Safekeeping

By Jean Robinson
jeanrobinson@yahoo.com


Disclaimer: Characters from the X-Files are the property
of Ten Thirteen Productions and the Fox Television
Network. All others are the property of the author. No
infringement is intended.
Rating: PG
Classification: S
Archive: Please ask permission.
Spoilers: Up through "Requiem"
Summary: Everyone needs a little protection, especially
when they think they don't.
Feedback: Adored at jeanrobinson@yahoo.com
Author's notes at the end
*****************************

SAFEKEEPING (1/3)
By Jean Robinson


Seven years with Mulder had inured Scully to a normal
person's alarm about waking up in unfamiliar
surroundings. Budget-rate motels rooms, lumpy
couches. An alien spaceship. A cot in a tent pitched on
the beach of Africa's Ivory Coast.

Ambulance gurneys. Emergency room treatment tables.
Hospital beds. Dozens and dozens of hospital beds.

All of these occurrences were, in their own way,
upsetting. Even the innocuous motel beds with their
overstarched sheets and flattened foam pillows could
cause distress, although it was usually of a banal nature,
such as a vicious allergy attack from dust mites lurking
in the unlaundered blankets.

Scully thought the morning she awoke in the
Cancerman's cabin hideout, snugly tucked into both bed
and pajamas by his hand without any memory of his
involvement or her consent, was the most frightening
return to consciousness she'd ever experienced.

She was wrong.

Panic surfaced and reached for her before she identified
the hard, knobby objects digging into her spine and the
backs of her legs as seatbelts. Another long, terror-filled
minute passed before the second set of sensory
information processed through synapses deadened by
illness and fatigue. It finally dawned on her that the
unusual pillow cushioning her head and shoulders was
Melvin Frohike's thigh, and therefore by extension the
hands stroking her hair and gripping her arm must also
belong to the shortest of the Lone Gunmen.

"Agent Scully? Can you hear me?"

She blinked; until she heard the sound of his voice she
hadn't realized her eyes were open. Frohike's face loomed
over her, displaying something new in place of his usual
expressions of benign lechery or temperamental
paranoia.

Fear. He was scared out of his wits, his eyes nearly wild
with alarm.

"Scully?" he repeated, desperation now edging his tone.

"Is she awake?" A second voice joined in the one-sided
conversation. Scully rolled her head slightly to her left
and made eye contact with Byers, who was twisted
around in his seat in defiance of the strangulation
hazard posed by his seatbelt.

"I don't know. I think she's still out of it."

The pieces started to fall into place, a jigsaw puzzle of
both monumental complexity and deceptive simplicity.
The gentle rocking sway of the surface she reclined upon
confirmed it.

Van. The ancient Volkswagen bus registered to Langly via
three or four dummy corporations and fake identities.
She was lying on the back seat of the van with her head
in Frohike's lap.

He'd hinted at this very daydream on several occasions,
but for all his innuendo-laden teasing Scully thought
Frohike never intended for her to fall into his arms for
real.

But that's exactly what she had done. She remembered
that now, the dreadful revelation that Mulder was the
one in imminent danger of abduction, not herself, and
the overwhelming dizziness that followed that discovery.
She had a vague memory of weightlessness, hearing faint
voices calling her name, then nothing but peaceful
darkness.

Until now.

Langly – if Byers was in the front passenger seat and
Frohike was cradling her limp body, then Langly must be
at the wheel – took a corner a bit too fast and Frohike's
grip tightened on her arm, keeping her securely on the
seat.

"Slow down!" Frohike snapped.

"A minute ago you complained I wasn't going fast
enough. Make up your mind."

"I'm all right."

Frohike didn't hear her. Not surprising; she hardly heard
her pitiful attempt at speech herself. Scully tried again,
this time moving a hand to clutch his sleeve.

"I'm all right, Frohike."

He jumped at her touch. "Scully! How are you feeling?"

"Better." A small lie. The hand she'd shifted to gain his
attention felt as though it weighed a hundred pounds.
The dizziness had receded but not left entirely,
threatening to return with a vengeance with every
shimmy of the van's worn suspension system.

