Character: Dana Scully

Fandom: The X-files

Rating: PG-13

Word Count: 1310

Prompt:

Cold and Ugly –

Underneath the skin and jewelry,

Hidden in her words and eyes.

Is a world that's cold and ugly.

She's scared as hell.-Tool Wk 46

Setting: Second Season Episode: "Duane Berry"

AN: I think a smidge of borrowed dialogue

As the sound of breaking glass shattered over her headphones, Scully's teeth cut through the tender skin on her bottom lip, her eyes locking with Lucy Kazdin's for a long, breathless moment. There was silence on the other end. Not even the sound of Mulder's low monotone sounded over the hiss of static. Nothing that clued either of them in on just what had happened. Had the sniper bullet been successful? Was Duane Barry down, or had something gone horribly wrong. Was Mulder even alive?

"Target down, move in," a distant, perfunctory voice sounded over the line, breaking the silence finally as on the monitor in front of them SWAT teams in heavy gear ran across the street under the heavy lights, crouched low to the ground for fear of some sort of return fire. Nothing came. Scully stared at the screen, one headphone pressed so hard to her ear that the lobe was going numb. She waited for some sign, some indication Mulder was all right.

Finally, from inside the door, there was a rusting beyond the frame, shattered glass glittering like white snow dust just inside the floor. Mulder stumbled to the SWAT Team and waved them inside, as Scully released her pent up breath, ripping the headphones off.

"I'm going out there," she told Kazdin, as the no-nonsense, African-American woman stared at her wide-eyed, trying to call after her. Scully ignored her as she rushed through the office, nearly bowling over Krycek as he stood by the doorway, watching the proceedings from one of the outside facing windows.

"Scully, where are you…" he began as she brushed past him, ignoring Mulder's partner in her haste to get to him.

"Barry's down, Mulder's alive," she replied, as Krycek reached fingers around her elbow, momentarily stopping her.

"Hey, wait, let the SWAT team do its job," Krycek frowned. "Look, Mulder's a big boy, he can take care of himself."

"Yeah, is that what you thought when you wouldn't even forward me to Kazdin with the information on Barry and his psychosis," she snapped, yanking her arm forcibly out of Krycek's strong grip. "What you did was irresponsible, Krycek, more than that Mulder could have been hurt without that information today."

She might as well have slapped him; he looked stung and angry, pulling away with narrowed eyes. "Look, you aren't his partner anymore. You don't have to keep running his errands."

His errands, Scully's eyes widened in disbelief at the other man. Mulder had called her on a hunch, to be better informed, and as it turned out his hunch was correct. She had discovered information no one else, not even Kazdin knew, information that could have led to hostage deaths, if not Bureau deaths. And Krycek was acting as if Scully had simply been doing Mulder's dirty work for him, perfunctory duties that had no real place in the greater scheme of Mulder's work.

How little Krycek knew herself….or Mulder. "I thought you understood Agent Mulder. I guess I was wrong."

She spun on the other man, rushing out of the door, and out to the street, where the SWAT team was giving an all clear sign to the anxiously waiting paramedics on the street. They rushed into the small office; gurney in their wake, as Mulder stumbled out of the way, wearing a borrowed EMT shirt, and a worn, guilty look on his tired, angular face.

He looked as if he had betrayed his best friend. Perhaps, she worried; he felt that he had done just that.

"Mulder," she called, dashing across the street to him, looking him up and down for cuts, bruises, signs of some sort of damage. Other than the wounded look in his green-gray eyes, he showed no signs of physical damage. He tried to smile at her weakly as he popped an earpiece out, waggling it in front of her as she stopped.

"Didn't expect you to fly down from DC for little, old me," he quipped, though his gratefulness was written all over his face.

She smiled briefly at him, relieved that he was fine physically, if not emotionally. "Mulder, Duane Barry was a very sick man," Scully sighed, glancing towards the door where the paramedics were working frantically on the body of the fallen man. "He had brain damage to his frontal lobes, an accident years ago when he was still with the FBI. Gunshot clean through them both, cutting communication between the two."

"Like Phineas Gage," Mulder sighed, his shoulders slumping. Of course he'd know of Phineas Gage, he had studied psychology. "Scully, he described all of the classic symptoms of alien abduction, down to the smallest detail."

She reached her fingers for his arm, where it lay bare beneath the short sleeves of the EMT shirt, squeezing the muscles reassuringly. "I know, Mulder. I can't explain how. Perhaps he followed abductions himself, much like you do, and his psychosis built it up in his mind. The damage in his brain is such he often doesn't know what is real and what isn't. Maybe it never occurred to him that any of it was fake."

"He knew about the children they took…like Samantha." His voice was thready and ragged as he watched the paramedics worked. "He said they did horrible tests."

"Mulder, he made that up. He doesn't know what happened to your sister." Scully had to believe that. All the evidence up to this point showed her nothing less than that Barry was a sick, sad, unfortunate man. To have believed anything else, she might not be speaking to Mulder right at that second.

The paramedics began ordering people to move, as out of the shattered door the carefully maneuvered the stretcher that carried the wounded Duane Barry, looking so much less threatening than he had in the photographs that the news had posted on the television. There he had been a menacing figure, with frightening eyes and a darkened scowl. As the paramedics wheeled him past herself and Mulder, he looked like nothing more than a broken, crumpled doll, an oxygen mask wrapped around his grimacing face, his shirt torn open where the EMT team had worked to stop the bleeding from the precisely aimed bullet of the sniper.

Mulder moved to watch Barry being loaded carefully into the back of the ambulance, as men began squawking on hand-held radios, warning the hospital ahead of their arrival. She didn't need to speak to him or even to look at him to see the guilt written there. The conflict broadcasted off of him as loudly as the men on their radios, and she longed to say something to reassure him that he was not wrong in his decision, that Duane Barry was not the man that he still suspected that he was.

"You okay, Mulder," she asked quietly.

"Yeah," he murmured, though Scully highly doubted that was the truth. She waited as he fidgeted besides her, wincing as the doors closed in front of Barry. "It's just that…I believed him."

Scully knew that. She knew he wanted to believe him so bad, even now, despite all of the evidence to the contrary, "sometimes when you want to believe so badly, you end up... looking too hard."

"Maybe," Mulder wasn't convinced. "The hostages all right?"

"They will be," Scully assured him. "I'm more worried about you."

"I think I will be too." He sighed heavily, watching the blazing lights of the ambulance swirl into the night, the sound of sirens howling all around them.