Dana Scully lie in the quiet stillness of her living room, occupied only by her thoughts.
'Chicken pox when I was a kid? 7th grade, maybe, when I had scarlet fever?' she thought groggily. 'No, no. Maybe that upper respiratory infection I had in med school...' She was trying to figure out the last time she had felt as awful as she did at the present moment. It was some sort of untold miracle that she was even able to register coherent thoughts at all, given her high temperature and menacing symptoms.
An exhaustion like she had never felt before had taken up residence in her body, invading it along with an unwelcome desire to sleep all the time and totally ignore the realities of day to day life. She was too tired to hold a book and knew there was no way she could concentrate on a TV show or movie. Not to mention that there were dishes to be done, mail to open, laundry to be washed.
Oh, and her job.
Scully groaned thinking of the mess she would return to at the office on Monday. She knew without a doubt she would be greeted by a mountain of paperwork that her partner would have either conveniently forgotten to complete or totally screwed up somehow, God bless him.
'I wonder how many pencils are pierced into the ceiling by now,' she thought to herself with a laugh she couldn't help. Fox Mulder was a man she was certain she would never understand.
Mulder. He was a completely different story altogether. She glanced at the clock for what had to be the millionth time that day, wondering why he hadn't called to check up on her yet. After all, this was only the second sick day she had ever taken in her entire time with the FBI, and she was all but certain she had scared the living daylights out of her partner when she had called him to tell him the night before.
"You sure you're alright, Scully?" had been his subdued response. If he had thought he was hiding his panic in his tone of voice, he was sorely mistaken. She had insisted that, yes, she really was fine, just that she needed to rest, and she had promised to be back in the office bright-eyed and bushy-tailed before he knew it.
She knew he hadn't bought it.
She was an idiot, really, to think she could have convinced him otherwise. The case they had just returned from was one of the most horrific she had ever experienced. Wayne Sutton ranked right up there with the worst of them as far as she was concerned: evil personified. His helpless victims, small children who had no hope of being able to escape from the madman, had been tortured and tormented while still alive, dying painful, terrifying deaths all alone just so the psychopath of an ex-doctor could follow his sordid, fictional agenda of bringing in the age of colonization. When Sutton somehow found out that she was a doctor as well, he began taunting her in the form of notes left at each crime scene. Riddles that no one could make any sense of until the forensic investigations had been complete.
She was highly aware of Mulder's concern for her throughout the case. She was pulling ridiculous hours in the lab, on her feet through two consecutive 8-hour shifts of medical staff at the morgue each day and constantly thinking about the case. She couldn't sleep at night and instead would sit and stare for hours at photographs of crime scenes and copies of the notes left by Sutton, attempting to think the way he did, to get one step ahead of him in a game she was trying desperately to keep up with.
She had been so preoccupied with the case that she had unintentionally skipped several meals. Even when she took the time to actually sit down with something to eat, she would run through the details of the latest murder without intending to and lose what little appetite she had come to the table with. Even with her well-practiced ability to detach herself, she was unable to this time around. When she wasn't in the lab, she was outside investigating in the field with her partner, working in near-freezing temperatures surrounded by snow on the ground. The stunning beauty of the landscape surrounding them had been in sickening contrast to the terrible scenes they would discover with each new victim. She couldn't pinpoint exactly when it had began, but she had started coming down with symptoms of her cold about mid-way through the case.
When they had finally caught Sutton, he was in the middle of performing one of his barbaric surgeries. Officers had swarmed the scene, gathering enough evidence to lock the bastard away until kingdom come and ensuring he would, at the very least, spend the remainder of his pathetic life rotting away in a jail cell. As Sutton had been led away to the waiting patrol car, he had struggled against the arresting officers and made a point of addressing her directly, a disgusting snarl of a smile draped over his face. "Agent Scully, it's about damn time. Shame on you! You could have prevented a lot of sufferin' if you had been on your game!" He had been shoved into the waiting patrol car mid-rant, still hollering and making a fuss for anyone that would listen.
She knew Mulder had been ready at that moment to put a bullet between Sutton's eyes, but she considered that kind of death too good for him. She wanted nothing more than to see him brought to court and punished for what he had done. She had calmly wrapped her fingers around Mulder's bicep and looked him square in the eye, mustering up every last ounce of energy she had to silently plead with him to just take her back to the motel.
They had flown home the next day, arriving late in the evening, so he had taken her home and asked her to take Thursday off. She had refused, determined to bounce back and get on with her life. She needed distraction anyway, always had in times of uncertainty or grief. The more she sat around at home the more she thought about things, and the more upset she got. So, instead, she had arrived at the office after a fitful night of sleep and was all but useless the entire day. The pile of used Kleenexes in the trash bin next to Mulder's desk had turned into a mountain by the time she had left for the evening.
When she had gotten home last night, she collapsed on the couch and had hardly moved since, except to use the restroom and adjust the thermostat from time to time. She had made the decision to take Friday off, but it took her over an hour to get up the nerve and energy to call Mulder and let him know.
Her temperature had been fluctuating all day between 100 and 102. She was sure she'd be feeling better after a few days of rest and that a good night's sleep, whenever she got one, would fix everything. As she drifted back off to sleep on her couch, she hoped that Mulder was being somewhat productive in her absence.