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Chapter or Story 
Chapter or Story
Disclaimer: The characters Miss Parker, Sydney, Jarod, Broots etc.and the fictional Centre, are all property of MTM, TNT and NBC Productions and used without permission. I'm not making any money out of this and no infringement is intended.
Precious Blood
Part VI: Mors, We Bow To Thee
Matrea Nara
Mulder watched his partner tend the boy with a heavy heart. He knew what she was thinking. She was remembering Emily, who had been created without her mother’s knowledge just as this boy had, and the fate that had befallen her. When Scully heard what had happened with the kids at Jarod’s apartment he had seen how strongly she was affected by it, had tried not to hover as he knew he was in the habit of doing what he was concerned for her.
Scully stayed beside Ryker until he fell back asleep, then joined Mulder by the window to stare out at the moonlit yard. Maggie and Jarod were asleep as well, and Miss Parker had left some time ago to collect her things in the city and go back to Blue Cove after Arin and Luke. Mulder and Scully stood close, touching at the shoulder, taking comfort from the nearness of the other. She hadn’t let him close when she was going through the ordeal with Emily, had distanced herself from the solace he might have offered, not wanting to be comforted. Now though, both of them were caught up in something they were unused to, not the familiar, deadly ground that was their dealings with the Syndicate. They were trying to figure it out, as they had been trying to figure it out since they had first met Jarod, and both found themselves longing for the X-Files, and the defined enmity of the Syndicate and the bounty hunter and Krycek and colonization and the rest. They knew that. They could deal with what they knew. This was a whole new game, though similar in some respects, and they were not prepared for the tying emotional burden they had to endure. Close contact, the dear and comfortable, was the sole island of familiarity in the chaos that had found them, on top of the chaos that knew so well.
“You ok?” he asked her. She was leaning on him, using him for support when she could have just as easily put her weight on the window frame to her other side. He draped one across her shoulders and she immediately stopped holding herself up, so he had to hold her with both arms just to keep her from falling. “Scully listen to me. What they did to those kids is bad but you know we’ve seen worse. You have to be strong, you have to think clearly or we might not be able to save them.” He paused. “You were strong for Emily.”
“Emily died Mulder.”
“But she didn’t die alone, or afraid.”
“Luke and Arin have a chance of dying both.”
“No,” said Mulder darkly, “but Lyle does.”
Three hours later, the sky fell.
><
Arin paced. She had been doing nothing but pacing for hours now, keeping an eye on her brother and on Lyle, marking every staff man or woman that came in or out. She felt Luke in her mind, a distorted static full of pain and confusion, lost in a sea of blackness. It got so bad she wanted to break down and weep, but she refused. Either Lyle or Willy was always watching her, and she would show no weakness in the face of either man.
From time to time her thoughts would drift to her father and younger brother, and the mother she had never known but would surely know about her by now. She wondered if they were coming for her, or even if they were still alive. She knew she could find out if she wanted to. It would not be hard for her to get out of here now that her father had told her how, now that she had already busted loose once before. But she wouldn’t, couldn’t leave her brother like this. Luke was half of her, and if he stayed here he would die. Not in body, they were never let that happen, but his soul would perish and so too would hers. After tasting freedom that vibrancy she knew so well in him would not survive long caged.
So Arin paced, and let the hatred and rage swell in her…
…and marked every man that came in, or went out.
Arin had been Centre born and bred, and due to the fact that she was not only a pretender, but a twin as well, she had been subjected to some of the most difficult SIMs imaginable. She and Luke had been through pain beyond measure since they were old enough to begin training, including electroshock to stimulate certain sections of their brain and pain endurance, meant to test whether one would experience the shocks suffered upon the other. She had built up her pain threshold to admirable high levels, so she could sit quietly through one such a session and never flinch, never cry out.
But all that meant nothing when it hit her. She felt as though her skull had been sundered, every bone in her body smashed at once, her heart ruptured, a thousand knives ripped into her body. Tears of blood streamed from her eyes, rivers from her mouth and nose. She cried out, more an animal’s howl that a young girl’s scream, and dropped to her knees clutching her head. A dozen wounds opened up simultaneously on her body, with no apparent cause, the air was driven from her lungs, and she crumpled to the floor whimpering and convulsing with her eyes rolled back in their sockets as the medics rushed to her side.
In his bed mere yards away Luke’s back arched in pain, wounds mirroring his sister’s appeared, his mouth and nose bled, and the EKG beat out a rapid staccato as he felt in all its savagery all the pain visited upon Arin.
Lyle watched in fascination. Maybe he wouldn’t have to break them after all. It would appear someone else had done it for him.
