By stellar_dust
stellar_dust_x@yahoo.com
 

WEBSITE: http://katycat.net/xfiles/
ARCHIVE/FEEDBACK: Sure!  And if you tell me
you've archived it, I'll link back to your
site.
SPOILERS: FTF
RATING: PG-13
CHALLENGE: AU
WORD COUNT: HAHAHAHAHAHAHA you're funny.
SUMMARY: "But what about Mulder?"  "He'll never
make it!"
DISCLAIMER: CC would never be so cruel and
heartless.
DATE: 08/05/2004
NOTE: This was written for the Alternate
Universes challenge at
http://www.livejournal.com/~xf_drabble . It
turned out to be anything *but* a drabble.
EXTRA NOTE: I'm not ruling out a sequel.  Or two.
Encouragement highly encouraged.  d-;

~~~

Heaven's Ashes

By stellar_dust
 

"C-cold. So c-c-cold .."

Her voice was barely a whisper in the throbbing
depths of the ship. He stared for a second,
horrified, grateful beyond belief - conscious!
She was conscious!

"Hang on, Scully. I'll get you out of there."
He pulled frantically at the ice surrounding
her; it came out in ragged chunks that he
tossed to the floor and suddenly she was
falling, falling forward into his arms, naked,
in a torrent of water like amniotic fluid.
Alive. Her teeth chattered. God, she was so -
"C-c-c-cold."

"It's ok, Scully. It's gonna be okay." He
whipped off his parka and his snow pants,
pulled his extra pair of thermal socks out of
his pocket. He'd freeze on the surface but she
needed them more -

Mulder didn't notice the convulsions until
they'd already started. He struggled to his
feet and got Scully next to him as best he
could. And then he felt the tremor. It was in
the structure of the ship, it was in the air.

With a loud *thud* (Mulder jumped) the pod
beside him cracked. He looked up - all down the
line they were cracking, one after another, and
far, far down in the distance there was already
something - unspeakable - /looking/ at him.

God, no. No! He looked back and forth,
calculated times, distances, speeds -

There was no way they'd make it out in time.

He slung Scully's quiet form over his shoulder
and *ran.*

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

Mulder turned the knobs wildly on the remaining
oxygen tanks, praying he was turning them the
right way, breathing with relief when he heard
the telltale hiss, shoved Scully inside the
transport bed and climbed in after her, pulled
the top closed just *seconds* before something
that was all claws and teeth and eyes and slime
*slammed* into the side -

Mulder held his breath. The seal held.

Two more crashes - three - the vessel still
held, and the thing slunk away after easier
prey. He breathed again.

Outside the tiny capsule of sanity, he could
hear raucous screams and cries, loud, cloying
wails as though a soul was torn asunder from
its body, muted through the walls of the
isolation chamber. Mulder shivered, and the
entire huge structure shuddered almost in
perverted empathy.

"M-mulder?" Scully's eyes fluttered open. "Wha-"

"Shhh, Scully." He pulled her close against
him, sharing heat. "I'm here. We'll be okay."

With all his soul, he willed truth into his
voice. He watched Scully's eyes drop closed as
the screaming went on, and the giant spaceship
he'd invaded began to shake itself into
oblivion.

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

It might have been minutes or hours that he lay
there, wrapped around Scully, watching her
breath, marveling as color crept back into her
face.

The screams had stopped not long after Scully
closed her eyes. He supposed it hadn't been
long; time seemed subjective, somehow.

In the same instant, Scully's eyes opened, and
the throbbing, rattling concussion of the ship
dwindled into silence.

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

She said she thought she'd be ok. She didn't
say she was fine, so he believed her. They
waited until the silence became oppressive,
until they couldn't think for the cotton in
their ears. Then Mulder told her everything -
everything he'd done since that bee in his
hallway. Her eyes widened and with a gasp,
her hands moved to his gunshot wound, probing,
gentle, ensuring.

"It's okay." He smiled and took her hand
between his. "I'm okay." Their eyes met for a
second, held. She nodded.

Mulder grasped the catch for the isolation
chamber. "Then what do you say we blow this
popsicle stand?"

She chuckled and shook her head, which he took
for a "yes." With a soft *poof* the lid came
off and they were free. Mulder clambered over
the side and gave her a hand up -

- into a charnel house.

"Oh my God," Scully whispered, shrinking back
toward the relative safety of the pod. Mulder
could only stare.

It was death. It was all death. All around
them, all through the cavernous chamber and as
far down the tunnels as his eyes could see,
they lay strewn like so many broken branches
after a storm. Black, ichorous blood pooled
beneath their grey, slimy bodies, sightless
eyes coated in gelatinous, filmy death.
Everywhere. They were everywhere.

Scully recovered first. "I thought you said it
was a /weak/ vaccine ...?"

Mulder shook his head wonderingly. "They don't
know what they hell they've got ..."

"Come on." He grabbed her hand and pulled her
along after him. "Let's get out of here."

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

The hatch wouldn't open.

He'd banged, cajoled, twisted, shot at it -
nothing. He was positive this was where he'd
entered the ship. No question in his mind about
that.

It simply refused every effort he put against
it.

They weren't stuck. He wouldn't accept that.

Mulder pulled out his cell phone. No service.
Of course.

He slumped to the corrugated floor beside
Scully and dropped his head to his knees.

He hadn't followed her to Antarctica, saved her
life, only to lose them both to slow starvation
and death under the ice. He *hadn't*. He
wouldn't *let* it happen.

