Chapter 2

Rescuer

Washington DC

August 7th, 1994

9:00 PM

Scully paced through her dimly lit apartment, cell phone pressed to her ear. In her free hand was a tiny glass vial, containing a metal implant. It had suddenly become all-important, a great mystery that needed solving. And she needed Mulder's help to solve it. Unfortunately, though, the dial tone rang and rang until it finally went to the answering machine.

"This is Fox Mulder. Leave a message, please." Then a beep. Damn it. Sighing heavily, she began speaking.

"Mulder, it's me. I just had something...incredibly strange happen. This piece of metal that they took out of Duane Barry, it has some kind of a code on it. I ran it through a scanner and some kind of serial number came up." Scully paused, narrowing her eyes as she examined the chip. "What the hell is this thing, Mulder? It's almost as if...as if somebody was using it to catalog him."

Suddenly, her head shot up as a loud bump emanated, followed by rustling. Someone was nearby.

And then light shone through the window, prompting Scully to examine the window. Phone still in hand, she crept closer.

When she saw the face of the man on the other side, she gasped.

Glass shattered and feet shuffled. Duane Barry's gruff voice somehow was picked up by the answering machine.

"Come on, lady..."

"Mulder!"

"COME ON!"

"I need your help! Mulder! MULDER!"

She heard Duane Barry kill a police officer. Much later, she heard him saying he was unstoppable, and what may have been maniacal laughter. She thinks she may have heard Mulder's voice, but that was probably her imagination.

From then on, time was but a blur. Darkness, blinding beams of light here and there, the sharp stab of what may have been needles. Scully hoped they were needles and nothing worse. Voices coming from odd shadowy figures saying things she couldn't understand. But it didn't sound like any foreign language she knew of.

She drifted in and out of consciousness. It could have been hours, days, weeks, months, or even years. Scully wouldn't have known. Sometimes she dreamed of old memories- the snake she had shot with her brothers, her father affectionately calling her "Starbuck". Mulder, her mother. And of course, him. Her imaginary friend, the man with the blue police box.

One day, everything shifted. She heard a harsh groaning sound, like a dying car engine. Then there was the yelling- a man, speaking English. He was calling out her name- her first name. His voice was vaguely familiar, too. Like a memory from a dream.

And then her world went black.

She saw his face again, looking down at her. Not smiling, the way he had been when she met him. He was concerned, but reassuring. And it felt like she was moving- maybe on a gurney. His voice echoed in her ears. "Don't worry, Dana Scully, I'm gonna get you out of here. I believe I have a promise to keep."

I must be dreaming again, she thought. And yet she had never seen him in a jacket or a bow tie.

Eventually, though, she woke. And there were no shadows or needles or dream figures. Just the harsh florescent light and stark white walls of a hospital room. There were tubes in her arm, but she knew them. A heart monitor beeped to the left of her. There was a slight pressure on her left palm, as if someone was squeezing her hand.

She blinked her eyes several times. Her vision blurred, doubled, spun, but eventually came into focus. In front of her, there was nothing but a blank wall. Where was she? A hospital, surely, but where? And how did she get there?

When Scully turned to her left, she began to doubt the reality of it all over again.

He was there at her side. He was the one holding her hand. And he was no longer sopping wet or dressed in ragged clothes. His hair seemed to be naturally disheveled and fell just over his eyes. He wore a tweed jacket and a burgundy bow tie. But his eyes were the same- an odd sea-green color, with shadows swimming behind them. His face was grave, but relieved.

"Doctor," she tried to say, but all that came out was a ragged croak. He shook his head and leaned closer, almost frantic.

"No, no, don't try to talk." The Doctor sighed. "You're okay now, Dana."

"Water," she managed to get out, and he nodded. Standing up, he walked over to the sink, grabbed a paper cup, and, after filling it with water, moved back to sit down beside her and handed it to her.

Her eyes never left him as he moved about the room. When she took the cup from him, she immediately brought it to her lips and drained it in one gulp. Then she cleared her throat. "Where am I?"

