Character: Dana Scully

Fandom: The X-files

Rating: PG

Word Count: 2136

Prompt: You know, a little dark, a little gloomy. And, as always, hey, full of dead people. What are you gonna do? ....Hades (From scifi_muses at LiveJournal)

Setting: Season One Episode: "Ice"

AN: Some borrowed dialogue, and some dialogue is actually snatches from the episode, but only part can you hear. I played with it to add to the greater flow of the story. And I still don't own.

In medical school you grow accustomed to death.

There is finality to it that you just can't escape as a doctor. Yes, those first few weeks in your first year were always squeamish and uncomfortable, as you looked on the face of what had once been a living person, and wondered who they had been in life. Had they been a mother, father, lover, and sibling? Did they leave behind a grieving family? Or did no one care, and that was why they ended up there, beneath your first-year scalpel, preparing for a dissection by an clumsy, inept student who was still cringing at seeing the strange, gunky insides of a human being? There were whispered or silent apologies to the corpse as you poked and prodded the once vital organs, weighed their heart, prodded their brain. And then you sewed up the remains with Y incisions and feel a slight bit guilty about what you saw, as if you had caught them in an intimate act, and learned all of their private, personal secrets.

But by second year, you had well gotten over that. The dead were no longer with us, their bodies cold, impersonal, and only filled with questions, especially for the forensic pathologist. You don't care anymore about who they were in life, but why it was they died? How did it come about? Was it through another's actions or their own. If it wasn't through suicide, was it an innocuous death through disease or outside contagion, or was it the deadly hand of another bent on stealing that which man cannot grant. Gone is the face of humanity from the person, and instead they are a giant, Petri dish of questions, answers, and often-ugly truths.

It was the ugly truths Scully was wondering over as she zipped up the bodies of the two men left from the scientific team, wondering how it was the strange worms had been introduced into their bodies, and why it was they had such an effect as to cause to men who had been colleagues before to turn on each other in murder.

Heavy footsteps sounded as she finished closing the bags, and she wasn't particularly surprised to see Mulder standing over her, eyebrows knit together as he himself puzzled the same question out from his own end. His gazed speculatively at her, and she was suddenly self-conscious…defensive.

"I'm just….uh…double checking. Making sure I didn't miss anything." She busied herself with closing the last of the body bags.

"Just some sleep, huh?" He was teasing her, but there was concern there as well.

"Sleep," the idea sounded good in theory, but her nerves were so strung out she doubted she could put it into practice. "I'm so tired, I can't sleep."

"We're all wired and hypersensitive," Mulder fell into the psychoanalyst in him, a sure sign he too was worked up, and his mind swirling in a million directions. "It'll be good to get a fresh start in the mornings."

Her body insisted Mulder's idea was a good one, but she shook her head, setting her jaw stubbornly, more against her own exhaustion than Mulder's suggestion. "Mulder, I don't want to waste a second trying to find a way to kill this thing." Stop it; destroy it, before it got her, before it got him, or the rest of them. She wanted to go home…to see home even. A grasping, irrational fear that she may never again see her parents or siblings against gripped her for no reason, and she bit her lip hard, steadying her nerves.

Mulder stared through her, not really seeing her, even as she started to move past him back to the small lab that she and Hodge were working on. "I don't know if we should kill it," he finally murmured, a comment so shocking, she stopped to stare at him, eyes wide with fearful surprise.

"This area of the ice sheet was formed over a meteor crater. The worm lived in ammonia. It survived sub-zero temperatures. Theorists in alternative life-designs believe in ammonia-supported life systems on planets with freezing temperatures."

She knew where his ideas were going. Proof of alien life, of something brought to this planet from elsewhere in the universe, scientific evidence that he and all of his theories were now all completely howling mad. She shouldn't be shocked or surprised, or even angry really. On any other day, the scientist in her might have agreed with him, been just as excited as those now dead men were on their video. But she was tired, and she was frightened, and she was trapped in the Arctic with a creature that she little understood, one that might kill her. And if Mulder's were to have his way, that creature could escape from this sheet of ice and rock alive, and have the potential to infect others. And as a doctor, she just couldn't abide that.

"No," she shook her head firmly, standing her ground against the oncoming argument she could already seeing building in Mulder.

"The meteor that crashed here a quarter of a million years ago may have carried that type of life to earth," he insisted, that familiar fervor in his green eyes.

"Mulder, that pilot developed surface symptoms within a few minutes. Within a few hours, that parasite had total control. What would happen if this got into the population? A city the size of New York could be infected within a few days."

"Exactly. But what do we know about it? This organism might be lying dormant in another crater." He knew how to speak her language, and was doing it well. But she wasn't about to be swayed.

"Mulder, if we don't kill it now, we run the risk of becoming Richter and Campbell with guns to our heads."

"But if we do kill it now, we may never know how to stop it or anything like it in the future." His voice rose to that feverish pitch of his, his jaw set, blazing. It was always so hard to stand against him when he was in this mode, especially when in theory he wasn't really wrong. But fear and exhaustion had their own way of working on Scully, and she wasn't about to back down.

