay, the line drifting across the carpet through the wall to be redirected
into the main link.

And idly wonders if tapping to the Bureau's servers would be considerably
harder than getting into Georgetown Medical's.

Conference Room 2
Annapolis Police Department

Barbara Benedict is a striking woman. An ageless, faintly lined face of
delicate, but strong European features, a large, acquiline nose over full
lips, dark blonde hair with eyes an odd, opaque green, which takes a minute
for Scully to recognize as colored contact lenses. Exotic and powerful,
almost masculine features that might have stepped out of an Ingmar Bergman
film. Even through red puffy eyes and a face streaked with tears, she draws
herself up with a quiet dignity, with such presence that one would almost
forget about the wheelchair she is in.

"When was the last time you saw your daughter?"

"Last night."

A dark, smoky timbre that would have probably sent shivers down Mulder's
spine, were he here.

"I put Kathy to bed at ten before heading to my own room. When I woke up
this morning--"

Scully hands her a tissue, something she keeps an abundant supply of,
especially recently. As the woman gratefully takes the kleenex, she notices
how large, yet delicate the receiving hands are.

"Do you think anybody might have kidnapped her? Your husband? Family?"

"Agent Scully, my husband is dead. The only family I have left is a younger
brother, Nathan, who has been living in Amsterdam for the past ten years."

"What about friends?" Barbara gives a half-smile, daubing at an eye.

"We don't have many." Then her face drops, as realization sinks in. "Is--is
it true?" she whispers. "Is she..."

"We won't know for sure until we can match her dental records."

"And how long will that take?"

"A few days. Perhaps a week."

"You're saying I might have to wait a week to find out whether that...in
there is Kathy?" Her voice rises, stopping at a notch before hysteria. The
worst part for families, the waiting, though the argument of which is a
greater evil, the dread of anticipation or the agony of the truth is
something that can never be truly answered.

Picking up a pen, Scully twists it through her fingers, gnarling the piece
of plastic and metal over skin and sinew--under the index, through, over
the middle, through...

"Do you have a picture of your daughter?" she finally asks. The woman nods
tearfully, opening her purse, and the agent glances in as she pulls out her
pocketbook, noting, among other things, a bottle of saline solution and a
pill case with "Est--" visible on the obscured label. Flipping to the
middle section of semi-clear plastic card holders, between the social
security card on the flip side and drivers license on the accompanying
slot, is a photograph young girl with the smiling innocence of youth
staring back out at the two, a wide grin only flawed by one missing
incisor. The momentary flash of that same face and jaws flapping, pleading
nearly staggers Scully, and she takes a deep breath, collecting herself.

"I'm...sorry, Mrs. Benedict," she begins. But can't finish.

Fox Mulder's Office
FBI Headquarters

     O fortuna,
     Velut luna,
     Statu variabilis.

The strains of the chorus, nearly a hundred strong, shake the very
foundations of the basement office as they chant out the set of verses that
everyone has heard at one time or another in their lifetime in at least a
dozen films, though many who walk by the door of Agent Fox Mulder's office
would probably not recognize the name "Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi" any more
than they would "Also Sprach Zarathustra."

Inside, unheeding of tinnitus he will probably suffer later, Mulder
scribbles into his field journal, precise, neat strokes of blue coloring
the parchment, as he peels away each facet of the killer's mind. Making a
career out of entering people's heads is a treacherous task, as any
psychologist will explain, the endless alleyways and twisting corridors of
the human brain are often filled with innumerable dead-ends and doorways
that lead to sudden drops nowhere. When the mine is one of a madman, it is
practically suicidal.

'The idea of transformation is important to her. She sees herself in a
state of suspension, like a cocoon. She does not do this seeking her own
pleasure, but rather, for the pleasure of another. Her hunger is not of a
physical nature. She is feeding something almost vampiric in nature. An
irresistible force. An impulse, if you will call it.'

He rereads his last few words, as the sound of the door opening and
shutting reaches him during a rare moment of pianissimo grace.

"I heard you blasting "Excalibur" all the way from the elevators."

Scully gingerly covers her ears as the volume of the verse rapidly
escalates into a mind-numbing forte, the effort causing the tinny speakers
to rattle and shimmy worse than a hyperactive kid at a long church sermon.

"Oh ye of big-budget, cheesy flick fandom. This is Carmina Burana by Carl
Orff. Which is probably the most overused selection of music in film
history and somewhere in the background of every other movie from your
beloved "Excalibur" to "The Doors.""

"So I can safely assume you're now out of your industrial music phase?"

Bending down, he turns the volume knob several notches to the left and
spins back around in his chair to look up at his partner as she settles her
briefcase down on the table. Or rather, at the bandage at the top of her
right index finger, a wide tab of pseudo-flesh dyed color one or two tones
darker than the finger it's wrapped on, and at the very, very tip, a barely
visible speck of red peeking through the thin layer of gauze.

"...with V8 instead of coffee?"

He veers back to reality, catching only the last part of her comment, as he
follows the line of that same hand pointing down to the pint of red
vegetable juice on his table.

"I thought I could do with a change."

"I'm amazed you would even entertain the thought of vegetables, much less
imbibe those of the liquid variety." "What is that?" he asks suddenly,
unable to take his eyes off that strip of sticky plastic curled lovingly
over her first digit.

"It's called a bandage, usually used to cover up cuts, dermal abrasions..."

"I know what a bandage is, Scully. What happened to your finger?"

"I cut it during the autopsy."

"Did you get it checked out?"

"It's just a nick from a syringe, Mulder. I didn't have time to have it
looked at."

"Scully, needlestick injuries need to be checked on for contamination and
bloodwork. The risks--" He stops as she fixes him with an odd look,
suddenly feeling about as silly as the time he had tried to explain the
process of exsanguination to her.

"Mulder, it's not that important."

"You can't avoid hospitals forever, Scully."

She pauses in unpacking the contents of her valise, and something briefly
flickers across her face just before the curtain drops and she re-assumes
her professional mask. Feeling something clamp and twist in his chest, he
forces himself to breathe normally, as she carefully and calmly lies to
him. "I'm not avoiding anything, I just don't have the time right now."

Mulder who picks up the bottle, absently swirling the remaining quarter
contents of V8 around.

"You would tell me if something was wrong, right?"

Snapping up the screen of her Powerbook, she sits down, ducking behind it.

"Of course."

Which signifies the end of that particular line of questioning.

He chucks the bottle across the room, watching it sail in a graceful arc
and land with a solid clunk in the garbage can.

"Now," she continues, halfway hidden behind her shield of laptop. "If
you're done lecturing me on the finer points of JHACO regulations...the
case?"

"Show me yours if I show you mine?" A weak, half-hearted attempt--a forced
concession that tweaks the knot in his chest a fraction tighter.

