Title: Timber Author: nevdull Posted: December 11, 2000 Category: X (mytharc) Rating: R (violence, language) Spoilers: Takes place soon after "En Ami" and derails off canon from there. Archive: Yes, please link to http://nevdull.tripod.com/timber.txt Notes: At end. Summary: The stars are projectors. ___________________________________________ I "The extremely cold winds chap the timber and kill the cattle." -- J. Reynolds _View of Death_ (1725) ___________________________________________ The air was still and smelled of dung. If it were summer, the stench would be overwhelming -- all those leathery hides baking in the heat -- but the spring air remained tinged with frost. It tasted sterile and metallic. "Sir?" the too-young technician asked him. The boy's pleading tone suggested he was repeating himself. It happened. "Yes?" the man replied. He remembered the technician's name but it amused him to pretend that he hadn't. "Which one are you?" "I'm Jenkins, sir. I need your signature here." The boy's obsequious voice irritated him. Every one of them who'd had an ounce of dignity was gone and he couldn't say much for the succeeding generation, except perhaps that they needed him. Judging from the way this project was going, even that was in doubt. He scribbled some initials and a name and held the clipboard out to the technician. When the boy reached, the man dropped it onto the soft grass. He'd learned to take the small pleasures life offered him. This new biotech consultant was not one of those small pleasures. She jostled in front of the embarrassed technician, huffing and posturing. The woman stood, as she always did, too closely. "I don't know how many times we need to run this test, sir." Her tightly bound hair had sprung loose in several places but she still looked officious and pent-up. "We've varied every possible parameter and the results are consistent. Nothing -- the vaccine has no effect." "No effect on the cattle. It had an effect on Dana Scully." Who would, he mused, eat this twit alive as soon as arrest her. The consultant rolled her eyes. "We had similar results with the human subjects. We've been over this a thousand times. The factors with the earlier groups... We don't know what strain they used, what the environmental parameters were, what interactions occurred with the chips. My opinion is that it was inconclusive..." "Your opinion, Doctor, is whatever I say it is." He lit a cigarette. "Keep that in mind." Her jaw clenched with the first note of appropriate fear, but she continued. "I was hired for a purpose, Mr. Spender. Now if I am to understand the urgency of this situation, it is in the interest of everyone involved that the work continue as quickly as possible." She paused. "Of course, this would all be unnecessary if the item we were promised had been what it should have been. How unfortunate to find only a blank disk." He looked back at her steadily. "Yes, very unfortunate." They remained silent for some time. In the distance, grim-faced soldiers set fire to a hundred carcasses and the unearthly progeny which incubated within them. -- Mulder pushed back against the hospital bed in an ill-fated attempt to sit upright. He couldn't quite see what she was doing to his cast, but she didn't appear to be writing on it. Unless she was writing quite a bit. "Never figured you for a budding novelist," he said loudly, craning his neck. At the foot of the bed, Scully stood. She was shaking her pen and frowning at his leg. "How are you supposed to sign an inflatable cast? Anyway, I think this pen ran out of ink." "Well, hurry up and get another one." She looked up. "Anxious to know what I'm going to say?" "No, get a pen so you can sign me out of here." She leaned on the bedframe. "Mulder, you're scheduled to be released in two hours. You have an engagement more pressing than that?" "I wanna get back down to the court to catch the end of the game." He reached forward, scratching under the cast. It itched like hell, predictably enough. She swatted his hand away. "You're going to show your face on the court after you broke your ass?" "I have a minor fracture in my leg." "Equally undignified in this case. How does one manage to break one's leg on level ground?" "I wasn't on the ground. I was mid-air. And I didn't break it, Dr. Scully--" "Mulder, white men can't jump." "Joke too obvious. No points." "That's true for both of us, unless you actually made that death-defying basket." He scratched beneath the cast again and asked for the time. His entrance into his apartment would certainly have been comical if it had happened to someone else. He dropped the right crutch when reaching for his keys and dropped the left crutch when he reached for his right crutch. Scully entirely failed to catch him. "Couch," Mulder croaked. She obligingly dragged him across the room, cast bumping along the floor. "Up," he gasped. Scully gently lifted the cast onto the coffee table, first sliding a pillow under it before letting go. "Water," he concluded, and collapsed into the cushions. When she returned a moment later with a pair of drinking glasses, he was flailing aimlessly at his answering machine. He'd managed to knock it off the desk and onto the floor. It blinked at them. "Messages," she guessed, putting down the water and righting the machine. She pressed "play" and started to place it back on the desk, then froze. "Long time no see." Krycek's recorded voice was smarmy yet buzzing with nerves. "I've been in the neighborhood a few times but haven't had the opportunity to stop by. A lot of traveling, but I've managed to keep my ear to the ground. "You've had a busy year. I almost can't believe some of the things I've heard. Especially Scully. She's been very busy. Does that bother you, Mulder?" A moment of dead air, on the tape and in the room. "Anyway, I've left a little something at the office you might want to check out. Perhaps sooner rather than later, so don't take your coat off. Not that you would. You're probably halfway out the door already, chasing intrigue. I know, it's what you do. "A few words of advice before you leave. Don't think that the game's over just because a few of the players checked out. Don't think that you're not still their pawn. Don't think that I'm not still watching. "Speaking of which, Happy New Year's. Sorry I missed your little party." -- Scully pushed the door open with one hand and wielded her gun with the other. She'd heard the grunting noises and sounds of a struggle as soon as she had reached the hallway outside the office. Inside, the room was lit only by Mulder's desk lamp. It was bright