A Winter's Tale, Part 12

[anjoufic]

Title: A Winter's Tale 12/23

Author: comice aka Anjou (Anjou@rocketmail.com)

Posting Date: December 2007/January 2008

Rating: R for language and sexuality; M for Mature readers

Classification: Mulder/Scully, UST/MSR, AU

Archive: No archival until the story is completed, please. I'll be submitting to Ephemeral and Gossamer myself.

Spoilers: Through Two Fathers/One Son (S6), then AU. In other words, no Arcadia and beyond. Mytharc-y.

Disclaimer: All X-Files personnel belong to 1013 and Fox. All other elements are mine.

Author's Note: It looks like evenings will work best for me during the work week, at least for the moment.

Daily posts can be read on my fic journal: anjoufic, as well as Ephemeral and other XF fic sites. The whole tale will be archived at my website, No Other … , maintained by the generous dtg, when it is completed.

As always, thanks to my sister and editrix, Suzanne, for her support.

Summary: Cast your memory back to the dark days of Season 6, to the period immediately following the confrontation between Mulder and Scully in the Gunmen's Office. It is late winter, dark and cold, the landscape obscured and transformed by snow and ice. One must step carefully, for the very ground can be treacherous. This is a lesson Mulder and Scully have already learned when the pristine snow in Antartica yielded a long-buried secret. But the winter can hold many secrets, and could tell many tales, if it so chose.

This is but one.



~*~

The hours after lunch were a sharp contrast to the lighthearted fun of the late morning. Hannah's mood had deteriorated, and Scully's suspicion that her temperature was up was confirmed when the thermometer registered 100.7. Still, it took Mulder considerable cajoling to charm Hannah into resting after lunch. He finally laid down on the bed with her to watch cartoons, absentmindedly winding her curls around his long fingers. She fell asleep after Mulder had endured almost an hour of Rugrats. He rolled his eyes at Scully after he crept off the bed. "Cartoons were better when I was a kid," he muttered, going to the window to check on the weather. "It's really slowing down."

Scully nodded, only half-listening.

"Anything interesting?" Mulder asked, sitting down next to her at the table. He was twirling a pencil around his fingers, over and over. His fidgeting was so ingrained that she barely noticed it anymore, but in light of his surprising revelation of the morning, she was viewing his fascination with pencils in a new light.

"I don't know," Scully said. "A lot of what's been done to Hannah seems like an inoculation series, but … I could be just assuming that because Hannah said she'd been given shots, remember?" she looked at her notes. "But whatever they were doing it seems like they were repeating the same series over and over again."

"Why?" Mulder asked. "And what kind of shots?"

"I don't know," she answered, the frustration evident in her voice. "The abbreviations aren't for any vaccine series that I remember. Arguably, my pediatrics rotation was a long time ago, and I know that a lot of new vaccines have been added to the rotation, but these acronyms don't align themselves with anything on the current schedule of recommended vaccines from the CDC. I sent the guys an e-mail a while ago, and they're searching for the abbreviations, but so far…"

"Do you think they're inoculating her against Purity?"

"I have no idea what they're vaccinating her against," Scully said. "In fact, I can't even say that these are multi-part vaccines, or sequential inoculations, or vaccines at all. It's just the patterning that suggests that they are."

Mulder looked thoughtful. "Like the kind they give you when you go to Africa or India?" Off her look he continued, "I went to India one summer instead of coming home. Or, are you saying Purity is like rabies?"

"I don't know, Mulder," she said wearily. "I really can't tell anything from these schedules, other than they're sequential, and repeated."

Mulder sighed and turned toward Hannah, who was curled up in a ball in the bed. "Is she sick because she's due for some shots?"

"I don't know, Mulder," she said quietly.

He turned around and looked at her assessingly. "What's going on, Scully?"

She hesitated, but knew that he wouldn't rest until she answered his question. "I think it's possible that the room that she was in was a kind of clean room," she said, watching his expression carefully. "The Haz-Mat suits, the separate rooms," she continued. "I think that Hannah's not been exposed to a lot of germs."

Mulder closed his eyes and grimaced, "In other words, this is my fault."

"What choice did you have, Mulder?" she answered him. "Do you really think that she would have survived their experiments?"

His eyes popped open. "What're you saying, Scully?"

"Hannah did have three siblings," she said.

"Siblings? Not clones?"

"Not clones," Scully said. "From the RFLP information that was included in their records, they're not clones. There were subtle differences in the sequences that I could see."

Mulder's brow was drawn down in thought. "Variations on a theme … now why would they do that?"

"I don't know, Mulder. I do know that they were all subjected to the same series of experiments, and only Hannah has survived. If their immune systems were altered, it's a logical deduction that the environment was limited so that it wouldn't have an effect on the experiments, and that those experiments, perhaps in concert with the alterations, were what killed them."

