Character: Dana Scully
Fandom: The X-Files
Rating: PG-13
Prompt: "When Love cast me out, it was Cruelty who took pity upon me" (Kushiel's Dart) 40 on scifi_muses on LiveJournal
Setting: X-files: Season Six

Who would commit such sins on a child?

"What did they do to him?" Mulder watched with horrified eyes as Scully prepared her medical kit, glancing sideways towards the bed where Gibson Praise lay against a bevy of pillows.

"I don't know," Scully whispered, knowing full well the boy probably knew every word the two of them where murmuring to each other. "I'll have to get through the bandages to see, but judging from the amount of blood loss and his blood pressure, it's a wonder he's even up and walking."

Frankly the boy should have been in the hospital, but Mulder vetoed the idea no sooner than it left her lips after they had pulled away from Diana Fowley and Jeffrey Spender as nonchalantly as possible. However Gibson had ended up in their car, Mulder had argued, whoever he had done this sort of damage to him was likely still looking for him, and the hospital was the first place they would look.

"Mulder," she sighed, frowning at her woefully inadequate supply of disinfectants, antibiotics, and other things she carried for the minor scrapes and injuries her partner was prone to incurring out in the field. "I can't properly treat everything that is wrong with him. What if I get under there and find it is worse than I can handle."

"You're an amazing doctor, Scully, you'll think of something."

"Something…you can't just jerry rig medication out of Popsicle sticks and duct tape, he will likely need medical attention."

Mulder knew she was right. He grimaced, rubbing his palms across his face. "I know, I'm not saying he won't. But just a few hours, Scully, till we are certain it's safe and he won't disappear on us again."

That she perhaps could agree do. "What do we tell the Bureau or his parents? He's been missing for months?"

"When it's safe I'll put a call into Skinner. I'll see if he can't send someone to protect him."

"No offense, but the last time you tried that two US Marshall's died and Diana Fowley ended up with a collapsed lung." An injury that didn't seem to slow her down when it came to taking over their work, Scully noted.

"I know. But do you seriously think we will get him back safely to where he belongs if we don't have an protection?"

"No," she replied, shooting a flickering glance to the boy resting beyond. He was just a child. A gifted one; she admitted that, one with abilities that frightened her. But at the end of the day he was just a boy who liked watching cartoons and zoning out in front of the television, just like any other child. What in the world was so threatening about that?

"Listen, I'm going to call the boys, see what they've heard with an ear to the ground about what is going down at the nuclear plant. Do what you can for him."

"Right." What she could do for him was very little. Change his bandages, check the wounds, and give him something for any infection that was it. But she had no idea what sort of damage she would find when she got beneath the layers of blood soaked gauze. If there was cranial or cerebral damage she could do nothing to fix it there.

Gibson watched the television with glassy eyes, his pale cheeks flushed pink and feverish. He looked so fragile against the pillows, not the sturdy, defiant boy she knew months ago. He reminded her a little of Emily. So small, so frail, so sick lying in a bed far to big for her, her young life slipping out of Scully clasped fingers. She had tried so hard to protect her, to keep her there, to make it all right. But it had all been for naught…

"How old was she?" Gibson's swaddled head turned painfully towards her, his serious face somewhat sympathetic behind his thick glasses. Scully paused, unnerved one again by his uncanny ability, the way he read her emotions as she set down her medical kit on the bedside table with sharp precision.

"She was three," Scully replied more gently than she was laying out her things. "It happened last Christmas."

"You thought about her before, when you saw me." He watched with hollow eyes as she worked. "She was your daughter."

"In a manner of speaking," Scully replied, unsure of how to explain Emily's unnatural existence to him.

"I know how babies are made, you know." A hint of childish impatience arose, and Scully caught herself smiling despite herself. "She wasn't made like that?"

"No," she replied simply. "She was made from one of my eggs in an experiment. They made her to be a certain way."

"They made her sick." Gibson sounded truly horrified by that, but unsurprised. What had they done to him?

"Yes," Scully replied, pulling our one of her syringes and almost feeling Gibson cringe. "She was born with a condition that was killing her. I don't know why."

Why would anyone do these types of things to children? Why would anyone do these types of things to her?

"Because they want to control it," Gibson sighed, turned to glance at the television again."

His words stopped her in her work. "Control what?"

Gibson was slow in answering. "You know why. You saw it for yourself, though you don't remember. They want to stop what is coming, and they are trying to find the sort of people who will make it when everything happens."

He knew? Scully's mouth worked dryly, as she had a giddy thought about Mulder and OPR, but Gibson strangled that thought before it took root. "No one would believe you or me if we told them. You don't even believe it."

His reproach cut nearly as deep as Mulder's did, and she flushed, returning to laying out her things. "Gibson, it isn't as simple as that."

"I know, it never is. Adults always make things so complicated."

He had said that the last time, Scully recalled, and she smiled to herself as she remembered a similar scolding the night he disappeared. He had told her then she needed to tell Mulder how she felt about him. She had balked at the idea then. And now…

"Your daughter, she wasn't like me, was she?" Gibson interrupted her thoughts, for once not calling her out on them.

"No, I don't think so. To be honest, I don't know." There was no telling what Emily's potential could have been, had she lived. "She had a blood condition."

"She was one of those, then." Gibson didn't seem surprised.

"One of those?" Just what did Gibson know about what was happening? And how did he know it?

"Because they are like you, they forget I can read what's in their heads." A brief, smug smile lifted his pale lips. "They try to make some people different. They try to make some people like me, I guess, but they keep messing it up."

"Like you? How do you mean?" Just how much about all of this did Gibson understand? And what did he know about himself and his condition that she and Mulder did not?

But Gibson was tiring of their conversation apparently; shrugging with all the diffidence a twelve-year-old could muster. "They think I'm something I'm not. I'm close, but they don't know for sure what to make of me."

Scully had no idea what to say to that.

"I know you miss her," Gibson's gaze was penetrating, despite the fever haze and thick glasses. "For what it's with, I'm sorry she had to go through that. She was really kind of like me in a way, a way to get to the end. They didn't care who she was or that she had feelings, or what she liked, just that she was an experiment, something they could study and understand. And if she would have had to go live through the sort of things I did, maybe she's happier where she is."

Scully found herself torn between admiration Gibson's candor and heartbreak over whatever he had faced the last few months. What things had he experienced, what horrible tests had they done to this innocent boy whose only crime was being different? The idea that this too could have been Emily's fate had she lived unnerved her. For months, Scully had thought only of the loss of the only child she would ever have. She hadn't considered that her daughter's death could have been a blessing for the girl in disguise.

Tears rose, burning hot acid in her eyes, but she screwed her eyes tight, forcing them back and down, hidden behind the iron door that she kept Emily's memory behind. Let Gibson see. Let him know how she hid those memories tightly in her heart. He was likely one of the few people to truly understand.

"I better get to work getting that gauze off, take a look at your wound."

Fear and hesitation warred with weary acceptance out of Gibson. "Okay, just…remember, they had to cut off my hair. I'm going to look weird."

"I'm sure you'll look fine," Scully replied, picking up her scissors. It was sin, what they did to this child. It was a sin what they had done to her child, and her friends, and so many other people in this world, all in the name of their invasion. Perhaps Gibson wasn't far off, Emily was better off where she was, far away from the butchery done by these so-called "good men".

What good men would do this to a child?