Eleven

Scully sat up in bed several nights later as their lights switched on and a fierce alarm sounded. The whirring was so high pitched it reminded her of the noise of the invasion and she reached for Mulder as he too sat up, terrified. The sound did not dissipate as it had that night, but it was louder and it seemed to filter in from all boundaries of their room. It was not the sound of a human alarm, there was no beeping or whirring up and down an octave, and there was no siren. It was a constant squeal and it was deafening.

She dragged herself out of bed in her flannel pyjamas and hurried through their living room and past their small kitchen to the front door. She held her hand out to open it and looked worriedly into the hallway beyond their quarters. They were on the very top floor of the second tower which housed all the residents, and she could stand in the hallway and peer down to see people moving. Mulder came up behind her and they both went to the edge of the hallway where a railing prevented their fall. The alarm somehow seemed quieter outside their room.

"Dana!" Eddie shouted up suddenly. He sounded a long way down. "You better get to Tower One. We've got a code blue!"

"What does that mean here?" Mulder asked as Scully headed for the stairs. Mulder shut and locked their door and then caught up, both of them in long-sleeved, dark blue flannel pyjamas which had been provided for them upon their arrival.

"It means somebody's dying," she answered simply over her shoulder as they scuttled down to the nearest cross-ramp that would take her to the adjoining tower. The ramps were on every second floor and were angled down a floor, so to cross they either ended up a floor lower or a floor higher than the level on which they started. As such, they were not bridges. Mulder believed the design had some structural significance, creating a zigzag pattern of support beams between the three towers. Scully could accept that. They were underground amidst crushing, powerful ice and needed all the structural support they could get.

There was a ramp right at the end of the floor just below theirs which would take them to the floor below the operating theatre and examination rooms. The ramps were enclosed and protected from the white-blue ice outside, but the enclosure was see-through and they could see what they would face should the structure ever collapse as Mulder had witnessed in the past. 'Claustrophobics beware,' he had teased on their tour, 'this is not the place for you'.

Once they were in the first tower Scully immediately spotted one of the elevators on its way up. A group of residents were on the escalator, climbing as it climbed to hasten their ascension. Scully turned to the nearby staircase that wound around the inside of the hallways and took the stairs one at a time, as quickly as she could. Mulder could have easily taken three at a time with his longer legs but purposefully trailed behind. He was not the doctor on call. He was just a helper. If somebody really was dying, she would need more help than one nurse could provide.

The doors to what Scully termed 'the hospital' were already open. Really it was simply her operating theatre, with three separate bays. It was set up like an emergency room, again from a magazine or television show. Sometimes Mulder questioned the reality of where they were and whether it was really happening or all just in their minds. The fantasy could be quaint at times and it was unsettling. But there was nothing quaint about the massive blood loss he witnessed when he looked at the floor and the operating tables. One patient was already occupying the closest table, and another was being lifted by Eddie and another man from Malaysia that Scully only knew as Ray.

Mulder watched her race for her scrubs and he heard her start barking orders as Eddie, asking what the hell had happened and what the symptoms were and what their conditions were like. Eddie hooked both patients up to heart and blood pressure monitors. As Scully strapped a mask over her face Mulder knew she was in emergency medicine mode, and that she would not register the significance of the bodies in front of them, but he could not help noticing.

On the two operating tables lay the only other women who lived at the complex.

Scully went to the patient who looked closest to death first. The woman was Caucasian, French, and her name was Suzanne. She was a mediator. Her olive skin was grey and her lips were blue. She was wearing casual clothes; presumably she had been awake in her own 'day time' when it happened. Whatever happened, Mulder thought curiously. Her skirt and legs were streaked with blood; it was pooling on the table and dripping off the edges onto the ground. He knew that pale look about her skin. She had lost a LOT of blood. Mulder watched Eddie hack her skirt away and only then did he glance at Mulder and then to the door just beside him.

"Keep everyone out," he ordered. "Shut the curtains." Mulder nodded, pulling the curtain to shield Suzanne from the door and then making sure the door was closed firmly. He used his authority in the system on the level to lock the door.

