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Twenty-six hours into the new millenium, Scully woke out of a sound sleep to someone pounding on her apartment door and calling her name.
There was a bad moment as she jerked awake, already reaching for her gun. She relaxed when she registered that the voice was Mulder's, then tensed all over again when she caught sight of the clock beside the bed and took a moment to think through the very short list of reasons Mulder would have to show up at her door at three in the morning.
Tension turned to dread as she threw a bathrobe on over her pajamas and padded into the living room, only to hear him calling in a pleading, ragged voice, "Come on, Scully, open up. I have to talk to you. Please, Scully."
She paused for a moment in the front hall with one hand over her eyes, gathering strength. It would be a lie to say that on some level she hadn't expected this. Wasn't this how it went? You had a deep relationship with someone for seven years, until finally you kissed them, and then it was all dramatic emotional confessions at ungodly hours and flowers and dinner dates and marriage in a Catholic church and everything her mother had always dreamed of. She'd finally begun to believe that she wouldn't have to go through all that with Mulder, no matter what jokes the other agents made about Mrs. Spooky. But here he was, barely a day after he'd kissed her at the turn of the millenium, waking her up in the small hours of the morning and begging to talk to her. The only possible explanations were romance or running from attempted assassination, and she didn't know which one she dreaded more.
She took a deep breath as she reached for the door chain, trying to keep from scowling. This was going to be hard enough as it was, and she didn't want to hurt him more than she absolutely had to.
She'd been expecting him to have brought her flowers, or some other sappy, sentimental cliché -- or to have a gun to his head. What she didn't expect was that he would push past her the second she cracked the door open, fling himself to the floor in her living room and handcuff himself to the radiator.
"Mulder! What --" she couldn't even form the question. What are you doing seemed inadequate, somehow.
"Don't get too close," he gasped. His breathing was harsh and labored, his chest heaving as though he'd run here from Arlington. She took a step towards him and he flinched away, huddling against the radiator like he was expecting a blow.
"Mulder, what the hell is going on?" She reached for the light switch. In the lamplight she saw that he was wearing tattered sweatpants and an old Oxford t-shirt that he'd nearly sweated through. His face and neck were flushed, his cheeks and forehead beaded with sweat despite the subzero temperatures outside.
She took another step forward and sank to her knees, reaching for him, but he shook his head frantically and edged away from her hand as far as the handcuffs would allow. She crossed her arms over her chest, trying not to show how much he was frightening her. "Mulder, you look like you've got a fever. What's wrong?"
"Please, Scully, you have to help me," he croaked. "I couldn't go to the hospital, they wouldn't believe me. They have to isolate me, I have to be restrained --"
"Nobody is going to restrain you," she said firmly. The memory of his psychotic break still made her skin crawl. She'd die before she'd see him like that again.
"Please," he whimpered. He was curled up with his back to the radiator, his handcuffed arm stretched at an awkward angle. He closed his eyes, letting his chin fall forward onto his chest, too exhausted to hold it up. As Scully edged closer he shivered, curling further in on himself. "Please, Scully."
He seemed to have forgotten that he had wanted her to stay away. She managed to get close enough to run her fingers through the damp, sweaty mat of his hair, trailing a soothing touch down the back of his neck. This close she could feel the heat radiating from him. He hadn't showed the least trace of fever when she'd last seen him the day before, and it was deeply worrying that any kind of virus could have come on this fast. "Mulder, what happened? How long have you been feeling sick?"
"Not sick," he mumbled, still shivering. "I'm infected, Scully."
"Infected --" Of course. He'd handcuffed his right hand, the one he'd injured in the necromancer's basement. With the hand that wasn't cupped around his neck, Scully gently pulled up the sleeve over his right shoulder, revealing the bandages over the massive bites on his bicep. They were stained with a yellowish discharge, indicating a serious infection in the wound.
"Oh, God." She rattled the handcuffs. "Give me the keys, Mulder, I've got to change your bandages."
"No," he groaned.
"Mulder." It was the sharpest warning tone she could muster, but he just shook his head.
She was getting ready to search him -- how many places could he be keeping the keys to his cuffs? -- until he added, "Don't have 'em. Left 'em at home. I'm not safe, Scully, I might turn."
"You might turn?" Understanding dawned at last, so ridiculous that it was almost funny. "You mean turn into a zombie?"