"Northeast Georgetown Medical Center. Washington DC. November 2nd, 1994. I...I asked the TARDIS to take me where we needed to go. And she brought us here. I'm guessing you live nearby."

She nodded very slowly. "Yeah. I live in DC. Part of the job description." When he gave her a confused look, a hint of a smile appeared on her lips. "It's Special Agent Scully now. I work for the FBI. At least, I did before..." The smile faded, and she trailed off.

"Do you know what...happened to you?" he asked haltingly. She tilted her head and thought for a moment, her brow furrowing. After a long silence, she shook her head.

"I was kidnapped by a former agent. He was delusional. He had been shot in the head a few years ago, and it destroyed the moral center of his brain. He was convinced that he was following the orders of extraterrestrials. After he took me...I can't remember anything else."

The Doctor reached out and squeezed her hand again. "Delusional or no...he may have been," he murmured. "I found you inside an alien vessel. It was obvious tests were being performed on you. The only thing is, the race that possessed the sort of ship I found you on is now extinct. So it was stolen. The only question is, what race committed the theft? I couldn't tell, I never got a good look at any other life form on it. The TARDIS just took off by herself, and after she landed, I opened the doors and there you were." He sighed. "Funnily enough, I knew it was you. You don't forget the face of the first person you see after you've died and come back to life."

Scully's mind was reeling with questions, not unlike when he had crash landed in her backyard twenty-three years ago. But some of them would have been a bad idea to ask. After a long pause, she settled on, "What about you? What happened?"

The Doctor chuckled. "Well, after I said goodbye to you, I realized that the engines on the Old Girl were phasing, and that she would burn up if I didn't do something. I jumped into the future to fix it. Went forward...twelve years, I think. But I found the house empty. Boarded up. So I decided I'd fix myself up and then go looking for you." He paused, clearing his throat. "I battered about the universe for a couple of weeks, fixing small mishaps here and there, when she took off by herself. And the rest, as they say, is history." She chuckled at his remark and subsequent smirk.

Then, Scully sighed. "I believed you at first, you know. Right after you left. In the morning, I tried to tell my family about it, and they told me I had a very vivid imagination. I remember Mom smiling and saying that my imaginary friend sounded like a nice person. And after a while, I convinced myself that I had dreamed the whole thing. That it was the product of a child's overactive imagination. I convinced myself that aliens and UFOs and flying phone booths didn't exist. Yet...here you are."

He grinned. "Indeed I am. And I intend to keep my promise. If you'd like me to, that is."

"I'd like some proof of this, Doctor. Then maybe I'll decide."

"If it's proof you want, then proof you shall have, Agent Scully. Oh, I like the sound of that. Has a nice ring to it, don't you think?" When she gave him a half-smile and shrugged, he continued. "I already made sure your family was contacted. You were on file here, so that wasn't difficult. I should leave before they arrive- the less people who know about me, the better. As far as your family is concerned, I'm still just your imaginary friend." When she opened her mouth to protest, he cut her off. "I helped you some, but you're still in relatively bad shape, Dana. You need time to recover. Tell you what..."

He reached into his pocket, fishing for something. With an "a-ha" he removed what he had been looking for- a set of yellow post-it notes and a pen. He scribbled something onto one of the post-its and peeled it off, handing it to her. "When you've been discharged, call me. Give me a date, time, and location, and I'll come and get you. Preferably somewhere discreet, if you don't mind. As I said, the less attention I draw to myself, the better."

Scully stayed silent for several moments, then blurted out, "You have a phone?"

The Doctor grinned, standing up. "Well, yeah. I fly a phone booth, don't I?" he teased. Then he moved to stand in the doorway, pushing the door open slightly. "See you around, Special Agent Dana Scully."

He winked.

Then, in a flourish, the door closed behind him, he walked down the hallway, and he was gone again. This time, when he was out of her sight, she laughed softly. "See you later, Doctor."

"Scully, I know you know who brought you to this hospital. The nurse says she saw you two talking. Why won't you give him up? Did he threaten you?"