The only thing Mulder really understood in what Scully was saying was that Suzanne was haemorrhaging, critical internal bleeding in the abdomen, and was there enough blood in storage?

"We have blood, but will it go to waste here?" Eddie asked. It was not a question Scully was used to hearing and her back tensed as she glared up at him. Still, even Mulder could see the woman was continuing to lose blood and her pulse. They would never stop the bleeding without cutting her open, but her pulse was erratic and her blood pressure falling. Though the operating theatre was well equipped, Scully had told him it was not trauma equipped.

Suddenly the second woman hit the flat-line first and alarms on the EKG began ringing. Scully had abandoned the second woman, an Albanian lawyer whose name Mulder couldn't remember, in favour of Suzanne, but they were both in a very similar shape. In fact they looked to have the exact same symptoms. Mulder had never seen so much blood leaving a person's living body. That was worrying, and potentially why Eddie had told him to seal the doors. If they were dealing with some sort of virus they could all be at risk of contagion.

Scully had barely reached for the defibrillators to use on the Albanian woman before Suzanne also lost her pulse completely. Mulder hurried to her side and began manual chest compressions. Scully saw what he was doing and returned her attention to the second woman. The defibrillator was portable and its power source was unknown to Mulder. He asked no questions of those sorts of things.

Scully shouted for clearance and Mulder flinched at the sound of the shock and the jolt of the body against the table. She attempted resuscitation via the machines only a few more times before turning around and ordering Mulder to step away from Suzanne. He did as he was told; he had not been able to rouse her. Both women were still bleeding. If Scully managed to get any result with the defibrillators it would be a miracle, and no guarantee of any sort of recovery.

Scully only attempted resuscitation for a short amount of time. Even if they had been able to stop the bleeding, they could never have pumped in enough blood to both women fast enough to save them. Both women were dead, and she ran shaking fingers through her hair. She had been in Antarctica for so long without any problems, nobody had come down with more than a sniffle, and suddenly two of the residents bled out in her operating theatre in a matter of minutes. Not only that, but she and Mulder were standing barefoot in pools of their blood.

"Mulder come next door, I'll get you some scrubs and wash your feet." Mulder stared down at his feet then, crinkling his toes under the warm, runny redness. He suddenly didn't feel very well, and he was grateful when Scully wrapped a secure but small hand around his elbow and guided him through a door at the back. He knew it was where she scrubbed up. He sat in a chair as she filled a bowl of water and put it on the ground, washing his feet for him. He complied, busy staring through the one-way glass at the two bodies and Eddie standing near the door making sure nobody else could see. "I'm sorry you had to see that," Scully explained when she realised he was mute. "Mulder?"

"Um?" he asked, looking down at her. She knelt and rested her hands on his knees, concern shining beneath the tears in her blue eyes.

"I said I'm sorry you had to see that," she repeated gently, rubbing his thighs through his pyjama bottoms. "I need to stay here and try to figure out what caused this. Maybe if you're up to it you could talk to people who were with them when it happened?"

"No," Mulder insisted firmly, shaking his head with more certainty than Scully had been prepared for. He had looked almost lost just staring back at the bodies. She thought getting him away from all the blood would have been a good idea, but he was determined and she did not understand why. Finally he explained, and she was surprised by what he said. "I'm not leaving you. You're the last woman left here now. I don't want that to happen to you too."

Scully's lips parted as her eyes widened. She had never thought much about the division of male and female in the complex. She was used to being in the minority, but the way Mulder had announced her newfound isolation from the rest made it sound so much more significant, and she knew it mattered more to him than it did to her. She allowed a brief, irrational fear for her own safety to show in her face and Mulder reached down to squeeze her shoulder. She reconnected with his eyes, both of them serious.

"I'm going to stay with you until you find out what killed them," he stated decisively.