She pulls out the folder, thick with polaroids and autopsy details, and
sets it down in front of him. He eyes it with unveiled wariness, not
reaching for it, as if afraid of having his hand bitten off.

"A woman, Barbara Benedict, came to the station today to ID the body as her
daughter, Karen."

"What is her viability as a suspect?"

"I would say in other circumstances, Mrs. Benedict might have been one of
my first guesses."

"But?"

"But she's confined to a wheelchair with no active mobility in her legs."

"Being wheelchair bound didn't stop Peggy O'Dell from running into the
street and ending up as a hood ornament."

"Back to the abduction theory, Mulder?"

He shrugs.

"Just something you might consider."

"Peggy O'Dell's condition was the result of a hysterical reaction, much
like Billy Miles' catatonia. There was no real physiological basis for her
paraplegia."

"And Barbara Benedict?"

"Is diabetic. She goes in for kidney dialysis three times a week at St.
Mary's. Even if she could get out of her chair, her hypertension binds her
relatively close to home. Shuttling around to three different states just
to hide bodies is rather extreme considering the renal distress she would
have been subjecting herself to."

"Was ID on the child confirmed?"

"Not yet, but in light of the picture she showed me and..." she sighs.
"Let's just say I won't be surprised when the dental records come in."

"But you didn't tell Ms. Benedict."

"What was I supposed to say, Mulder? That I woke up this morning to see her
daughter standing in front of my dresser start to bleed from the ear and
then burn to death?"

"You might have rephrased it a little differently."

"I don't see how you can rephrase something like that at all!" she snaps.
"And what if I'm wrong, Mulder? I would have tortured that woman on the
basis of a hallucination."

"A hallucination?" he repeats slowly. Dangerously. "Is that what you're
calling it now?"

Fox Mulder knows about denial quite intimately. It was, after all, his
first lover, and visits him for regular nocturnal trysts, but Dana Scully
takes that art to an entirely new canvas. She lowers her eyes to the desk,
to the folder on the exact dividing line between the two, the file he still
hasn't dared to touch yet.

"What does it matter, Mulder? It's not as if I could use this as a basis
for identification purposes."

"Just try to understand, Scully--"

Bastard. Self-conceited son of a bitch. The tightly wound self-control, the
mask suddenly explodes in a torrent of exhaustion, anger, fear, and a
thousand other raw emotions, a swirling miasma of conflicting, splintered
nerves lashing themselves out to strike the man across her with an
indefinable fury.

"Understand? You're asking me to understand, Mulder?" her voice begins low,
but rapidly escalates with each punctured, stressed word. "You try having
fifteen-year old boys with multiple gunshot wounds accost you from the
shadows, you try seeing strangled prostitutes on corners silently begging
you for help, old men and women beaten to death by their caretakers,
children run down in the street by hit-and-run drivers, you try seeing that
little girl die in front of you over and over again every time you close
your eyes, and you try to tell her mother just how her daughter was killed.
And then you tell me how goddamn understanding you can be!"

She slams down the lid of her Powerbook with enough force to nearly crack
the screen and storms out of the office, the clap of the door banging shut
behind her echoing in the hallway, as the final strains of "O Fortuna"
bleat out weakly behind Mulder. He closes his eyes, feeling himself come
undone like individual piano strings, each snapping one by one down into a
descending hollow chorus.

* * * * *

quod per sortem                  since Fate
sternit fortem,                      strikes down the string man,
mecum omnes plangite!        everyone weep with me!

                         --"O Fortuna," Carl Orff

* * * * *
(4b/11) posted to ATXC: 7/28/97
* * * * *

She had barely enough time to race to the bathroom, hand pressed to her
face, before it hit her again.

The symptoms come fast, often without preparation, but Scully has learned
to read certain signs-- a slight moment of dizziness, a lapse of phase,
becoming asynchronous to the rotating world, a familiar, numbing tickle
starting off between her eyes and eventually moving down her nose, until
the inevitable finally happens.

Two drops fall on the front of her jacket, the remaining ones splatter in
stark contrast against the pasty porcelain sink. A red Monet, she thinks,
noting the delicate flowering patterns of the blooming crimson spots,
before counting the days since the last one.

Eight days, she calculates a few seconds later. The time between each
attack shortens by a few days, sometimes as much as a week, as time slowly
ticks to zero on the Armageddon clock. There had been twenty-nine days
between the first few. After that, twenty-one. Seventeen days. Fourteen.
And now, eight. She dabs at her jacket, vaguely thankful she'd worn black
today. Blood wreaked havoc on beige. Wetting a towel, she wipes under her
nose, then blows into it to get the salty stench of blood out of her
sinuses. Then, tossing it away, she washes her hands under the faucet once
again and pulls off the soggy bandage to inspect her finger.

Although the flow has mostly staunched, the wound is still open, leaking
just a little bit of plasma and erythrocite matter. Poor clotting agents,
Scully notes critically. Another sign.

Searching her pockets for another band-aid, she remembers with a certain
reluctance that she'd placed them in the pocket of her long coat.

Which means she has to return to the office.

No use in avoiding the situation. She will simply step back in there, sit
down, continue working. Pretend the argument never took place. Pretend that
everything is fine. Pretend hard enough and maybe Mulder will just shut up
and leave things alone.

Easy enough.

* * * * *

"A kodak moment," Mulder mutters to no one in particular.

He would have been muttering to Scully if she hadn't only just vacated the
premises, nearly tearing the door off its hinges in a fury that he found
himself picturing in terms of Odysseus' ride through the strait of the
Sirens-- where the old sailor had to be bound to the mast so he wouldn't
pitch himself off the side of the ship in a combination of madness and
desperation.

In other words, she was pissed and he was confused, and he didn't know what
to do.

It would have been easy enough if the situation was merely a
life-threatening case, because then he could pitch himself headfirst into
the action, but then again, jumping onto a moving train had nowhere the
consequences getting Dana Scully mad at him did, point being, that while
falling off a speeding locomotive would have certainly, painfully mangled
if not outright killed, it would at least have been a much more pleasant
prospect than facing the deadly ire of his partner, who could do in so many
words what soccer players with steel cleats could to a set of unprotected
balls. So, in the course of working a rather (self-confessed) thin
Greek-and-sports analogical correlation to this particular predicament, he
decides on a course of action he has always taken when such situations
arise.

He does nothing. And he does nothing for a while, simply letting his eyes
roam about the office, drifting over the filing cabinet, the desk in the
far, far corner that she never uses, until it makes its rounds to finally
drop back down to his desk.

And her case file.

One that probably has a whole slew of disgusting photos taken from every
single imaginable angle as well as a penetratingly detailed report on
exactly how that little girl's body came to its unenviable conclusion.

(You're going to have to take it like a man some time, g-man.)

