The usual - I don't own The X Files, Scully or Mulder.

If there happens to be a real Our Lady of Hope Medical Center and/or a Chief of Emergency Medicine named Greg Davis - I don't own them either.

This is not for money or fame - its for you and for me and for fun :-)

Please read and review!

THANK YOU SUNNY!

10:13am

Mulder woke in a hurricane of flailing arms and legs, raining sweat and gasping for air. Almost falling out of the chair, he grabbed the table for stability and tried to remember where the hell he was. The kitchen. Ok, so why was he sleeping at the kitchen table? Damn, when was this going to stop? Looking around the room, he tried to drive away the fogginess of the nightmare and remember.

The clock above the stove read ten-thirteen. That meant he'd been in the same spot for almost five hours. No wonder he was numb from his ass down to the floor. Like the waking nerves in his legs, the events of the morning slowly came back – he'd told Scully about the nightmare. And it hadn't gone well. He remembered the shattered coffee mug. Tears she tried to hide. Shaking hands and quivering voice. Then she left without saying goodbye, and he had sat at that table and cried – and apparently fallen asleep.

He pulled himself up and walked upstairs into the bathroom. It smelled of her perfume. It was a light and subtle number he'd given her specifically to wear at the hospital - strong fragrances were a no-no but he knew she liked to smell nice. He turned on the shower and stared at his reflection in the mirror. It was the first time he realized how old he looked. Hell, he felt old. Weariness filled his bones. Looking at the man in the reflection, he berated the bastard.

"Why couldn't you leave well-enough alone? Better yet, why couldn't you grow a pair and get past it on your own, you stupid ass. You just ruined any chance at all of spending the rest of your life with her, ya know? What woman in her right mind would stay with such a pathetic fuck?"

He shook his head in disgust at his own existence and stepped into the shower, praying the scalding water would wash away his uselessness.

11:36pm

The phone rang and Mulder grabbed it before the first tone disappeared.

"Scully?!"

"Mulder."

A man's voice? It wasn't her and for a moment Mulder almost hung up the phone in anger and fear. She was late and she hadn't called – he knew she could be stuck in surgery, but even then she always had her nurse let him know.

"Mulder? Are you there?"

"Who is this?"

"It's Greg, Mulder."

Mulder's heart stopped. Why was Greg Davis calling him? The Chief of Emergency Medicine at Our Lady of Hope Medical Center wasn't just one of Scully's coworkers, he had become a trusted friend. Still, his phone call didn't ring true to form – something was wrong.

"What's going on, Greg? Where's Scully?"

"You need to come to the hospital, Mulder."

Panic rose like a geyser in his gut.

"Greg?! Where. Is. Scully?"

"She's being flown in as we speak – she's been in a car accident. One of the medics on scene called me when they recognized her. I don't know much more than that right now, but you need to get down here."

Mulder didn't bother answering – he dropped the phone without replacing the receiver, grabbed his keys, and didn't even bother locking the door on his way out.

"Dammit Greg! Where is she?"

Mulder's face was wet with sweat, his brow furrowed with deep lines of fear and worry. Veins bulging in his neck, threatening to burst at any moment, he looked every bit as insane as he felt. Nothing was making sense to him, the neurons in his brain chaotically firing but making all the wrong connections. People were talking but nothing sounded like any language he'd ever heard.

A sudden explosion of pain in his gut brought him up short. Doubled over and falling to his knees, he struggled with nausea for several moments. He swallowed the urge to puke, gasped for more air and raised his head, making eye contact with Greg, who had sucker-punched him to force a redirect of focus. It worked.

"Listen to me, Mulder. I'm only going to say this one more time. You have got to calm down."

Mulder dropped his head and sucked in a deep breath.

"Mulder, look at me. She's alive and she's going to be fine. They took her back to radiology. She will be coming back any minute."

He couldn't look away, even after Davis was obviously finished talking. He felt like the world was collapsing around him, tears filling his eyes. He believed Greg but he needed to see her, to touch her, feel the warmth of her skin, and hear her breathing.

Automatic doors opened at the other end of the trauma hall and a transporter came through pushing a gurney towards the two men. Mulder scrambled to his feet, dizziness nearly knocking him back to his knees. Davis steadied him and they moved aside as the gurney wheeled past them and into the trauma bay.

Mulder stood at the curtain and stared at Scully. She was so still, so small in the long narrow bed. Auburn hair lay across the pillow, splayed in half-hazard directions. He could see the shallow rise and fall of her chest under the blue blanket and he felt his own breathing synchronize with hers. The saline bag hanging from the IV poll had a slow drip-drip-drip that flowed into tubing that disappeared under the right side of the blanket. A heart monitor quietly beeped with each heartbeat.