><
Miss Parker had given no explanation when she returned to the hotel the next afternoon and told the team to pack up for the return trip to Blue Cove. Sydney and Broots had covered for her well in her absence, and no one asked where she had been. No doubt there was at least one sweeper on her team reporting to each of the various power players at the Centre, telling her father, Reins, and Lyle exactly where she was or wasn’t, warning them of her imminent return. She didn’t care. It didn’t matter whether or not they knew she was coming, they would be no more prepared for her when she arrived.
She was half packed when the overwhelming desire to hear Jarod’s voice seized her. It was a peculiar thing, and caught her totally unawares. She was so shocked by it that when it blindsided her at about four o’clock that afternoon she stopped dead, midway through cramming an article of clothing into her duffle bag, to analyze it. Her conscience, she decided. He had been in bad shape when she had seen him last, and she was feeling guilty about hurting him further. That was not why, but it was an acceptable rationalization for the time being.
Mulder had given her Maggie Scully’s phone number, as well as his, Scully’s, and Jarod’s cell phone numbers. Refusing to allow herself to call Jarod’s number first, telling herself he was probably out cold anyway, she called Maggie’s number. The answering machine picked up, and Parker didn’t bother to leave a message. That was strange. Why weren’t they answering? They probably didn’t trust her not to give them away, and had moved as soon as she left.
So she dialed Mulder’s phone, let it ring a dozen times before hanging up. Scully’s number next, no reply. What the hell was going on here? It wasn’t like they were out of range or anything, wasn’t as if their phones were turned off…they just weren’t answering. There was no way of rationalizing what she was feeling just then. It was that old fear, the same fear she experienced in Dover when their captor grabbed Jarod, took him away for defending her, when he had put himself in front of the gun so many times trying to protect the others, when she had been rushing the other hostages out and noticed he wasn’t with them. It was the fear that had plagued her when Bartlett was on the loose and threatened Jarod, when Jarod and Major Charles were trying to escape Donaterase and she saw Jarod stumble, shot, after the explosion when she didn’t know if he’d lived or died, yesterday in his apartment, and a dozen other times before. Realizing she was shaking, she dialed Jarod’s cell.
No one answered.
><
Parker kicked in Maggie Scully’s door with her gun held out before her, swept left, swept right, and stepped through the threshold. It had taken her hours to get here, but remarkable there were no police, no one but her anywhere near this place at all. Considering that this was a residential, suburban area it was a wonder no one had called the police to report shots fired.
The gory chaos that greeted her knocked her back a step before she regained her composure. Furniture overturned, wall mirrors and artwork smashed, bloodstains on the carpet and splattered on the walls, a bloody handprint on the wall directly in front of her…someone trying to escape, being dragged back…the place looked like a massacre had occurred here, a merciless, bloody massacre. How could anyone have survived when this much blood had been spilled?
Parker pulled her cell phone out of her coat pocket and dialed Mulder’s number again. It was ringing, but nowhere in the house. She tried Scully…the same. Jarod next…and she could hear it, coming from upstairs. Jarod’s phone was still here, but was Jarod? Still holding her weapon out front, glancing occasionally back over her shoulder, she advanced up the stairs.
The fight had apparently started downstairs, then moved up. There was evidence that there had been two groups of shooters, one firing down the stairs, the others firing up. The defenders had been forced to retreat though, evidently into the spare bedroom where Ryker had been taken when she had first come here. All the other doors had been broken down, the rooms wrecked, but the only blood she saw up here was at the head of the stairs and in that one room. The window here had been smashed, the apparent escape route, if in fact anyone had escaped. If the amount of blood in the hall out here could be taken as evidence, the defenders had taken down at least two of their attackers before they had fled, or succumbed, but any bodies had been cleared away. There was a clear spot on the floor in here where another had fallen, close to the door, so probably an attacker forcing his way in. There was more blood near the window, on the window frame, and behind the bed, which had been tipped over for the defenders to hide behind and shoot over, but there was not as much here elsewhere. The defenders had clearly won this fight at great cost to the attackers, but how many of the defenders had lived to tell about it.
Jarod had been in no condition to fight, or move for that matter, finding it too great an exertion even to talk for long periods of time. And he had been downstairs, where the battled had initially begun. That handprint on the wall downstairs stuck in her mind. She dialed Jarod’s number again, listened for the sounds of the ringing…
The closet. He was, or his phone was, in the closet to her right.
She opened the door…
“Oh shit. Oh God no.”
Jarod was there all right, beaten and broken. The wounds in his chest and leg bled anew, his face was barely recognizable, swollen and discolored and bloody. He bled from his mouth and nose, from his temple, from his chest his leg and his abdomen. Limp and propped up in a corner, his head lolled to one side and his breathing was so shallow she would not have though he was breathing at all if not for the soft wheezing of the air moving in and out through damaged lungs. He held an empty forty-five in one hand, his still-ringing cell phone in the other.