A moment later he felt her hand on his arm.
"Mulder. We're here. Let's see what we can
find." And she was on her feet helping him up.

Mulder felt a surge of shame. *He* was supposed
to be the strong one; she'd just been poisoned,
experimented on, imprisoned. He shook her hand
off and rose on his own.

"You're right .. you're right," he breathed.
"Okay. Let's go. We'll find a way."

She looked him in the eye and nodded, then
picked the right-hand corridor at random and
led the way. She'd changed into her old clothes
from the isolation chamber, and once again wore
her cross around her neck; the clack of her
heels echoed reassuringly in the silence as
Mulder followed her into the belly of the
beast.

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

Scully stopped short in the doorway. Mulder
tensed and moved up beside her, mentally
preparing himself for more gruesome bodies,
half human, half alien, littering the floor as
they'd seen in countless dozens of rooms just
like this. /So many of them/, he thought. /So
many. And so few of us./

No bodies, was the first thing his mind
registered. The second was the opposite wall.

Or more precisely, the lack thereof.

It was black, pure black, deeper than the
deepest black of an alien's blood. Tiny pricks
of light seemed to glimmer at the edges, but
disappeared when he tried to focus on them
directly. Dominating the picture was a tiny,
glowing, blue ball, mottled with brown and
streaks of white.

It was all moving slowly, ever so slowly
inching itself beyond the left wall.

Mulder's throat constricted. He could almost
reach out and touch it - it was the most
beautiful, precious, evocative thing he'd ever
experienced. The Apollo photographs were
nothing. Nothing ...

"Oh my God," Scully croaked.

/Oh, *shit*./

"Scully, that .. " Mulder swallowed. "That
can't be what it looks like."

She turned to him, eyes wide and breathless.
She shook her head in a wordless denial.

Mulder had nothing to offer, and she took it.
She turned and ran, back the way they'd come,
away, far away from this impossible truth.

Mulder couldn't run. He fell to his knees and
started panicking.

****************
FOUR DAYS LATER

Scully paced the hallway outside the control
room. They'd found the room on the second day,
filled with instruments (luckily) labeled in
English, along with quite a few boxes of
hastily abandoned food, bottled water, and
Morley's cigarettes. Mulder had been glued to
the instrumentation for 48 hours, desperately
trying to find something, anything that would
start the engines again and take them home. In
the end he'd had to settle for short, modulated
radio signals, but even those were beginning to
weaken. The artificial lights had started to
dim, too ..

Scully had occupied herself in the rest of the
ship, trying to find a mechanical cause. It was
a small favor that the alien corpses didn't
smell ... In the end, though, it hadn't been
her physics degree that solved the problem.

She massaged her forehead. She didn't want to
tell Mulder .. he'd been so quiet since the
first day. She knew he was blaming himself,
taking all the guilt and anger, subsuming it
half into action and the other half to
brooding. At first she'd felt vindicated - let
him stew. It *was* his fault. *Everything* was
his fault, everything ...

But working alone, in the bowels of this odd
ship, she'd calmed. Thanks to him, they were
alive; and life was hope. She needed to tell
him that, but she didn't know how to start -
and this news was *not* how she wanted to open
the lines of communication.

The spaceship was biological. With the vaccine,
Mulder had killed it as surely as if he'd
crushed the engine of a Model T beneath his
boots.

She whipped around. She couldn't. She wanted to
see the Earth first. She needed to pray.

The ship was rotating at a rate of about once
every two days. She didn't know the exact size
of the craft, wasn't sure if the spin
contributed to the obvious artificial gravity.
Come to that, was it her imagination, or did
she feel lighter today ....?

Anyway, if the spin hadn't slowed, the Earth
should be back in view right now. Scully strode
purposefully toward the observation room.

Mulder was already there, head bowed, facing
the screen. Scully hovered in the doorway, not
wanting to leave, not wanting to be seen.

"We're not going home," he said, without
turning. "Are we." It wasn't a question.

Instantly, Scully was next to him. "You don't
know that. We aren't *that* far. Just barely
outside of lunar orbit. Someone will hear your
message."

He shook his head impatiently. "It's getting
weaker. You /know/ that, Scully."

She didn't have an answer.

Scully licked her lips, swallowed, stared
sightlessly out into space. /Literally./ She
didn't appreciate the irony at all.

"This ship. It's huge. They'll come for it,
they won't just -"

"The ship's dead. I killed it. It's
contaminated. It has to be." He spoke briskly,
hoarsely. He didn't add: they won't come.

She had no answer for that, either. She knew
the lights were dimming, and the gravity ...
she knew exactly how much food and water
remained. She had no idea about the air, but
somehow, she thought that would be the least of
their worries ...

They stood like that, still, contained,
separate, staring at the marble embedded in the
void, for what felt an eternity.

"Scully," Mulder rasped out. She looked at him.
His eyes were clenched shut, his face
contorted. "I'm so, so s-"

"Mulder, don't." She touched his arm. He
jumped.

Scully took a deep breath. On the count of
three, she pulled his arm around her and leaned
into his side, her own arms wrapping tight
around his waist. She leaned her head on his
chest and turned again to the window.

Instinctively, he wrapped her in his embrace.

"It's so beautiful, Mulder." She worked hard to
keep the tremor from her voice. Failed. "I'm so
glad I'm alive to see it with you."

He pulled her closer, starting to chuckle, and
pressed his slow sad smile against the crown of
her head. She felt his tears on her scalp as he
murmured into her hair. "I always wanted to be
an astronaut."