DISCLAIMER JAZZ: "The X-Files" and its characters are the 
creations and property of the fabled Chris Carter, Ten Thirteen 
Productions and Fox Broadcasting. I am, of course, using them 
without permission. No copyright infringement is intended. All 
other concepts or ideas herein are mine.
RATING: NC-17
SPOILERS: Through US season 7
ARCHIVE: ONLY ON THE AUTHOR'S OWN WEBSITE UNTIL STORY IS 
COMPLETED. This way I can mess with the early parts as later 
parts develop...
TIMELINE: Though this takes place sometime after "all things", in 
this universe "Requiem" did NOT happen...


"Water's Edge"
by 
Elizabeth Rowandale 
Copyright (c) 2003


Chapter 15a



**MUUULLLLDDDEERRRRRR!!!**



Her vision was blurring from the overpowering sense of the 
surreal and the strangle hold on her throat.  She couldn't trust 
her senses.  But her body reacted on instinct.  Training was a 
powerful thing.

"Get off of me," Scully hissed.  She lacked the breath to shout.

She couldn't get the leverage to flip the man over her shoulder.  
But he wasn't slick enough to keep his hold on her throat 
impenetrable.  The slightest shift from him, and she seized her 
opportunity.  She angled away from the knife and swung him hard 
into the hallway wall.  She heard his pained gasp, weathered only 
a surface wound to her throat; saw the blood splash onto the 
carpet.  And in the moment of slack when her assailant gasped for 
breath, she ducked out of the headlock.  Her hand sucked to her 
weapon, but before she could swing it around her body, he rushed 
her, shoulder first, like a football player.  She hit his face 
with her knee and she heard the grunt of pain, but his force 
propelled her back and across the dining room table.  She cried 
out as the landing jolted fiery pain down her spine.  Every inch 
of her skin protested the contact with his form.

"Get off of me!" she shouted, this time getting the force she 
wanted behind her words.

She still had a hold of her gun.  But he was quick to pin her 
wrists to the table, and for one wild moment of nothing between 
her chest and his but thin silk and cotton, she wondered if she 
had missed something in all the autopsies, all the forensics 
reports--or if maybe this were another criminal altogether--and a 
sexual assault was imminent.  It was one of the few indignities 
of violence she had not yet suffered and secretly feared in the 
night.

The man above her wore no ski mask, no nylon stocking to hide his 
features.  He was dressed in black, but his boyish face was clear 
above her.  Which meant he was either naively confident or had 
more lines of back-up than she was aware of.  He didn't expect 
her to get away.

He couldn't have been more than twenty-five years old.  White 
with freckles and dark hair slipping over his eyes.  Neat.  
Clean.  Carefully groomed.  The picture-perfect image of the boy 
next door; the horror movie favorite for a psychotic killer.

Scully thanked the fates she hadn't kicked off her shoes.  She 
dug her heel into the man's shin.  His grip on her wrists didn't 
slacken, despite her carefully synchronized jerk for freedom, but 
he did pull his leg and hips back from her lower body just enough 
to grant her a hard kick to his crotch.  That bought her a 
second, and she pushed up and took a shoulder high karate kick at 
his jaw.  Her foot hit its target and the man in black's head 
jerked backward as he staggered a step away.

She shoved back hard, sliding across the table and swinging her 
legs around to land on her feet, placing the table between them.  
Her gun was on him before she touched the floor.

"Freeze, FBI!"
 
The man turned slightly, hand caressing his injured neck and jaw.  
She wondered if she had broken his nose with her knee.

He actually smiled.

She felt sick.

"Don't move!"

She caught a glimpse of Daniel on the floor near the kitchen, but 
she couldn't see if he was hurt or conscious or even alive.  She 
wanted desperately to look again, really *look*, go to him, touch 
him, but she had to shut that off, because every breath and 
thought had to be focused on the killer in front of her.

"You think I'm scared of your badge?" he said calmly.  "After 
what I've seen?"

"My badge means nothing in the next ten seconds.  My gun means a 
hell of a lot if you take another step."

He smiled again.

She never had a chance to see it coming.

The knife sailed through the air at lightening speed, a sharp 
whistle cutting through the air.

Scully ducked to save her face but felt a tug at her hair.  She 
heard the dull thunk as the knife lodged in the wall behind her.  
The briefest glance toward the gleaming weapon, showed a tuft of 
red hair pinned to the plaster.

Before she could recover, the man catapulted himself like a 
cannonball, bellysliding across the slick wood of the table and 
tackling her stomach as his weight flew off the table.  They hit 
the floor together, Scully catching his bulk on her delicate 
frame.  She lost the gun. 