Mulder pushed his chair back away from the table and strode to the window. He looked furious, but remained silent. She got up and followed him. The snow had slowed down to a trickle, and no longer seemed to be accumulating. The world outside the window was white and still, with nothing moving except for the occasional drifting of the snow. She shivered at the sight.

"What are you thinking, Mulder?"

"I'm not," he said after a minute, "I'm feeling incredibly angry and ..." he shook his head, "After all this time, part of me still cannot accept the absolute barbarity of what they've done." He turned away from the window and looked at her, his eyes dark. "To you, to my sister. How many more do you think there are, Scully? Women and children like Hannah, and Emily. I'm sure you noticed that these bastards never seem to experiment on themselves, and hardly ever on their sons."

She opened her mouth to point out that their experimentation was focused on reproduction, which made their human subject choices explainable, but he continued on, his voice hot and low.

"And is it any surprise, really? How else could it have turned out when they used Victor Klemper and men like him to design their experiments?" He paused, "They're not scientists, they're monsters." He was flushed and couldn't meet her gaze. She wondered exactly to whom he was referring. "Sometimes, I wonder who's worse? What they're claiming to protect us from, or the supposed cure?"

Hannah made a distressed noise in her sleep and suddenly rolled over, diverting their attention to her. Scully noted how she looked with a sinking feeling, glancing over Mulder's shoulder to the unblemished snow outside. There was still no sign of a plow.

He shook his head in frustration. "Damn it!" His voice had dropped back to a whisper, but there was a desperate edge to it. "As soon as they plow, we're leaving," he said intently. "That way, we can get to the Crawfords first thing in the morning at the latest."

She nodded her agreement, and he stared at her, still for the first time in a while, stopped by her lack of argument. "I agree, Mulder," she said quietly. "She's not getting any better. We should go as soon as it's safe."

"OK," he said, snapping back into action. "I'm going to find a shovel to dig the car out." His hand enclosed her wrist for an instant as he passed by her, already in motion.

~*~

Eight hours later, Scully sat huddled in the backseat of their rental, travel-weary, exhausted and terrified. In her arms, Hannah lay in a stupor, having passed into a quiet, heavy sleep that frightened Scully far more than the fevered thrashing that had occurred most of the car ride. Hannah's temperature now hovered somewhere near 104 degrees. She'd tried to convince herself that it was unlikely to be an accurate reading; Hannah was not only wearing her coat, but Mulder had wrapped her in the purloined blanket from the motel and his own overcoat. When they finally got into their room, she'd take Hannah's temperature again. She searched for a glimpse of Mulder via the window into the motel office, but he and the proprietor were still out of sight. He'd been outside for a few minutes, bouncing on the balls of his feet and chafing his arms against the cold penetrating his thin suitcoat, ringing the bell of the office repeatedly until a tall older woman, wearing a flannel bathrobe and carrying a double-barreled shotgun, had appeared.

Less than ten minutes had passed since he entered the door of the office, but Scully felt panicky at being alone with Hannah. It wasn't like Mulder could do anything for Hannah, but while he was there, at least her feeling of impotence was shared. She didn't know what else she could do for the child other than worry. On the long drive as Hannah's fever had raged, and Mulder drove carefully behind the snowplows, inching ever closer to Rochester, she had worried. She worried that the Motrin was no longer reducing Hannah's fever, but was too worried to try another fever reducer. What if Hannah had a reaction to the acetaminophen? Aspirin was out of the question from the reading that Scully had done, and yet it was probably still the most effective fever reducer available. Yet, with visions of Reye's Syndrome and Kawasaki Disease running rampant in her imagination, she wouldn't risk giving Hannah either drug.

She found herself checking Hannah's lymph nodes again and again, running fingers over them lightly to see if they were swollen. She'd checked the skin on the palm of Hannah's hands repeatedly, and examined her mouth and her tongue with her penlight.

If Hannah had developed a serious pediatric illness, she would have to wait another eight or nine hours to even begin treatment. Scully felt her scalp break out in a sweat at the very idea and clamped down on the rising wave of panic. They couldn't take Hannah to a hospital – although they would have to if they couldn't find the Crawfords or worse, if there was nothing that they could do for Hannah. Mulder was firm in his belief that the Crawfords would know what to do, and she could only hope that whatever instinct guided his movements was right yet again. Still … the Crawfords last known location was a nondescript office park off secondary roads. The Gunmen were monitoring the plowing being done in the area and had promised to call as soon as the roads were passable. It was all taking too long.

