A Cold Day in July

By Jordan

~~~

The Prologue

by jordan

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

Something's wrong.

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

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

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

Gut feeling: danger. Serious, immediate, deadly.

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

Hesitates again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter One: The Predator

by jordan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter Two: The Prey

by jordan

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

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

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

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

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

She looked up, startled.

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

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

"Scully," he said.
 

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

"Are you alone?" he asked.

She nodded. "Yes, sir."
 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He rose and said, "Get your coat."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He said, "Why did you run away?"

"I didn't run away."
 

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

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

"Byers?"

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

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

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

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

"I must have been."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And left the room.

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

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

And she was on her own.

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

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

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

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

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

Krycek?

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

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

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

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

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

I won't let them hurt you, Scully.

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

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

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

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

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

But Scully was gone.

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

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

A Cold Day in July

Chapter Three: The Chase

by jordan

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

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

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

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

Surely she wasn't going to...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nothing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then silence.

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

Chapter Four: The Attack
 

A Cold Day in July

Chapter Four: The Attack

by jordan

Something was wrong.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then the gates of night opened and darkness flooded in.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You...?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Passports?"

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

He only watched her, not speaking.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"So you came here."

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

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

"You okay?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter Five: Cliffhanger

A Cold Day in July

by jordan

Chapter Five: Cliffhanger

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Good," he said.

She nodded. "No kidding."

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dana,

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

Dave

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

"Yes."

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

"We're going south," Skinner said.

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

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

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

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

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

Skinner said, "Put your seat belt on."

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

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

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

"Yes."

"Feeling better now?"

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

"You called me? Then what?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Do I look sick to you?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"How did you find me?" she asked.

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

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

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

"But you came."

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

"What did I say on the phone?"

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

"So you came to arrest me."

"I came to take you home."

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

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

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

"No."

Her eyebrow arched. "No?"

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

"Well, do you­"

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

"What?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

------------------------------------------------------------------------
A Cold Day in July

Chapter Six: Cold Hands
 

by jordan

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

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

Had she gotten clear?

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

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

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

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

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

"What?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"No."

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

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

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

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

"What now?" she asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Not a clue."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What? Where?"

"Over there!"

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

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

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

"What?" he asked.

"Is there another one?"

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

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

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

"Into what?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What theory?"

"Never mind."

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

"What are you going to do?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

next: Chapter Seven: Warm Heart
 
 

A Cold Day in July

Chapter Seven: Warm Heart

by jordan

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

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

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

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

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

He said, "Are you okay?"

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

"Can you sleep?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next: Chapter Eight:The Trap
 

A Cold Day in July

Chapter Nine: Heat

by jordan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, God.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"To discredit the X-files, maybe?"

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

"Maybe..."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Not and live, no."

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

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

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

"That IS the point?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I don't understand."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Don't be ridiculous."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You okay?" he asked.

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

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

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

"Yes. Definitely tomorrow, at first light."

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

Like tonguing a sore tooth, Skinner could not let go of one idea she'd
put in his head earlier. He said, "So it was Byers who suggeseted that
you call me?"

"I think so." He could feel her voice through her back, a pleasant
vibration. "Maybe I suggested it to him. I told you, I don't remember."

Silence. Sleep retreating coyly. She said, "They never doubted my story,
not once. They believed me right away."

"Yes," he said gently, "But Scully, aren't those the same three men who
believe that Men in Black is a documentary?"

She gave a little laugh, and said, "You never stop surprising me, Skinner."

He chuckled, and they both relaxed a little. He moved his hand around,
trying to find the valley between them without making it seem like he
was patting her down for a weapon. "Sorry," he muttered.

"Just lie still," she said, as if soothing a child. "Go to sleep."

"Sorry."

"And quit apologizing."

"Sorr..." He chuckled again, and she stifled a giggle and said, "You
know, this situation really is too ridiculous for words."

Skinner's left arm was going to sleep, and he tried to position it under
his head, folded for a pillow, his cheek resting on the inside of his
elbow. But what seemed to work the night before now cut off the
circulation, or poked her. He unzipped the bag a little to see if he
could move around without bumping into her each time.

Feeling the rush of cool air, Scully rolled over on her back and looked
up at him, "What the hell are you doing?"

Skinner raised himself up on his elbow, reaching over her to zip the bag
up again. He looked down into her drowsy eyes, the blue so clear he
could even distinguish the color in the candlelight, when the rest of
the room was in black and white. That was his undoing. He had never seen
anything as beautiful as her face at that moment outlined by the soft
spread of her hair, the darker color in her cheeks as she flushed when
she saw him staring down at her, her mouth a little swollen as if he had
already been kissing her for hours.

Skinner felt himself moving forward and tried to stop but the most he
could do was constrain himself to kissing her lightly on her poor
bruised cheek. He'd wanted to do that since it happened. Then to not
kiss her again seemed like an unforgivable crime against nature; her
mouth was shaped for it, so soft and yielding under his. To just let her
lie there, disturbing but undisturbed, was impossible.

He brought his mouth down on hers gently. Once, twice. Her eyes blinked
like a sleepy child's, the lashes fluttering down, and then with a small
cry of desperation she pushed her arm from the bag and put it around his
neck and pulled him down to her.

Everything that happened after that missed every textbook definition of
lovemaking; they had waited so long, put it off past the point of common
sense, that when the dam broke, there was no time to be skillful or
patient about it.

She opened her mouth instantly and moved her lips against his, inviting
his tongue. Skinner thrust it in her, moving a hand over her breasts
roughly, possessively, with false bravado. He felt her curves, the stiff
nipples under his palms, the elegant radius of her ribs. He felt the
heat underneath her clothes, her heat, the heat that burned upwards for
no one but him.

It was too cold, too cramped to unbutton her blouse or pull off his
jeans. He had to unzip his pants and extract his cock carefully, pull
down her sweatpants and the panties beneath just as far as her knees;
she couldn't open her legs wide, but as he moved on top of her she
spread them as far as she could and he cupped her groin and found the
small ridge of flesh between her legs with his middle finger, wiggled it
furiously until she tried to reach down under the blanket and find him
to bring him inside her.

He found his own way, lifting his weight, repositioning it with care
over the naked parts of her, so that his cock was like a pole vault,
probing at her a little more roughly than he wanted, but it was hard to
negotiate under the insulation, the clothes, the sheer weight of the
cold itself.

