Title: Isolation
Author: Vivian Wiley
Email: vivwiley@yahoo.com

Rating: R
Spoilers: SR 819, Brand X
Category: V, A

Summary: Skinner must find the hope under the silence

Disclaimer: These characters and situations belong to
Fox. No infringement is intended, no profit will be
made.

Author's warning: I *made up* all the "science" in
this piece. Suspension of disbelief is required....
you've been warned. Other notes at the end.

Feedback will be cherished.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The isolation ward hummed.

To be more precise, it hummed at two different and
ever-so-slightly discordant pitches. There was the
soft low burr of the air filtering system that was
jarred by the higher pitched whine-hum of the
fluorescent lights.

It made Skinner's teeth hurt.

It was, perhaps, the case that his teeth hurt because
he had been grinding them - at least metaphorically -
for the better part of the past 72 hours. But they
hurt nonetheless.

Damn Scully, his doctors, and every fucking scientist
who ever walked the earth.

He paused in his pacing--the tight, regimented steps
back and forth across the linoleum--and growled
briefly while he considered whether he was being fair.

He shrugged. He really didn't care if he was being
fair. If those assholes at Morley hadn't started
tinkering with the genetic structure of the tobacco
he wouldn't be in this goddamn fix.

And Scully? Well, as far as he was concerned she was
culpable too since it was she who had asked the
question that had landed him in his current
predicament.

"Sir? Have you been smoking?"

The question had come out of the blue in the middle of
the hasty debrief she had been leading him through
while they were waiting to see if the nicotine
treatment would work on Mulder.

He was slumped over in the uncomfortable plastic
chairs in the corridor outside Mulder's room, and her
inquiry made him snap upright and respond sharply.

"NO! I don't smoke," the 'anymore' left unsaid.

Her nose twitched. "Odd, you just smell so strongly
of smoke."

He thought that he stank of fear and exhaustion, but
decided there was some information that didn't need
to be shared.

"Well, Weaver blew a lot of smoke at me while I was...
uh...negotiating with him."

She stiffened. "Blew smoke...did you inhale it?"

In his tiredness, he resorted to juvenile evasions,
instinctively knowing that something was beginning to
happen, even if he couldn't quite see its shape. "I
did not inhale." Even to his own ears the Bill Clinton
impression sounded lame.

She simply stared back at him.

"I don't know, Scully. I may have inhaled some of
it...we were in the same room, and I was trying to
move toward him slowly."

He watched the blood drain from her face and wondered
what it was, exactly, he had just said.

It was nearly the last coherent thought he had for
the next 4 hours. Because his words were still
echoing in the corridor when Scully was on her feet
shouting for a doctor, "stat!" and then he was being
hustled down a hallway to the isolation wing.

He was stripped, de-con showered, and tossed into an
isolation room nearly before he'd had time to ask,
"Why?"

When he finally had a chance to ask, he was sorry he
had.

Scully explained - remarkably calmly, he thought in
retrospect - that so far as she could determine,
Mulder had been infected with the bugs in his lungs
by Weaver's second-hand smoke. The bugs' larvae
carried into their new home on a deadly airborne
vector. So, Scully thought it best that Skinner spend
a few days in the very controlled climate of medical
isolation while they ran a few tests and assured
themselves that his lungs hadn't become the next
breeding ground of the mutant beetles.

It had given him a whole new set of nightmares.

In the grand scheme of things, three days was really
nothing. Skinner was no stranger to prolonged
hospital stays. Nor to the insult of numerous
casually cruel medical tests. But somehow this felt
different. He felt violated in ways that were
difficult to explain.

Maybe it was the inherent indignity of the way he had
been manhandled into the ward. For the first 24 hours
he'd been given nothing to wear but one of those
stupid hospital gowns.

When he'd utterly refused to get out of his bed the
second afternoon on the grounds that he was an
Assistant Director of the F. B. Fucking I. and he'd
be damned if he'd violate local indecent exposure
ordinances, Scully had taken pity on him and talked
the hospital staff into giving him a pair of old
surgical scrubs to wear.

It would have been more of a victory if she hadn't
been laughing her ass off at the time. Of course,
she didn't laugh at him to his face, but he knew.
He would swear she was getting some perverse
enjoyment out of the whole situation.