She stared down at Hannah, feeling the solid weight of her in her arms. This was her child, and she was a doctor, and there wasn't a damned thing she could do to help her. She swallowed the tears that threatened to overcome the panic and wondered how in the hell anyone could be a mother when it was such a jumble of overpowering emotion all the time. This child, the one whose possible existence she hadn't contemplated 72 hours ago, had become essential to her just as Emily had before her. How many more times would she have to live this horrendous scenario before her own heart exploded from grief?

She heard the sound of Mulder's voice as he exited the motel office with a key dangling from a big piece of plastic. "Thank you for helping us out," he said with strained civility, "my wife and daughter are very tired." As soon as his back was turned to the door, the polite mask that he'd been wearing crumpled, and she could see the worry and fear return. He ran the few feet to the back door, shivering convulsively in the cold air. She leaned over and unlocked the door across from her just before he fumbled for the handle, sliding a bit on the ice in the parking lot.

"We're just down the row two doors, and …" he said, as the door opened, but whatever he might have said was lost as he bent down and saw her face. "Oh, Scully," he said sorrowfully.

She lifted Hannah toward him with arms that had long ago cramped from holding her weight, feeling the imminence of the tears that threatened to overflow at his stricken expression. He leant in across the seat and reached for her instead, cradling the back of her skull in his large palm as he pressed a lingering kiss to her forehead. "I'm so sorry, Scully," he said in anguish. "I wish …"

"I know," she said, "I know." She moved Hannah toward him again as he hovered over her. "Mulder, please," she whispered. "Help me. We need to get her inside."

He gasped a little at her words, but nodded and lifted Hannah out of her arms easily. Hannah didn't stir at all, and the sight of her so still made Scully question whether or not they should just take her to the hospital after all. She stumbled as she got out of the car, not realizing until she stood upright that her legs had gone to sleep from Hannah's extra weight compressing them.

"Scully?!" Mulder turned from the sidewalk in front of the car as she clung to the top of the door. Hannah stirred in his arms and half-opened her eyes.

"I'm fine, Mulder," she said automatically, even thought she was dizzy and tired and the world was blurring at the edges. "My legs are asleep. Get her inside."

Hannah had begun to shiver in the cold, despite all of the protection she had against it. "'m cold," she whined, and Scully felt incredible relief to hear the plaintive sound.

"OK, honey, OK," Mulder soothed, turning back toward the door, and then peering over his shoulder. "I'll get the stuff from the car in a minute, Scully," he said. "Come with us."

She nodded and shambled along in his wake, wincing at the pins and needles that ran along her right side and through her legs. She rubbed at her extremities as she moved, stopping to stamp her feet once or twice on the cleared and dry sidewalk. Her head ached with the cold. Shivering, she stepped through the door of the motel room and found, like Alice in Wonderland, that it seemed she'd stepped back in time. The room was nearly the reverse image of the one they'd left eight hours ago, a fact that did nothing to help her muddled thinking. The sitting area was to the right of the door, and the bathroom was at the back, next to the closet. The heap of Hannah's outdoor clothing was piled on one of the two queen-sized beds that were squeezed into the space along the left wall. When she closed the door to the parking lot, a small walkway to maneuver around the end of the second bed appeared. A nightstand between the two beds with a phone and a bureau with a TV set opposite the bed farthest from the door completed the set-up. It was clean and neat, and the only difference between it and the room they'd left behind hours ago was that somewhere along the way, the motel must have had a lodge theme, because the walls were paneled with faux-knotty pine.

She could hear the low murmur of Mulder's voice in the bathroom, and realized that he was trying to cajole Hannah into using the toilet. She walked over to the wall unit on tingling legs and turned the heat up all the way, then made her way back around the end of the bed and crossed the room to the closet, hanging up her coat. She walked back to the bed, stomping her feet as she went, and found Hannah's coat under Mulder's, hanging it up. She left Mulder's coat where it was in the vain hope that he would actually wear it outside when he went to collect the rest of their belongings. It was useless to suggest to him that the cold made him more vulnerable to illness. Mulder hardly ever got sick; in all the time she'd known him, his visits to the doctor had almost always been due to injury. It was one of his more annoying traits, since she tended to get every cold that passed through the Hoover and hold onto it for a week or two, while Mulder would maybe get a sniffle for a day or two.

She realized that her thoughts were whirling, but very slowly, and then felt her own forehead speculatively. It was impossible to judge if she had a fever, but her cold hand felt soothing against her head. She took an inventory, running her fingers lightly over the lymph glands in her throat. She was achy, addled and her throat hurt. However, she was exhausted and had been dumping adrenaline into her bloodstream all day while consuming thoroughly inadequate amounts of food. Her jaw ached from tension and her mouth was dry from her nearly constant state of spitless panic. She was, most likely, very dehydrated.

Mulder brought Hannah out of the bathroom and tucked her into bed, propping her up on two pillows. "I'll be right back," he said to her, his hand circling her elbow briefly as he passed by her.