Figuring things couldn't possibly get much worse at this point, he opens up
the dreaded folder.

He is right about those photos. There are lots of them. Dozens, in fact.
Picture upon picture, with enough close ups and detail for him to mentally
piece together an entire horrific three-dimensional model. Buried within
the little pile of polaroids is a little wallet sized photo of the girl,
one of those Sears discount
ninety-one-different-sized-versions-of-the-same-pose-for-$14.95 studio
session results. He feels his heart start beating faster crashing against
his ribcage. She looks a little too much like Samantha for comfort.

"Shit," he spits, turning the picture over, so he's staring at the back
with the "made by Kodak" seal racing repetitively across the paper. Then
picks up the reports, first reading the statement made by Barbara Benedict,
the crime scene notes, and then finally, the details of the autopsy.

'A child, female, approximately eight.'

(A child. So pretty, so young)

'Ninety centimeters in extremis. Brown hair, brown eyes.'

(Beautiful redolent in crimson)

'Lungs show no carbon monoxide poisoning'

(as she cries, wailing echoes, reminding--)

'All signs indicate death occurring prior to the arson.'

(of the tinkling)

'Inspection of the cranial region further supports that...'

(of chimes striking against themselves in the breeze) '...a long, sharp
object had been placed into the aural cavity, bursting the tympanum,
cochlea, and semicircular canals.'

(With a flick of the wrist cries are forever silenced)

'Instant death resulted upon the object entering the brain.'

(A pity for a young one to have the mark on her)

A flash, a bright light, like a knife plunging into his head,
asconsciousness swoops into another body. And he is no longer watching,
like a third party observer:

(Spreads the three pieces of metal on the cloth) breathing (hands working,
moving, no longer awkward with inexperience) harder(picks up the filet
knife, a makeshift scalpel) comfort (draws it along own tongue) shivers
(tastes the edge) cool, sour scintillation a fine scarlet line (warm burst
of tingling nerves) breaking along the edge warm, salty (he begins...)

He sees it. He sees his hands, the knife. Such delicate work for what seems
to be large clumsy fingers. Stained red, so red, so warm, inviting, pulsing
of life, to soak luxuriously, bathe in such richness...

With a wrench that nearly tears unravels his guts, he is suddenly back in
place.

In D.C.. In the FBI Heaquarters. In the office.

Breaths come in short, dizzying pants, the air smothering, suffocating, a
fist slowly closing on his windpipe, ever so gently squeezing the oxygen
out of every single pore in his body. Cold, shaking, feeling his collar,
hands, wet from perspiration.

He looks down at his hands again, seeing the blood.

Out

(his mind screams)

need to Get out

Get--

* * * *

Scully didn't know whether to be concerned or annoyed when she stepped back
into the office only to find her partner had hastily abandoned the
premises, but not before making a complete mess of the place--autopsy
photographs scattered about the floor, tossed pencils, pens rolling every
which way, the desk lamp knocked on its side, and papers, pages, leafs,
fallen everywhere. Three discarded sample packets of Tylenol.

And his open field journal, sitting oddly untouched in the middle of the
desk.

Picking it up, she glances at the open page. Three words penned in large,
shaky scrawl, like a child first learning to write in block caps:

CHIMES

MARK

HANDS

"What the hell?" the agent mutters.

HN Hampshire Lounge
Alexandria, VA

Lifting a second martini to her lips, the Miriam Acheson takes a delicate
sip from the edge, actively ignoring the frank, open stares directed
towards her from the general male populace.

She is bored. Very bored. And everyone seemed so boring--pathetic
middle-management boors, sweating profusely while offering to buy drinks,
arrogant yuppie acolytes smoking large, expensive cigars while trying not
to gag on the foul odor, well-to-do married men, desperately afraid of
suffering their version of menopause, miserably trying to reassert their
virilty by hiding their wedding rings and picking up women half their age.

Dull, dull, dull.

And then he steps in, an Armani suit with a long coat, expensive Italian
shoes, and an attitude looming over him like a permanently overcast day.
>From the look of his tie, he obviously has no steady girlfriend or wife. He
seats himself at the other end of the bar, completely unaware of anybody
else, gesturing to the bartender. Interesting. Old money or nouveau riche?
she wonders, trying to mentally place him in the appropriate tax bracket.

"What'll you have?" the bartender asks.

"Whiskey. Straight up." The bartender nods, lifting a bottle of Bushmills
from the well and pouring a shot-and-a-quarter into a rocks glass.

She watches as he pulls out his wallet, catching a glimpse of a hip holster
and its contents. Neither. Government employee. Possibly Secret Service,
which would tally him up to a minimum of $70,000 per annum, Fifty thou, if
FBI. Not too bad, but not great either. In any case, he seems to be the
best option tonight out of all these clods. Yes, she supposes, he will do.

Mulder takes a sip and clears his throat as the liquid stings his vocal
passages, deliberately ignoring the thinly-veiled stares of the woman four
seats away. Right now he needs to get drunk. Get stinking, fucked-up,
shit-faced as quickly as possible, then go home and quickly pass into
insensibility. One peaceful night of stupor.

He feels her eyeing him up and down. She likes what she sees. But then
again, she's always had a thing for the sad, tortured types. And right now
Mulder knows he'd beat Gregg Allman hands-down, though probably couldn't
sing about it nearly as well.

He downs the shot in one gulp, coughing as he feels the alcohol burn its
way down his trachea, a miniature Sherman's March into his gut, as it
begins its slow dissipation into his bloodstream. An easy effort aided
along by an empty stomach.

"You obviously don't do this often," comes the voice from his right, as he
signals the bartender for another.

He turns to look at her.

Tall, brunette, with long legs cropped off only by the medium-length skirt
and a voice that could make ticking off register receipts sound terribly
sexy.

His type. He shrugs. "This is more my father's drink."

"And are you like your father?"

"Only in the fact that a lot of people want to kill me too." He downs
another one.

"So you like to live dangerously." Observing her through slightly fogged
eyes, lifting thoughts, phrases, paragraphs from every little movement she
makes, he constructs the picture of this woman. Looking for a challenge, a
little game to play. A mindless fuck.

He needs another drink. "You might say that. Care to find out?"

She hesitates, fidgeting with her martini, before empyting the rest of it
in one movement.

"I don't even know your name."

"Marty." He signals the bartender.

>From his own psychologist's perspective, he realizes he is only prone to
this sort of excessively self-destructive behavior whenever felt he had
lost or was losing Scully, throwing himself blindly at everything and every
one. Drinking. Sex. Mental dissolution: Comity. Some other mysterious
brunette whose name, for some reason, he can only vaguely remember in
shadows and whispers. The Mostow case. Instincts of self-preservation
completely and totally disregarded, all actions driven on adrenaline,
blindly racing forward at full speed into every brick wall without a helmet
and hoping in his own little petty, insecure way that she would still
somehow care enough--

Yeah. Right. As if any minute now and she'll magically appear in this bar
to save him from this Bambi Berenbaum double, this woman whose physical
attributes were quite...tributable, but about 8 million gigawatts short in
the lighthouse.