It had felt good to lose his temper, though. And,
the scrubs did have the virtue of allowing him to
get out of his bed and pace.

He understood, of course, that under the buried
laughter, Scully was deeply concerned about him.
On a subterranean level he realized that her stringent
insistence on the comprehensive tests, and the
prolonged isolation were not simply her reaction to
a perceived public health threat. Rather, he had the
distinct impression that she was worried about him,
as a colleague and a friend.

It did not, however, do much to make him feel more
charitably disposed toward her in the short run.

He saw her at regular intervals throughout the
relentlessly boring days. He wondered if she were
wearing a groove or a trail in the hallways between
the ward where Mulder was recuperating and his
isolation ward. He could picture her moving through
the halls of the hospital--her steps precise, sure,
and focused as she strode unscathed through the sea
of doctors, nurses and attendants. He was reminded
once more that she was an important ally to have on
one's side.

She offered very little news of Mulder's progress
beyond vague generalities: "his numbers looked better
this morning," "he's holding his own." It was unlike
her to be so imprecise, and he finally decided that
Mulder's recovery was both slower and more painful
than she was willing to discuss. Particularly with
him, as he might have to undergo precisely the same
therapy.

She was probably trying to spare him bad dreams,
which was kind, but a waste of time.

He had long ago learned to scream silently in his
sleep. It was one of his myriad traits that had
disturbed and ultimately driven away Sharon. It was
not a conscious thing for Skinner, this nighttime
suppression of sound. He'd always supposed he had
learned to do it during his long recovery period
after Vietnam. He figured his basic need to scream
wouldn't go away, so he had unconsciously learned to
scream in a way that wouldn't trigger a nurse waking
him up in the middle of the night.

He screamed for different reasons now.

The parallels of the bugs--the ones that Krycek
controlled--in his blood and the bugs that were
possibly growing in his lungs didn't even bear
discussing aloud. His subconscious was doing a fine
job of creating lurid and scarring scenarios each
night. On the first afternoon on the isolation ward,
he briefly entertained a fantasy that the two would
stage a war across his body and simply cancel each
other out. He could almost see the surreal
microscopic battle between the organic mutant beetles
and the nightmarish high-tech bugs squaring off for
control of his body or the right to finally kill him.
It was plausible in a way that only made sense in the
twilight zone that had become his life. But he
dismissed the thought almost as soon as it was formed.

So he was left to wait. And pace.

He'd tried to convince Scully to let him have a laptop
and do the case wrap-up work while he was waiting. His
arguments that the larvae would gestate just as well
with or without him writing reports fell on deaf ears.
He had forgotten, temporarily, how stubborn she could
be. It was a trait, no doubt, that served her well
in working with Mulder, but it was also extremely
annoying in these circumstances.

He needed distraction. He finally cajoled a nurse
into bringing him some reading material, but the
selection of "literary classics," and out-of-date
waiting room magazines that she brought him failed
to capture his attention for more than 15 minutes
at a time.

Skinner felt his long-cultivated patience raveling a
bit more with each passing hour.

He was hard-pressed to explain exactly what it was he
was waiting for, other than definitive word that he
was infected, or would be allowed to go home. But
he could definitely feel himself waiting for
something. Something vaguely threatening, but
necessary. He hated that sort of ambiguity.

This afternoon, his pacing was interrupted by
Scully's quiet knock that preceded a brief pause
while she waited for his "come in," before she
entered. It was a polite fiction on her part that he
had some control over his privacy and might actually
refuse a visitor.

She was carrying something rectangular and dark.

"Finally decided to let me do some work?"

"Sir?" Her confusion seemed genuine.

"I see you brought me a laptop." He nodded toward
her hands.

She looked down at her hands, almost as through she
were surprised to find herself carrying something.
Then she smiled and grimaced slightly.

"Uh...no laptop, sir. It's an old Scrabble game.
I thought you might like to play?"

He just stared at her for a long moment. "Scrabble?"
He tried to keep the disappointment out of his voice.
She seemed to be waiting for him to say something
else. "Who were you proposing I play with? You?"
It struck him, a half-second later, that the
incredulity in his voice was probably undiplomatic.

She looked up again to meet his eyes. "Well, yes.
But maybe it wasn't a very good idea. I just know
you've been a bit...bored in here."