They quickly dressed, Scully removing her pyjamas underneath her blue scrubs and throwing on some old clothes she kept in a bag in the room. Mulder wore a pair of Eddie's pink scrubs and though Scully had old sneakers in her bag she had no shoes for Mulder. He was so traumatised by what he had seen, however, that he refused to go back to their quarters to retrieve some. So she gave him some scrub booties for his feet and told him if he slipped and cracked his head open she would be very pissy. He had laughed, content with her concession.

xxx

Mulder and Eddie stood passively against the far wall as Scully made a Y-incision on the Albanian, after a visual exam seemed to reveal a large haemorrhage in her abdomen, just like Suzanne. Mulder usually had no problem with watching Scully perform autopsies. She had a routine she followed and he had gotten used to it over the years. But he had not seen her do one in perhaps five years, maybe more, and he still believed it was ickier when the dead body was still warm. That was just too creepy for him, and he stood back and let her commentate. After all, somebody had to take notes. There were no voice recorders underground.

Yet Scully had so far performed her autopsy with very little talk. It was unlike her. One possibility was that she had no idea, but Mulder could not believe that. She had seen so much and he had presented her with the oddest causes of death, and it seemed pretty obvious to even him what had happened; they had bled out, gone into shock, and died. He knew Scully was searching for the 'why', and that she was focussed. She would have her suspicions, a list of possible causes of intra-abdominal bleeding, and she would be searching for their truth.

"Do these women have a medical history here?" he asked Eddie. Eddie, who looked unusual but comfortable in his pink scrubs over his jeans and t-shirt, shook his head with his arms folded over his broad chest.

"They came in when Dana got here and ordered everyone in. Noted nothing odd. Haven't had any complaints. What do you think, Dana? Hypovolemic shock?"

"Unquestionably," she replied. Her back was to them and Mulder could not see the abdominal contents as she peeled the skin back, but it was not very often he heard Scully say, 'ew' and mean it. "There's a large volume of blood in the peritoneal cavity," she announced. Mulder reached for his tiny notebook and pencil and scribbled it down. He watched Scully scratch her head. "This doesn't make sense," she sighed after several minutes of searching. "I can see what caused this woman's death but I don't know why. Eddie how did they present?"

"Uh, we were in the mess hall all eating and hangin' out, and I was chatting to Suzanne. She doubled over first, she was bleedin' when she hit the floor. She had been looking a bit paler than usual I suppose, but she seemed normal. Didn't complain about any pain until she keeled over. I picked her up to bring her up here and hit the alarm on my way when Arjeta screamed. She passed out as soon as she saw herself bleeding too and hit her head on the table on the way down. I took Suzanne and Ray brought Arjeta up."

"Did they eat something?" Mulder asked, even though he knew it was an insane notion that food could cause fatal haemorrhaging. But he was in Antarctica and the world had been divided up between aliens and supersoldiers; he was entitled to ask insane questions.

"No man we were just playin' cards," Eddie replied with a shake of his head.

"Do either of them have partners here?" Scully asked. "Boyfriends?"

"No one steady but I can ask around." Scully nodded and Eddie left via the main door, blood spattered but unaffected. He sealed the door behind him and Scully turned instantly to Mulder.

"Come and have a look at THIS," she ordered, her eyes wide. Mulder smirked when he realised she had been keeping her cool for Eddie's sake, and he wandered to her cautiously, peering over her shoulder at the exposed portion of the abdomen. Mulder's mouth opened at the sight of so much free blood. "I don't know how to explain it, but I've seen this before. Not quite as bad, but what's unbelievable is the setting. I have NO explanation for it. I'm not sure a complete autopsy could give me one."

"Why not?" he asked.

"Because, Mulder," she hissed. "This woman's uterus has ruptured. The way Eddie tells it, it happened in a matter of minutes, maybe even seconds. It's destroyed her reproductive system, it has torn all down the left side, the broad ligament's torn and everything has spilled into the peritoneal cavity. I observed a hysterectomy as a result of a serious rupture when I was at med school but I have never seen something this severe. And this woman wasn't pregnant."

"Are you sure?"