Mulder would have seen through the lie. He might not
question her or call her on it, but he would know.

Oh, God, Mulder. . . .

To take her mind off what might be happening in Oregon,
she voiced a question. "Where are we going?"

"The hospital. You fainted back in the conference room.
Mulder said you'd been having dizzy spells."

"Frohike, I'm fine. I don't need to go to the hospital."
Scully tried to sit up, but he refused to let her move and
silenced any further objections with one irritatingly
chauvinistic but quaintly chivalrous sentence.

"I promised Mulder I'd take care of you."

Chastened, she stopped struggling. Of course Mulder
would have worked out some secret deal with the
Gunmen to safeguard her well-being. Over the years his
original slogan of "Trust no one" had been expanded with
a quirky addendum – "except three peculiar and
intensely loyal computer geeks." Scully had to admit the
addition had served them well.

That her unorthodox bodyguards chose to carry her
unconscious from the Hoover Building and drive her to
the hospital themselves rather than phoning building
security to summon an ambulance spoke to the level of
their commitment. She'd traveled without incident in
emergency vehicles as a patient at least four times since
the night she'd been abducted to Antarctica, but their
memories were as long and vivid as her partner's in that
regard. Mulder had most likely instructed them, "Don't
let her out of your sight," and Frohike, Byers and Langly
were adhering to both the spirit and the letter of his
edict.

Part of her rebelled at the coddling, the insistence that
although she was capable of protecting the public from
mundane serial killers, she was still vulnerable to attack
by extraterrestrial forces.

The rational part. The part that still insisted Mulder's
little gray men were =not= out there, could not be out
there, despite all she'd seen and experienced. The part of
her that had struggled through a male-dominated
profession and bristled at the suggestion that she was
weak or unfit for the life she'd chosen.

It was a side of her personality that she'd started to
quash more and more frequently in the last two years in
favor of Mulder's brand of "But what if?" pseudo-science.
And it was easily overpowered by the certain knowledge
that she =wasn't= well and she =did= need to be checked
out by medical specialists, because normal, healthy
people just didn't faint for no apparent reason.

Normal, healthy people didn't have a government-issue
microchip implanted in their neck, either. A microchip
that might be keeping a life-threatening disease at bay.

If there was something wrong with the chip. . . if the
cancer was back. . . .

"Scully? Hey, Scully, stay with me, here!"

The vertigo swept over her again like an ocean wave,
wiping out the sound of Frohike's voice in a riptide of
white noise.

End part 1 of 3
______________

SAFEKEEPING (2/3)
By Jean Robinson
Disclaimer, etc. in part 1


Bodily jostling jarred Scully back to semi-consciousness;
the floating, weightless sensation was back but this time
it could be attributed to Langly, who was carrying her.

It was too much of an effort to open her eyes, and she
could no more move or sputter a protest than she could
run a marathon in her current condition, but she knew
who was holding her just the same. The long hair tickling
her cheek could belong to only one of the trio.

Byers was yelling for help, shouting for attention; she
caught the words "federal agent" and "injured."

Everything else was blur of motion and light.

Too much light. She tried to force her eyes open, to
assert some control over herself and the situation, and
was defeated by the piercing brightness of the overhead
fluorescents. Unfamiliar yet gentle hands pried her from
Langly's grasp, laid her unresisting body on a padded
surface she recognized – an examination bed in the
emergency room.

Disembodied voices spoke over her prone form, sentences
oscillating in and out in uneven waves as she struggled
to remain conscious. They spoke as if they believed her
incapable of hearing, not yet realizing that their patient
was also a colleague and could therefore follow the gist of
the conversation, half-heard or not.

What surprised Scully most of all was the distinctive
voice responding to the doctor's questions with
astonishing accuracy.

Frohike.

At least two hospital staff members, possibly more, were
fussing around her, pulling open her shirt to check her
heartbeat and attach a monitor, pricking her finger for a
blood sample, inflating a blood pressure cuff around her
upper arm, pressing a thermometer into her ear to
document her temperature, yelling for someone to find
her old charts. Frohike ignored first their suggestions
then their insistence that he wait outside while she was
examined. Abandoning hospital policy in favor of the
path of least resistance, the doctor decided to make good
on the Gunman's presence and was throwing questions
at him as fast as he could answer.