“Dammit Jarod,” she whispered. Tucking her gun in her waistband, leaving the safety off, she moved swiftly to his side, pulling him into her arms and rocking him gently as unwanted tears flooded her eyes. “Dammit.”
The floorboards groaned.
Parker drew her gun, holding it out in front of her as the found of footfalls advancing on her position drew nearer. In her arms Jarod trembled. She could feel his blood soaking her clothes, warm and damp against her skin.
“Who’s there?” she demanded. “Come any closer I’ll blow your head off.”
“That would be a bad idea Miss Parker,” called a familiar voice. “You’re not going to carry him out of here by yourself.” Fox Mulder, his gun drawn but down and to the side, stepped into her line of sight. She dropped her own weapon.
“Why the hell weren’t you answering your phone?”
“Up until a few minutes ago for the same reason he’s not answering his.” One side of the agent’s face was badly bruised, as though someone had cracked him with the butt of a pistol. “I was caught in the backyard covering their escape.”
“Who?”
“What do you mean who? Scully and Maggie and the boy.”
“No,” she said, exasperated. “Who caught you?”
“Stupid question.” She nodded, understanding.
“Why was he left behind?”
“Look at him Miss Parker. Remember how he was when you saw him this afternoon. Was he in any condition to jump out a second story window? He stayed to cover us, just like I stayed back to cover in the yard. Ryker was pissed, but that’s the way it had to be.”
“I thought he was shoot to kill,” she said softly, stroking her fingers through Jarod’s damp hair and fighting a new wave of grief and rage that threatened to overtake her. “Why do they do this to him?”
“I have a theory.” She looked up sharply, seeing for the first time the quiet sadness in Mulder’s gentle pretender eyes. “But not now. We have to get him out of here before they come back to finish the job.”
They were half way down the stairs before Parker thought to ask her next question. “Mulder?”
“Yeah.”
“Why didn’t anyone call the police?”
“They did.” Her confusion must have been evident, for he continued. “The police never came Miss Parker, because the police have a chain of command just like everyone else, and it looks like my people and your people are on the same side these days.” His people? Who the hell...
“Shit,” said she.
“Yeah.”
Precious Blood
Part VI: Mors, We Bow To Thee
Matrea Nara
Mulder watched his partner tend the boy with a heavy heart. He knew what she was thinking. She was remembering Emily, who had been created without her mother’s knowledge just as this boy had, and the fate that had befallen her. When Scully heard what had happened with the kids at Jarod’s apartment he had seen how strongly she was affected by it, had tried not to hover as he knew he was in the habit of doing what he was concerned for her.
Scully stayed beside Ryker until he fell back asleep, then joined Mulder by the window to stare out at the moonlit yard. Maggie and Jarod were asleep as well, and Miss Parker had left some time ago to collect her things in the city and go back to Blue Cove after Arin and Luke. Mulder and Scully stood close, touching at the shoulder, taking comfort from the nearness of the other. She hadn’t let him close when she was going through the ordeal with Emily, had distanced herself from the solace he might have offered, not wanting to be comforted. Now though, both of them were caught up in something they were unused to, not the familiar, deadly ground that was their dealings with the Syndicate. They were trying to figure it out, as they had been trying to figure it out since they had first met Jarod, and both found themselves longing for the X-Files, and the defined enmity of the Syndicate and the bounty hunter and Krycek and colonization and the rest. They knew that. They could deal with what they knew. This was a whole new game, though similar in some respects, and they were not prepared for the tying emotional burden they had to endure. Close contact, the dear and comfortable, was the sole island of familiarity in the chaos that had found them, on top of the chaos that knew so well.
“You ok?” he asked her. She was leaning on him, using him for support when she could have just as easily put her weight on the window frame to her other side. He draped one across her shoulders and she immediately stopped holding herself up, so he had to hold her with both arms just to keep her from falling. “Scully listen to me. What they did to those kids is bad but you know we’ve seen worse. You have to be strong, you have to think clearly or we might not be able to save them.” He paused. “You were strong for Emily.”
“Emily died Mulder.”
“But she didn’t die alone, or afraid.”
“Luke and Arin have a chance of dying both.”
“No,” said Mulder darkly, “but Lyle does.”
Three hours later, the sky fell.
><
Arin paced. She had been doing nothing but pacing for hours now, keeping an eye on her brother and on Lyle, marking every staff man or woman that came in or out. She felt Luke in her mind, a distorted static full of pain and confusion, lost in a sea of blackness. It got so bad she wanted to break down and weep, but she refused. Either Lyle or Willy was always watching her, and she would show no weakness in the face of either man.