"Mulder a rupture this serious would only happen as a result of severe hypertension or, or because of past multiple non-lower-transverse caesareans, and it would happen at term, Mulder, at full term or during labour," Scully whispered. "This woman doesn't look pregnant, and neither does Suzanne." Mulder glanced over at the blonde woman just a metre from the Albanian and bit her bottom lip. They were both shapely women but relatively slim, and if they were pregnant they were definitely not showing.

"And you're sure that's what caused all the bleeding?"

"It's definitely the main cause. The tearing and bleeding is extensive even without all the extra blood a pregnant woman produces. I'm going to have to suction this out and examine all the arteries and organs for aneurisms and other tears but I wouldn't be surprised not to find anything else. Considering the blood she lost internally, not even considering external bleeding, she would have gone into shock quickly, and the pain would have been intense."

"Could something else have caused it?" Mulder asked. "To happen to both of them at the same time, that's unheard of, right?" Scully nodded seriously. "So could it have been...a reaction to something, or could somebody have attacked them?"

"I'll have to wait until I examine the tears but you couldn't cut internally like this without making an incision or using, perhaps a specially formatted laser? The fact is Mulder, this does not happen spontaneously to women who are not pregnant."

"Then they must have been," he insisted. Scully sighed, shaking her head.

"I would have known," she pressed. "I'm the doctor here. They would have had to come to me, people would have been talking, and it would have been obvious. What's visible to me of the tear looks a bit like a torn piece of bread, like somebody just ripped right down with no real precision. This would have hurt like all hell, Mulder." She glanced back over her shoulder at him as he scrunched up his nose. His eyes drifted to hers as she raised her eyebrows expectantly.

They suddenly found themselves very close together and Mulder had a flashback to the old days of autopsies with Special Agent Dana Scully and the question he had always asked himself: how close could you stand to the enigmatic Doctor Scully under the premise of observing a body without her catching on you really didn't like looking into open carcasses?

The answer to that question had always been 'very close'. Close enough to feel their breaths bouncing off each other's faces, close enough to feel their body heat, close enough so that their heads were tilted together in private conversations even though they were discussing the most public of murders, information anybody else in the room was just as entitled to.

Their relationship had moved far beyond those days, and Mulder felt no fear at resting his hand on her hip and brushing slightly inwards, her blue scrubs crinkling under his touch. He ducked his hand underneath and touched a thumb to the naturally curved tissue and skin just below her navel. Scully's stomach sucked in and she shivered at the intimate contact but their eyes never shifted. Hers were wide with confusion and understanding, if such a contradiction was possible in the one mind.

"Do you feel okay?" he asked seriously. She nodded, speechless, and Mulder took a step away. "Good. Because if you don't know what did this, and they weren't pregnant, and it happened at the same time in a public place without any provocation, then 'something' is going on here that we don't know about, and you're the only one left now."

"Mulder, that's not so unusual," she assured him. She could see the fright in his brown eyes as he shrugged, shifting his weight from side to side. This was the first real trauma they had experienced together in a very long time, she reminded herself. They had been standing in blood. Mulder was not himself.

"Then what explanation is there?" he asked. "What answer is there to the question of why there are only three women in this place of nearly a hundred people? Why were only three human women chosen to be here when there are so many men?"

"Firstly, a little concept known as the glass ceiling," Scully answered calmly. "All these people were chosen for their notoriety in their fields, and for their lack of family. Those who survived with family are all in the colonies. Nobody came here in a pre-existing relationship but us, Mulder. For all opinions here we should be in one of those colonies, and I know what people say about why we're not, and I know that most of them are right, but that does explain why there are not many women here. They need specialists in the colonies as well, and women with families in those positions would have been taken there before any of this happened."

"This all boils back down to the fact that they were never expecting us to come, yet when we did everything was ready and just as we wanted it, and they never asked, we never renovated, it was ALL to our liking as though they KNEW."

"Well they were forewarned," she reasoned. "We don't know how long we were unconscious for. But those things aren't important here. It doesn't help me figure out why these women spontaneously haemorrhaged in the mess hall." Mulder stared at her seriously.

