"Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light."

- Dylan Thomas

It comes to her when she doesn't want it to. It's cold, and wet. Heavy, like long hair coming out of the sea, like hers, tugging on her spine, and drawing lines in rivulets down her back. It comes to her bathed in guilt.

Guilt.

What doesn't live in guilt these days, she wonders. It's so familiar that she almost misses it, and of course, when she does catch it, the slither of feeling spreads from the palm of her hand, spidering out to her fingertips, and through her veins, much like the lifeblood she'd rather forget flowed through her.

Blood infiltrated by foreign markers. Alien genes.

Junk DNA, Mulder had called it once.

"When we found you," he'd said, speaking around the truth, "When you were sick, the first time, the guys analysed your blood."

"I didn't know Frohike was a medical doctor," she said, twisting her head sharply to dislodge the soft concern in Mulder's voice. "What'd he get his license revoked for? Unethical treatment of the human body?"

Mulder smiled, but his eyes still held hers.

"No," he acknowledged. "That was for something else. They did this at my request. And they found something."

"What something?" It bothered her, viscerally, that she was more unknown to herself than anyone else.

"Byers called it 'junk DNA'. Foreign genes that co-mingled with your own genetic makeup, but were alien in origin."

"Aliens from space? Or -"

"It doesn't matter. It just cluttered up your system. It was killing you."

"But I didn't die," she protested, reminding herself. She didn't die. She never died. "I came back, I chose to come back, and no one ever mentioned this to me then. I've had blood tests since, and nothing's ever shown up."

"You didn't know to look for it."

"You can't just, just -" she struggled, grasping for an easy way to explain the impossibility of the science to someone aiming to defy it. "That's not how it works. You can't just add genes to pre-existing DNA, and then hide them. The technology doesn't exist, and even if it did, genes don't disappear. They can be inactive -"

"I think that's what the chip is for," he insisted. "The chip keeps the junk DNA quiet. It makes it harmless. Until it's removed, at which point, the non-compatible components run rampant, and replicate. It's -"

"Cancer."

"You know this. It's happened before. To you."

She shook her head, denying it.

"That's not what happened," she argued. "My remission occurred after courses, and courses of chemotherapy. I had help. I had belief – your belief. I prayed -"

"God helps he who helps himself, Scully," he said. "You prayed, but you also put that chip back in your neck."

"There's no definitive proof that it made any difference," she said. Her voice had been worn, but weighted, then. It wasn't coloured with the static crackle of distance that blurred her speech when she talked these days.

"You're standing here, fighting me," he'd countered. "That's proof enough for me."

So he'd told her. And she'd forgotten.

Even after Antarctica, even after the blinding snow, and the cold, and what she'd seen, she'd forgotten about this.

It might have been wilful ignorance, she concedes to herself, staring at the most recent run of tests in her hand. The gossamer sheets of plastic marked in the ghosts of her own genetics shimmer back at her, as transparent as her own false justifications.

But, she reasons, there'd been no cause to consider it after that. Her regular screenings came back negative, year after year. Five years. Then ten. And in between, there'd been Mulder to deal with. Mulder's own fragile, complicated wellness.

And William.

God, she thinks about William. All the time.

What if he's unhappy? What if he's scared? What if he misses her?

What if he doesn't.

And yet, all this time, even with the countdown on, and passed, and time overrun, even then – she'd ignored this.

Because if her DNA has been manipulated, if she's been made immune, then she knows she could have stopped this years ago. Before they knew the date, before they lost their jobs, and their home, and their child. Before it had gotten this far.

"The truth that I've been searching for," he'd said, "That truth is in you."

Mulder had known. And he was right.

So it's guilt, now, that reminds her of what she'd forgotten – what she'd chosen to suppress, and ignore. Forget. To say that, even to herself, denies her her own culpability. She is guilty of so much, and it seems only fitting that the end of everything should rest at her feet, too.

When people first started falling sick, she'd turned off the news, and gone to bed alone. She'd been going to bed alone for a few months, but that night the sheets felt especially coarse, the comforter especially heavy, and she lay in bed, suffocating, until the lack of oxygen took her.

Two months later, the sickness had spread. Cases were being reported in Europe, and China. Canada's CDC centres were being accused of secretly implementing containment strategies at hospitals across the country, at the same time the U.S. was vehemently denying the presence of any afflicted individuals on their soil. This was despite the quarantine being enforced at a small hospital in Dallas.

"It's targeting the young, and strong, Scully," Mulder said, his voice made shallow by the thin phone she held. "And there will be a loud wailing in Egypt. It's beginning."

"This isn't a plague, Mulder," she countered impatiently. "It's an epidemic."

"What's the difference?"

"Well, significantly less paranoia, and fear-mongering, for one thing."

He'd hung up the phone without any mention of her absence, and the next morning she'd found a link to Tad O'Malley's show in her inbox. She hadn't felt compelled to watch it, and he hadn't sent another.

When next he called, he'd had Sveta.

