TITLE: Washed in the Blood
NAME: Mik
E-MAIL: ccmcdoc@hotmail.com
CATEGORY: M/Sk
RATING: Gee, no sex.
SUMMARY: Heroes in ordinary places.
ARCHIVE: This story belongs to Gaby.
FEEDBACK: Feedback? Well, yes, if you insist.
TIMESPAN/SPOILER WARNING: none
KEYWORDS: story angst Mulder Skinner
DISCLAIMER: Fox Mulder, Walter Skinner, and all other X-Files characters belong
to Chris Carter, Ten-Thirteen Productions and 20th Century Fox Broadcasting.
No copyright infringement is intended and no profit is being made from their
use. I personally think Chris Carter, et al, should just give them to me, since
they're not using them anymore, and anyway, I treat them much, much better,
but there you are.
Author's notes: This story was commissioned by Gaby, who made a donation to the Red Cross Katrina Disaster Relief Fund. Thank you.
Washed in the Blood, by Mik
My team was on the scene fully an hour before I got there. They weren't supposed to be there. That is to say, they weren't assigned there. But Agent Scully is, above all other things, a doctor, and Mulder...Mulder is Mulder. And they were already in town when it happened.
The rain was coming down in sheets that blinded one to almost everything but the beams of light cutting through the wreckage, landing here or there on something misshapen or projecting out at an implausible angle. And yellow flags fluttered frantically in the wind and rain, making a high pitched, desperate sound, almost crying out 'here is a body, here is where someone died'.
Agent Scully was up to her knees in mud, examining one of the lucky ones, a woman who, albeit somewhat battered and bloody, was alive. She was sobbing, and fighting off Scully's ministrations, but I couldn't get close enough to her to find out if there was more to her fight than hysterics.
As I fought the mud and the slope of the ground, trying to get closer to Agent Scully and the woman she was working on, Mulder shambled up to me out of the madness, staring straight ahead. "Her baby's missing," he announced flatly. "She can't find her baby." He moved on.
Something about his tone, eerily detached and almost cold, sent a new kind of iciness through my spine. Mulder was never detached from his work, and could never be cold about a child in jeopardy. I followed him, picking my way through the jagged steel and smoldering seats. "Mulder? Mulder." I caught his sleeve. "What do you know so far?"
He didn't look at me. He stared up the tracks to another car that had buckled and still burned. "The world is a dangerous place." He started to move again.
I held onto his sleeve. It was warm and sticky. I pulled my hand away and saw, even in that rain soaked light, something dark and alien on my hand. "Mulder, you're bleeding."
He looked back at me. "I know. Everyone's bleeding." His voice faltered. "There's too much blood."
The woman Scully was trying to treat slapped Scully sharply and wailed. I jerked my attention in that direction and lost Mulder in the rain and blackness.
Slogging my way back to her, I barked out an offer to help. Scully didn't even spare me a glance. "Hold her still," she muttered.
I knelt and wrapped my arms around the woman's upper torso, trapping her flailing arms at her side. Up close she looked like any number of young women who rode the trains to work from the suburbs of Connecticut every single morning. When she left the house that day, she had been nicely coiffed and made up. Her grey suit was probably perfectly pressed and most certainly didn't have that gash across the skirt or the splatters of mud and something else that might be blood. And it was not much of a leap in logic to believe that when she left her home that morning, her right leg did not stop abruptly just below her knee.
While Scully struggled to get the bloodied stump bound, the woman continued to wriggle and scream. "Do we have any idea where her baby is?" I asked over her noise.
Scully lifted her head just long enough to give me a bewildered look. "Baby?" she repeated and returned her attention to the knot she was making in what appeared to be part of her own shirt. "Oh. That was..." she paused, raised her hand and made a bit of a dismissive gesture, "that was someone else." She gave the ends of the knot a sharp tug. "You've seen Mulder." I opened my mouth to tell her I had, but she wasn't looking at me. "Over here! Now!"