But Scully has surprised him before. At Ellen's. In Alaska. Miller's Grove.
Even taking the wrong elevator into the kitchen. Somehow he knows he
wouldn't be surprised if she did walk in here, take one look at his sorry
ass and then drag him out of here by his tie and take him home. Take care
of him. Worry about him. Fuss over him. All the while ignoring herself and
her declining health.

He downs the rest of the drink, forcing the thought out with some sluggish
success. The other reason he rarely imbibes--usually, it leads to too much
self-analysis. Introspection on things he'd rather not have to look at too
closely. No. Not tonight.

Tonight he doesn't want to be found.

He looks at the woman as she chatters on, picking up his silence as an
opportunity to fill the dead air with, apparently, moving air. Just yakking
on about something or another, the words warbling in his ears like the
muffled grown-up voices in Charlie Brown cartoons, and Mulder smiles at
her, even though he doesn't know what the fuck she's talking about.

When was the last time when getting stinko and sex came together hand in
hand? He vaguely wonders if there is another odd conjunction of the planets
hovering directly over the bar tonight.

The Chrysalis sees him, a tall, walking shadow. He is hurting from
something. The smell his vulnerability, his desperation, is oh, so sweet.
Something in him cries for comfort, for solace from the agonies of the
wright of life has brought him. He is beautiful in his misery. Mesmerizing
in his pain. His devastation is nearly complete, the taste, thrilling on
lips.

And her. The bitch. She has no idea what he is.

>From one of the shadowed booths, the observer goes unnoticed, watching the
man with the woman. He pays for both their drinks and they leave together.

Empathy is not a common emotion. More often, it is a distraction.

But this is different.

Oh, yes. Chrysalis can understand the source of his pain.

It is from fighting his nature. The familiar pain felt within, every knife,
every wound emanating from his resistance to the inevitable.

(Don't fight it, love. You will never win.)

But he will learn. Tonight he will be initiated.

You see, the man is a feeder too.

* * * * * *

Shoes. At least a hundred pairs. High heels, clogs, flats in every color
imaginable, one of those jumbo-sized boxes of crayolas spilling out all
over the place, the ones with a plastic sharpener in the front with
descriptions on each individual wrapper reading "cornflower" and
"goldenrod" and "vivid tangerine," spread out in several rows of racks.
Drawing eyes up, he nearly does a double-take at the incrediby tacky Nagel
in the hallway directly across from him.

She had gone straight for his belt before the door even clicked shut,
unzipping and drawing him out with expert haste, as she lowered herself
down on him. And Mulder reacted instantly, vaguely surprised at his
functional ability after nearly half a dozen shots in his system.

So he leans back against the opposite wall, looking at this pseudo-art
tripe that's staring back at him with the wickedly sharp flat green eyes of
a four-color spread, thinking this has got to be one of the ugliest, most
cliche piece of shit he's ever seen, seconded only to an Elvis-on-velvet
painting, and at least the latter contained better taste in subject matter,
all while she's working on him below, bobbing her head back and forth,
doing her darndest to keep his attention as he feels his legs giving out,
not from any intense pleasure, but because he's so fucking plastered, he
can barely stay awake.

He groggily pushes her head back from him, feeling her front teeth bite in
on the head of his cock as it exits her mouth. Standing, she yanks his tie
out of its carefully constructed knot as he presses her up against the
wall, groping at her under her dress, lifting it higher and higher as
clumsy hands yank down the obstructive pantyhose.

Taking the tie from her hands as she undoes his shirt buttons, he wraps it
around her wrists, tying them together in a loose knot, then pulling her
arms over his head, so they're bound around the back of his neck, he
presses her body against the wall right next to that fucking Nagel as she
wraps her legs around him and then, unheeding of whether she's ready or
not, he rams himself inside. He has no trouble entering.

No kissing, no holding, no polite exchanges. Nothing more Mulder wants from
her than what the contact points of their bodies provide, as he slams in
and out of her warm, pulsating flesh like a jackhammer, the lithograph
shaking and tilting against the hall.

She bites his shoulder and he pushes her face away, keeping her at a
distance, only feeling the nerves from the end of his groin working in and
out of her.

She likes it rough. He can do that.

He puts his hands around her neck, thumbs up against her carotid arteries
and squeezes, cutting off the blood supply to her brain. As he feels her
struggle against him, she lets out a long, shuddering growl as her inner
muscles contract against his straining member. His body continues moving,
screaming for release from the tension but it doesn't come.

He can't.

She feels leaden, her body heavy like a corpse. Looking at her, he sees her
face dissolve-- rotting like decaying meat sinking falling of bones as
squirming maggots rise out of eyeless sockets and nostrils feasting on the
flesh within

(Feels fingers)

sinking into bones grubs crawl over his fingers down his sleeves chunks of
her sloughing off oozing a putrescent stench that suddenly churns his
stomach.

He tries to shove her away, but she clings on, opening her mouth to let a
rotting tongue drop down from between decaying teeth, jaws grinning as the
words and clicking of innumberable bug exoskeletons hiss out from the
exposed larynx.

Feed the worm, she whispers.

Feed the worm. Recoiling suddenly, he pulls himself out, dropping her to
the ground, and untangles himself from her arms, scrambling away from her.
He hastily grabs at the shorts around his ankles, nearly sprawling into the
racks of shoes, but instead only knocks a few flats out of place.

"Hey, you're not finished," she slurs, working one hand loose from the
bindings. "Where the hell are you going?"

He doesn't answer her, afraid to look back, clamping his jaw tightly shut
as the familiar sour taste of bile rises up to his throat and spreads over
the inside of his mouth. Pulling up his pants over a rapidly diminished
erection and buckling it, he yanks open the door, his shirt hanging loosely
open at the front as he stumbles outside. "You bastard!" she screams,
picking up an orange clog and throwing it, only to have it clunk against
the door as it slams shut behind him.

*****

The woman is angry, the figure observes from the blanketing shadows of the
street.

Though nothing is visible through the pitch black emptiness of the
apartment's windows, it knows she smells of sex and of sweat, fluids musky,
pungent in the heavy air.

The Chrysalis found that falling into his mind is as easy as him had
slipping into hers, their souls interconnected with the sanctity of vision,
sharing each kill, each beautiful bath of awashed torment. And with that,
Chrysalis smelled the mortality on the woman's skin as surely as he.