Then...he was sliding down into her, pushing her lower lips apart,
stretching her wide to accommodate all of his thick penis until she
finally held the full length him in her snug clasp.

Skinner withdrew halfway and slid forward again. They both gave a little
moan, their voices in ancient harmony, bass and tenor. He did it again,
again. Scully moved her hips in small circles as he found his rhythm and
began to fuck her harder, faster. Harder. Faster. She turned her face
away, her eyes staring at nothing, wide, a lmost frightened, and he
kissed the chilly skin of her throat. He managed to find her hand and
hold it on the floor just above her head, and her fingers kneaded his
restlessly as he bucked his hips up and down on top of her, driving his
cock to force her open, pulling her thighs wider apart as she fought her
own clothes in an instinctive need to wrap her legs around his waist so
he could have full access. Skinner longed to reach under her and grasp
her buttocks to control her position while he pistoned his cock deep
into her, but he couldn't get his arms under her.

Scully whispered urgently, "Don't stop. Please, don't, don't stop."

He had no intention of stopping. He was screwing her and as far as he
was concerned it would go on forever. The slide of skin on skin was
generating so much heat that it blazed up his groin to his belly, his
chest, his brain, and set his heart on fire. His penis felt impossibly
huge as it pumped in and out at a furious rate, and Scully was groaning
with pleasure and increasing need. The sounds she made encouraged him to
heroic heights; he was master of the universe, god of worlds, he had
chased this woman down, spread her legs and fucked her, and she was
submitting to him with helpless pleasure. There was nothing else after
that. If the devil had appeared at that moment with a contract to keep
her, nothing in the world could have saved Skinner's soul. The sense of
power was overwhelming, and he only saved himself from total madness by
opening his eyes and looking down at her face.

She was looking up at him, her eyes just slits of liquid blue, her lips
parted to how her teeth, her hair damp with sweat across her forehead...

"Skinner..." she moaned.

It was the voice of surrender, the come-cry of a woman who was about to
sail beyond her control into some other world, and he heard himself
saying her name in response, with the same falling away sound, the same
surrender, the most vulnerable moment of human existence, when one
joining ends and another begins.

Then she was struggling wildly and he was trying to hold her down with
his thrusting as they both wrestled their way to a sudden soul
shattering climax. She convulsed, clutching at him desperately, making
sounds deep in her throat that kept him hard when he thought he was
completely spent. He kept stroking into her, even after her shuddering
slowed, even after he knew there was nothing left in him but hollowed
out desire filling with tenderness. Even after he pulled out of her, he
pushed his hand down between them and found her clitoris again, just to
feel her whole body quiver and dance at the rolling of his fingertip.
Make it last, make it last, because it may be the last chance you ever
have to sleep with her like this, and she has to remember it, as you
will, forever...

Slowly spiraling back to earth, she was still kissing his face, and he
put his mouth on hers and kissed her one last time.

Then they moved apart as far as the sleeping bag would allow. The heat
dissipated a little, but didn't leave a chill in its wake, trapped as it
was between them. It was so comforting it was soporific, and within
minutes they were both asleep.

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

Chapter 10

A Cold Day in July

By jordan
 

Chapter Ten: Mulder's Sleeping Bag Theory Confirmed

Scully woke in the night, wet, shaken, unable to process anything. For a
few minutes she felt drugged again, but then everything came back to
her, and she stirred, startled into wakefulness. Skinner's arm tightened
around her. He was sleeping behind her, the sleep of the satisfied man,
which thunder would not waken.

So that's the secret, Scully mused. Not dinner or flowers or long sweet
courtships, not avowals of love or foreplay or a even a shot of ergot in
her bloodstream. All it took for the most wonderful orgasm of her life
was for her boss to just roll over in a sleeping bag and stick it to
her, and inside of ten minutes she was THERE.

It made her angry, it made her sad, it made her a little frightened. But
in some dark corner of her mind it made her feel something else she'd
never felt before. Skinner wanted her. He wanted her enough to break a
promise, to violate a trust even to himself, enough so that all his good
sense and starched attitude flew out the window. He had no control when
it came to her, not when it came to sex. He found her overwhelmingly
attractive. After years and years of being found so utterly resistible
by her partner, this was a new and heady feeling.

The downside of that was that neither did she seem to be able to hold
herself back. When she thought of how it had felt when he first put his
big hand between her legs...expert, experienced, but his fingers
trembling with excitement like a boy's...She squirmed a little just
thinking about it.

Ah, here's a good way to keep her face warm when not in the sleeping
bag; just blush all to hell. She thought her face was probably glowing
in the dark. Not like she hadn't been laid before, for God's sake. She
and Jack Willis must have done it twice a week, at least, for a year.
That was different. She'd always had an orgasm with him, he saw to that.
He had been a good lover. But it hadn't been anything like this. Not
even close. Skinner had aroused something elemental in her, something
she'd felt down to the soles of her feet. She couldn't stop herself,
couldn't think in the rush of sensation. And now, although her fears
about him and concerns were the same, Scully gripped Skinner's wrist and
held on where his hand curved around her ribs; if they never slept
together again, she would hang onto this feeling as long as she could.

She'd been wrong; Skinner was awake, had responded to the tightening of
her fingers on his wrist. She turned in his arms and e pushed his arm
out of the bag and unzipped it again. She couldn't see his face in the
dim light of the sputtering candle; was he even really awake? Was she?
Was this even really happening? It was easy to pretend in the dark that
this was all a dream, a prequel to a thousand fantasies she knew she
would have in her bed alone at night if she ever made it back to
Georgetown.

He unbuttoned the shirt she was wearing over her thermal shirt, and then
pushed the thermal shirt up over her breasts so he could touch her
there. It was cold, but worth it for the feeling of his hands on her.
Then he was pushing down on the waistband of her sweatpants again.

"I want you naked," he whispered.

"It's so cold." She murmured, but she made no attempt to stop him when
he dragged her panties down once again, this time, using his foot to
pull them down to her ankles and over her socks. He mounted her, and she
felt his penis slide wetly down her belly and between her legs, but he
didn't enter her. Instead he balanced himself on his elbows so that his
weight was suspended above her, and he put his hand on her face and
kissed her.

It was not a kiss like before. This was the male animal arousing the
female animal, telling her she was about to be mated and trying to get
her to participate in the act. It was a demand and an appeal at the same
time, and Scully spread her legs in response, arching a little towards
him. When he shifted his weight to one side and moved his upper body
away, she missed the warmth, the shadow of him above her, but it was
only so he could free his right hand to put between her legs again.