He slowly moved into the room. Greg walked silently behind him, bringing up a chair from the corner of the room and putting it behind Mulder.

"It's ok, Mulder. Here, sit down."

A gentle hand on his shoulder guided Mulder to the chair. He leaned in towards the bed and reached his hand to brush the hair from her face. Fresh sutures snaked their way across her left temple, bruises already appearing around her eye socket and along her jaw-line. There was ACE wrap covering her left hand, up to her elbow and he could see bruises above the dressing all the way up to her shoulder. He put his hand softly over hers.

"What happened?"

"According to the reports I got, she was on 79 headed home when she approached the intersection at Martin's Bridge Road and didn't make the stop. The witness in the vehicle behind her said she had drifted into the on-coming lane as she blew the stop sign. A pick-up truck coming from Martin's Bridge hit her right on the B post of the driver's side – a text-book T-bone."

Mulder nearly threw up.

"Is she ok? I mean, what are her injuries?"

"You can see the sutures on her temple. She has a pretty bad concussion but no active bleeding on her brain, and the swelling seems to have stopped. I've ordered a series of CT scans to keep an eye on it, of course, and she'll stay here until I'm satisfied she's out of the woods. That's the worst of it, luckily. There is significant bruising over the left side of her body, as you can understand, but no internal bleeding. Two fractured ribs. Her left wrist is probably broken but I'll have to wait for the swelling to go down to get a decent x-ray. A bunch of small lacerations, but those will heal without scarring..."

Mulder looked at the doctor when his voice trailed off.

"What Greg? I hear a 'but' in your voice."

"Mulder, she's got injuries I would expect to find in a person who was intoxicated at the time of the crash."

"What? Are you saying she was drinking and driving?!"

Mulder was indignant at the suggestion, his face turning red again.

"Of course not, Mulder! What I'm saying is I think she was unconscious before the truck hit her. Drunk drivers, or unconscious people in general, are loose. Their bodies flex more than a fully-aware person – what I mean is they absorb impact rather than tensing and bracing against it. The witness said she was in the on-coming lane of traffic and that she didn't even tap the brakes as she approached the intersection. Does that make any sense to you? Because it sure doesn't to me. You've said it yourself – she's the safest driver either of us have ever been in a car with. So why would she have been in the wrong lane and not even tried to stop?"

She felt heavy, like sand bags lay on top of her, holding her down. Or maybe gravity had shifted and she now weighed three times as much as she should. Mulder would love that - the world's biggest skeptic entertaining the idea that the forces of nature had altered in some tangible way.

Mulder.

Suddenly she was filled with the overwhelming need to touch him. Her skin tingled and her muscles burned. She had to get up. She needed to find Mulder.

Both men raised their eyes to the sudden screaming of the heart monitor alarm - Scully's rate had jumped to more than one-hundred, the tracer line making frantic up and down movements.

"Greg!"

Davis quickly moved between Mulder and the gurney. He listened to Scully's chest with his stethoscope and then shone his penlight into each of her arctic-blue eyes. Satisfied with what he saw, he put the light back in his pocket, silenced the monitor alarm and spoke to her.

"Dana? It's Greg. Can you wake up for me?"

Mulder held his breath. Unwelcome what-ifs raced through his head like rabid dogs. What if she wasn't ok? What if she didn't open her eyes? What if she never opened her eyes again? He knew about trauma victims that never regained consciousness, even when everything looked like they should. Hell, Scully had treated two of them since joining the trauma team at the hospital.

"C'mon Scully," he pleaded.

She could hear him. Mulder was talking to her, calling her name. But why was he so far away? She fought the weight holding her down, forcing her hands to claw through the darkness. If she could just wave her hand, show him she was trying, he'd come closer and she could touch him. That was all she wanted.

Mulder felt her fingers move under his hand. Looking briefly at her swollen digits then back to her face, he saw her eyebrows rising and falling as if struggling against their own weight. She was trying, fighting.

"That's it, Scully. C'mon, open your eyes."

A tiny sliver of blue appeared between the lids of her right eye, then disappeared as they fell shut again. Mulder held his breath. Please, God, let her wake up. He dropped his chin to his chest and prayed – she had used the strength of his beliefs to pull through before. Now he called upon the strength of her faith and begged God to give her back to him. The silence broke in two with a whisper.

"Mulder..."