He wedged his forearm against her throat.  "Bitch.  Stop fighting 
me.  You've already lost the battle.  You won't leave here 
alive."

"Like hell I won't," Scully spat through clenched teeth.

"Your boyfriend's dead already."

She didn't listen.  She freed a hand and clawed at his eyes.  He 
cried out and fought back, and in the struggle they slammed into 
the legs of the table and chairs, and tangled with the jungle of 
wood, and she took a nasty hit to the side of her head; and she 
remembered hiding under the dining room table with Missy playing 
treehouse hideout at the square little house on Miramar and 
secretly writing their names in the most hidden corner of the 
underworkings of the table and how Mother never found out.

She saw the gun.  His weight was on her back.  He was pulling at 
her hair, grasping and bruising her arms, but she was moving 
forward, dragging the two of them with the sheer force of her 
forearms, kicking at his legs, fighting for the use of her knees.  
Her fingers were inches from the butt of the weapon when he 
jerked her hair back hard and lunged over her head in a crash of 
chairs against table.  A flash of pain and a blur of color and 
she was on her back again, head hitting the edge of the kitchen 
tile and the cold steel of her gun wedged against the hot skin of 
her throat.

"Aaaaahhhh!"  Pure frustration.  She panted for breath, her 
throat straining away from the weapon.  Her salvation was 
transforming into her downfall.

"Why?  Why--do you want--me dead?" she managed, trying to give 
the intimidation of eye contact, but wanting to look toward 
Daniel.  She could have sworn she saw him move.

"Don't you understand?  Don't you get it?  You, out of all of 
them...  *They're coming!*.  And they put that *thing* inside 
you, under you skin.  So they can control you.  So they can use 
you and make you a fucking slave for their Nazi take-over.  Don't 
you get it?  They already own you!  You're one of them!"

"I don't belong to anybody."  *'Is any of this coming back to 
you?'  'I was there?'*

He jammed the gun harder into her throat and a pained sound 
escaped her lips.

"Don't talk to me.  I don't speak to the enemy."

*****

Daniel was slipping in and out of consciousness.  The world was 
horribly black, and he had never had to fight so hard to catch a 
glimpse of light.  But he registered random images of the unreal 
sequence playing out around him.  He didn't believe what he was 
seeing.  Dana slammed across a table; Dana, high-kicking the 
assailant who had taken him down in less than a minute; Dana 
pointing a gun; blood on the pale carpet; Dana pinned to the 
floor--*'don't pin me face down'*; Dana with a gun to her throat; 
Dana with her wrists and ankles bound in the same duct tape that 
held his own, Dana being dragged across the floor and hoisted 
back onto the dining room table.  Every fiber of his being wanted 
to move.  He ordered his muscles to obey, mustered every ounce of 
strength he had.  But all he could manage was to hold back the 
darkness.  He couldn't move.

*****

"I am not the enemy," Scully managed weakly.  But he had stopped 
responding, she had lost the window of communication, and his 
silence ate away at her wall of rage, letting crystalline drops 
of helplessness seep in.

The man in black was hard at work now, intent upon his task, mind 
deliberate upon every step of the process.  He had taken great 
care in positioning her on the table, carefully securing the rope 
to each of the table legs, then ever so attentively managing the 
shift as he fastened the rope to each wrist, tightening the slack 
in the exact second he released the tape.  Her ankles had 
followed.  The rough rope cut into her skin like tiny blades.  
Not all the bodies had had rope burns.  He must have worked with 
his surroundings, adapted to his environment.

He retrieved the knife from the wall, running a hand over the 
plaster as though assessing the damage.  The image was eerily 
domestic.  But he was wearing gloves.  Not confident enough to 
leave prints.  That, they had already known.

She focused on her breathing.  Deep and even.  If she gave in to 
rapid breath, she would soon get light-headed, trapped on her 
back.  And she had to keep thinking clearly.  You were never dead 
until you were dead.  There was never a point of surrender.

Michaels didn't expect her for another two hours.

The man crossed back into the kitchen, brazenly stepping over 
Daniel's prone form, and rinsed off the knife at the kitchen 
sink.  He dried it carefully with a paper towel, then stopped to 
drop the paper towel in the garbage.  A day's work to him.  
Nothing to rush, nothing to fear.  Nothing to shake him outside 
of daily norms and customs.

Scully pushed down a rush of nausea.  *I'm coming to get you, 
girly-girl.*

When the man returned to the table, she tensed hard, hurting 
herself as she pulled taut on the restrictive ropes.  The man 
never made eye contact with her.  His focus was locked onto her 
forearm.