He was damn good at what he did, Scully dimly observed, wincing a little
at the scratching of his unshaven jaw as he rubbed it against her neck,
kissing her ear, coaxing her now with his mouth and his finger, sliding
around her slippery skin, slowing pushing his middle finger up her,
pausing, kissing her again, sucking on her tongue as he dipped his
finger back down, two fingers now, stretching her, palming her clitoris
and then another soft, coaxing kiss on her lips. Scully thought she
wouldn't be able to wait until he entered her. She said, "Oh" without
opening her mouth when she felt his fingers hard inside her, wondering
if he was trying to make her beg for it. She would have, but she didn't
know how, didn't know what to say. She seemed all response and no
initiative; she wanted to reciprocate, to make him feel the way he was
making her feel, but she didn't know where to begin. She ventured one
small hand between them, under his shirt, and felt the tight muscles
over his ribs, the coarse hairs on his chest; she could run her fingers
through them gently, and was rewarded with his sharp intake of breath as
her caress moved over the region of his heart.

He pulled his fingers out, rubbed her clitoris in a slow, knowing way.
"Do you like that?" he whispered.

"Skinner..."

Someone else had taken over her body, some stripper or callgirl or
something, and made it move in ways that surprised her. After the word
"Skinner" she was unable to articulate the English language for a little
while; he went on and on with whatever things he was doing to her, and
Scully could only reach down and find his penis and feel it twitch and
swell like an inflatable raft until it literally spread her fingers
apart. For some reason that sent her almost over the edge and with an
irritable, convulsive movement she shoved his hand away and said, "Now.
Now."

He positioned himself carefully as if afraid of hurting her. Truth be
told, he had hurt her before; he was too big to simply start fucking her
without some foreplay. But she'd only felt the ache afterwards, not
during, and she felt it again now. It took a few seconds for her to
accommodate his size comfortably, for the soreness to subside to a kind
of feverish itch. Then she moved forward, and he let his weight down
slowly.

She was glad she couldn't see his face in the dark. Not because she was
embarrassed, not because she didn't want him to see how intensely she
was feeling every inch of him, but because she knew if she could see
Skinner's face at that moment, the dark eyes, the high cheekbones, the
angle of his unshaven jaw, she would not be able to stop herself from
coming.

He tried to make it last, he really did. She admired his efforts. His
natural style was to fuck her fast, with short hard strokes that moved
her whole body forward a few inches on each thrust. But he tried to slow
down, tried to bring her around more gently this time. It just didn't
work. Scully felt him inside her and lost all restraint; she moved her
hips up and forced him to take her harder, forced his rhythm to speed
up, and she climaxed almost at once. Actually it wasn't precisely her
orgasm, or his, but a mutual orgasm that both seemed to participate in;
she was sobbing against his neck and could feel more than hear the sound
he was making, teeth clenched, groaning low in his chest. They entered a
place of pure sensation, indescribable afterwards, but one which bonded
them in a common experience so intense that some kind of permanent
exchange was made between his soul and hers, and the loss of it was like
the loss of heaven. But the memory was so sweet that it lingered long
afterwards into sleep, and for a very, very brief second before Scully
slipped away, she recognized what it was: she felt loved.

Or maybe it was all just a strange beautiful dream, because when Scully
woke up it was full daylight in the cabin and she was zipped up in the
bag to her chin, her clothes in disarray but mostly in the right places,
and Skinner was gone.

***********
 

chapter 11a
 

A Cold Day in July
by jordan
Chapter Eleven: The Morning After
 

Something was wrong.

Back up. Back up and think what it could be. Skinner heard all the
sirens and alarms in his head going off, but he could take no action
because he could see no danger. He only knew it existed, and it was deadly.

He stood on the road to town, watching as a young man approached him
from a silver truck and walked across the hard packed snow towards him.
"Are you okay?" the young man was calling. His teeth showed in a smile.
"Car break down?"

Skinner's mind was racing back over the events of the past few hours. He
had lain awake most of the night thinking. He would have resisted sleep
in any event, knowing that it would be the last time he held Scully like
that, lying beside her with his arm around her, feeling her breathe
softly in and out and letting her heat seep into his bones and change
him forever in small secret ways. Last night that had seemed to take
precedence over all rational thought.

When daylight came it was early and intense. It poured into the room
through the fluttering curtain in full buckets of brilliant sunshine
that gave even the silly cartoon dogs a certain rakish charm. Worried as
Skinner was, a man would have to be dead not to have his spirits lifted
by such dazzling light. He adjusted Scully's clothes around her as best
he could and eased out of the sleeping bag, though it was obvious he
needn't have bothered; Scully was sleeping so heavily nothing would
disturb her.

He had gone outside to relieve himself, but stayed out to look around.
The full sun felt unbelievably good on his face, and the blue, blue sky
smiled down on a beautiful white world innocent of all storms and
sorrows. The snow was hip deep but powdery; it was just a matter of
wading through it with wet crunching strides until he got to the road.
To his surprise, he found it had not only been cleared, but tire tracks
of other vehicles showed there had been recent traffic. Skinner narrowed
his eyes and turned in a slow circle, scanning his surroundings. The
building was a hundred yards away, lost in the white glare, almost
buried under the snow that had stacked itself on the roof and was now
inching downwards in compressing drifts. Tall firs behind the structure
spread their snow laden branches over it, and the sun had already begun
to thaw them into long crystals that glittered and stung the eye with
their brightness. A small bright blue bird had settled on one of the
branch tips, and it whistled a cheerful melody overhead.

Skinner knelt to examine the tiretracks on the road. If it had been
cleared this quickly, only hours after the storm subsided, then it must
be a thoroughfare, and people must live nearby and need immediate access
to the town. This was the good news. The bad news was that the next car
down the road was just as likely to hold a happy family of four on their
way into town for breakfast as it was a cold blooded killer who would
dump a man's body in the trunk of a car and then cut the brake linings.

Either way, the suspense was soon to be abated; he heard the ragged
sound of a car engine coming from the south. From town, unless this road
went as far as the main highway and someone had doubled back...As
Skinner looked up and down the horizon, he realized there were a million
places a man could hide just by lying down in the snow, but if he did,
he'd miss the chance to flag down a ride. There was nothing for it but
to face the danger and hope for the best.

A silver truck rattled around the bend. Skinner stood tensed, his hands
in his pockets, and in one of those hands, hidden by the bulk of his
parka, he held the butt of his gun. The bird fell suddenly silent.
Skinner could hear the creak and groan and slide of snow on the roof of
the shack, the crack of high up branches beginning to thaw, the purr of
the engine as the driver slowed it to an idle.

The driver put out one hand to wave, while the other rested on the
steering wheel. Skinner watched closely as he got out of the car; he had
no weapon. He walked to the truck as the driver came around, calling to
him to ask if his car had broken down.