". . . name?"

"Dana Katherine Scully. =Doctor= Dana Katherine
Scully."

"Dr. Scully? Can you hear me?"

That had been directed at her. Scully knew it, had
caught the entire sentence, but despite all her efforts she
could only manage to open her eyes halfway and utter an
affirmative hum to indicate understanding.

Both the doctor and Frohike, however, viewed the slight
movement as a monumental improvement, even if she
was still incapable of speaking up for herself.

"How long. . . experiencing. . . ?"

"Maybe three, four days."

In the next five minutes, Frohike calmly cataloged her
entire medical history, the words "nasopharyngeal
tumor" flowing off his tongue as if he'd spent days
rehearsing them.

His flawless pronunciation didn't garner any laudatory
exclamations from his audience, however. The doctor,
who had just invited Scully to track his finger with her
eyes, froze mid-motion at the mention of cancer.

"When was this?"

"She's been in remission for two and a half years."

There was a heavy pause. "Order an MRI," the doctor
quietly instructed the nurse, who scribbled something on
a clipboard and murmured an acknowledgment.

To Scully the command sounded like a death sentence.
So much so that she nearly missed his next question.

"Is she pregnant?"

Frohike stumbled for the first time, revealing two very
different things to the two parties listening closely for his
answer. "Uh. . . I don't think so."

The doctor heard his hesitation and read it as a positive
admission.

Scully heard it and suddenly wondered how much
Frohike, Langly and Byers knew about her reproductive
woes.

She was aware that they had helped Mulder access
records on her behalf; he'd confessed to consulting them
during her initial cancer diagnosis and while
investigating Emily's background.

The full implications of what their involvement might
mean hadn't registered at either time. In Pennsylvania
she'd been cushioned by the shock of her diagnosis,
operating through a fog of defensive denial. Her own
survival was secondary to that of Penny Northern; if
Penny lived there was the merest breath of hope that she
too could beat the disease. After her friend succumbed,
Scully cast about frantically to find a new reason to
hope, to endure, to carry on the fight against those who
had done this to her.

And found it standing sentry outside Penny's hospital
room, waiting for her to emerge to hold her and reassure
her.

Less than a year later, the same silent guardian hovered
in the hallway in another hospital on the other side of the
continent, allowing her the necessary time and space to
grieve for a dying child.

He drove her back to her brother's house after all the
arrangements had been made, and stood with her after
the funeral feeding her small details in a valiant attempt
to provide her with a sense of closure.

How much or how little Mulder had ever told the
Gunmen about their role in these most intimate details of
her life had never crossed her mind.

Or how much more he might have revealed to them that
he still kept hidden from her.

But apparently he'd respected her privacy enough to
keep mum about this. They'd seen pieces of the puzzle,
but not the entire picture spelling out "infertility" in large
neon letters.

Of course, Frohike, Byers and Langly were not only far
from stupid, they were extraordinarily gifted at making
bizarre leaps of logic from minute scraps of information,
much the same way Mulder was. They =could= have
inferred a great deal concerning her condition from their
repeated intrusions into her medical files, dating back to
the day Frohike smuggled her chart out of Northeast
Georgetown Medical Center after her abduction.

Clearly, they hadn't.

And Mulder, for all his male posturing, hadn't gone about
bragging about his sexual conquest to his best friends.
The Gunmen might suspect, but they didn't know for
sure if their favorite rogue agent had finally shared the
sheets with her.

The vertigo was winning out; even with her eyes partially
open it seemed as though the room was spinning lazily,
just enough to keep her disoriented and vaguely
nauseated. The chills which had driven her to seek
comfort in Mulder's room not so many nights ago in
Oregon returned, causing the doctor to lean over her with
renewed concern.

"Dr. Scully? Can you hear me?"

She tried nodding ever so slightly, her vision trembling
and blurring at the edges.