He had left her gun on the end table beside the kitchen doorway.  
Carefully placed beneath the pump lamp.  It was all she could 
think about; but she refused to look.

Her right arm had been fastened to the center leg of the table, 
leaving her arm down at her side, wrist ten or twelve inches from 
her hip.  Her left arm stretched out above her head.  He had no 
use for her left arm.

The man finished unbuttoning the last stubborn button on her 
sleeve cuff, and pushed the material above her elbow.  She 
actually entertained a split-second of gratitude that the sleeve 
was loose enough to rise.   If it hadn't, he would have stripped 
off her blouse.

He brought a chair up beside the table, positioned it at a 
precise angle.  His nose had begun to bruise from the impact of 
her knee.  But he seemed unaware of the pain.  A slight puffiness 
to his jaw and a narrow abrasion of flesh marked the place her 
shoe had contacted his jaw.  Her chest was quivering with every 
breath.  She was straining in the unnatural quiet for the sound 
of activity in the hallway, for voices outside the living room 
window.  For the least sound of breath or movement from Daniel.  
She had been rewarded with a shallow sigh moments ago.  At that 
second, at least, he had been alive.

As the tip of the knife touched the pale skin of her forearm, the 
man lifted his head and sought her eyes.  "If there is any part 
of you that is still human, I'm sorry for what you must suffer.  
But they feel what you feel now.  They see what you see, and they 
know what you know.  Your memories and experiences are no longer 
your own.  And so...they must feel your punishment."

"I...am not...one of them," Scully said firmly, eyes heavy, voice 
like ice.  She knew she should be maintaining human warmth with 
her attacker, trying to appeal to his understanding, his 
sympathy.  Work within his logic.  But anger had taken hold and 
was keeping her heart beating and her head clear.  She couldn't 
sustain the duality.

The man returned his attention to her arm, and made the first 
cut.

*****

The screams brought him back to consciousness, like a primitive 
mourning cry dragging him up from the netherworlds.  Reality took 
a moment to form around the sound.  But he registered the gut 
truth before he opened his eyes.  Dana.  Dana was screaming.  
Screaming in desperate pain.  He squinted through the darkness.  
Things were clearing more quickly this time, the scope of his 
vision had widened near to normal.  The room was properly bright 
and expansive.  But the visions before him remained unbelievable.

The intruder had his back turned to Daniel.  He caught only 
glimpses of Dana, strapped to the table a few yards away.

There was more blood on the floor.

Daniel was afraid to move.  He needed to think, absorb every 
aspect of the situation before he gave up his advantage.  His 
wrists and ankles were bound, ankles roped to something heavy he 
couldn't see.  But his wrists weren't tied to anything else.  
Which meant the intruder took him to be in worse shape than he 
was.  He had to take advantage of that.  From the sound of Dana's 
cries, it was all they had.

*****

The pain blurred red across her vision. She was losing focus.  It 
was increasingly difficult to thread together the facts and 
formulate a plan.  She had caught one good look at the letters 
slowly forming on her arm, then ceased to watch.  Struggling only 
jostled the knife and tore at her flesh.  But her suffering was 
starting to work to her advantage.  The truth of that was sinking 
into her thoughts.

The more she appeared to surrender to the pain, to lose her fight 
in the agony; the more the man in black relaxed his approach.  He 
expected her to give up.  Expected her to give in.  And he was 
struggling, squirming, endeavoring to gain the proper angle for 
his work.  The further he moved up her arm, the more challenging 
the angle became.

She saw him glance at the rope.  He was considering letting it 
go.

*****

Daniel had pushed up onto his elbow just enough that he could see 
across the top of the table.  It had taken a full two minutes to 
reach this height, moving a hair's breadth at a time to avoid 
notice or sound.  It took fifteen long breaths before Dana turned 
her head and lowered her gaze to catch sight of him.  She didn't 
flinch, didn't speak, but he saw the brief flash of recognition 
in her gaze.  She turned away again, continuing to play the game.

He continued to wait in silence, watching Dana watch her 
assailant, fighting back the gut instinct to lash out, feeling 
her wrenching pain in his gut with every breath and cry.

But he had to know her plan before he could help her.  He didn't 
have much to give.  But Dana hadn't given up.  If he knew 
anything about her, he knew that.  And if he could see it, see 
the pattern of her thoughts, maybe he could help. Maybe.

He watched and waited.

Dana screamed again.

*****

All she needed was a distraction.  *And one deep breath*.  
Anything to get him off guard at the right moment.  But she 
needed Daniel to wait.  She prayed he had been watching long 
enough to realize what was coming.  Their window of opportunity 
was about to slip open.