He looked up at her at last, his eyes wide and his lips trembling. Scully's heart ached, or else she might have laughed. "Mulder, as a doctor, I can promise you that you are not going to turn into a zombie. You've seen Night of the Living Dead one too many times and you've got a fever from a bacterial infection. You're not thinking clearly."
For once, her assurances didn't touch the panic in his eyes."Scully," he said, and she winced as his voice broke. "I don't want to hurt you."
"You won't." Even if he did turn into a zombie, she couldn't imagine it. He would be the gentlest zombie the world had ever seen. She caught his face in her hands, stroking her thumbs over his cheekbones, and pressed a light, lingering kiss to his forehead. That seemed to calm him, at least; his eyes fluttered closed, and she could feel his breathing slow down a little from the pitch of panic. "Don't move, okay? I'll be right back."
He mumbled something that sounded like agreement. As Scully stood and ducked into the kitchen, she thought that even flowers would have been preferable to this.
She found most of what she needed in the cabinet under the sink; gauze and tape for a fresh dressing, washcloths and rubbing alcohol, a pair of shears. What Mulder really needed was IV fluids and broad-spectrum antibiotics, but she would have to deal with the handcuffs first. She headed for the bedroom and dug the little packet of lockpicks out from its hiding place in her dresser drawer, underneath her grandmother's Bible, and returned to the living room to lay everything out on the floor beside her partner.
He had let his head fall back against the wall and sat with his good arm hanging at his side, breathing deeply. His eyes were closed, but she could still read the evidence of pain in his furrowed brow and the lines around his mouth. The sight caught at her heart; not only because of how vulnerable he looked, but because the ease with which he'd apparently fallen asleep was a sign of how sick he was.
He stirred but didn't wake when she rested a steadying hand on his shoulder and went to work cutting the bandages away from his wound. She had decided it would be easier to tend to his arm first, since he'd obligingly handcuffed himself in a position that gave her good access to it, and this way if he decided to be difficult about the handcuffs -- which she had a sinking feeling he would -- he would at least have the injury taken care of.
A sigh of relief escaped her as she pulled the last gauze pad away from his skin. The bite was definitely infected, but not as badly as she'd feared. The skin around the torn edges was red and swollen and hot to the touch, and there was a small amount of the yellowish discharge seeping around the stitches, but there was no sign of permanent tissue damage or --
Or what? What had she been expecting? Rotting, mottled green flesh, coming off in patches? The theatrical pallor that movies loved, that she'd never seen on an actual corpse? Maybe she'd seen Night of the Living Dead one too many times, too.
Mulder lifted his head as she started to clean the wound, wiping away the pus with a damp washcloth. "Scully?" he grunted.
"It's all right, Mulder, relax. You've got yourself quite an infection here, but it's going to be fine."
He shuddered and groaned, letting his head fall forward again. "Hurts."
"I know." Her touch was gentle, her hands steady despite a sudden surge of anger. They should have given him prophylactic antibiotics at the hospital, it was standard procedure for human bites. In the morning she would find out who had been responsible for his treatment and --
What? Yell at them for failing to treat her partner appropriately for a zombie bite? As quickly as it had come, her outrage faded, and she let it go with a sigh as she set about packing gauze around Mulder's wound. A bite from a living human was unsanitary enough; who knew what flora could have been growing in the mouth of a man who'd been dead and buried for six months? There was no one to blame but herself. She was the only one who could have, should have guessed that run-of-the-mill antibiotics wouldn't be enough to ward off infection for a wound like this. She should have known. She should have done more to keep her partner safe.
She drew the last layer of gauze tightly over her makeshift dressing and smoothed the ends down, then reached for the lockpicks. Mulder was breathing deeply again, and she prayed that he'd fallen asleep, that she'd be able to get him loose and convince him to go to the hospital without a fight.
No such luck. The second she touched the cuffs he jerked awake, twisting his neck to see what she was doing. "Scully?"
"Hold still, Mulder," she said as authoritatively as she could. It didn't work. He started thrashing, trying to bat her away with his free hand, panic giving him strength. "Mulder!" She grabbed his flailing forearm with both hands, fighting him to a standstill, but that left her no hands free to pick the lock. "Mulder, you have to calm down --"
"No! I told you, Scully. I'm not safe." He was trembling, a pinched look of pain setting in around his eyes from the jostling to his injured arm. "You can't let me loose."
