Our next delivery contained only a syringe, but it came with a note: "Give this to her". It confirmed my suspicions that someone is somehow watching us, or at least listening.

My hands were noticeably shaking as I tried to pick up the syringe. Was it her cure? Was it her poison? Were they trying to cure her because for some reason they needed her alive or were they trying to dispose her as no longer useful?

I held Dana's life in my hands. Literary. I held it for hours, or it could have been just minutes, in which case those minutes lasted way too long. It didn't matter much, because my sense of time escaped from our cell a long, long time ago. Or a long short time ago. Whatever…

How could I inject my friend with something that may kill her? How could I not inject her with something that might cure her? How could I possibly make that decision? I was never good at making choices, not even the small ones like which tie to wear or whether to trust Mulder or Cancerman. As assistant director I always played by the book, not by my own reasoning. Rules were to be broken only if there were lives to be saved by doing it, like Mulder's life, or Scully's.

Scully. How do I save you now? What would Mulder do? With that thought I went to her and pressed the syringe to her skin. That's what he would do! Mulder would know that whatever they think they are doing, having a dead body rot in the cell with me wouldn't be a wise act.

Unless they were using her to break me, to make me kill her so that they could release me to live with it for the rest of my life. Why did I think of that only after injecting her? Why did I act impulsively just because Mulder would? I don't have his instincts!

Damn you Walter!

I was afraid to look at her, but nothing seemed to had changed. She didn't die. She didn't come back to life either. She was still sitting on the pile of clothes and blankets against the wall, staring at nothing. I sat across her and waited…

I waited.

And waited.

I must have fallen asleep because the next time I opened my eyes she wasn't there anymore. I jumped and turned around, immediately spotting her next to the sink before I had a chance to start panicking. She was standing. Standing! Relief washed over me as I approached her, but it was quickly replaced by a sheer horror as I came face to face with her blood, which covered her left arm and chest, while in her right arm she held a razor, the only razor we ever got, used both to shave my face and her legs. Well, she apparently had a new use for it, to cut herself.

What happened next was very fast and very blurry in my memory. I probably lost my mind too by that point. I remember grabbing the razor from her and slapping her hard, so hard that she fell on the floor. I never hit a woman before and I never thought I would, under any circumstances. Well, never say never, I guess.

She quickly got up and started hitting me, but I didn't hit her back, I didn't hit her again. I grabbed her arms and tried to calm her, but her eyes scared me, her eyes were empty and lifeless. My friend wasn't in there.

I want to think that I slapped her to shock her, or to bring her back from a shock, to bring her back from whatever the hell place she got stuck in, to bring her back to me. I want to believe that, but the thing is I just don't know. I didn't have time to think about what and why I was doing.

Whatever the hell I brought back, it wasn't her…

I still didn't think as I fell on the floor with her and stuck my tongue into her mouth. Did my tortured mind somehow come to idea to kiss her back to life? Or was it simply another part of shock treatment? Probably the last thing she, or anybody for that matter, would expect from me to do in that situation was to start a make out session.

Apparently, I invented a new form of mouth to mouth resuscitation, which could be closer described as tongue to throat chocking. I devoured her like I was a starving lion oblivious to her struggle.

Finally, a thought managed to penetrate my mind. It was hardly a coherent thought, hardly understandable, but somewhere in line of what-the-hell-am-I-doing. It lasted just long enough for me to loose my hold on her just long enough for her to manage to push me off of her.

She was coughing and fighting for her breath, but I wasn't doing much better myself. Finally, she started to cry, loud and desperate and I crawled to her and took her in embrace. Those flooding eyes, those heartbreaking sobs, that was my Scully. She was falling apart, she was fighting for life, but she was back.

I held her and rocked with her and cried with her. We were still locked in a tiny room for all eternity, we were still broken and hopeless, but I had her back and nothing else mattered.

"I love you," I told her between tears. It felt strange to say those words, since I haven't used them in a long, long time. But at the same time it felt as the only right thing to say, the only possible thing to say, the only truth that ever mattered.