That was the point at which Skinner had paused, a strange sense of
unreality whispering over him again, dreamlike, or nightmarish;
something here was really, really wrong.

The young man was somehow...wrong.

He was not much beyond twenty years old, wearing a brown snowsuit with a
yellow and brown striped ski hat, work boots laced almost to his knees.
He was slight of build, but wiry rather than fragile, and he moved with
a familiar kind of stride, a walk Skinner would recognize anywhere. From
under the sides and front of the ski cap bright red hair glistened in
the sun. His chin had a very slight cleft in it. His cheekbones were
high, freckled, the mouth generous and curved a little, and there was a
very slight overlap from his upper to his lower lip. His eyes...

Skinner pulled the Sig out of his pocket and took a step back.

"Hold it right there, son."

The young man in front of him was not Scully, of course, but if Scully
had been male, and twenty years old, this would be Scully. The mouth,
the arch of the eyebrow, the features he'd so tenderly memorized in the
night, were now on someone else's face.

The boy came to a stop and raised his hands to show he was unarmed.
"Whoa up," he said. "The keys are in the truck. I don't have any money
on me, sir."

Voice: male. Skinner's mind scrambled to find purchase in this slippery
place. Wait. Didn't Scully have a brother? Not the big one...a little
one, somewhere. Had they been twins? No, he'd have known a thing like
that. Maybe...maybe...

Maybe, shit. No coincidence could explain those eyes, that particular
shade of blue he could pick from a palette of millions of inferior
colors, the irises flecked with just enough hazel so that in some lights
they looked the color of sea foam. No. This boy and Scully were directly
connected and this meeting was no coincidence and this was not good.

Skinner raised his gun aggressively and spoke in his most dangerous
voice. "Who are you?"

"You mean, who am I?" The boy touched his fingertips to the breast of
his jacket. "My name is Kurt Crawford."

"You know what I mean. What are you doing here?"

Those spooky Scullylike eyes searched his, and like Scully's they had a
kind of bedrock integrity, a goodwill towards men that couldn't be
faked. Whoever else Kurt Crawford was, he was an honest young man, and
his eyes were as clear a reflection of his character as Scully's were of
hers. They showed the lie coming, and they showed the minute he
abandoned it for the truth.

"I'm here to help you, Mr. Skinner," he said. "Or rather, I'm here to
help Dana."

"How do you know Scully?"

The boy blinked rapidly, his Adam's apple bobbing, as if trying to edit
his words as they came out, nervous about getting it right. "She was
part of an experiment about five years ago. Well, I guess you know
that." His eyes darted past Skinner, searched the area, and then
returned to Skinner's face. Not good. This kid was either looking for
Scully or expecting trouble.

"Look, there's no way I can explain all this in just a few minutes,"
Crawford said. "Just let me tell you that Dana is in extreme and
immediate danger."

"From who?"

The boy moved backwards, towards the truck, and Skinner moved forward to
keep the distance equal between them. He suspected the boy wasn't trying
to get away, but to move them both closer to cover.

"Where is she now?" Crawford asked.

"I'll ask the questions. What are you doing here?"

Crawford tried again. "Dana was part of an experiment that involved
cloning. Her ova was removed and...things were done to it. Hybridizing,
splicing. Like with Fox Mulder's sister. But you know that already, right?"

Skinner thought of all the sketchy reports he'd read, how he'd demanded
Scully always make some kind of rational sense of them, even if they had
to remain unfinished and added to the unsolved stats, in preference to
some garbled Mulder explanation of events. Things happened, but the
author was always ultimately in command of the "truth," if it came to
that, and Skinner knew that the hardest part of Scully's job had always
been being the liason between that "truth" and whatever really happened
on their cases. He saw for the first time the tightrope she must have
always walked, trying to satisfy both the men in her job as well as her
own personal sense of integrity. The fact was, there was a lot Skinner
didn't WANT to know, that he was too much a coward to even look at, like
a child watching movies in the dark with his hands over his eyes. Now he
wished he had listened harder, read between the lines, been more of a
man for her.

Crawford was still talking. "Most of the hybrids have been destroyed,
even the drones, at least in this country, as far as we've been able to
tell. But there are still some left, some that weren't activated until
later, like Mulder's sister. They could just take her out and activate
her in adult form when they needed to."

"They who?"

The boy looked at Skinner carefully. "These people don't have names, do
they?" he asked.

"You tell me."

"Look..." Crawford rolled his head miserably. "You know Dana had a
tumor, right?" He pointed at his own forehead, between the eyes, like a
child pantomining suicide with a finger gun. "Right there. In her head."

"I know she had cancer, but she's in remission now." If Skinner's voice
was unusually harsh, it had to do with the dryness of the air, and not
his unwillingness to accept Scully's mortality.

"SHE is, yes," the boy said, his words increasing in urgency, "But only
her. Because, see, they made computer chips to stop it in the first set
of subjects. We think...we think that WAS the experiment, see, and not
the cloning at all. Because they could do clones fifty years ago. But to
see if they could make a chip to fix whatever might go wrong in the
process. When Dana got sick, they gave her the chip...THE chip...to make
her immune system really, really powerful. But the clones, the hybrids,
anything that was built with the same DNA, that obeyed the same commands
of that DNA, they got sick too and there was just the one real chip, for
the one real person. Just Dana's chip. Anything else created from the
ova...even the hybrids...would eventually get sick and die."

He was blinking rapidly again, and Skinner wondered if he was fighting
back tears. Some intuitive part of him recognized this boy as a part of
Scully, and as such, he felt a strange responsibility towards him.

"So what you're saying is that there's a clone of Scully with a brain
tumor running around here trying to kill her." His voice, clouded in
vapor, seemed to be reading the words; it expresed neither belief nor
disbelief. However insane it sounded, as he stood on the icy road with
the engine of the truck rumbling quietly a few yards away and the cold
already numbing his feet, whatever information Kurt Crawford had must be
used somehow to save them.

He said, "Was this clone the one who shot Mulder?"

Crawford nodded eagerly. "That clone...that...hybrid...thing...she shot
Mulder. He must have figured it out. She was in love with him. I've got
some papers, letters, some pictures, too. I can show you. You've got to
believe Dana had nothing to do with that. The other one, she...I think
she must have been planning this for a long time, because her rate was
so slow..."

"Her what?"

"The rate of her tumor growth. It has to do with environmental
influences, too. Especially if there's hybrid DNA. "

"I saw scans that showed the growth to be almost incapacitating,"
Skinner said. "How could anyone that far gone be smart enough to set up
a plan like that?"