"Future? Mulder," she scoffed, her voice now rising just as loud and angry as his own. "How can you talk about the future when right now, there's a creature here killing off innocent victims. I don't think you have a right to put all of our lives in that danger, or that anyone has the right to?"

"Do we have the right to destroy an organism which can provide vital information not just on the existence of this creature, but how to prevent it from infecting and destroying other lives." Now he had changed tactics, moved from the strictly scientific card to the moral one. He always took that when he needed better leverage, and it was an area he always knew was difficult for her to defend against in any argument.

And frankly, the fact that he knew that pissed her off. "Mulder, I can't believe you."

"What," his stance became his typical defensive one, hands to waist, staring down at her in a way that loomed over her with his indignation.

"You want so desperately to prove your theories, you want to show the world that you aren't just some crank job in a basement that you would willingly put the lives of potential hundreds of thousands, if not millions, in jeopardy just to prove a point."

"You think that this is some game for me, Scully, that I'm doing this just so I can wave it in the face of Blevins and Skinner that I was right and they were wrong," his face fairly flushed purple, and she could see a vein in right where his jaw muscles clenched pulse dangerously.

"I think you care more about these creatures being the scientific breakthrough you can hang your alien-seeker hat on, than you care about them posing a biological hazard." Her voice rang out in the sudden stillness, and it was only then that she realized how silent the three scientists were in the room next door. Had they heard everything they had just said? She dropped her gaze suddenly to her feet. They probably had, and she felt her own face brighten as it finally occurred to her she was airing her and Mulder's own personal laundry in front of people who already suspected the two of them and their motives.

"Why do you think it would get out into the populace if it were to be studied," Mulder's voice quivered angrily.

"It can't be contained," she insisted, turning heel on him and moving to return to the lab and the others.

"How do you know it can't be contained," he insisted, charging after her, nearly bowling over herself, and Hodge and DaSilva, who had been walking towards their now obvious conversation with equal looks of worried interest at the two agents. She ignored them as she rounded back on her partner.

"It can," she countered, only not how he thought. "By extermination. We should take the bodies, worms and all, outside and incinerate them."

Mulder mouth opened to defy that idea gain, but Hodge interrupted, glancing between the two as DaSilva and now Murphy watched the tableau with increasing looks of dismay.

"Something going on we should know about?" He's eyebrow was cocked in supercilious, suspicious interest, the sort of look that made her want punch the certainty out of his smug face. "Agent Scully, you all right?"

The question caught her by surprise. "I'm fine," her standard answer, even though she knew she wasn't. Every nerve was stretched taught, and Mulder's arguments were making it worse. "It's nothing."

Hodge seemed unconvinced. "You seem a bit stressed."

She almost knew this was what his line of questioning was leading to, and she felt her already simmering temper boil over at him in a flash of white-hot indignation. "What the hell are you trying to say?" She moved to confront him directly, moving her face just inches from his own, despite the fact he had nearly six inches on top of her. She wasn't about to cowed by some stuck-up, cowardly pill-pusher who sat comfortably from some desk somewhere, when she had as much medical knowledge, and perhaps much more experience than he…

Mulder glided quickly between her and Hodge, putting his own tall, lanky frame easily between her quivering one and Hodge. "Let's all settle down. It's been a hard day. We're all tired and scared." His voice slipped easy into his comforting monotone, the familiar, soothing pattern of the peacemaker, no doubt learned from his years of using it on the very killers and their victims families that had drove him from the behavioral science. "Let's not all turn on one another."

"At least not with good reason," Hodge dug in snidely, shooting a pointed glance once again at Scully.

"Maybe we should get some sleep," Mulder again tried to diffuse the situation. But Hodge seemed about as dismissive of him as he was of Scully.

"You kidding? You think any of us could sleep right now? Guys, let's face it; we've got to check for spots. Any person or persons who has them should be confined. Are we agreed on that?"

He had a point, now matter how much it pained her to admit that he did.

"Are you going to do the exam," DaSilva seemed to automatically defer to Hodge, and that bothered Scully.

"No," she said, glancing from DaSilva to Hodge. "We do them in front of each other. No secrets."

Automatically the men all glanced between each other, then the two women, then back at Scully with varying degrees of bemusement.

"Perhaps Hodge, if you take Mulder in Murphy in the next room, and DaSilva and I will stay here," she tried desperately to maintains some sort of professional decorum, though Mulder was making it difficult with his disappointed shrug. "That way we can at least all know that we are safe."

"Right," Hodge at least looked mollified, if not completely happy with the idea. "All right." He gestured to the other room, where Mulder and Murphy silently shuffled, as Scully turned to DaSilva. The other woman looked as white as the snow outside, and about as frightened as she herself felt.

"What if we do have spots," she whispered, glancing at Hodge's retreating figure.

"We'll figure it out when and if that is a possibility," Scully whispered back in what she hoped was a reassuring manner. Though, she covertly thought to herself, she best make sure she knew where her weapon was, just to be on the safe side.