Character: Dana Scully
Fandom: The X-Files
Rating: PG-13
Prompt: Willow: Chemistry is easy. It's a lot like witchcraft, only less newt. (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) Vol 3. Week 1 on scifi_muses on LiveJournal
Setting: Season Four Episode: Terma
AN: One of the things I'm fascinated with in the X-files is the alien virus and how it works. Notice they never fully explain all of it, and so over the course of Seasons I've tried to piece bits of it together from Scully's scientific perspective, how she would explain this from what she knows. Whether it's right or not…who knows. But we get some Pendrell time in this one, which makes me happy.
As was becoming disturbingly normal in Scully's life none of this made sense.
"We haven't been able to give him anything but fluids for over forty-eight hours." The status of Dr. Sacks condition hadn't changed. He still lay comatose, motionless and unblinking, unresponsive to any stimuli, even the prick of the needle in his skin. Scully glanced over to where Pendrell worked, at a total loss despite all of her medical training.
"It doesn't help that he's in a restricted environment," Pendrell pointed out grimly, eyeing the quarantined area set up for Sacks with mild distaste before bending over the electron microscope again. Pendrell wasn't a medical doctor, though he was a scientist. Still he didn't understand the procedures that were vital when dealing with an unknown, infectious agent that could potentially get loose into the population.
"If he has been infected by some kind of organism we risk contamination." Hell, they didn't even know what he was infected with yet. "Are you seeing anything?"
Pendrell made an inarticulate noise, it sounded positive but confused. "The blood in the carotid artery looks slightly thickened, possibly due to the decreased hear rate and blood pressure." Scully's spun on him, his description sounding frighteningly familiar. He didn't look up at her, but paused, surprised at something behind the lens. "Now what's this….what the hell is this?
Fear spiked tangy in her throat. "What is it?"
"I don't know?" Pendrell pulled away, frowning in horrified confusion as his wide, blue eyes stared troubled at the still body of Dr. Sacks. "It looks like its concentrated around his pineal gland…and I think its alive."
Alive? Unwilling to dwell on what he meant by that image, Scully swooped down towards the microscope, squinting into the lens, focusing on the image magnified before her. She immediately fought the urge to cringe and back away. Pendrell was right; it was alive, whatever it was. Tendrils of thin, curling, wormlike creatures sputtered and thrashed, wrapped around the tiny gland in the doctor's brain, threading around it over and over again.
"It looks like a nest." It was the first descriptive image that came to Scully's mind as she pulled up, swallowing the vague horror she felt at the sight. "Some type of black vermiform organism attached to the pineal gland."
"What is it?" Pendrell asked in a strangled gasp, his pale face slightly green. Poor guy, Scully thought, it was rare in his high tech lab he ever dealt with anything biological let alone disturbing and biological. She grimaced slightly as she pulled up, glancing at the doctor's prone form.
"I'm guessing that's the fossilized bacteria in the rock….or perhaps not so fossilized." She pursed her lips, thinking quietly. "The organism's placement on the gland would explain why he is in his comatose state. Likely the organism is altering the glands ability to create serotonin and melatonin."
"The hormones responsible for sleep cycles." Pendrell nodded grimly. "Is that why is blood is thickening?"
"Possibly," she acknowledged, though privately she didn't believe that was all of the case. "It could be due to the fact his system is shutting down, without the serotonin to keep him awake all his vitals are slowing down to only what is necessary to keep him alive." Why, she wondered, eyes flickering to the microscope.
"But…" Pendrell could sense the word in her tone. For all his happy-go-lucky charm and geeky social skills Pendrell wasn't an idiot. His strawberry blonde brows quirked in worried apprehension, waiting for the other shoe to drop, and Scully realized that whether she liked it or not, Pendrell was going to be pulled into this mess, the same as herself, the same as Mulder.
"There is a virus that is out there," Scully murmured quietly, opening the Pandora's box of secrets that was the work compiled between herself and Mulder these last nearly four years. "It is an engineered virus, created by our own government during the Cold War. It is…alien in nature." She chose her words carefully, not wanting to give the wrong impression about what she believed this virus to be, but knowing that Pendrell would take it that way anyway.
"Aliens…like Mulder's little green ones?"
"Not exactly." She pulled up a stool, perching her petite form on it wearily, realizing this was going to be a long explanation to the other agent. "The virus is extra-terrestrial in that it doesn't match any of the DNA sequences commonly found on earth. That isn't to say that it hasn't been engineered that way or hasn't been created by something that isn't native to the planet."
Pendrell was starting to see the pattern as well, his scientists mind automatically following the path she was leading him down. "A meteorite, something from off world that might have a bacteria in it?"
"There's been rumor of bacteria found in meteors on the moon, and now they are saying there is a possibility on Mars. Think about it, Pendrell? We don't know what life is out there in our own little solar system, what organisms are out there effected by the radiation and forces off our world. NASA finds a rock with a fossilized form of virus, someone in our government comes up with a brilliant idea to utilize it…"
"And you have yourself a nifty weapon that no one can fight against." Pendrell concluded gravely, running nervous fingers through his coppery hair. "Do you and Agent Mulder have proof of this?"
"No," Scully replied quickly, but not for lack of trying. "You can imagine how difficult it is to get that sort of proof. But I've seen the virus at work. An Agent in Syracuse was killed after being infected by it, and Agent Mulder nearly died from it himself once."
"How did it get out? Wouldn't something like that be in a test tube in some facility somewhere under guard?"
"We think the government has been running experiments for years on that virus, perhaps other things." Scully's memory shied away from the leper colony in West Virginia, away from Betsy Hagopian and the women in Allentown. "There are people who carry the virus, I suspect that both Agent Mulder and Agent Weiss were infected by one of these carriers. It doesn't seem to affect those who carry it, but once it enters into the blood stream of anyone else it starts causing the body to over produce red blood cells, constricting the arteries, causing swelling in the extremities and clogging the heart."
"But outside of the thickening of the blood Dr. Sacks isn't displaying those other signs."
"That's the confusing part." One among many perturbing aspects of all of this, "Neither Mulder nor Agent Weiss displayed the comatose state, the attachment to the pineal gland. Which leads me to believe that whatever this life form is either it has nothing to do with the virus we found, or it is the source from which the engineered virus was created." And she had a suspicion that her latter assumption was the more correct one. She would need to study this more, to understand what the writhing mass attached to Sack's pineal gland was, how it reacted, and whether it was sentient, but if she could take a guess this was the life form that the government was modeling its virus on. This was why the rock was as valuable as Krycek said. This was also why ships such as the Piper Maru were out in the middle of the Pacific, looking for the remains of the downed World War II submarine.
Which didn't explain the radiation burns on those men…
"So theoretically then," Pendrell began slowly, pacing the small confines of the makeshift quarantine set up at NASA Goddard. "What we are dealing with is an alien life form."
"In theory, yes." It was a far cry from Mulder's gray skinned, black-eyed aliens, but technically true.
"Well…I suppose I'll have to stop calling Mulder crazy behind his back, huh?" Pendrell tried to smile weakly.
"You wouldn't be the first or the last to have called him that," Scully replied with a small, disapproving smirk. "But I won't know anything till we can get some blood work done, see what is going on in his system. If I'm right, I know a course of treatment at least to prevent the thickening of the blood, but I don't know what to do about whatever is in his brain." She had no idea what it was or if it really was linked to the virus at all.
"Do you really think we can keep him from dying of whatever this is?" Pendrell didn't look hopeful. And to be honest, Scully didn't feel that way herself.
"All we can do is try, Pendrell." She turned to regard the geologist's body quietly. "After all he didn't ask for any of this, did he?"