It is a powerful, delicious odor that permeates to the very core of her
being. Like a ripe fruit ready to be plucked and eaten, to be opened and
devoured, she is ready for the passage, to be fed to the worm. The man had
started the job, and the shared joy was exquisite, the vicarious pleasure
almost as powerfully orgasmic as the act itself.

But he was unable to finish. Mortis interruptus.

Disappointed. Very dissapointed.

This is, simply, bad manners.

Fox Mulder's
Apartment Alexandria, VA

Letting the spray of the shower jettison over his body, he scrubs himself
furiously, frantically, to get the smell of her off him, rid himself of
that stench, but the sheer presence of it seems to have seeped into his
pores, down into his flesh, his muscles, the very marrow of his bones.
Gripping his arms tightly around himself, as if afraid he will suddenly fly
apart, Fox Mulder leans back against the tile, standing there until long
after the water runs cold.

Ignoring the chill, biting air and evaporating water prickling his skin, he
steps out of the bathroom and pulls on a pair of black shorts and a jersey.
Looks hazily around the room for his journal, then remembering where he
left it.

At the office.

Shit.

Inside the desk, he rummages around, looking for sheets of paper and a
writing utensil. Snap.

The tip of the pencil breaks against the paper from too much pressure on
the delicate point.

Snap.

The second one too.

With a silent roar, he tosses the papers across the room and opens the
drawers, ripping apart. Sweating. Shaking. Like an addict in withdrawal.
Fumbling, dropping he finds his long unused tape recorder, and after a few
tries finally manages to press the record button with slippery fingers,
hoping that the batteries aren't dead. They aren't.

"There is a certain dance of death within the animal kingdom, a finely
choreographed ballet between the predator and the prey. It is believed that
every animal intrinsically knows when its time to die is, whether it's
young or old, healthy or sick. The predator recognizes the scent, and the
prey struggles, as every death row prisoner does as he is being led to the
electric chair, but its demise has already been foretold.

"I have always accepted this dance of death, but have never felt it's scent
caress me until today. It is indescribable, an almost irresistible
foulness-- "

Hands begin to shake violently, almost spasmodically and the tape recorder
drops to the floor, spinning and bouncing like a leaden jumping-jack, but
still whirring, still taking in the sounds of the room and preserving them
on the magnetic analog strip. Scrambling out of his chair, Mulder tries to
pick it up, but is unable to hold himself steady as the room begins to
spin, a carnival ride rising from a dormant state, slowly rotating,
eventually picking up enough momentum to whirl in a dizzying fury. The
crack of bone kissing wood follows as he drops to his knees, then, ever so
slowly, crumples, slowly folding until his forehead touches the ground.

As the whirr of the tape recorder beside his head seeps into his
consciousness, he turns his eyes to gaze blankly at the spinning rollers.

* * * * * *
(5a/11) Posted to ATXC: 7/28/97
* * * * * *

Autopsy Bay 1
FBI National Academy

The body this time is a young woman who might have passed as a close
relative of a certain entomologist, Scully fleetingly muses, as she looks
over the corpse, picking out individual details anomalous to the entire
MO--the main one being the victim was mostly fresh, bodily fluids left
undrained, instead of the usual days or even week-old dessicated shell. It
hadn't been burned too badly before the team finally retrieved it. Liquids
in the tissues made all the difference.

The work was incredibly sloppy too. The killer had left behind a
substantial number of fingerprints and foreign samples, not even bothering
to eradicate evidence, as if this particular slaughter were a hasty, spur
of the moment decision instead of the usual, meticulous, well thought out
plan. The fire had not been usually well contained--spreading only after it
had destroyed nearly all evidence--but carried the haphazard marks of a
hastily abandoned torching. All these moves which had first made Scully
suspect a possible copycat. But certain details only known to the
investigating staff are showing up--mainly the badly cobbled stitches of
fishing line in the back of the neck and gums--cutting off that avenue of
possibility, and so the case perhaps is beginning to look up as they have
not only a mostly intact body of evidence, but a killer who is also
pleading to be caught.

Mulder would have been able to shed some insight into why the murderer is
suddenly becoming so obvious.

If he had shown up for work, that is.

Because he has basically disappeared. Well, perhaps that is a bit of an
exaggeration. He is, simply, more or less incommunicado at the present. No
one answers at home, and his cellular only returns an "out of service"
recoding. When the local bureau couldn't reach him this at 3 AM this
morning, they called up Scully at home to report the latest fire taking
place in Alexandria--three miles away from Mulder's domicile. They couldn't
find him, so she ended up going to the site by herself, feeling oddly out
of sorts about the whole thing, like a recent amputee still unreconciled to
losing a limb. Naturally, she would assume he had ditched her once again,
but he has no real reason to this time, especially in the light of the most
recent incident occurring practically on his doorstep. Oh, there is no
doubt he had hightailed it off somewhere, though the reasoning behind it is
rather strange to Scully because despite Mulder's frequent flights of
eccentricity, it is very unlike him to abandon a case in mid-investigation,
especially one he has a vested interest in.

So she simply has to assume he is out sniffing down another trail only
visible to his uncanny senses.

In the meanwhile, she has a body on a slab with a full story to tell. Death
whispering her secrets to her from beyond the unknown. This unmoving flesh
would tell her what the woman ate for lunch, what sexual activity she
recently engaged in, if she took drugs. It would tell her if she smoked,
had enhancement surgery, ate fatty foods, drank too much, or ever brought a
child to full term, if she dyed her hair, had an appendectomy, a yeast
infection, even glaucoma. And most importantly, it would tell her when and
how she died. Perhaps even why.

Clicking on the tape recorder, Scully begins in a tired, drawn voice. "Time
is nine forty-five AM, Wednesday, June seventeenth. Deceased is a female,
late twenties..."

Office of the Special Representative to the Secretary General
United Nations Building
New York, NY

Marita Covarrubias is resigned to being taken for granted, ordered around
by the unnamed men of the Consortium, the old, powerful shadows who own the
life of her, her superiors and millions of others. She willigly plays this
dutiful role, behaving like the meek, submissive puppet while watching,
observing. Planning. Because old men, no matter how powerful, how rich, how
untouchable, do not live forever.

She is not, however, thrilled about being called upon in the menial task of
catering to standard government issue like Special Agent Fox Mulder. So, as
she steps out from her desk to face the man in the chair across from her,
she crosses her arms stiffly, and in the frostiest, biting voice, makes no
qualms about her irritation regarding this issue.

"Agent Mulder, you have obviously mistaken my position for that of a
secretary. Why do you need _my_ help in tracking down a man's records in
Amsterdam?"