"We're going to send you for an MRI and give you some IV
fluids. It may be an inner ear infection, or it may be
something else." He didn't elaborate on what that
"something else" might be, but that her symptoms might
point to a dire, possibly fatal prognosis wasn't a new
thought for her. "Your blood pressure is low, and we'll do
some bloodwork to check for anemia and such. And a
pregnancy test. Just to be sure. All right?"

She nodded again, swallowing hard. More tests. More
tests, more tests, more tests, would there ever be a time
when she wouldn't be on the receiving end of a needle, a
probe, a scope?

"I'm going to admit you for observation even if everything
comes out normal, just to be safe. Your friend says
you've been having these symptoms for a while, and I
want to know you're not going to pass out in the parking
lot on your way home."

Scully smiled slightly at the mental image.

"Now would you please tell your friend that he's going to
have to wait for you in the lounge with everyone else?"

"Scully. . . ." Frohike stepped into her line of sight,
reaching for her hand.

In the past he would never have taken such liberties.
Touching her was a privilege reserved for Mulder alone;
all three of them respected that and knew better than to
attempt physical contact.

She allowed it, curling her fingers around his in a weak
parody of her usual confident grip. Recent events had
turned everything in her ordered world upside down,
inside out and backwards; in a day that had seen her
cooperate with Alex Krycek and Marita Covarrubias as if
they were long-time allies rather than the most hostile of
enemies, send Mulder off to finish a case with no backup
but an ex-Marine whose loyalties had been compromised
more than once, and ended in a curtained cubicle of a
hospital emergency room where this man had received
visual confirmation of all his secret fantasies concerning
her lingerie, she saw no reason to balk at holding his
hand.

"Frohike." God, her voice sounded so feeble. What the
hell was wrong with her?

He squeezed her hand lightly. "Scully, I can't leave you."

"It's all right," she managed softly, forcing herself to
enunciate, to recover some of that masterful tone that
had so cowed Frohike and his friends when she'd
discovered the deception that had lured her to Las Vegas
at their behest last year. "I'll be fine. Go. . . go wait with
the others. Please."

"Dana. . . ." his voice, still registering refusal, trailed off.

Scully shook her head, squinting through her lashes to
minimize the spinning sensation that the motion
produced. "No. I'm. . . I'm not in any danger here. It's
Mulder. Go. . . go find out what's happening in Oregon."

He continued to hesitate, indecision and concern warring
for supremacy on his face.

"Please. I need to know. . . to know that he's all right."

The desperate entreaty for reassurance of Mulder's well-
being won him over more than any bluff affirmations
about her own health could, she knew. It was unfair to
frighten Frohike into believing that unless she knew for
certain that Mulder was indeed alive she would fret and
stew until her minor symptoms escalated into major
ones, but there seemed to be no other way to convince
him to leave and let the hospital get on with the business
of poking and prodding her.

And it wasn't entirely a feminine ploy. Mulder was at
risk; they'd already figured that out. She =was= worried,
and it would affect her even if the tests showed nothing
more serious than low blood sugar due to three days of
meals eaten on the run.

As expected, he acquiesced in the face of her plea. Over
the years she'd come to realize that Frohike, more than
any of the others, did indeed carry a torch for her, a
carefully guarded and nurtured flame that he hid under
a camouflage of running sexual banter.

Frohike, who, according to Mulder, had donned a suit
and a bow tie to pay his respects at her bedside after her
abduction, complete with flowers that the ICU nurse had
borne away immediately. And who'd looked positively
shattered by her condition, scanning her chart to divert
both Mulder and himself from his distress.

Frohike, who'd turned up drunk and maudlin at her door
that time Mulder had gone missing in New Mexico,
accepting her coffee and her comfort. It was only after he
left that she realized she'd needed him more than he'd
needed her, and that the contents of the bottle he'd been
clutching when she answered his knock had most likely
been emptied down the sewer rather than down his
throat as he'd implied.

Frohike, who sided with her when Mulder refused to
believe the evidence implicating Diana Fowley in the
Consortium's grand scheme.