She sighed in his wake and went over to the bed to pick up the overcoat he'd ignored and hang it up. Hannah watched her listlessly, already half-asleep again.

Mulder was back in the room in an instant, dropping bags on and around the table and leaving the door open while he ran back to the car for the last of their belongings. She heard the sound of him skidding, then a curse and a muffled thump like he'd bounced off the car. By the time she got to the door, however, he was already halfway back to the room, holding the cooler in his hands.

"I'm fine," he announced as he strode by her into the room. "I just slipped."

She closed the door behind him. He had retrieved a Gatorade from the cooler, which he moved toward Hannah with as he spoke. "I didn't flush," he said to Scully over his shoulder, "she hardly peed at all, and it's very dark."

She moved into the bathroom and stared down at the orange liquid in the toilet basin, before closing the door and trying to void her own bladder. Her own output was similarly minimal and dark. She stared at her pale, exhausted face in the mirror. The truth was that she had already been run down before this latest adventure had begun. If what Hannah had was communicable, she was definitely vulnerable to it. There was nothing she could do about it right now. She washed her face and hands and dried them, going back out to the room.

Mulder had turned the TV on, but was sitting next to Hannah on the bed with his back to it. A half-drunk cup of Gatorade stood abandoned on the night table, but Mulder hadn't given up. He was feeding a dozing Hannah the liquid through one of the unused eyedroppers. She took off her shoes and went to the cooler for a bottle of water for herself, opening it and guzzling it down while she watched him patiently feed Hannah. The set of his back was determined, but he was extremely gentle with the child, not forcing her to drink. He paused between eyedroppers full of liquid, watching to make sure that Hannah swallowed before he continued. She shucked her suitjacket, hanging it up in the closet, then paused. She really should change into more comfortable clothes, but it seemed like such a huge effort at the moment. She stood at the opened door of the closet, swaying in indecision.

"Scully?" Mulder was looking over his shoulder at her. "Are you all right?"

"I'm so tired, Mulder," she said, after a pause.

He got up from the bed and took off his own suit jacket, dropping it at the end of the bed, and rolling up his sleeves. He was studying her, as he unknotted his tie and laid it atop the jacket. He toed off his shoes and walked over to her. "Why don't you lie down for a while?" he asked in a gentle voice.

"I …" she started to speak, but his quiet voice undercut hers.

"She can't have any more meds for a while," he said, "and I'm not tired. I'm going to get some more of this Gatorade into her." He ushered her over to the other bed, pulling back the covers. "I promise I'll wake you if anything happens. Just lie down for a while."

He pushed her gently down to the bed, and it felt so good underneath her that she moaned a little.

"I really shouldn't …" she protested weakly, but Mulder had picked up her feet and tucked them under the covers.

"Just rest for a little while," he ordered.

She closed her eyes.

~*~

Part 13

Comments

[tree]

i have such a soft spot for Mulder taking care of Scully. and Scully letting him.

[anjoufic.livejournal.com]

Me, too.

I wish it had happened more often in the show.

[charvill.livejournal.com]

Maybe it will in the movie :-)

BTW, I am in love with your story!!! Thanks for sharing!

[anjoufic.livejournal.com]

Thanks, charvill -- that's very kind of you to say.

[pluschi.livejournal.com]

Oh yes there's something very special about Mulder taking care of Scully and SCully really letting her guard down. She's doing that here and she -knows- she is and she is even liking it. This is getting better all the time.

Something I noticed and wanted to comment on:

"What are you thinking, Mulder?"

"I'm not," he said after a minute, "I'm feeling incredibly angry and ..." he shook his head, "After all this time, part of me still cannot accept the absolute barbarity of what they've done." He turned away from the window and looked at her, his eyes dark.

You've made Mulder say a 'feeling' statement. In the X-files I've noticed that Mulder hardly every says 'I'm feeling this or that'. The fact that he's saying here "I'm feeling angry"...it stood out for me. One because Mulder hardly says these things at all and when he does it must mean something. I thought it fit the growing trust and openness between them. Lovely!!!

[anjoufic.livejournal.com]

That's very true, pluschi and that's specifically why I had Mulder make that distinction. Thank you for noticing!

[whitewriter.livejournal.com]

... Meanwhile, you'd think Skinner would be all sus - his 2 fav agents disapearing without explaination?

* really really hopes Hannah will be okay *

[anjoufic.livejournal.com]

Well ... it has actually only been a couple of days.

Thanks,

Anjou

[tabula-x-rasa.livejournal.com]

Oh, poor Mulder's going to have his hands full.

Excellent chapter, as always. I'm trying not to worry about them too much, but you're making it difficult. ;)

[anjoufic.livejournal.com]

Sorry! Scully's just worn out.