The Agent wearily passes a hand over bloodshot eyes as he picks apart the
details of her clipped, precise speech. Her bark rings like that of an
automaton, anxious to get him out of there, hiding something, perhaps.
Mulder has never trusted her much in the first place, and that particular
feeling rages even stronger now. Eyes narrow, as he begins to watch her
more carefully, absorbing, categorizing, processing, and interpreting every
nuance of movement down to a careless flicker of finger.

"I've gotten a hold of Nathan Benedict's older records, but they disappear
after 1994. He supposedly hasn't left that country, and I need to know why
he suddenly vanished."

Of course his sudden fixation on the figure of the Special Representative
does not go by unnoticed. In fact, this is better than she can hope for.
Fox Mulder's reactions, despite her best machinations of their brief
encounters, have always ranged from indifference at best to barely-veiled
annoyance at worst, so she had hastily aborted her attempt at seduction in
its fetal stagge. Being rejected is one of those things that does not fall
on her well. But now, his sudden apparent notice of her sparks that
opportunity once again. Fox Mulder is not an unattractive man. This would
be one of the more pleasant things she would have to do for those old
bastards, a nicer distraction. She swiftly changes her mind about this
menial request, shifting her tactical base.

"This would require some...deep research on my part. Is it really that
important?" Sitting back on the corner of her table, she delicately crosses
her legs, allowing him a somewhat tantalizing view of thigh.

He notices. Of course he notices. He wouldn't be human not to notice.
Unfortunately for her, however it does absolutely nothing to him. After
last night, it'll be a long, long while before he'll be able to even
contemplate the idea of sex again.

"It is. This information is vital to several lives. I need your help. I
wouldn't be asking otherwise. Can you do this for me?"

She fakes a look of pure sympathy, whispering throatily. "Are you giving me
a choice?"

That line stops him cold. Familiar. Too familiar. Where had he heard those
words before?

He racks his brain, trying to relive, recall snippets of dialogue stored
away in folders within folders, each one opening up as he mentally unearths
them.

Rhode Island.  In a hospital.  In a hallway.  A man.  A cigarette.  His
gun.  And a threat.

('You wanna smoke on that or you wanna smoke on this...?')

Cancer Man.

"What makes you say that?" he asks neutrally, hoping like hell the Rep
can't hear the pounding of his brain bashing against the inside of his
skull, fighting to get out.

It explains everything--why she was always so eager to help, spewing crap
about 'believing in what he did' and 'right' and all that other upbeat
cheerleader babble she stroked him with. Too ready with information that
Deep Throat, would be nervous in passing so openly to him. Too sure of
herself despite the dangers of flouting such powerful figures.

In short, it was all too easy. And he had almost fallen for it. But the
furtive meetings, the thickly discernable fear and nervousness that
constantly licked at the trail of his two former informants, these elements
aren't in the makeup of in the woman in front of him.

Deep Throat was afraid.

X was afraid.

Covarrubias, on the other hand, acts like she's playing some fucking
pinball game. With him. With them. A nudge here, a shake there, information
seeping in through one channel, spinning out against the flipper to
another. Right now he couldn't see it any clearer if she lit up a Morley
herself and blew fucking smoke rings into his face.

"I'm sorry. I simply can't help you with this," she says briskly, while
writing down something on a piece of paper.

Slipping the scrap of paper to him, she brushes his hand upon passing and
looks up at him with a smoldering eyes. He smiles gamely, fighting the
reflex to yank it away and slug her with it. So, they decided to set up
their own little purveyor of disinformation. A good plan. A brilliant plan.
But they should have used a better actor. As he leaves her office,
clutching the sheet in his hand, he contemplates his next move, not looking
at the note until he reaches the lobby.

Opening it up--

'Friday, 9 PM, my place. I'll have what you need by then.'

Christ. Another heavy-handed
'oops-you-caught-me-in-nothing-but-my-bathrobe' scene in the making. Not
that Covarrubias isn't attractive or anything, she just isn't his type.
That and he harbors an inherent, deep mistrust of anyone who could rise to
a position of authority under the age of thirty. Bill Gates included.

Still, the Rep may be a useful source after all. At least until she
outgrows her usefulness or the Consortium figure out that he knows and
inevitably, invariably, intimately introduce her to the nearest ditch.

The price of playing.

He tears up the note into tiny pieces and dumps them into the nearest trash
bin before heading back to his car.

Sci-Crime Lab
FBI Headquarters

2:30 in the afternoon with Mulder still a no-show. Scully glances at the
same "No service" message for the eighth or ninth time this day, feeling
incredibly irritated and achy from the stuffy congestion building in her
head and a tickle in the throat which she recognizes as the onsetting
symptoms of a cold. Great.

Though she'd like nothing better than to tell Mulder to shove this
particular case up a highly sensitive area, go home, fall into bed and
sleep for a week, a deeper sense of responsibility places her, at the
moment, with Agent Callas for the better part of an hour waiting for the
computer to chug out a match for the latent fingerprints.

"I'm sorry, Agent Scully," the younger agent shrugs. "I've checked and
cross checked but nothing's showing up on the NCIC database."

"Why don't you take a break while I look some more?"

She gives Scully a grateful smile as she stands up stretching.

"Thanks. I'll be right back."

"Mulder, where are you?" Scully mutters to herself, after the door shuts
behind Callas.

Creeping up somewhere in her slightly muddled mind, a wee bit of guilt
flashes for snapping at him yesterday. It is not as if he's never acted
like an insensitive boor wheneer he was obsessing in a case. She has
accepted as fact that all his mental energy, including those of functioning
as a decent human being, becomes redirected, focused in a magnifying-glass
pinpoint towards his goal. Simply put, on case he would be a complete jerk
with single-minded intensity, to the detriment of all polite behavior, but
return to his goofy, normal self soon afterwards. Or some semblance of
such. It's just yesterday she wasn't in the mood to take it. Tired. Sick.
Something.

She clicks on the search menu for the government database, watching the
little hourglass empty, tilt over, and empty itself again, a pattern that
repeats itself six or seven times before displaying "MATCH" on the screen.

"About time," Scully straighens, tapping impatiently on the table as the
page slowly loads.

The name and image slowly scrolls down on the monitor, a picture, a name,
the branch, and ranking. A feeling of deja-vu settles over the room as she
stares numbly at the information displayed in front of her.

Not terribly eager at the prospect of spending a few more hours looking up
fingerprints in every single available database, Callas takes her time in
walking back down the hall towards the lab.

Opening the door, she is nearly bowled over by Scully mumbling an apology
before bulldozing her way out.

"Ugh. Sorry. Did you find what you were looking for, Agent Scully?"

"Um, yeah," Scully calls back. "Just not what I expected," she mutters to
herself, as she hurries down the hall, leaving the befuddled agent to stare
after her.

Office of the Assistant Director

Walter Skinner knows it has to be either one of the two--they're the only
ones who would have the chutzpah to attempt to burst into his office
without an appointment.