"I appreciate the thought, Agent Scully, but I'm not
sure this is quite what the doctor ordered." He
hoped the mild joke would make up for his earlier
lack of tact.

She shrugged. "I guess not." A brief pause during
which he could hear her shifting mental gears.
"How are you doing, Sir?"

"I rather imagine that you're going to tell me. The
last tissue biopsy they took should have showed at
least the beginning stages of the larvae if they were
going to develop, right?"

She nodded slightly. "Yes. So far as the
entomologists have been able to determine, 72 hours
is probably the outside time for the eggs to lie
dormant before active development would begin. The
good news is that so far your lung tissue seems to
be completely clear. But, since we're dealing with
an unknown species here..." her voice trailed off
and she looked down at the floor for a moment.

Skinner was acutely aware of the hum of the lights,
the sound of their breaths drawing in and out, the
whir of the ceiling vents.

He sighed, the sound shockingly loud in the room.
"So how much longer will I be under house arrest?"
He could learn resignation. He could, he could.
He had before.

"My recommendation, and the other doctors and the
science team concurs, is another 72 hours. That would
put you, we think, completely in the clear, based on
what we've determined from the others who died and
what the entomologists have learned."

"Another three damn days?!" Her almost-imperceptible
flinch was the only indication he had that he'd
shouted.

She never broke her steady gaze with him, although
her eyebrow raised slightly. "Yes. Another three
damn days."

She seemed to relent about something. "Besides, sir,
this may be a blessing in disguise."

He wasn't sure how to react to Pollyanna Scully.

"Why? Because it's allowing me to catch up on my
beauty sleep?" He knew that she knew about the
night terrors.

"No. Because while we are collecting all these...
samples from you, we're, well a couple of us, are
getting a chance to look for...other things, and to
consider options."

He could feel the damn things chittering along his
veins.

"There aren't any options for that, Scully. I'm sure
they made sure of that." He was pleased at how
dispassionate he managed to sound.

"I wouldn't be too sure. It's a rapidly developing
field, and there are literally daily developments."

"I think we're still years away from what they--" he
stopped abruptly aware that he was about to betray
that he knew more about the things in his veins than
he should. Krycek, in his periodic appearances to
torment Skinner had let drop a few tidbits about the
technology. Not enough to be useful, but enough to
convince him that the technology was based on nothing
that any mainstream scientist would recognize.

Scully narrowed her eyes at his silence that lingered
as he struggled to find something to say.

Finally she said, "Well, I don't have any answers for
you yet, but I think we're getting some useful
data." He had the sense that she was mildly
disappointed in him.

He wanted to express the tired gratitude he felt, but
it was drowning in his sense of inevitable failure.
His sense that the shadows would always be two steps
ahead of them. It was important, though, that he try
to let Scully know how much he valued her attempt to
help him.

"Thank you, Scully." He didn't want to sound
dismissive. "I...I appreciate it."

"Of course, sir. You know I can't promise anything
here. We're really still trying to figure out what
we're dealing with."

"I know. But I do appreciate it."

She nodded and turned to leave. Half-way to the door,
she stopped and turned back. "Do you need anything?"

"Something to keep my mind occupied."

"I thought Nurse Johnson brought you some reading
material."

"It's not quite doing the trick. I'd rather work."

"I know--but you know that we can't bring your files
in to this non-secure facility."

He decided to let the excuse pass. "Yeah, I know."

She left him alone to pace. Left him alone with
sudden visions of freedom, of a future that didn't
include an invisible leash that tethered him to pain
and control.

It was heady. He found himself staring out the window,
but he wasn't seeing the newly budding trees.
Revenge, uncovering the truth, undeniable action
against the shadows, being able to fully and publicly
back Mulder and Scully: those vistas suddenly
stretched out before him.

The first thing he would do is hunt down Krycek and
kill him. He found himself sneering at his reflection.
The niceties of a righteous shoot were not a
consideration. He would hunt down the son-of-a-bitch
and kill him. And he would enjoy it.

Then he would go after the smoker. CGB Spender, or
who ever the hell he was.

It was an appealing future. Grimly sweet, but he
understood that it was not the one he was destined
for. He took a deep breath; rolled his head left to
right, unsurprised to feel the tightness across his
shoulders.