"No, no, no. That's not what I'm talking about. Those scans were not
Scully's. I mean, they..."

Without any warning at all, the boy attacked Skinner. One minute he was
talking, and the next he was flying through the air with his hands out,
grabbing at Skinner's parka. Skinner brought his pistol up, but long
training kept him from firing on an unarmed man, or at least he thought
it had. There was the sound of a gunshot and the boy grunted and fell
forward, his clasping hands missing the parka and grabbing air instead.

He fell to his knees, clinging to Skinner's waist, and his weight
dragged them both to the frozen ground. When the second shot skittered a
path in the snow, Skinner realized what was happening. Someone was
shooting at them. He grabbed the boy and fell on top of him, then pulled
him over, and they rolled over and over to the safety of the truck. The
third gunshot passed so close to Skinner's ear he actually heard the
thunder of the air tunnel closing behind it before he heard the sound of
the shot.

He risked a look over the fender of the truck. Up ahead, just past the
bend in the road, was a woman dressed all in white. She could have
walked right up on them and they might not have seen her. She held a
rifle like a long black stick and she walked towards them with faltering
steps that were oddly measured, the way someone might come down the
aisle of a church at a wedding if they were very, very drunk. There was
something so wrong with her that even at a distance it was obvious. Her
face was as white as if she had been frostbitten, or floured. She
carried the rifle at waist level, the fingers of her white gloves
clenched around barrel and stock.

Skinner glanced down at the boy, who was lying curled up, breathing in a
fast, shallow way that meant shock. "Hang on, kid," he said.

He came up in a shooter's stance, head and shoulders above the fender,
pointing the Sig at the woman.

"Drop your weapon!" he commanded. "NOW."

Crawford was tugging at the cuff of Skinner's pants. "Not her, not
Scully," he panted. "Not Scully."

From twenty yards Skinner could see that when the woman got close enough
she was going to look so much like Scully that he was not going to be
able to shoot her. It was now or never. When she raised the rifle again,
he took careful aim. She fired, and the bullet smashed through the
windshield of the truck, making a glassy spiderweb on the passenger side.

"Dana!" she screamed. "Dana, come out of there!"

Her step faltered; she looked like a mechanical toy in the middle of a
malfunction, breaking down before his eyes. Skinner took a quick deep
breath and fired, calmly, deliberately, shooting her in the upper left
thigh, outside, away from the femoral artery.

He saw the bullet hit, saw the tear in her clothes, the puff of wadding
from the insulated ski pants. But she never even paused. She fired the
rifle twice more in rapid succession, and without hesitation Skinner
shot her the way he'd shoot a target at practice, dead center.

She flew backwards, arms in the air, the rifle making a parabola in the
air, and lay still.

As he started towards her, he saw that the boy's eyes were clenched
shut, and he leaned over, wondering if he could put pressure on the
wound. But as he bent forward, his eyes suddenly began to sting as if
from ammonia, and he felt an intense rush of nausea. He took a few
staggering steps away from the truck and threw up into the snow covering
the ditch by the side of the road.

For a long dizzy moment he held still, hands on his knees, doubled over,
until he could breathe normally again. Then he wiped his mouth,
disgusted, and with a quick glance to make sure the woman was still
down, he scooped up a handful of snow and bit into it, rinsing out his
mouth. He spat, looked at the boy, looked again at the woman in the road.

But the woman in the road was gone.

*******

chapter 11 b

A Cold Day in July
by jordan
------------------------------------------------------------------------
This is the second half of Chapter 11/12
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Shit.

Skinner stared at place where he'd last seen her. All she had to do was
lie down somewhere in the deeper snow and she'd be invisible until she
popped up like a leathel jack-in-the-box and took his fucking head off.
God, how could he have let this happen? What if she found the shack? He
shuddered with a horrible thought: what if she had ALREADY found the shack?

Scully. Scully. Leadfooted, he jogged up the road. When he reached the
spot where the woman had fallen, he saw her parka lying like a deflated
balloon on the ground. It was white, and empty...and so were her ski
pants, and boots.

A few yards away, the rifle lay harmlessly in the snow in the opposite
ditch, as if it had skidded there when she dropped it.

Nausea swarmed over him again and Skinner stepped back from the body,
holding his hand over his mouth. There was no body, really. Just a faint
hissing sound as something burned its way into the cold, leaving a
faintly corrosive smell, like muric acid, and a residue, greenish,
slimy, coming from the top of the parka, below where the ski cap lay empty.

Vision of the future: Kersh glaring at him over the desk, backgrounded
by the men in suits. "You say there was a woman who looked exactly like
Agent Scully committing these crimes?"

"That's right. Identical to Agent Scully."

"And where is this woman now?"

"She melted, sir. Melted right into the snow like a pat of butter in a
hot skillet."

Jesus.

Skinner went back to where he had left Crawford. The boy was in a bad
way, and Skinner wondered if Scully could help him. As he approached,
Crawford called out, "No! Stay away from me! I'll kill you."

"I'll get help. I'll get Scully."

The boy's face was bone white and his teeth were chattering so hard
Skinner winced at the sound. "Don't let them hurt her," Crawford begged.
"Please...she's our mother. Please don't let them hurt her."

"I won't," Skinner promised.

He had to get to Scully. He turned towards the shack, hearing a
frightening noise, a kind of muted roar he couldn't identify. He reached
inside the truck and turned off the ignition. It sounded like an
avalanche, like the whole damn mountain was about to come down on him.

The groaning and creaking sounds made him look towards the shack.
Something had shaken the snow on the pitched roof, probably a branch
falling from the weight of ice, and it was sliding down both sides,
plopping off onto the ground and exposing the roof while it completely
covered the sides of the building.

Skinner's first thought was, Surely she didn't sleep through THAT, and
then his second was, she might be suffocated by the snow. But the roof
was too drafty for that; all she'd have to do was dig her way out, if
she hadn't already gotten out...

Sure enough, he saw the blue of her parka, the red hair bobbing above
the snow. Her arms airplaned for balance, she was wading through the
tunnel he'd made earlier. He went to meet her.

"What's going on?" she demanded. "I heard shots."

"It's okay," he said, "But there's someone who needs your help over here."

Her face darkened with concern, and she followed him to the truck where
Kurt Crawford lay. "This kid said there was a clone," he told her. "That
would explain who shot Mulder. We guessed right."

"She shot Mulder," Scully said, with relief in her voice. "That explains
it, then. I mean, two people couldn't be at the same place at the same
time, right? That will clear me, right?"

"Well, you might want to take a look at her before you decide on whether
it will or won't."

Scully glanced at the pile of clothes in the road curiously and followed
him around the truck to where the boy was lying, his eyes glazing and
cooling, his face fixed in a grimace of death.