>From the voices outside, he recognizes Kimberly and the other one as
Scully. Which in all likeliness means that her partner has once again
gotten engaged in something foolhardy and probably life-threatening as
well. Mentally steeling himself for yet another impending disaster, he
closes the report in front of him and awaits the agent, who storms in,
wasting no time with pleasantries.

"I'm requesting you take us off this case right now," her voice carries
through a little stuffy.

"What case are you talking about, Scully?"

"The arson-mass murderer, the fetishist..." Her voice trails out at the
blank look on his face. "You didn't green light it." A statement, not a
question.

"Agent Scully. The only 302 Agent Mulder recently brought to my attention
involved steer innards and the Midwest. It sounded so ludicrious, I
flat-out denied it. Now what is _this_ that the two of you are unofficially
working on?"

"It--there's--" interrupted by coughing. A wet, congested sound.

"Is that it?" he points to the folder in her hands.

She hesitates, but his look brooks no disobedience. Reluctantly, she
relinquishes her report. Flipping through the pages, Scully fidgets even
more as his face grows darker and darker. After a long, uncomfortable
silence, Skinner puts down the folder and removes his glasses.

"Agent Scully," he rubs the bridge of his nose, an action he only does when
he is about to lay into either her or Mulder. "Do you honestly think I
would let your partner handle another case like this after the Roche
fiasco?"

"No, sir."

"Then my advice is for the two of you straighten this out before I do. That
will be all."

She nods, eyebrows furrowed, before picking up the folder and leaving.

So it is happening.

Skinner knew from the start, had more than an inkling that despite episodes
of sheer brilliance, Mulder was also totally unstable, and he had thought
he had seen the agent at his worst--when Scully had been abducted.

Despite several hairline fractures and cracks in the construct of the
agent's mind, Mulder had always managed to somehow hold together in the
end, perhaps by Scully's help, perhaps by divine intervetion. But his one
fatal flaw, this broad, perverse streak of self-destructiveness, is now
flaring at full light once again. This time, instead of weathering the
damage, he can almost see Mulder finally falling apart from the constant
chipping:

The return and subseqent loss of Samantha. His father's death. His mother's
illness. Scully's cancer. Bit by bit, chip by chip, waiting in hushed
anxiety for the vase to finally break.

The AD had hoped mandatory counseling sessions might have worked out, but
in reading the reports sent up by Karen Kosseff, what he saw only
reinforced his fears--Mulder would simply not deal with the Social Worker
in an open, honest manner. Fear because, in the end, the only alternative
for the agent would be early retirement for mental disability. His career
effectively finished. Over.

God knows Mulder didn't give a bean about his career when he had thought he
would lose Scully the first time around, and now his actions verge on
desperate, an insistent bid, his hat tossed into the race to see if he
could die first.

Die first to avoid facing the pain of losing her again.

And all Skinner can do is wait. Wait for the inevitable. Wait for a
miracle. Wait and hope that somehow, in the irrational and disordered
universe, the two agents would perhaps manage to find a way to prevail,
because he himself couldn't do a damn thing.

Position. Rank. Power. They had given him just enough to show him how
utterly meaningless to it really was.

* * * * *
part 5b/11 Posted to ATXC: 8/12/97
* * * * *

FBI Headquarters
Washington, D.C.

It was late in the afternoon before Mulder managed to stumble back into the
basement hallways of the J. Edgar hoover building. He had taken three steps
away from the stairwell when a sudden wrench tore through him like a
buzzsaw set loose upon his innards.

Racing to the bathroom, he flings open the door to a stall and lets it all
come up, unable to stop hurking as his guts twist and splash out into the
depths of the bleached blue water, wave after wave of coiling then purging,
the wracking reaching deep, deep down all the way down to his gonads, a
stinging, aching sensation like they'd been recently used to tee off at the
Masters.

Feeling weak and light-headed, he leans heavily on the flush handle,
another headache choosing at this moment to tear through his brain, as he
spits a few more times, trying to get the sour taste out of his mouth,
drool leaking out the corner of his mouth.

Dramamine. Need more Dramamine, the thought filters through the knife
stabbing in his head. In the car. Too far away.

"Fuck," he mutters as more saliva dribbles over his lip.

Tylenol. In the office. Only fifty feet. Okay, left foot, right foot, left
foot, try not to fall, idiot, where was he? Left--no, right, left...

If he had looked down at the contents of the bowl, he might have noticed
the thick, black fluid slowly sinking to the bottom to swirl away down the
drain.

What seems to feel like hours later, the agent somehow manages to get the
right key into the lock, fending off the temptation to violently kick the
door in out of blurry frustration, and stumbles in the office, staggering
against, and then past the filing cabinets in a clumsy little feint before
dropping ice-sweaty palms against the top of the desk. The left hand steals
under the drawer, yanking it open hard enough to spill several paperclips,
two erasers and a pencil out onto the floor, and rummages through for those
little red-and-white packets. Only two more left. Mulder tears through them
shoving all four pills into his mouth and taking several long, painful
swallows before dropping his head back down blearily at the contents of the
calendar below him.

"Are you through? Or shall I wait for you to knock over your desk lamp
first?"

The clipped, cold voice strikes through the fogginess in his head, and he
looks up, meeting eyes that deliver a look so cutting, he suddenly wishes
he'd stayed a little longer in the bathroom.

Say 'till, maybe next week.

"Christ, Scully." He wipes the cold sweat off his forehead with the back of
his left hand. "How long have you been standing there?"

"Long enough." She slams the case file onto the desk, missing his right by
millimeters. "What is this?"

"It's called a folder. It usually contains documents, photographs--"

"Cut the bullshit, Mulder!" Her voice raises a notch, dampened only by
slight congestion. "What the hell do you think you're doing?"

He blinks, taken aback by the first real profanity he's heard come spilling
out of her mouth. Directed at him, anyway.

"Skinner told me you never even brought this up with him." Her tone drops
back down, though barely contained.

"Oh, I knew something slipped my mind."

"You lied to me!" Up again.

"I'm assuming this isn't an appropriate time to say 'now you know how I
feel.'"

"I had a talk with Skinner. He said he never approved this. You lied to me,
Mulder. About the case. About...about everything, you asshole!" She ends,
shaking, barely coherent. Not that a stuffy nose helps either.

"I think this may constitute what could be known as a double-standard,
Agent Scully." He eases himself down into the chair, interlacing his
fingers.

She swallows her retort, choking down a bolus of colorful phrases Mulder
would have been surprised to find out she knew. After a few seconds, she
finally allows only a question to escape.

"Who is Miriam Acheson?"

A dumb, blank look returns to her. He hadn't even known her name.