I looked over my shoulder and saw two paramedics skitter their way down an embankment with a stretcher balanced between them. Scully stood, brushing rain out of her eyes. "You're going to need to restrain her," she told them. "She's going to need sedation as quickly as possibly. The way she's flailing around she's losing blood very rapidly." She stood there just long enough to see that the woman was lifted onto the stretcher before she started toward where the next car in the train would have been, her little flashlight swishing back and forth in the rain.
I felt compelled to follow along. "How can I help?"
"You can keep a look out for her other foot," Scully said darkly. "Although…" she brushed at her eyes again, "based on what little information I could get from her, and where she was when I found her, I have a feeling it's under that car." She flicked the beam of light back in the direction we had come.
I felt a little bit of queasiness somewhere in my gut. I'd spent enough time behind a desk that I'd become little better than useless in a scene of destruction and pain such as this. I am an administrator now. So...I administrated. "How many casualties, in your estimation?" I pulled out my flashlight and mimicked her movement.
"Well, I've heard rumors of as many as a thousand people on this train." She bent and poked amongst an outcropping of jagged metal beams. "It looks like the first three or four cars took the worst of it, and one car might have slid down into those houses below. I personally have seen three survivors and about two dozen fatalities." She straightened. "Although, I've only been through two cars." She turned and scanned the blackness behind us. "You have seen Agent Mulder, haven't you, Sir?"
"Yes, he's the one who told me about the baby."
"The baby." Scully sighed.
"Yes." I pointed up the embankment. "He said that woman had lost her baby and no one-"
"Sir, I'm no psychologist," she said, cutting me off, "and I'm certainly not opposed to any sort of help here, but I really think Mulder needs to be removed from this. He's no longer...effective."
That rankled me for some reason I could not identify. "Agent Scully, perhaps you could be a little more explicit?"
She pursed her lips. I could see it in the shadows and flashes. "The first casualties we encountered were a woman and her infant. The woman had sustained significant injuries." She was choosing her words carefully. "The infant appeared unharmed but for a small wound...in the upper thigh. When we moved the mother's body, the wound was opened up." She waited a moment to see if I would grasp what she was trying to say without her actually saying it. I did not. "The baby bled out while Mulder was holding her."
The blood on Mulder's jacket wasn't his own. "I see." Well, as an administrator, I might be more effective meeting the needs of my agents than mucking around in the wreckage anyway. "Any recommendations?"
"Clean him up, give him a shot of whiskey and put him to bed," Scully said frankly. She finally turned and looked at me. "He's not failing to do his duty, Sir," she added anxiously. "He's not letting anyone down. He's not...quitting. He's just seen too much. It's time to give him a break, before he breaks down." She moved away from me, and vanished, save for the occasional flicker of her light.
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"It's not as bad as we'd initially believed," I said, flipping through a sheaf of paperwork before me.
Mulder sat across the table from me, pushing a packet of the blue stuff around with a plastic coffee stirrer. He said nothing. He had said nothing since I literally wrapped him up and dragged him back to his hotel room and put him to bed.
"Forty fatalities. One hundred seventy two transported to hospital. One hundred and nine admitted. That's not bad." I closed the cover on the report. "Considering last night we thought we had upwards of a thousand casualties, that's really not bad."
Mulder didn't look up. It was clear he did not appreciate the situation from the same perspective. He was still taking it personally.
I decided to toss out one more enticing bit of information. "And now that the NTSB has ruled out terrorism as the cause of the accident, we're off the case. We can go home."
When even this news did not rouse him from his sulk, I leaned across the table and tugged the stirrer from his fingers. "It's good news, Mulder. We're going home."
"Good news?" He looked up at me bleakly. "Forty people are dead. Seven homes were destroyed. A hundred and nine people are in the hospital. And that's good news?"
"Yes, when you look at the big picture," I returned evenly, "it is very good news. We were lucky this time."
"The big picture is not at play here, Skinner." He batted the Equal packet around with his fingers. "There is no 'big picture'. There are two hundred twelve little pictures. And none of them are good. None of them were lucky."
"Mulder, you have to look at the big picture or you'll go insane. You know that better than anyone." Impulsively, I caught his hand and gave it a squeeze. "People die, Mulder. It's a horrible truth, but it is still a truth. Every single day a thousand men kiss their wives goodbye and never come back again. It's how this world is. But when we can send nine hundred and sixty men and women back to their loved ones and only send forty off to the morgue, then we've had a good day."