That seemed long ago, now, though thinking about it, laying it all out in her head as she tries to pinpoint the moment of her own failure, she realises it has only been a few months. Five, at most.

Five months she could have spent doing something. Wasn't that what she wanted? Wasn't that what she missed?

She'd joined the Bureau believing it would give her the chance to have an impact. To make a difference. There was some naïve, girlish part of her that still ached for the opportunity, and on the X-Files, in pursuit of Mulder's glorious truth, she'd thought she might find it. She thought she had found it; something bigger than her, but still tangible. Important, but dependent on the devotion of someone else to be affective.

It wasn't arrogance, so much as it was her own existential fear of her own absence. The end, her end, had always been coming, and time needed to be marked. Noted. She needed to touch something outside herself, and change it for the better, if she could.

But with the end so explicitly set, and their main seat of power usurped by higher authorities, life on the run had worn her out. She was exhausted. The vibrant red of hope she'd be so saturated with once had been washed out by that cool, steady drip of guilt. Her hair grew long, and colourless, her skin pale, and her voice brittle. When she stood beside Mulder now, with empty hands, she felt like a dirge to American Gothic. Not the fugitive truth-seekers they'd set out as. Not the Moses of the world, dragging light and guidance from down the mountain.

It was a quiet, slow slipping away.

Her sights were more intimate now. She thinks about her work at the hospital, surrounded by prayers, and scalpels. She assisted, she corrected, she let herself melt into the background, secondary – tertiary – to the drama that played out. One person, she prayed, one child at a time.

A tangible result, and a life saved.

Then this.

Sveta had been insistent, and Scully needed a control. Something to compare Sveta's DNA to, something Mulder would accept (and something, she heard whispered in the back of her mind, to prove what Mulder had told her years ago).

She'd done the sequencing. She'd known where to look, where she hadn't wanted to before, and there it was.

One lonely marker. Quiet. Inactive. Just a little piece of trash suspended harmlessly in her system.

But Sveta didn't have it – not the same way.

And that, more than anything, that made her angry. It had been so many months since she'd felt something other than sadness, or disappointment, or the cold, blue stab of injustice with no recourse. This anger – it warmed her. The icy pane she'd set to shut Mulder out was opened, and though it was too early for spring, the bracing chill of fear invigorated her, making her feel feverish. There was power in pursuit, there was opportunity in action, and Mulder still believed. He was still here.

And William was out there.

That was the hardest thing to come home to. Looking at Mulder, she could only see everything he'd had taken from him, the last, and most treasured being the son she'd stolen. He never said anything, never mentioned their child, never spoke William's name – even in reference to his father, or her brother. It was hard, to hear nothing from him, when William's name reverberated through her skull, an echo that never faded. And it made her wonder if he saw anything at all when he looked at her.

She'd wondered that for a long time.

"Scully, you were never just anything to me."

This, she wanted to believe.

And so she'd looked harder at what he'd given her. She's still looking.

Months passed, and her mother had died. Everything became so immediate, and work – work beckoned. Find this, fix this, fight this.

Secretly, she'd continued to plot out her own genome, picking out genes, highlighting any mutations, and pinpointing the sequence of junk that languished inside of her. She'd tried to isolate those genes, and replicate them inside sturdier molecular casings, but they were always the first to die outside her body.

For hours at a time, she came back to this small metal stool, adjusting the focus on the microscope, staring at these withered foreign bodies, dead and decaying before they could be of use to anyone but the men who first created them.

Which left her with a problem. The solution she had nestled in the folds of her brain, not yet spoken, but fully formed, and cradled within. A vaccine.

Synthesised from her own blood, the immunity she carried being replicated and repeated over, and over again until the cure was as widespread, and common as a smallpox vaccination, and the Spartan horse it smuggled into the immune systems of everyone it vowed to protect.

Of course, that would take some time.

And a lot of blood. A lot of flexible cellular matter that wouldn't collapse the minute it was evacuated from her bloodstream

She needed stem cells. William's cells. William would have the same marker. William, she hoped, William would be protected. If there was nothing to be done, then at least William would be saved. He had to be. There had to be some reason she had been his mother, something she could – must have – given to him.

But he wasn't hers to take from, or ask anything of, and for the world, for the world, she couldn't. Even if she knew where to find him.

Which left her with a problem. One that she considers now, as she gazes at the film in front of her. There's something, something she's missing.

Her hand rubs idly at the back of her neck, sweeping against the soft baby hairs at her nape, the longer strands pulled up into a pony higher than she's worn for almost ten years. Her nails scratch against the skin there, catching on the tiny scar, and she knows what she has to do.

Henrietta Lacks, the immortal woman, who died more than half a century ago, but whose cells continued to be grown and studied, used as a testing ground for theranostics, virology, and cloning, these cells were sturdy. Invasively prolific. And, she knew from earlier experimentation, entirely unable to sustain any alien gene of hers she attempted to graft into them.

Cancer cells that could sustain, and replicate the immunity to the Spartan virus.

She knows where to find those. But first, she has to tell Mulder.