"A woman," she continues casually. Too casually. "Twenty-nine. Five-foot
seven. One hundred thirteen pounds. Brown hair, brown eyes. Lived at 1342
Mission Street. The killer struck again early this morning. The police
tried to get hold of you, but you were...unavailable."

Each individual detail drops into place like the pieces of a puzzle, until
the picture finally coalesces into memory.

His gaze lingers on the file in front of him. Lifting up the cover, the
newest autopsy photo of pale carcass with a y-incision across the neck and
down the abdomen greets him with grim familiarity.

Scully watches his face uneasily, noticing he is unsurprised by what he
sees.

After a long moment, Mulder looks up from the picture.

"Do you think I killed her?" he asks slowly.

"The woman had recently engaged in sexual intercourse. Latent fingerprints
on her neck were revealed to be yours. Bodily fluids found in her are the
same phenotype as yours as well the remains of a certain tie. If I were
inclined to gamble, I'd wager how certain hair and serum samples collected
from the scene will probably turn out once the DNA results return from the
lab."

He nods, calmly pondering the overwhelming evidence.

"Arson is not an uncommon method used to cover up sexual assault."

"What do you expect me to say to that, Mulder?"

"Do you think I killed her?" he repeats.

"No, Mulder, I don't think you killed her."

"I've lied to you once already," he presses.

"Mulder, why are you doing this?"

"I want you to make sure you're not just saying this out of some sense of
obligation to me."

(Boy you're just charming 'em left and right this week, G-man. Would it be
at all possible to say something to Scully that didn't make you sound
either completely stupid or like an Assholes Anonymous dropout?) The look
she slaps him could crystallize his spleen.

"All right, since you think so little of my objectivity, I'll give you my
theory. One: the fact that you're pyrophobic, scared dumb by the very
notion of fire, precludes most possibilities of arson use. Two: all signs
point to the woman having consensual sex, not forcible assault, as opposed
to the theory you so kindly offered. Three: circumstantial evidence aside,
your preferred method of execution is usually a bullet to the cranium." She
takes a fleeting, nasty pleasure out of seeing him flinch at that one.
"Four: You can barely sew, much less know the intricacies a Smead-Jones
knot. Did I miss anything, Agent Mulder, or do I pass?"

He doesn't reply, only flips through the rest of the report agitatedly.
Afraid. Distressed.

She almost reaches a hand out to touch his wet forehead, where little beads
of perspiration seem to conglomerate on a regular basis now, almost takes
his hand to squeeze in a small gesture of her support. Almost. Because she
can almost see where his hands have been, his arms, his lips, his body
against the one she had to cut up, only recently alive, breathing, both
covered in her perfume and musk. Her body, now dead, pale, gutted and
decomposing, lying in the morgue.

Scully suddenly finds the simple act of touching him repulsive. Instead,
she steps back, shielding herself in a knot of crossed arms.

"Where were you, Mulder?"

"I took a drive up to New York this morning."

"Last night."

"I went home. I went walking."

"Did you go home or did you go walking?"

"I don't know. I was drinking. I don't remember."

"You were drinking?" Deja-vu indeed.

He stops, reading the autopsy details, pointing a slightly shaky finger at
one line on the page.

"It says here, instead of fragments of metal, There were pieces from a
compact disc embedded in those three areas."

"Yes. There were also a few other conflicts with the MO, which leads me to
think the killer is getting sloppy."

"Who was the artist?"

"Mulder, are you even hearing me?"

"I said, who was the FUCKING ARTIST?"

Her eyes go flinty.

"Rachmaninov."

He throws his seat back, rising abruptly.

"I have to get to a music store." "Mulder, stop this right now!" The tone
in Scully's voice stops him cold at the door. This isn't our case. This
never was our case. If word gets out to OPR, that we've been obstructing
VCS' investigation, this won't be our jobs either!"

Another racking cough seizes her, and she covers her mouth feeling wet
flecks hit her palm.

(Damn, no, not now, not...)

"I don't give a shit about Skinner, OPR, or Violent Crimes." He throws out
into the door. "They don't know what the hell is going on, and they'll
never know. I know. I've been there. I've seen it. I've done it. And if you
can't help me, Scully, just get the fuck out of my way!"

He spins around angrily, and like quicksilver, the emotion instantly shifts
to fear as he stares aghast at the blood spilling down her nose and chin.

She is looking down staring at the massive spray of blood on her palm,
seeping from between fingers running in tiny rivulets down the back the
hand. Then, ever so slowly, she looks up at him with eyes that are much too
blue, much too bright.

The last thing Scully sees is Mulder, mouthing her name as he leaps towards
her, before pitching forward into darkness.

*******

Movement, swaying. Muffled sounds, murmurs.

She feels herself pressed against another body, the light sway of movent
and footsteps rocking their forms. It is nice and warm. And strong. She
doesn't want to leave the comforting embrace, she wants it to be like when
she was five, to sleep in the comfort of the back seat of a car during a
long road trip, lifted in Ahab's arms and carried into the house, to her
room, and gently tucked into bed.

She reluctantly opens her eyes halfway, pushing against the lull of the
regular heartbeat and sees the floor moving, reflecting the lights in
alternating patterns of light and dark, the hallway bouncing by like waves
in a calm sea.

And the open-mouthed gapes of the entire steno pool.

Only then she realizes she is cradled in her partner's arms, being carried
down the hallway like some damn scene from 'An Officer and a Gentleman.'

Her eyes flicker wide, and she sits up, nearly dislodging herself from his
hold.

"Put me down, Mulder."

"You're going to the hospital." Or something like that. His voice muffled,
unclear and hollow, as if talking though a glass of water.

"I'm--" She shifts in his arms, attempting to find a way to straighten out
without unceremoniously dumping herself onto the floor.

"If you say that word one more time, I'm afraid I'll be forced to gag you."
A calm, reasonable tone, belying a definite and sincere threat.

He is so fucking tired of sitting on the offsides, tired of hearing that
annoying, endless phrase like it's her fucking mantra, tired of being
scared shitless every time she has a nosebleed or faints or...

She squeaks as Mulder's arms unconsciously tighten further on her squirming
form, taking longer, faster, furious strides down the hall.

He wants to carry her away, throw her in the car and blaze his way back to
Annapolis, back to her apartment, and lock the both of themselves away from
the work, away from the world and feed her endless bowls of chicken soup
and grilled cheese sandwiches until she gets better because as anyone
knows, chicken soup is the universal cure, but something warns him in that
oh-so familiar voice that if he even attempted that, he would be the next
body on Doctor Scully's autopsy table.

Justifiable homicide, she would say.

He stops in front of the elevators, bringing his face within inch of hers,
and evenly spits out his words in a low, threatening tone usually reserved
for questioning recalcitrant suspects.

"You are going to the fucking hospital right now, and you're going to stay
there and have every single test ever known to medical scie