Scully grabbed Skinner's arm and tugged at it. "Get away from him," she
said. "Come on. Back away." Puzzled, he let her move him away from the
boy. The sizzling sound began as they were moving, and Skinner watched
in fascinated horror as the boy who had called himself Kurt Crawford,
the boy who had looked so much like Scully he could have been her son,
simply dissolved in front of his eyes. Scully had her hand over her nose
and mouth. "There's a chemical reaction," she said. "I've seen this kind
of thing before. If you're close to them when they die, they can kill you."

"Shit," Skinner said softly. Within seconds, there was nothing but a
green haze, and then that collapsed on itself and faded into the snow.
Only the outer clothes were left, sleeves and cuffs frayed from whatever
sickening chemical had evaporated into the air. "How the hell did you
know that, Scully?"

She was already walking up the road towards the remainder of the clone's
body. She stopped and stood there, her legs apart, hands at her sides,
staring down.

Skinner walked about half of the distance between her and the truck,
slowing as he moved, a great heaviness descending on him. His mind felt
like a giant rock that had rolled uphill as far as it was going to go,
and now was about to roll back down again, ponderous and inevitable. The
sickness was so intense he wondered if he was going to vomit again.

Scully said quietly, "She almost ruined my whole life." Her words barely
raised a fog in the air. "She just wouldn't quit."

Skinner felt helpless to move as he watched Scully walk across to the
ditch and pick up the rifle. Whatever he was going to say to her didn't
matter anymore. All he could think of was that it was just too late. Too
damn late. The world spun by like a crystal dream, all powdered sugar
and frosting, lovely on the surface and poison underneath. Centuries
might have slipped by in the few seconds he stood there watching her.

As she walked back to him, he stared into her face, and she had only to
look into his eyes to know.

She stopped, raising the rifle in both hands and pointing it at him
loosely. With a heartfelt sigh, she said, "It would have been so much
easier if you hadn't guessed. We could have walked right out of here."

"No," he said. "Mulder figured it out. Other people would, too."

She laughed bitterly. "Dave guessed,"" she said. "The fucking idiot. She
was so in love with that asshole Mlulder, she never even looked at
another guy. But Dave had the hots for her, and I took advantage of it,
and no sooner than I'd screwed him, he got up and looked at me like I
was dirt, and said, You're not Scully. You know what I said to him? I
said, That's right. I'm not Scully."

She laughed again, a little hysterically this time. "The weird thing is,
I forgot. He just fell over and didn't get up when I shot him. I mean, I
forgot he would leave a body."

"You shot Mulder." It wasn't a question.

"Well, I had to, after that bitch gave us away." The not-Scully gave a
little shrug. "He's so into himself, he hardly ever looks at me anyway.
It took him weeks, but in his favor, we were never alone that much. Then
just when he acted suspicious, I would let DAY-NA off the dosage enough
to get back to work." She spoke Scully's name with such derisiveness,
Skinner grimaced. "That seemed to calm him down for awhile," she said,
"And it kept her so screwed up she wasn't asking the right questions
about what was happening to her."

"Still," she said, with another sigh, "Mulder must have been suspicious
enough to sic Kurt Crawford on us. Mulder. Jesus." She rolled her eyes.
"That man doesn't pick up any signals that aren't from outer space, does
he? Any other man would have taken me to bed about fifty times by now."

She looked into Skinner's eyes suddenly, her own a warm blue, smiling.
"Had you suckered, though, didn't I? Just for the record, what tipped
you off?"

Skinner shook his head slowly. There was no point in trying to explain
what he'd felt that morning in the Hoover building outside his office,
or this morning, when he'd seen Kurt Crawford. The wrongness that was
not Scully, the rightness that was. He might have gone his whole life
never understanding it himself if he hadn't touched her in the night in
that place that was neither body nor mind, but a kind of singularity, a
thing that made the difference between Scully and every other woman in
the universe that could never be duplicated or explained. No matter how
many bodies looked like Scully, there was just the one soul.

"Oh, my God," the not Scully said, in disgusted amusement. "You're not
in love with her too, are you? Oh, great. That is just so damn perfect."

"You won't get away with this," he said.

"Why not? Because I can't kill her? Big deal. I admit it. I can't. But
what's she gonna do when I remove you from the equation? Run for it? Not
her. Not DAY-NA. She'll take the rap. I'll take the money and my
passports and just disappear." She snapped her fingers, a sharp popping
sound in the brisk air. "Mulder will stick up for her, but who the HELL
listens to that screwball? Oh, that's right. You did. Well, we can fix
that, can't we?"

Skinner said, "You won't get away with it because you're dying."

Her face contorted. "No, I'm not. Not me. It was her." She gestured
slightly with her head, not taking her eyes from him. "She was the one
with the monster tumor. Mine hasn't grown in months."

"But it will," he said, with a sadness he didn't have to fake. "It's
inevitable. Already you're making mistakes. Your only chance, if there's
to be any chance at all, is in treatment, and you're not going to get
that if you run away."

"NO!" She screamed and leaped forward, thrusting the barrel of the rifle
into him so hard and fast he didn't have time to move out of the way or
tense his muscles. The metal tip caught him in thet solar plexus,
driving the air from his lungs. He fell back with a grunt and sat down,
gasping.

"You, I can kill," she said, bringing the gun up to her shoulder.

Skinner was trying to wheeze a reply when something flitted between them
like a white bird. Before he could even guess what it was, a snowball
flattened against the leg of the not-Scully's jeans.

Both of them swung their heads around to see Dana Scully coming through
the tunnel of snow towards the road. She was scooping up another handful
of snow as she walked, swiveling her hips from side to side to widen the
tunnel, She packed it into another snowball, took aim, and fired.

Skinner stared, his mouth slightly ajar, as she flung it hard, overhand,
like a baseball, and hit the not-Scully in the shoulder. The snowball
exploded harmlessly and slid down the goretex parka.
 

"Over here!" Scully shouted. Her voice echoed her fury throughout the
hills. "You want to take a shot at someone, here I am!"

The not-Scully half turned as if to exchange a look of bemusement with
Skinner, and turned the aim of the rifle towards Scully, who looked
curiously denuded, wearing the plaid shirt over the thermal shirt. She
must have been freezing. Nothing on her head either, and no gloves.
She'd be lucky not to get frostbitten ears out of this. But her face was
flushed with anger and she looked like an avenging Valkyrie, a Norse
legend sweeping down into battle. Skinner closed his mouth and
swallowed, his breath coming easier but his heart hammering. The very
sight of her made him rejoice; God, she was magnificent.

Whap! Another snowball. This one struck the not-Scully's hand where she
cupped the stock of the rifle. "Quit that, you crazy bitch!"