Her partner's reckless concern for her was getting annoying. "No, Mulder. He only wanted me to know the identity of my rescuer. His face, I should say. He didn't tell me his name. Just that...whoever took me had been running tests on me. He...found me, Mulder. He's as clueless as I am as to how I wound up where I did after Duane Barry."

Melissa wasn't convinced, that she knew. "Dana, there's something you aren't telling us. Something involving a painful memory. A very old memory."

Scully sighed in frustration. "I had a lot of dreams, alright? Involving my imaginary friend. It's confusing to me. I don't know why I kept seeing him, and it just brought back a lot of things."

Her mother and sister nodded in understanding, but Mulder looked confused. "Imaginary friend? I didn't think you were the type of kid who had imaginary friends, Scully."

Maggie smiled. "When Dana was seven, she told us that a man crash landed his spaceship in our backyard while we were asleep. Came inside and asked for food. She said he looked like a normal man, but he was really an alien. I said-"

"Mom," she interrupted. "I don't think Mulder wants to know about this-"

"No, go on," Mulder replied, grinning. "This sounds like a good story."

"-I said, 'Dana, you have a very vivid imagination.' And she insisted that it was true for the longest time. Said that he promised her he'd come back and take her with him when she was older. It went on for a year, at least."

Scully sighed, resisting the temptation to either bury her face in her hands in embarrassment or punch that stupid grin off of Mulder's face. "So, you know how it feels to not be believed, and yet you never believe me," he drawled.

"Shut up, Mulder," she snapped. Of course, he didn't. "I have a theory. Your imaginary friend is very, very real, and he rescued you."

"Fox," Melissa chided. "Don't."

Mulder shrugged. "Okay, fine. She can tell the truth when she feels like it. And it's Mulder, not Fox."

God, Mulder, you're going to be the death of me, she thought to herself. If I don't kill you first.

Mulder was in a much better mood as he headed back to his office. Scully was back and recovering, and he had something he could hold over her head for the rest of their lives. The skeptic with an alien for an imaginary friend. He'd said what he had about her rescuer partly to tease her, and partly because it could have been possible.

He found himself humming as he unlocked the door to their office, and found someone already sitting in his chair. A knowing smirk was on her face. She'd been expecting him.

"Do you want ta tell your partner about the pencils in the ceiling, or should I?"

Mulder grinned. "When it comes to timing, you really know how to take the cake...Bad Wolf. And I've got quite the story for you."

Three Days Later…

Scully held her breath as the dial tone reverberated against her ear. Then the click of someone picking up a receiver.

"Hello?"

"Doctor. It's, uh...it's me. Dana Scully."

"Dana! Blimey, hello! It's been about a week for me. What about you?"

"Three days," she replied, smiling to herself. "I'm out of the hospital now. I don't know what you did to fix me up, but I just might have to thank you for it."

A slight laugh. "Always happy to be of service," he said breezily. "Now, I'm assuming you're calling to set up a meeting?"

She nodded. "Yeah." She gave him a date, time, and location before changing the subject. "By the way, nobody but my family calls me Dana. And only my superiors call me 'Agent'."

He replied, puzzled, "Well, what do I call you, then?"

She chuckled. "Scully. Just call me Scully. Everyone else does, and it's kind of stuck. Especially ever since Mulder started using it."

"Mulder?" the Doctor repeated, confused. "Who is that?"

"My partner," Scully replied. "In the FBI. When we meet up, I'll tell you more."

And when Scully arrived at the agreed meeting place a day afterwards, the first thing she heard was the harsh wheezing noise that would become pleasantly familiar to her, and a blue phone booth faded into view a few feet in front of her. Standing upright this time, she noticed.

Smiling, the Doctor opened the front door to the- he had called it the TARDIS. His spaceship and time machine. He stood just in front of it, and beckoned for her to come closer. "Welcome to the TARDIS...Scully."

(A/N: Scully becomes the Doctor's companion! Ironic that the skeptic meets the alien and not the believer, right? And that aside, Scully needs someone to bitch about Mulder to. Because let's be real here- Mulder is a lovable dork, but also an insufferable annoyance. Especially to his partner.)