Frohike, who rescued her from her own inhibitions, once
they'd been loosed by a newly developed chemical
weapon. The details of the incident were fragmented and
hazy in her own memory, but she understood enough to
know that she'd been within inches of jeopardizing her
professional career and her personal safety when he
dragged her out of the hotel bar.

Frohike, who would do anything at all to make her happy
or comfortable, including disobeying Mulder's orders.
Determined as she was to send the Gunman away, Scully
was equally unprepared for the wild, irrational impulse to
call him back and beg him to remain at her side that
swept over her as the nurses prepared to transport her to
radiology.

She crushed the idea instantly, ashamed of herself.
Using Frohike as a substitute for Mulder would be the
height of cruelty. She would get through this alone.

She always did.

End part 2 of 3
___________________

SAFEKEEPING (3/3)
By Jean Robinson
Disclaimer, etc. in part 1


For once she couldn't fault the hospital; where she had
expected to wait hours for access to machinery,
technicians, interns and nurses to complete all the
procedures the emergency room doctor had ordered, she
was instead whisked to the head of the line each time,
aware of the envious and occasionally venomous stares
from other patients in the queue.

Scully concluded her preferential treatment had come
thanks to the Gunmen, who had obviously decided that if
she was to be out of their sight until the tests were
completed, then said tests should take the minimum
amount of time possible.

She suspected they accomplished this feat of efficiency
with a two-pronged attack: making an all-around
behavioral nuisance of themselves and liberally
threatening ominous government reprisals on behalf of
her status as a federal agent, up to and including
potential IRS audits.

Now, securely checked into a private room, Scully found
she hardly cared what illegal or immoral acts they'd
performed to speed her through the process. It was over.
She still had to endure a worrisome wait until all the test
results were compiled to formulate a diagnosis, but at
least no one would be invading her body or her personal
space for another few hours.

She was finally alone with her thoughts.

Not that they were comforting, peaceful ones. But at least
no one was trying to pry them out of her.

Mulder, where are you? What's happening?

The implant. It'll show up on the MRI; they'll want to
know what it is and how do I explain it?

And what if the cancer's back? What then?

Mulder, why did I let you go back to Oregon without me?
What was I thinking?

A soft knock interrupted her reverie; she knew who it
would be before they announced themselves. The medical
staff would have just barged in, bearing fake smiles and
bluster to cover the fact that to them patients were
nothing more than objects to be tended, not individuals
with rights to common courtesies such as asking
permission before entering.

"Agent Scully? It's us." Byers. Only it didn't sound like
Byers, not his usual quiet, respectful tone that always
reminded her of librarians.

Scully told herself that it was just the way the door
muffled the sound, that there was no reason to be
alarmed and think that he was hiding something,
bearing terrible news. That it was silly for her stomach to
be cramping and her hands to clutch the sheets,
involuntarily bracing her to receive a shock.

"Come in."

The instant she saw them, she knew.

The instant they saw her, they knew she knew.

"What. . . ." her voice cracked and failed; she cleared her
throat and tried again, managing to spit out the words
this time although her mouth and throat felt sandy and
dry. "What happened?"

"Agent Scully, we don't have all the details yet. . . ."
Byers' voice faded as she turned determined blue eyes
toward him.

"What happened to him? Just. . . just tell me."

There was a heavily charged pause, while they all
exchanged uncomfortable, knowing glances with each
other. Frohike stepped forward, assuming the role of
unofficial spokesperson. He drew himself up to his full
height and looked at her without flinching.

"Mulder's gone," he said simply.

The statement struck with the punishing force of a
hurricane despite all her mental preparation. Her vision
went briefly to black, due not to the vertigo that had
landed her here in the first place but from a more
sweeping, widespread sensation of unreality. As much as
she'd been anticipating it, she hadn't truly been
expecting the unthinkable.

Scully recovered before the Gunmen could react, blinking
back the darkness and focusing on the three miserable
faces at her bedside. "Gone," she echoed dully, as if
perhaps she hadn't heard them correctly the first time
and she could elicit the response she desperately wanted
to hear by making them repeat themselves.

No such luck.