"You drugged me for weeks," Scully shouted. "You shot my partner, you
ruined my life and my career, you tried to dump all that snow on me and
trap me in that shack. AND YOU STOLE MY COAT!"

Still another snowball, and this one must have stung a little when it
glanced off the not-Scully's cheek. "Now you either kill me or I am
going to KICK YOUR ASS!"
 

If Skinner could have stood up just then, he would have cheered. As it
was, he only began to slide the Sig out of his jacket pocket. "Give it
up. She means it."

Scully had reached the road and was coming at them. She only paused to
reach down into the snow in the ditch and come up packing another
snowball from hand to hand. She advanced on her double with no
hesitation. Skinner drew his gun out all the way into the open. With a
hiss of anger, the not-Scully whirled and brought up the barrel of the
rifle and pulled the trigger. Skinner saw her hand convulse around the
trigger and fired at the same time. Both shot from point blank range.
Skinner braced himself, teeth clenched, the gun jerking its recoil in
his fist.

No time to aim; his bullet struck her just between the ribs. But her own
weapon exploded like a small hand grenade with a flash of gunpowder and
a blast that made Scully yelp and drop to the ground and Skinner throw
his arm over his eyes.

The not-Scully slithered down as if shrinking into her own clothes.
Skinner caught a glimpse of the side of her head, blackened by the
explosion, the one ruined eye and the terrible hole in the side of her
face, and couldn't look any further.

After a few seconds, Scully crawled over to him. "Are you okay? Did she
get you? Are you hurt?" She looked at the Sig in his hand and said, "Why
didn't you let me know you still had your gun? I thought you were
helpless."

"Is that why you tried to draw her fire? What the hell were you
thinking, Scully?" He got to his feet painfully, too furious to think of
what might have happened to temper his words. "You had no way of knowing
the barrel of rifle would pack with ice and backfire like that! So you
thought you'd just come in shooting with a fucking SNOWBALL?"

"I saw that gun lying there before she picked it up," she snapped back.
"She'd already fired it, so it had to have melted the snow into ice
around it and inside it."

Skinner jerked the zipper of his parka down violently and pulled it off.
"That was an insane thing to do, Agent Scully, and if that's the best
your FBI training has done for you, then I think it's time you had some
refresher courses."

She took the parka from him and put it on without pausing in her reply.
"You are the only man on earth who would stand there and complain about
someone saving your life--"

The not-Scully was bubbling into oblivion, and the air literally smoked
with their shouted words. Skinner turned suddenly and said, "That will
be ALL, Agent Scully," in a voice that brooked no disobedience.

Scully glared, but fell silent. She turned from him, saw the clone
melting into the earth, and her face changed, grew pale. She looked away
again, eyes haunted by the vision that would probably never leave her.

Skinner wondered what she was thinking, but he didn't ask. He was not
going to ask her again. That part of their adventure was over, and now
he had to think of the future.

His real work was only just beginning.

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

chapter 12 "EPILOGUE"

A Cold Day in July

by jordan

Chapter 12/12

Epilogue: Past, Present, and Future

Something was wrong.

Scully sat in the back seat of the patrol car, a battered tan Buick with
a faded sign painted on the door, staring out the back window. The town
might not have much in the way of funds to pay a lawman, but the sheriff
had been decent and courteous to her, professional with Skinner, and was
doing a very thorough job of things. Surely he must have thought the
story strange, as he tromped around the snow with the other men, marking
sites with yellow tape and little surveyor flags. But he had never so
much as raised an eyebrow or let a cynical tone creep into his voice
when he spoke to her.

Two agents were being flown in from a Washington State field office to
escort her home. That was the first thing. Why had Skinner called them?
Why wasn't she flying back with him? He was going back at once, not even
coming back to town, but going with one of the deputies to someplace
further south, a town with an airport and chartered flights.

The second thing--and it took her the better part of an hour to figure
this out--was that Skinner was deliberately avoiding all eye contact
with her. From the moment he had called her "Agent Scully," everything
had changed. It wasn't even a coolness about him, but more of a denial
of her existence, as if she had simply become a problem he had to deal
with.

Now as she sat on the cheap vinyl seatcovers that reeked faintly of
vomit and urine and old dog, her stomach rumbled and her head ached and
her nose dripped from the cold, and every time she wiped it she looked
at the tissue expecting to see blood. She felt weak and tired and
discouraged. She hadn't been handcuffed--that was a good sign--but she'd
been told in no uncertain terms to stay there, and no one would tell her
anything else.

The first incredible high had worn off; that had been earlier, when
Skinner told her to get into the truck and then he got in and rolled up
the windows and turned the heater on full blast. They had sat there
luxuriating in the warmth, Scully with her eyes closed and her palms
flat on the dashboard which the full sun had heated, Skinner going
through the brown leather briefcase he had found on the front seat. He
had grunted to himself a couple of times, as if he'd forgotten her
presence, leafing through files and taking some out, reordering others.
And one or two, if she wasn't mistaken, had gone quietly into his
jacket. She'd been waiting for him to speak then, but he had never said
anything to her.

There was a CB scanner in the truck and Skinner had no trouble raising
help. The sheriff had been out patrolling the roads and was there in
twenty minutes, and other people showed up inside of an hour. A coroner.
A local doctor. A couple of part time deputies. Skinner had talked to
them, and put on his best FBI-in-charge voice, but what he said to them,
she didn't know. She'd just been escorted to the cruiser and told to wait.

She wiggled the back door handle experimentally. Locked, with the inside
popup lock unscrewed and bolt-cut at the base. With a good pair of
tweezers she could probably get out of the car, but she didn't even have
her purse with her. And anyway, what was the point?

Finally a deputy came to her window and rapped his knuckles against it.
It was only then that Scully saw that the window handle worked. She
almost laughed, and rolled it down.

"Ma'am, we're going to take you back to town until your own people can
fly in and escort you back to Washington. Mr. Skinner said to ask you if
you wanted anything before we go."

"Tell him I want to talk to him," she said.

She watched the deputy, a long legged boy of no more than twenty or so,
lope up to the tall, somehow remote figure of Skinner, interrupting him
as he and the sheriff were talking. She saw Skinner turn his head in her
direction, saw his shoulders lift and fall in a sigh as if to say, oh
well, if I must.

When he crouched down by her open window and looked at her and said,
"What is it, Agent Scully?" she wanted to say a thousand things. But
when she studied his cool, impassive face, she saw nothing of the dark
lover who had taken her in the night, who had touched her with such
tenderness that she'd thought it had to be emotion and not just skill.