enough to see that there was a man tied up and on the floor near the desk. He turned his head to look at her, and she saw that it was Skinner. His face and hands were covered in sickly-familiar discolored blotches. He opened his mouth to say something but was interrupted by a kick in the chest. Krycek slid out from a darkened corner. He regarded her with undisguised curiosity. "You're just full of surprises lately, Agent Scully." She ignored him and bent down to her boss, feeling his pulse. Skinner's heart was racing -- he was wild-eyed with fear and his skin was icy cold. "Where's your partner?" Krycek asked breezily. Scully kept the gun pointed squarely at him as she felt the sides of Skinner's face with the back of her other hand. She reached up for the phone on the desk. Krycek ripped it out of her grasp and threw it across the room. "Where is Mulder?!" Finally, she looked up at him. "What do you want?" "Your attention. And now that I've got it, I want to talk." He caught her eyes flickering downwards and produced a small electronic device from his jacket. "Don't worry about him, I'll tune him to a happier channel." Skinner gasped, as if coming up for air, and then slowly closed his eyes. His breathing became even and deliberate; the discoloration lessened. "I'm not going anywhere with you," Scully said evenly. She stood up. "Certainly not until I've looked after him." "This isn't another Smoking Man get-away. I wasn't even expecting to find you here. This little show was just to convince Mulder I was serious." Scully couldn't help laughing. Merely knowing Krycek was in the country was enough to get their attention. "You did this to Skinner just to get to Mulder?" Krycek leaned back against the wall. "Well, I wasn't going to do it to you -- that's hardly an imaginative strategy at this point." He considered the figure on the floor. "Besides, I'd had other plans in mind for him, but the balance of power has shifted. He doesn't have the influence he once did. No one does." "What are you saying?" "You've seen it for yourself. We're all back to the Mulder family drama, where everything started. Small men and their petty tantrums." "Something you'd know about." He laughed more than the comment deserved. Scully felt a flush of embarrassment. "Krycek, what do you want?" His laughter increased. It sounded a bit manic. Scully had never put her weapon away, but the moment she raised it, Krycek's hand was on the device. "I can wake these nanites as fast as you can fire, and I don't have to aim." His expression flattened and she wondered if this was his serious face. "I'd expect better from the woman who outsmarted the world's most powerful man." She felt it wise not to admit she wasn't following him, but she did lower her gun. Slowly. "What I want should be obvious. I want what the world wants, which you and Mulder are in possessive of but have no idea of its real importance." Something clicked. "You mean the disk? The one C.G.B. Spender arranged for me to have?" There was no good reason to lie to him -- he'd find out soon enough. "I don't have it." "I'm sure you don't. That's why you're going to tell me where it is before Mulder does something heroic and stupid." "Like what?" He snorted. "Like give it to Ted Koppel. Like upload it to the Internet. Like try to save the world, when that's the last thing it would do." "And what would it do, Krycek?" He shook his head in snide disbelief. "Releasing it now would only give them time to adapt. It took us 20 years to come up with that ridiculous vaccine, but it would take them 20 days to overcome our resistance. Unless we strike at the right time, which we can do if you give me the disk." "I told you, I don't have it." "You really are his partner, aren't you? Neither of you know when to trust." "I mean," she said patiently, "I've never had it. The disk C.G.B. Spender gave me was blank." Now it was Krycek's turn to lower his weapon. "Blank?" "Blank. He must have switched it with the real disk before giving it to me." He was no longer looking at her but at a space on the floor between them. "But they don't have it either." Scully experienced brief disorientation, a shock of recognition. She couldn't quite place the feeling, but Krycek reminded her of someone. "Who doesn't have it?" He met her gaze. "You don't have the disk, and they don't have the disk. The man who gave it to you is dead?" Scully nodded. This was surreal. "Then it's over," he said. He tossed the device to her feet. "Consider that my parting gift." She finally placed the feeling: Krycek reminded her of that green and eager replacement partner for Mulder from so many years ago. She'd thought the entirety of that person had been another one of his lies, but maybe there was as much of the real Krycek behind the wide-eyed young agent as there was behind the renegade's sneer. Unexpectedly, he put his hand on her shoulder. "I'll be in touch," he said, and walked away. He left behind a profound numbness in her arm, as if she'd slept on it for a very long time. "How is he?" Mulder asked. Scully turned and was surprised to see her partner limping towards her down the hospital hallway. She sighed. Even practicing doctors had a patient limit, and her patients were especially detrimental to her patience. Or something. "Didn't they just send you home?" Either he still hadn't gotten the hang of the crutches or he was deliberately trying to look helpless. She stood her ground outside Skinner's room. Mulder clumped to a halt and tried to look around her. "The admittance staff asked me if I wanted my usual room." She followed his gaze; he could see only the pair of bruise-blue feet protruding over the edge of the bed. "How is he?" he repeated. Scully consulted the clipboard in her hand, mostly to avoid looking up. "He'll be okay. Not because of anything we did, of course." "Where did you put it?" The device, he meant. The magic box. "It's with me." "Right now? You realize it's not safe with you." She didn't much care for the condescension, but it was hard to fight with a man in a cast. "I know. I haven't had time to think of much besides Skinner." "Of course," he said, in a tone suggesting exactly the opposite. "When you're finished here, we can take it over to the Gunmen and have them check it out." Scully frowned and held up the clipboard. "Mulder, I don't know when I'm going to be finished here. His life could still be in danger. We don't know what the relationship is between this object," she tugged on the pocket of her jacket, "and Skinner's condition. We don't know anything right now, and you're in no position to decide to go anywhere