Character: Dana Scully
Fandom: The X-Files
Rating: PG-13
Prompt: John Constantine: But a single word can give you courage, or turn your favorite pleasure into your worst nightmare. (Constantine) Vol4.8.2011 on scifi_muses on LiveJournal
Setting: X-files: Drive, Season Six
"Have you ever run one of these before?"
Scully turned from the futile rubbing of the blood and gore off her shirt to the white face of the corner. The woman blinked first at the possibly contaminated stains, then up at Scully's frank expression. She tried not to let her heart skip at the gesture, to let the thought of a contagion rise in her mind.
"Run a quarantine…not exactly." Scully thought back over the years to the quarantined situations she found herself in. "More often than not I was the one in the middle of it, so I can say yes, I've had experience with them." She turned off the water at the shiny, metallic sink, knowing it was little use. The scrubs would likely have to be burned, but at least she wouldn't have potential danger splattered across her mid-section like finger paint. She tried to smile reassuringly at the other woman's concern.
"This is just a precaution until we get the CDC in here to check this out. It could be nothing, or it could be something that is quite easy to handle."
"Or it could be something that is out there in the populous right now." The corner frowned knowing all to well that the poor, dead woman's husband was in a cell at the police station.
"I've requested a cell phone, when I get it I'll put a call into my partner." Irritation flickered across Scully's cool tone, this wasn't her first time at the rodeo, and she couldn't help but be nettled at the woman's reiterating what Scully already knew. "Mulder will get the man quarantined and anyone who has handled him. He's been through this before as well."
"Do you make a habit of finding yourselves in these situations often?"
Patience, Dana, she breathed. It wasn't the coroner's fault. She had simply been doing her job, and in walked Scully, offering her professional, FBI advice to this back, country medical examiner. All the sudden the Center for Disease Control is getting involved, the morgue being sealed off, and a potentially dangerous contagion could have infected them both, one that had literally blown the side off of Vicky Crumps head. Scully's mind raced, what sort of infectious agent did that?
"My partner and I used to work on unusual cases for the FBI," she replied, more as something to occupy the empty space between them and fill it with something other than worry and anxiety. "Often times our work would mean we would come across strange pathogens, infectious agents that were unexplainable." Should she dare bring up the black oil, the strange, alien virus that seemed to only get more complex the more they tried to understand it.
"One case we worked on in the Oregon woods, we came across a strange, phosphorescent insect in the woods that swarmed and desiccated living flesh. We still don't know where it came from or anything about it really, my guess is that the insect is still being studied." If the CDC hadn't ordered the entire area burned, which Scully strongly suspected they had.
"A bug…and it was just out there?" The coroner's eyebrows rose dubiously, but at least there was no longer trepidation hanging on her words. Scully thought she might as well go with story hour, if it kept the mood in here calm and rational for the moment.
"Strange things exist out there." Scully couldn't believe she was the one saying that as she found a metal stool to perch on, an eye on the lab door to see if her promised phone would arrive. "We looked for a Cal Tech volcanology team in the Washington Mountains, and found a spore that used the human host in the next stage of its reproduction. That required a month long quarantine."
"A spore?" The coroner wrinkled her nose, much like a five-year-old would when told to eat Brussels sprouts. "All of this here in the Pacific Northwest?"
"I had an edict against cases out here for a long time," Scully sighed, recalling how many odd cases ended up with them in isolation of some sort in the area. "But it's happened other times. We were called in on a manhunt of escaped prisoners who happened to be in a ward exposed to a foreign disease that a pharmaceutical lab was running tests on. Thankfully I wasn't infected, but one of the other doctors working in that quarantine was. He died." Scully thought sadly on the poor doctor, who had worked so hard to help keep her alive even as knew he wouldn't make it. Pinck Pharmaceutical had run that test, and no one had ever called them out on it.
And those were just the times when they were infected with something that people knew about. No one knew or even understood the other virus, the one that Scully now found to be all too human in its DNA structure…or at least their DNA was far to similar to the virus. In the end the virus she had thought alien was nothing more than a cleverly redesigned virus, with the same base as every other living thing on this planet, but with a few alterations to make it different, perhaps more deadly. Did it make it alien? Or was it simply a product of the chimera cells, the strange, biotechnical games that the government played with the very essence of biological life?
"It sounds as if you two lead extremely interesting lives," the other woman murmured with eyes wide. Had she even believed when Mulder and Scully came breezing through, two bored agents, that they would bring a quarantine on her morgue. Poor woman, Scully thought, she likely saw only a few bodies a week, and now she was in the middle of one of Mulder's X-files. He knew how to find them, it was as if he had sensed this the minute he caught the strange news report on the farmer's television.
"Technically we should be leading very boring, sedentary lives now," Scully replied fretfully as a lab tech with her cell phone waved it into view. She was going to have to explain this all to Mulder…and to Kersh. AD Kersh, their new boss, somehow she doubted he would be as understanding as Skinner regarding their little detour or their involvement in it. His orders had been explicit, go nowhere near an X-file. They hadn't been, really, they had been doing their job, they just happened upon this case.
Somehow, Scully doubted their taciturn, legalistic new boss would see it anywhere close to the same way.
"Excuse me," she murmured, meeting the tech at the door before he could enter and forcing him out with strict orders of the quarantine. She had to call Kersh and explain why it was she was involving the CDC, and why it was she had let Mulder convince her into taking this side trip in the first place. But before that, she needed Mulder, to warn him and get everyone who had contact with Vicky Crumps' husband into isolation before this got out.
Scully's thin thread of patience stretched as Mulder's phone continued to ring and ring, going to voice mail. Dread settled in her stomach as she dialed again. Somehow she knew she was going to regret giving into him on this. Frankly, she already did.