She suddenly remembered a detail so poignant it brought tears to her
eyes: after they had made love she had left one hand out of the bag, and
he had pulled it back inside, tucked it under the goosedown. As if he
could feel her cold then, as she could feel his now.

Suddenly he made eye contact and she was the one who had to look away
from that chilly inner sanctum where there was no place for her. "What's
going to happen now?" she asked, hating herself for the meekness in her
voice.

"We'll talk in Washington," he said.

"Am I in custody?"

"Technically, yes," he said, "But there's enough evidence in Crawford's
briefcase to clear you a dozen times over. I just want to make sure we
observe all the formalities so there's no question about anything that
happened here."

If he recognized the irony in his own statement, he didn't acknowledge
it. He said, "Crawford seems to have known that these two women who
looked like you--possibly because of plastic surgery, or whatever--had
been planning for some time to commit a series of robberies, blame them
on you, and then escape, leaving you to take the fall. Making it look
like you made a run for it and then got caught in flight, while your
partner, Dave, got away with the money. He's got all sorts of dated and
even notarized documents and photos that show these women in places it
will be easy to show you were NOT. He even has some samples of your
blood in the briefcase to show what you were drugged with; I'm not sure
what the results will mean but we'll have the lab work on them. Our only
real problem is going to be convincing these people not to waste their
time searching for the women or their bodies."

"Why did Crawford do all this and yet never just call the police?"
Scully asked.

Skinner looked uncomfortable, as if weighing his answer. Then he said,
"I guess we'll never know."

Everything dawned in slow light over Scully, bathing her in relief.
"Then...it's going to be all right?"

He nodded. "Yes. I think it will be. There are still a lot of unanswered
questions, but it's something you and Mulder can pursue if you wish when
you're back on the job."

Mulder. Scully remembered with a rush of pleasure that Mulder was all
right, that she'd be seeing him soon. The very thought fortified her.
She took a deep breath and said, "Thanks, Skinner."

He patted the car door a couple of times and got up. Scully watched him
walk away, the stiffness in his back, the long strides away from her.
All too obviously glad to be away from her.

Well, what had she expected? Avowals of undying love? He was a man, she
was a woman, they'd been in desperate circumstances. So she discovered
he was a wonderful lover. It was just something she would have to put
behind her. Something she would have to forget, as he had probably
already forgotten.

The deputy got in and started the car. He gave her an awkward smile in
the rearview mirror, probably meant to be reassuring, and pulled the
Buick through the tangle of cars and onto the open road beyond. Scully
saw a man in a grey jacket, most likely the doctor, kneeling by the
blanket that had been placed over the empty clothes of one of the
not-Scullys. Skinner stood beside him, his back to her, broad shoulders
so familiar she thought she could pick him out from a crowd at a stadium
without seeing his face. Despite herself, she felt a strange, tortuous
twist of grief. Then her breath fogged the glass and she saw nothing but
the vague white world slipping away through a mist like tears.

The car moved on. The men moving around the snow had churned it to
slippery mud, and were watching where they walked, and no one looked up
to see her go.

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

Skinner waited until he could no longer hear the engine of the Buick
before risking a glance after it. She was finally gone. Thank God.

He still felt a prick of irritation from that one bad moment, the urge
that had been almost uncontrollable to reach out and shake the word out
of her head when he'd said "Mulder" and her eyes had suddenly lit up for
the first time that morning.

Mulder. She would probably stop at the hospital that very day to see
him. He was undoubtably sitting up by now, harassing the nurses with his
stupid jokes. He would have regained enough physical ability so that
when Scully came in he would be able to put his arms around her, hold
her, feel the way she shapeshifted to fit against him. And he'd know.
Men knew. Not right away, but he'd figure it out eventually. He'd feel
the new warm heaviness of her body, the loose muscles that used to be
clenched all the time. He'd see the way her mouth turned up at the
corners when she was staring into space, thinking no one was watching.
And maybe he'd guess exactly what happened, but more likely he wouldn't.
Sad to say, but when women got laid, Skinner was usually the last
suspect on the list.

And yet.

He had not talked to Scully about anything. They would have to talk, if
only to get their stories straight. She'd keep her mouth shut until
then. He knew he could trust her common sense, and her sense of
propriety. Before the hearing. During the investigation. She HAD to talk
to him. Somewhere in DC. Somewhere safe, where they could be alone,
unobserved. She'd see the logic of that. And when could Scully ever
resist logic? Eventually, the Subject would come up. What we did. What I
did to you. Hard and deep and fast, the way you wanted me to. Remorse,
guilt, crocodile tears. Maybe a little comfort, a little forgiveness
afterwards. A little something to make them both feel better.

Georgetown was in the middle of a hot, sultry summer, long days and
leisurely dinner hours as the sun took its own sweet time about setting.
There would be plenty of time for them to meet after work. Plenty of
time, in the light, in places where she could feel safe. That was the
key. Sooner or later he'd find a time and a place for what he wanted. If
she resisted him--and of course she would? he knew just what it would
take to get her to lie down under him again, just when she needed to be
bullied and when she needed to be begged, just where the line of her
resistence would melt to the right touch.

That was a promise he'd made to himself the minute he saw her pulling on
his jacket, when he suddenly realized it was all over. It would NOT be
over. Dana Scully would feel him inside her again, as often and as
thoroughly as he could manage it. She'd be shy and ashamed and a little
scared until she finally figured out that she was safe with him, safe
with those feelings, as long as she believed that it was just a series
of accidents that happened between them and no demands would be made on
her.

After he made love to her again, he would let her go. And let her go.
And let her go. He'd never try to hold her, ever. But one day she
wouldn't want to go. One day she'd wake up in his bed and it would be
morning, and she'd lie between the clean white sheets and smell the
coffee he was making, and she wouldn't want to bolt for her clothes or
jog the three blocks to where her car was discreetly parked or call and
tell her mother she was spending the weekend with friends. One day she'd
only look at him sleepily and let him do it all again, in full daylight,
with God watching in smiling approval.

And one day, if he was careful enough and distant enough and passionate
enough at the right moments, Dana Scully would tell him she loved him.
Then he might let her know he'd always been in love with her, or he
might pretend it was a gradual thing with him, too, or when she said it
he might just sit and stare at his hands and will himself not to weep
like a child.

One day.

Skinner was waving at the sheriff, walking away, already a million miles
into the future somewhere with his hand on the side of Scully's face,
where it fit so perfectly. He gave himself one last over the shoulder
glance at the roof of the shack, which was poking up like a witch's hat
from under all that snow, and he smiled. One day Walter Skinner would be
Dana Scully's lover. Yeah, right. One day when pigs flew. One day when
hell froze over. Or once on a cold day in July. Hell, anything was
possible. Hadn't they already proved that?

End

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