"Then what can I do to help?"

xxx

Mulder had no idea whether it was their day or their night, but considering how exhausted he felt it had to be early morning. He was sitting in the far corner taking notes as Scully spoke. She was onto her second pair of scrubs and they were stained with blood. He had watched her suction blood away and remove Arjeta's organs. She examined each one just as she had always done, but she found no evidence of other lesions or clots.

Some time ago she had moved onto Suzanne's body without drawing any conclusions about Arjeta's cause of death. From what Mulder had written down about Suzanne's body so far, their symptoms were identical, and he knew Scully wanted to complete both autopsies before even attempting to summarise the situation.

Eddie had questioned everyone who had been present and reported back with a collection of statements which all said the same thing, and he had confirmed that neither woman had been involved with any man in residence, and that neither had a reputation for sleeping around.

That had not shocked Scully, who by then had already confirmed neither had been pregnant.

"I don't know what to tell you Mulder," she mumbled eventually, turning around and removing her plastic safety glasses, sitting them on top of her orange, sweat-dampened hair. "This could not have happened in 'real' life. The risk factors with something like this relate to multiple births, past caesareans, perhaps the risk can be greater if labour is induced by prostaglandins or oxytocins or um, past ruptures or cuts but something this 'violent'...without any of those pre-existing causal factors...is impossible. It leads me to the conclusion that these women were, more than likely, killed somehow."

"Murdered," he stated, raising his eyebrows curiously.

"Maybe," she reasoned. "I don't know how, but I do know they are not pregnant, have never had children, and their injuries are identical in length and character and they both lost a very large amount of blood in a very short period of time. There was no chance to save them."

"See, a few months in the desert Scully, and we've wandered back onto the X Files."

"Yes," she chuckled. "The good news is it appears to be isolated to the women, so you are all safe, and for whatever reason so am I. There's no morgue here. We'll have to take the bodies outside to be buried. I have all the samples I'll need for testing. Then we can go back to the labs and get to work." She softened as she watched his expression glaze with exhaustion. "Mulder you can go to bed," she assured him. "I'm fine."

"Bet they thought they were fine too," he mumbled, shaking himself out of his tired daze and refocussing. "I'll help you wrap them up. Do you have body bags or sheets?"

"In the exam room," she replied, pointing to the door to his right, opposite the room they had changed in.

"I'm back," Eddie announced several minutes later as Scully was closing Suzanne's body and Mulder was busy wrapping Arjeta in a sheet. "You done? Mulder I found you some shoes."

"With this part of the investigation," Scully replied. "How is everyone?"

"Okay. A bit stunned. Are you going to release your report?"

"Yes," she declared. "Over the network. I have some samples I'd like to look at but for now cause of death remains known but...unknown. Suspected foul play."

"Whoa, hang on," Eddie interjected, getting their attention. "Foul play? They were murdered?"

"There is no biological reason this might have happened," she reasoned. "Perhaps something will show up in the tissue samples I'm going to test, but this is not a situation I've ever heard of and I've dealt with a lot of unusual deaths. I can only suspect that it was induced somehow."

"Induced," Eddie repeated sceptically. "What chemical introduced to the body causes a build-up of such pressure to a particular part of the body that it induces a haemorrhage?"

"I never said it was something I could identify," she replied. "I'm hoping there is evidence of it in the blood and tissue samples I've taken which could help me narrow the field, but I doubt it's something I've seen in my own science."

"You mean you think it's...that the aliens did this to them?" Eddie asked, his eyes wide with surprise. Scully and Mulder shared a curious glance and then nodded. "O-kay," he drawled. "Well you know more about that stuff than the rest of us, but I'd be careful about how you word it in your statement."

"It won't be explained until I know how to explain it," she promised. "But I will be making a statement to the general effect of what has happened and I will be calling for calm. There's no reason to panic the rest when there's no evidence they're at risk. Can you help us move the bodies outside?" Eddie nodded.

"I'll grab someone to help clean up."

xxx

"Wow, Mulder didn't want to leave you huh," Michael announced once Eddie and Mulder finally left with the bodies in their arms. Scully smirked as she cleaned her tools and packed them away. Michael was busy mopping up blood. It was not within his normal duties as one of the cleaners but he did not seem bothered by it.