There was, he knew, only one future for him at this
point. A future controlled by those other forces.
He sighed - something that seemed to be happening
all too frequently these days. He watched the late
afternoon shadows deepen and then steal across the
lawn, until the dark owned all the grounds. It
surprised him that he was still capable of feeling
disappointment.

Nights were hard. The hum of the fluorescent lights
was lessened, but the ventilation system droned
relentlessly on, and there wasn't even the muted
noises of the choreographed anarchy of hospital life
filtering through to him. There was only the hum of
the fans, the beating of his heart, the rasp of the
air in his lungs.

And then, tonight, just as he was finally dropping
off into elusive sleep, there was a voice.

"Make her stop or I will."

Instinctively at the sound of that voice, he
stiffened. Braced for pain, the mindless arc of
agony that would begin in his center and radiate
out through his limbs and digits.

But nothing. Just the voice from the shadows. A
slight awareness of someone else in the room.
Krycek's stillness was astonishing. He was a part
of the shadow, indistinguishable from the grey and
ambiguity of the corners.

Skinner wondered if he was only dreaming. "What?"
His voice soft--a test against the darkness.

"You heard me. Make her stop, or I will. And I am
not, as you know, choosy about my methods."

He waited to see if there would be more, or if Krycek
had said everything he had come to say.

Krycek's chuckle invariably made his skin crawl. "You
know, I have been curious about one or two of the...
possibilities that her chip offers. She always seems
so...inviolate."

Skinner found himself on his feet and starting for
the shadow before he had time to think. He had made it
half-way to the corner before the first wave of pain
hit.

Fuck.

It was always a shock--a lesson newly learned in agony
and humiliation. There was no control, no rationality,
nothing but the pain overtaking his body. Nothing but
the sensations that had no name, merely shades of
agonizing orange-grey-olive pain.

It ended after a time. He never knew how long the
attacks lasted. They simply started and finally
stopped.

He lay gasping on the floor.

"You're such a creature of habit, Skinner. What
exactly were you planning to do? Defend her honor
with a manly display of violence?" Some days it was
hard to know which was worse--the pain or the mockery.

He considered a response, but ultimately decided that
nothing he could say wouldn't be purely juvenile.

The shadow that held Krycek gave an exasperated grunt.
"Look--just do it. Stop her, I will. There is no
room for argument on this. Get her to stop the damn
experiments on your blood." He muttered something
Skinner couldn't quite hear, and then it seemed the
shadow grew less substantial.

He waited a long time after the footsteps receded
before he got up from the floor.

He did not sleep that night, thinking about the
conversation he would have to have with Scully the
next morning. Trying to anticipate her arguments so
that he could counter them. Knowing that he would
probably have to resort to ordering her, as her
superior officer, to stand down from the experiments
she was conducting.

He despised being backed into one more corner. Hated
like hell that he would once more be forced to appear
weak and waffling to Scully. She didn't deserve
that. She was doing what she perceived to be right--
both as an agent and a scientist. She would be
resentful and suspicious.

It occurred to Skinner that maybe this was at least
half of Krycek's goal--to continue to drive a wedge
between the Assistant Director and his agents. To keep
the unit unstable, less effective at working together
because the players ultimately wouldn't trust each
other.

But he understood that he had no choice. He would not
sacrifice Scully. So he would have to get her to
stop, regardless of what it cost them all.

It was a good thing, he thought, that he had so long
ago come to terms with living in shadow. In being a
part of the dark. There is a certain cruel mercy in
knowing your exact place in the world. In the
knowledge that you have no hope of being saved.

Just before first light he fell into a light doze,
and as he was slipping under the currents of sleep,
he suddenly thought he understood, through the haze
of half-dream, what Krycek had muttered just before
leaving. It seemed to Skinner that the words had been,
"Too close, she's too fucking close."

It changed nothing. He would still have to get Scully
to stop her experiments. For now.

But he could feel the leash loosening.

END

Thank you so much for reading this. I hope you
enjoyed it. My deep thanks to the Unsung Editor,
who gave me both the confidence and technical
assistance to post this.

Feedback would be welcomed with open arms and a
grateful heart.

vivwiley@yahoo.com

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