*Let him see it, let him see it, let him see it, please GOD let 
him see it.  I haven't asked for much in a while.  You know that.  
You know why.  Please God...let him see it.*

"aaaaaAAAAAAAHHHHHH!!!"

The man couldn't get the angle right.

*****

The beat of her heart seemed to slow to the beats of time in her 
head.

She pretended she was taking the moment of quiet to breathe 
through the lull in the pain.  She watched in complacent silence 
as he slipped the knot over the base of her thumb, drew the loop 
of rope down the length of her hand.

Daniel threw the china figurine at the back of the man's head.  
It hit his neck, but the shot served its purpose when the man 
whirled around to face his attacker.

Scully wrenched the knife out of his slackened grip, and sliced 
at his throat before she had completed a breath.  She couldn't 
get a solid cut to a carotid from her limited angle, but she 
broke the skin enough to send him reeling away from her, and in 
seconds she had slashed the knife through the remaining three 
ropes and freed herself.

She felt dizzy when she stood up, and her sleeve fell down over 
her arm, clinging to the thick coating of blood.  But she kept 
her ground, knife raised and knees bent ready for flight.  The 
feel of the knife moving through flesh swept goosebumps the 
length of her body.  The victim never left the scene pure.

When the man turned his gaze to hers, there was a new-found 
animal fury in him.  She guessed she was the first to stop him at 
this late stage of the game.  Or to hurt him so fiercely.  His 
carefully marked plan was slipping through his fingers like the 
blood spilling over from the wound at his throat.

In a battle of brute strength, Scully would go down again, with 
her weakened arm and her strength sapped by the loss of blood.  
Her wits and training were all she had to get them through.

And she could see the way.

She had one chance to make it happen.  The set of his eyes was 
hard and dark.  She saw the plan forming, saw him coming.  She 
gave him the first two steps, waiting until his momentum was 
irreversible.  She held the knife out in front of her, carrying 
out the pretense that she meant to meet him head on.  The moment 
his foot hit the chair seat, propelling him toward the table, she 
made her dive.

Under the table and between the chairs.  Her forearms sheltered 
her breasts from the impact as she hit the hard wood floor and 
slid the last few inches out from under the table.  She sent the 
knife spinning across the floor toward Daniel to secure his 
freedom.  A foot underneath her, a lunge forward and her hand was 
on the gun.  She didn't look back, didn't know how close he was 
behind her, but she whirled even as she was rising to her feet.

He was around the table, charging toward her like a wild 
elephant.  Logic and deliberation had abandoned him and left 
nothing but action.  "I won't let them take over!  You will not 
be their slave in blue!" he screamed, and he was no more than 
three feet away when she pulled the trigger.

Her ears dimmed as the shot rang endlessly in the confined 
quarters.  Her bullet hit its target.  It always did.

He dropped to the living room carpet.  More yellow tape in her 
apartment.  More blood in the fibers, more forensics teams 
combing through her life.

The echo of deafening sound slowed down the world.  Scully took 
in every detail as the man in black's body sank to the carpet; 
the bounce and fall of his dark Irish hair; the twitch of his 
hand against the pale carpet; the momentary clawing at the deep 
pile; the hitched breath moving through his wide shoulders.

She drew four full breaths before she dared to shift her eyes.

She didn't think of lowering the gun.

He lay face downward.

"Don't move," she said.  Breathless, but firm.  The warning might 
have been unnecessary.  She wasn't certain how much damage the 
bullet had inflicted.  She refused to err on the side of risk.

She wasn't lowering the gun.

She looked to Daniel.  He remained on the floor, pale complected 
and trembling, but his feet were free now, and he was up on his 
elbow, working the knife against the tape on his wrists.
 
Her breath came so hard her lungs hurt.  "How bad?" she asked, 
cutting in and out of eye contact with Daniel to the prone figure 
before her.

Daniel nodded cautiously.  "Head injury.  Concussion, probably.  
I'll be all right."

Scully swallowed hard.  "The phone lines will be out.  It's his 
pattern.  My cell phone is on the kitchen counter.  Just above 
you.  Can you get it?"

Daniel shifted his body gingerly.  She saw him check his balance 
and maybe a wave of nausea.  But he moved on with only the 
slightest hesitation.  His fingers closed over the small piece of 
metal and plastic.  He sank back to the floor and tossed the 
phone to her feet.

She stooped to retrieve it, never lowering her weapon, and rose 
with phone in hand.

"You're still bleeding," Daniel said, his voice breathless from 
the small exertion.  "How bad, Darling?"

"I'm fine," Scully said evenly.  Her fingers shook as she pressed 
in the emergency numbers.  She didn't miss a key.  "I'll be 
fine."

*W-A-T-C--*

*****

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