Mulder's mouth worked silently for a moment. "When the number," he began weakly, "was supposed to be thirty nine, and we send back forty, that's a very bad day."
My fingers tightened around his hand. "You didn't kill that baby, Mulder."
He didn't look up, but I could see the guilt in his face. "I didn't save her, either."
"That doesn't make you a murderer," I reminded him patiently, "it makes you a witness to an unfortunate event."
He jerked his hand free, slamming it hard on the tabletop. "I am not supposed to be a witness. I'm supposed to be an active participant in protecting and serving."
"Mulder, in this case there was nothing you could do."
"No." He shook his head and settled back in his chair. "No. There's always got to be something." His voice quavered. "And I couldn't even do my job last night. You had to come drag me back to my hotel and tuck me in like an ineffectual child. Damn it." He twisted his face away and I realized with an uncomfortable start he was crying.
Having an agent cry is not common, but it's not unheard of. But having Mulder cry...that was unbearable. "Now listen to me, Agent Mulder. You did your job, you will continue to do your job. Your job is to find out why people die and change things, where possible, to make sure it doesn't happen again. That baby died because of an unforeseen condition on a railway track. You couldn't have prevented it. You can't always be..." I stopped. Something occurred to me. Something that could help him, and even if it didn't accomplish what I wanted to accomplish, it would help someone. I pushed myself away from the table with deliberation. "Come on. Let's go."
He looked up at me, his reddened eyes rimmed wet. "Go where?"
I grabbed his jacket from the foot of the bed and tossed it at him. "To make a difference."
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He was just climbing into the chair when I finished. I saw him as I came out of the booth, rolling my sleeve down. He looked a little anxious, and a little doubtful. An older woman, with a face that reflected a time when she was considered beautiful, and a smile that reflected a heart that still was, was speaking to him softly and reassuringly. "You're lucky," she was telling him. "You are CMV negative."
He looked at me, and then at the needle in her hand. "What does that mean?"
She flicked a finger against his vein. "It means you don't carry the CMV virus. Most adults do. It's not a bad thing, it comes from a very common cold like virus most people get as children."
She pressed the needle in and I could feel Mulder hitch his breath. "Why is that lucky?"
"Because it's fine to transfuse blood with CMV present to other adults and most children. But it isn't safe for premature infants. Your blood," she smiled as she began to draw the red fluid out, "will save the lives of babies."
I saw Mulder's throat flex as he swallowed. He turned his attention away from the line in his arm, and his eyes swept the room and settled on me. There was something there...I couldn't quite place it, but it warmed me. "I guess that is lucky," he said quietly.
"Yes, it is." She gave his shoulder a pat. "You'll save someone's life today."
I could have kissed her at that moment. She couldn't have said a kinder, more beautiful thing. And it showed in his face, as well. The pinched, guilty look didn't entirely disappear, but it faded away and a look of relief and gratitude took its place. "Thank you," he said quietly. He was looking at me.
"Oh, no," she said cheerfully, "thank you. Now you sit right there. If you try to stand too soon, you'll be dizzy. When you're ready to get up, we'll get you some juice and cookies."
"I'm okay," he tried to insist, but I moved in quickly and put a hand on his shoulder.
"He'll do as he's told," I promised the woman gravely. "I'm his boss."
"And you both came in?" She beamed at us. "How wonderful." She hurried toward the door. "Don't forget to get your juice and cookies and your tee shirt before you go."
When she was gone I squeezed his shoulder lightly. "Feel a little better?"
He nodded. "Yeah. Thank you."
"Me? I didn't do anything." I rubbed at the bandage at my elbow. "If anything, I should be thanking you. You gave me a new view of the little picture."
The woman bustled back in, with two white tee shirts on her arm. "Here you go. Now, you wear these proudly. You deserve to." She handed one to each of us. "And come see us again in about eight weeks. We're always here."
Mulder unfolded his tee shirt and a strange, soft expression came over his face.
I unfolded mine. It read: Somebody's hero.
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