Character: Dana Scully

Fandom: The X-files

Rating: PG

Word Count: 965

Prompt: ...with each past exploit I've lost friends, white men and black... and much more... Allan Quatermain, the Adventurer wk 14 (From scifi_muses on LiveJournal)

Setting: Season One Episode: "Fallen Angel"

AN: Still don't own.

He was a boy. He couldn't be more than twenty-three, a kid who had his entire life in front of him…or should have, if he wasn't dying before her eyes. The ventilators pumped air in and out of his body for him, but Scully knew it was already too late. She was simply watching the monitors by his bedside, waiting for the inevitable beeping noise to sound as he flat lined, and the potential of his life slowly ebbed away from his charred, cracked body.

It was a damn shame…a damn, fucking shame. She held the boy's hand as he his heart became weaker, his breathing slower, until finally the quiet emergency room was broken by the sharp, though not unexpected alarm of another life expiring. With evident finality, she turned the machine off, and gently placed the young soldier's hand on top of his ruined chest.

She felt as if she had let this kid down, this soldier, who had been called to a mission she surmised he little understood, only to die in a most horrible and horrific of a manner. She had tried, of course, as had Dr. Oppenheim, the physician in charge of the ER, but every one of the victims had come in with severe, radioactive burns, some so bad that they were dead on arrival, practically cooked from the inside out. The luckier ones, and there were only two of those, still looked like horrible victims of a raging house fire, and she doubted that one would ever be able to see again. They had been lost even before they had gotten to the hospital for treatment.

"Daniels," Scully jumped slightly as Colonel Henderson approached with heavy, booted steps, his face grim as he regarded the disfigured face of his man, torn between stoic duty and true grief at the loss.

"Yes sir," Scully nodded, glancing at the man's vitals chart. "I'm sorry."

"I've lost other men, ma'am, many others. It's part of the duty you take on as a soldier. Course, that doesn't make it any easier." He nodded solemnly to the young man's body. "This one was new to my unit. Just married six months ago, just found out he and his wife were expecting."

"It's a tragedy," Scully murmured, her heart aching briefly for the boy who now would never get to grow old with his young bride, or see the child that they had created. It made his loss seem all that much more nonsensical to her.

"Not as big of a tragedy as what might have happened if that plane had gotten through." Henderson turned knowing eyes on Scully, all seriousness as he stared at her across his former soldier's bed. "I know why you are here, Agent Scully. I'm glad you could be here to try and help my boys. I'm sorry that I was so curt when we met."

"It was understandable," she conceded. "But what I can't understand, Col. Henderson, is why you and your men have set about a campaign of threats and deceit about this situation. Surely informing the public about the truth of what happened here would be preferable than explaining to this boy's parents and wife their son died under strange and unforeseen circumstances. After all, how will they explain that their son can't have an open casket funeral?"

"Agent Scully, can you imagine the panic that would ensue if we admitted for even a moment that a terrorist action had not only crossed into American airspace, but had come this close," he raised his right hand, thumb and forefinger pinching together till they were only centimeters apart. "This close to having a nuclear weapon dropped on Chicago? The heartland of American, within striking distance of Canada, it would be devastating."

"I don't deny that, Colonel, but people will ask questions. People are already asking questions. By playing the cloak and dagger game, it won't make those questions go away, it will only amplify them."

"Perhaps if your partner wasn't the one inciting all of those questions in the first place," he snapped back angrily. "What business does the FBI have in any of this?"

"None sir," she replied honestly. "Agent Mulder will be facing an inquiry tomorrow morning, I believe that he has finished causing all the trouble he is going to cause for the time being."

She hoped he was, at least.

Henderson's temper seemed mollified by her answer. He placed a gloved hand on the now inert knee of Daniels, looking for the first time truly grieved. "I serve my country, Agent Scully. What I do might seem covert or even underhanded to you. But my men gave their lives to ensure that tomorrow you can go home, not fearing that you may have been exposed to radiation from a cracked warhead that never made it to its target. This is a horrible way to die, but my men did. I hope you can convey to your partner the same weight of importance of what my men sacrificed here tonight."

"I don't think Agent Mulder was questioning their sacrifice, Colonel. I think he was questioning why they were being made to sacrifice themselves in the first place…and for whom."

The colonel didn't respond to her, nor did he look at her as she finally turned away from the body, and moved towards the dressing rooms, eager to get the hospital issued scrubs covered in blood and ash off of her, and into her own clothes. She glanced at her watch, realizing she had less than five hours to get Mulder back on a plane and to DC and in front of OPR and McGrath.

"Agent Scully," Henderson called back over his shoulder. "Thank you again…for helping with my men."

"It's my duty, sir," she replied simply.