"Skinner's on his way back," Frohike continued gently,
his hand coming to rest on top of hers on the blankets.
"He sounded dazed but certain when we talked to him.
There was a ship. It took Mulder. He didn't want to say
anything else on an open line."

A ship. She didn't ask what kind; Oregon might be a
coastal state but she and Mulder had never referred to
"ships" in the conventional nautical sense.

An alien spacecraft. Mulder was on an alien spacecraft.

Mulder was gone.

Frohike took her hand in both of his, his eyes wide and
deadly serious behind his glasses. "We'll find him, Scully.
I swear we'll find him."

Echoed murmurs of agreement from Byers and Langly
competed with the white noise filling her head, turning
his first words into a ghoulish, singsong chant: Mulder's
gone, Mulder's gone, Mulder's gone, Mulder's gone. . . .

She shoved back the despair, the fear, the overpowering
desolation, with the same force of will that had seen her
through a terminal illness. Placing her other hand atop
Frohike's, making it a pile of four, she nodded and gave
them a brave ghost of smile. Later, alone, she might cry
and weep and wail. Maybe. Not now. Not here.

"I know. We will."

"We're going to pick up Skinner at the airport," Byers
said. "Do you want one of us to stay here?"

She shook her head. "No. Go get him. Find out what
happened. See what you can do to start getting Mulder
back."

They all came forward then, to touch and hold her
hands, offering their strength, their convictions, their
support. She smiled at them, returned their firm clasps
with one of equal resolution.

Frohike lingered at the door after the other two had
exited, his expression concerned and protective. "Scully?
We'll do whatever we have to. Whatever it takes. I
promise."

She nodded, feeling a lone tear escape to slide, hot and
sticky, down her cheek. "I know you will. Thank you."

He ducked his head and retreated, leaving her alone once
more.

For five minutes. Barely enough time to compose herself,
wipe the offending tear away with a tissue and banish
the source of any others that thought to follow, to tamp
down her frayed emotions and start methodically
planning how to rescue Mulder. To retreat to her science,
which, although she realized it might fail her now more
spectacularly than it had ever failed her in all her years
on the X-Files, was all she had to draw on at the moment
to stave off the crippling devastation waiting in the wings
to swamp her and render her completely useless.

Her door banged open and the latest doctor in charge of
her case arrived, carrying charts and films and notes and
grinning from ear to ear.

Smiling. Not a manufactured grimace that signaled
unpleasant news, but an honest, yet slightly smug smile
that spoke of both happy tidings and a faint touch of
superiority common to doctors who believed their
education gave them almost godlike powers over life and
death.

"Dr. Scully, I have your test results here. Your bloodwork
looks fine, although you're just slightly anemic. Nothing
to worry about, though. But the MRI is clear. You're still
in remission." His smile widened in anticipation of
exclamations of relief, perhaps tears of happiness.

Scully met him halfway, permitting herself to relax ever
so slightly. Her mind was still full of Mulder; it was
difficult to pay attention to her own ailments. She wasn't
dying. Mulder was still missing. Nothing the doctor could
tell her would change that. "Do you know what's causing
the symptoms?"

If his grin got any broader, she feared his face would
split. Something about her condition tickled his
funnybone, although she couldn't imagine anything even
vaguely amusing about her plight and his jovial bedside
manner was beginning to irritate her.

"Oh, I've got a pretty good idea. I'm going to run a few
more tests, just to rule out anything unusual, but I can
say right now that I'm pretty certain of what we're
dealing with here." He rocked back on his heels, hugging
her charts to his chest and beaming down at her with
twinkling eyes.

Suddenly furious at this vapid display of benevolence,
Scully glared at him with icy disapproval that threatened
review boards and misconduct hearings and demanded,
"Well, what is it?"

"You're pregnant."


End


Author's notes: With all the amazing cross-giving and
post-ep fics out there, I decided to go the route less
traveled and focus on how Scully ended up in the
hospital. My thanks to sister sandy of OBSSE, who gave
me some medical advice for my emergency room, and to
Jill Selby, who makes time to beta me even when she's
got more marshmallow sticks in the fire than a whole
troop of Girl Scouts. <g>

Feedback adored at jeanrobinson@yahoo.com