"He's afraid I'm going to keel over any second," she told him, laughing.

"It doesn't worry you?"

"If it did happen to me I'd be unconscious and then dead before I even had a chance to say goodbye," she reasoned. "Besides, I don't know, I feel fine. He just worries. We've been in some pretty dangerous situations before in regards to medical emergencies. We've both been at risk, and neither of us handles it well. As we get older, we take it harder."

"What did you find out?"

"I'm not really sure yet," Scully replied vaguely. Michael smirked at her, tall and casual as he leant against the handle of his mop. "You know I can't comment on an open investigation," she added, wondering at how much she sounded like her old self. Across from her Michael only smirked. "But can I ask, you've been here since the start, right?" He nodded. "Do you know if experiments are being performed here without my knowledge?"

"Experiments?" he asked curiously. "What sort?"

"Biological, chemical," she suggested. "I think it's possible these women were interfered with. And yet if they were being experimented on in any way I would expect to see more women here, but I don't. I would also expect somebody to have said something, unless any tests were being done without their knowledge, and even so I'm not sure how that could be."

"Why not?" Michael asked. "Could they just be drugged?"

"Yes but I would expect somebody to notice," Scully huffed, frustrated. "These women died from a human condition under inhuman circumstances, from a cause outside something I can understand. Is there somebody I could talk to about this here? Who would be able to give me answers?"

"You're asking if I know of anybody here who knows more than you?" he asked, confused. "I don't think so. None of us knows what's in the restricted area upstairs. Everyone is suspicious of you."

"But I'm just a person!" she exclaimed. "And when it came to trying to save these women today I had no chance. How can I be an effective doctor if I don't understand an alien science?"

"You think what killed those women is alien?" he asked. "There are no aliens here."

"I don't know," she conceded innocently, shrugging. "Never mind, Michael. I'm sorry. I'm just tired." She sighed, turning back to her table of implements and sorting through them.

Scully gasped when he closed in on her within a second. His large hand wrapped around her neck before she even registered the sound of the mop falling to the floor. Her eyes shut as one hand wrapped around his strong fingers and the other searched blindly for a weapon to use against him. He settled his second hand on her wrist and held her arm outstretched in mid-air.

"I don't think you want to cut me," he whispered, his voice hot on the top of her head. "I think you're smart enough to figure out why." Scully was having trouble figuring anything out apart from the fact her breathing was becoming painful and oxygen less plentiful as the tension of his hand around her throat increased. He was so large he could almost wrap his thin fingers the whole way around, and he towered over her. There was no cruel whisper in her ear because he would have to hunch considerably to get there, so he spoke down to her, right onto the crown of her head, leaning over her as though trapping her in a capsule.

"I can't breathe," she hissed as he slid his hand higher up her throat, gripping her from underneath her chin. Scully was aware of his fingers sliding over the pressure points by her pulse. She felt her eyes roll back in her head and her knees buckle, and then there was blackness.

xxx

"Go, go, go shorty it's your birthday, we gonna party like it's your birthday," Mulder sung as he and Eddie made their way back to the domed complex entrance after giving the two bodies a shallow burial several hundred metres away.

"We gonna sip Bacardi like it's your birthday," Eddie joined in, laughing as Mulder clicked his fingers. "And you know we don't give a fuck-"

"It's not your birthday!" they finished in unison, chuckling and slapping a friendly high five.

"Nothin' like a little funeral to lift the spirits," Eddie taunted. Mulder shrugged. "Narr, seriously, I have fun with you man."

"Thanks," Mulder grinned. "And thanks for these clown shoes. What are they, size twenty?" Eddie rolled his eyes as Mulder continued. "It's pretty cool here. It'd be pretty boring without you. I'd be hanging around Scully a lot more. She'd be hatin' it."

"I don't think she minds as much as she says," Eddie laughed. "She always seems to be the one tracking you down."