Seeing that he was geared up for a fight, she switched tactics. "Mulder, you're sick," she said softly. "You're hurt and you've got a fever. You need IV fluids and antibiotics, not to spend the night on my floor, handcuffed to furniture. You've got to trust me."
When he didn't move, she cautiously leaned her weight on his raised arm. He let her push it back down to his side, watching her with wide eyes and trembling lips, all the fight seemingly gone out of him. She took advantage of his calm to press the inside of her wrist to his forehead, trying to get a more accurate gauge on his temperature. He had a high-grade fever, but it didn't seem to be as bad as she'd first thought. Not life-threatening, and she doubted even high enough to make him delirious.
She bit back a sigh. She was beginning to suspect that Mulder's delusions of zombieism weren't a side effect of the fever addling his brain -- that his brain was addled precisely as much as it always was.
Mulder stared at her for a long minute, then licked his lips and croaked, "Do you have your gun?"
"No, it's in the bedroom."
"Go get it."
Anger was beginning to simmer again in the pit of her stomach. Her partner was sick and in pain, and she was getting thoroughly tired of not being able to treat him without tiptoeing around this zombie nonsense. "Mulder, I don't think--"
"Please, Scully." He sounded on the verge of tears. "Please. For me."
She hesitated, then stood with a long-suffering sigh and fetched the holstered gun from her nightstand, tucking it into a pocket of her bathrobe. "There, I'm armed," she told Mulder, kneeling beside him again. "Now will you let me get you out of those things?"
"Promise you'll shoot if I turn on you," he demanded. He was trying to be stern, but he was having trouble keeping his eyes open. Scully bit her lip and said nothing, turning her attention to the lockpicks. He rattled the cuffs, even though it must have been agony on his shoulder. "Promise me, Scully!"
"I promise," she said at last, and he let out a rush of breath, slumping back against the radiator in relief and exhaustion. "Now hold still."
This time he obeyed, and she was able to jimmy the cuffs open in less than a minute. He stifled a groan as she folded his injured arm back against his stomach and rigged a makeshift sling with another roll of gauze. "There, see?" she teased, trying to distract him. "You're free, and I'd bet my medical license you're not craving brains yet."
"'Yet' being the operative word," he mumbled, but he managed a smile.
She couldn’t resist ruffling his hair as she stood and reached for the phone. "Now, do you think you can stand and walk down to the car, or am I calling you an ambulance?"
"No hospitals," he announced.
"Yes, hospital," Scully countered, in a voice as flexible as iron.
Mulder opened his mouth to argue, then saw the look on her face and thought better of it. "Ambulance," he muttered, looking down. "Everything's kinda… sloshy. I don't think I could walk very far."
"Ambulance it is." She ducked into the kitchen to call the paramedics. Returning, she found that without the handcuffs pulling on his wounded arm Mulder had slid sideways, until only the last few inches of the radiator were keeping him from crumpling in a heap on the carpet.
"Mulder, what are you doing?"
"Dizzy," he grunted. Scully set the phone down and moved around behind him, kneeling so she could get the leverage to haul his upper body away from the hard metal plane of the radiator. He moved with her, twisting his hips so that he lay flat on her living room floor, his long legs stretched out and his head resting in her lap.
She hesitated, unsure whether it would be best to try to get him upright, maybe to move him to the sofa or the bed until help arrived. Her hand absently came to rest on his forehead, smoothing his damp hair back from his overheated skin. She should have brought a cool cloth from the kitchen. She could get one, if she could get Mulder to let her up.
It was a good plan, until he leaned his head back into her touch with a whimper of relief and she realized that unless she was prepared to deadlift all six feet of him, moving him was a lost cause, at least for the moment.
"It's okay," she sighed, stroking his hair again. "The paramedics will be here soon. Just lie still."
He made another soft, wordless sound of contentment, turning his head so that his cheek pressed against her leg and nuzzling into her like her thigh was the cool side of a pillow.
Suddenly it struck her how absurd this was, sitting on the floor of her living room at three-thirty in the morning, cradling her feverish partner's head as they waited for help to deal with an infected zombie bite. And the most absurd thing was that this wasn't even a remarkably unusual night in her life. She couldn't hold back a snort of laughter at the thought.