"That's because I'm always chillin'," Mulder teased. "All I wanna do right now is go to sleep! She's gonna head up to the lab so I might crash on a chair in there or something. Don't wanna leave her with all those freaky samples. We gotta start tossing up ideas."

"Well you know I'm always here to help," Eddie stated, opening the hatch and climbing through first, Mulder following and locking it securely behind him. They jogged in silence down the narrow staircase, bypassing access to the restricted floor that only Scully could use from that entrance point. "That was pretty freaky today though."

"Tell me about it," Mulder agreed. "Dana did what she could, but those women were dead when you got them onto the table. Hey, were there ever other women here? Or was it always just Suzanne and Arjeta?"

"There were others," he replied. "They didn't deal with the conditions so well."

"What do you mean?" Mulder asked. "Because Dana's had no problems adjusting to the 'conditions'; they're as close to home as could be really hoped for. Were they all claustrophobic? We heard there had been some 'trouble' here or something like that, without having a doctor on staff. Where did they go?"

"Uh, well see-" Eddie hesitated, not sure how to say what he wanted to say. Mulder was right behind him. "I'll explain in a sec," he promised, deciding he may as well tell them both together. Mulder nodded, accepting his answer and pushing through the door to take them into the room with the one way glass just beyond the operating theatres.

Mulder hummed thoughtfully when at first he saw nothing through the glass. Scully must have finished tidying up, he realised. Perhaps she was upstairs in the labs already. But then he saw her scalpels and saws still sitting on the little metal table beside one of the beds and his stomach turned. Scully was pedantic about her instruments. He remembered her yelling at him in the desert about the scalpel in the sand. Nothing ever got left behind.

"What?" Eddie asked, having heard Mulder gasp. Mulder crossed the room in great strides and lunged through the door, looking everywhere at eye level before his periphery turned his gaze downwards. Michael was hunched over Scully. Her face was covered by her hair and turned away, but she appeared motionless. Mulder knew that if she had been conscious and aware that her shirt was torn and her breasts were exposed and that Michael's mouth had been on her she would have been fighting. She would have tried to kill him.

"HEY!" Mulder shouted, even though he hadn't needed to. Michael had turned at the sound of the door, stunned to be caught, his dark eyes wide and filled with lust and surprise. One hand had frozen against Scully's waist, one on her shoulder. Anger coursed through Mulder as he stalked forward and lunged at Michael, punching him hard in the cheek. He crashed backwards, his legs still tangled with Scully's, and Mulder prepared to throw himself on top of the man to really fight him, when Eddie stopped him.

"I'll handle it," he urged. Mulder struggled under Eddie's secure grasp. "Mulder, stop it," Eddie ordered. Mulder growled, turning to try to fight Eddie. He was going to fight somebody. They had separated him from Scully, after all. What had Michael done to her?

Mulder did not get a chance to ponder the answer as Eddie tossed him away, sick of his struggling. Mulder flew through the air and landed heavily on his side beside Scully. He wasn't sure what happened then. He blacked out for long moments over a period of time, and each time he opened his eyes he saw Scully's orange hair tangled against the back of her head. His head throbbed and he groaned each time he woke, writhing on the floor as he tried to put himself back together. Eddie had thrown him, not just shoved, but thrown.

The next time Mulder felt himself rouse from unconsciousness there was a voice calling him forth. Familiar and warm and loving, and he felt himself puff in pain when lips brushed his forehead. Scully, he realised. Scully was awake. She was holding his head in her lap. His eyes fluttered slowly open and he stared up at her with a deep frown. She was leaning over him, cradling him just as he had suspected. Tears were in her eyes but her smile was wide and relieved, and he tried to smile back.

"You'll be okay," she told him, her voice shaking as she again leant over and rested her lips to his forehead. "It's okay now Mulder. We're alone here. It's okay. Where does it hurt?" Mulder could only groan and shut his eyes again. He did not know for how long. He hated to leave her. He didn't want to go back to the darkness but he had no choice. His head chose for him. He moaned deeply at the pain in his chest. He didn't want to leave her, but he had to.