Mulder didn't seem offended, just rubbed his nose against the top of her knee. "What's funny, Scully?"
"You," she said wryly. "Only you, Mulder, would get bitten by a zombie and then drive across DC in the middle of the night to bang on my door and handcuff yourself to my furniture. Do you know, when I heard you knocking, I was afraid you were bringing me flowers?"
"Could bring you a bouquet of brainstems," he murmured. "If that's what you want."
"That is definitely not what I want."
"Mm-hmm." He shivered, gripped by a sudden chill, but even with his eyes closed and his teeth chattering, Scully recognized the tone of voice that meant he'd seen something interesting and latched onto it with no intention of letting go. "What do you want, Scully?"
She rolled her eyes, thankful that he couldn't see. "All I want is for you to stay in one piece long enough to let me get a full night's sleep."
"Come on, there's gotta be more than that," he mumbled into her leg. He sounded sleepy but perfectly serious, and Scully had to bite back another laugh at the idea that they were going to have this conversation now, while he was half out of his mind with fever and she was keeping one ear out for the sound of approaching sirens.
"Well, I suppose there is," she admitted at last. Mulder made a sleepy I'm-listening noise, encouraging her to continue, and she smiled. "I want you to get well, and stay well -- and I want to find what we've been searching for, even if I'm not always sure exactly what that is. Although I am pretty damn sure it isn't zombies."
Now it was Mulder's turn to laugh, a soft chuckle that turned to a groan as the movement jarred his bad shoulder. Scully waited until he was still again, then added, "And I want to be able to do that without having to be… what we're not."
"What aren't we?" he asked. When she hesitated, he reached around to pat her knee with his good hand. "Come on, keep talking, Scully, it's helping me not think about my growing desire to feast on human flesh."
"Mulder!" She laughed at that, a real laugh, and she felt the movement as he smiled with his face still pressed against the side of her leg. "I just meant… there's so much that's unnecessary, that people seem to expect to see, to show that you love someone. I thought that's what you came over to talk about tonight. I was worried…" she paused, pressing her tongue to the back of her teeth, making a face that Mulder would have teased her for if he could see it. "I was worried you were one of those people who wouldn't be happy without some grand sentimental gesture to prove that you loved me. Or that I loved you. And I don't need that, and I was hoping that you don't, either. And I cannot believe you are making me talk about this with you now."
"Believe it, Scully." Mulder shifted a little, tipping his head back so he could grin up at her upside-down. "I'm Mr. Spooky, remember? I'll believe anything. You don't have to prove a thing to me. 'Who needs proof', that's my motto." He was drifting a little, rambling. Scully felt a pang of worry and guilt that he probably wouldn't have very clear memories of this conversation when his fever broke.
Then he reached up with his good arm and took her hand, lacing their fingers together, and she understood that while his words might have been fever-fogged, the emotion behind them wasn't. "Don't make any gestures for me, Scully," he said seriously. He thought for a moment, then added, "Kissing was nice, though."
He said it like he was informing her of a momentous scientific discovery. She bit her lip but couldn't keep from smiling. "Yes, it was."
"I'd like to do that again sometime. If it's okay with you."
"Sure, Mulder. When you're feeling better." She squeezed his hand, looking up as she caught a glimmer of flashing blue and red through the living room window.
"Okay." He closed his eyes and seemed ready to go to sleep again, content that everything was settled.
"Stay awake, Mulder, the ambulance is here." Scully tugged her hand out of his grip and settled it between his shoulderblades, pushing him to sit up. He went grudgingly, and she had to grip his good shoulder tightly once or twice to keep him from falling back as his dizziness surged. She got him leaning against the wall, then stood to get her coat.
He caught at her hand as she moved away, unwilling to let her go. "Some start to the new year, huh, Scully?"
"I've had worse," she said softly, returning his smile.
He let go of her hand and shifted uncomfortably against the hard plaster at his back. "Hurry back, okay? I wouldn’t want to end up taking a bite out of one of these guys."
She was fairly sure he was joking, that she'd convinced him he wasn't actually in danger of turning into a rotted creature of undeath, but there was enough real anxiety under the teasing that she crossed her arms over her chest and said in her best doctor voice, "Mulder, you're going to be fine."
He nodded contritely and she turned away, satisfied. He would be fine; they both would, this year and every year, zombies notwithstanding. Of that, at least, she had no doubt.