From time to time her thoughts would drift to her father and younger brother, and the mother she had never known but would surely know about her by now. She wondered if they were coming for her, or even if they were still alive. She knew she could find out if she wanted to. It would not be hard for her to get out of here now that her father had told her how, now that she had already busted loose once before. But she wouldn’t, couldn’t leave her brother like this. Luke was half of her, and if he stayed here he would die. Not in body, they were never let that happen, but his soul would perish and so too would hers. After tasting freedom that vibrancy she knew so well in him would not survive long caged.
So Arin paced, and let the hatred and rage swell in her…
…and marked every man that came in, or went out.
Arin had been Centre born and bred, and due to the fact that she was not only a pretender, but a twin as well, she had been subjected to some of the most difficult SIMs imaginable. She and Luke had been through pain beyond measure since they were old enough to begin training, including electroshock to stimulate certain sections of their brain and pain endurance, meant to test whether one would experience the shocks suffered upon the other. She had built up her pain threshold to admirable high levels, so she could sit quietly through one such a session and never flinch, never cry out.
But all that meant nothing when it hit her. She felt as though her skull had been sundered, every bone in her body smashed at once, her heart ruptured, a thousand knives ripped into her body. Tears of blood streamed from her eyes, rivers from her mouth and nose. She cried out, more an animal’s howl that a young girl’s scream, and dropped to her knees clutching her head. A dozen wounds opened up simultaneously on her body, with no apparent cause, the air was driven from her lungs, and she crumpled to the floor whimpering and convulsing with her eyes rolled back in their sockets as the medics rushed to her side.
In his bed mere yards away Luke’s back arched in pain, wounds mirroring his sister’s appeared, his mouth and nose bled, and the EKG beat out a rapid staccato as he felt in all its savagery all the pain visited upon Arin.
Lyle watched in fascination. Maybe he wouldn’t have to break them after all. It would appear someone else had done it for him.
><
Miss Parker had given no explanation when she returned to the hotel the next afternoon and told the team to pack up for the return trip to Blue Cove. Sydney and Broots had covered for her well in her absence, and no one asked where she had been. No doubt there was at least one sweeper on her team reporting to each of the various power players at the Centre, telling her father, Reins, and Lyle exactly where she was or wasn’t, warning them of her imminent return. She didn’t care. It didn’t matter whether or not they knew she was coming, they would be no more prepared for her when she arrived.
She was half packed when the overwhelming desire to hear Jarod’s voice seized her. It was a peculiar thing, and caught her totally unawares. She was so shocked by it that when it blindsided her at about four o’clock that afternoon she stopped dead, midway through cramming an article of clothing into her duffle bag, to analyze it. Her conscience, she decided. He had been in bad shape when she had seen him last, and she was feeling guilty about hurting him further. That was not why, but it was an acceptable rationalization for the time being.
Mulder had given her Maggie Scully’s phone number, as well as his, Scully’s, and Jarod’s cell phone numbers. Refusing to allow herself to call Jarod’s number first, telling herself he was probably out cold anyway, she called Maggie’s number. The answering machine picked up, and Parker didn’t bother to leave a message. That was strange. Why weren’t they answering? They probably didn’t trust her not to give them away, and had moved as soon as she left.
So she dialed Mulder’s phone, let it ring a dozen times before hanging up. Scully’s number next, no reply. What the hell was going on here? It wasn’t like they were out of range or anything, wasn’t as if their phones were turned off…they just weren’t answering. There was no way of rationalizing what she was feeling just then. It was that old fear, the same fear she experienced in Dover when their captor grabbed Jarod, took him away for defending her, when he had put himself in front of the gun so many times trying to protect the others, when she had been rushing the other hostages out and noticed he wasn’t with them. It was the fear that had plagued her when Bartlett was on the loose and threatened Jarod, when Jarod and Major Charles were trying to escape Donaterase and she saw Jarod stumble, shot, after the explosion when she didn’t know if he’d lived or died, yesterday in his apartment, and a dozen other times before. Realizing she was shaking, she dialed Jarod’s cell.
No one answered.
><
Parker kicked in Maggie Scully’s door with her gun held out before her, swept left, swept right, and stepped through the threshold. It had taken her hours to get here, but remarkable there were no police, no one but her anywhere near this place at all. Considering that this was a residential, suburban area it was a wonder no one had called the police to report shots fired.
The gory chaos that greeted her knocked her back a step before she regained her composure. Furniture overturned, wall mirrors and artwork smashed, bloodstains on the carpet and splattered on the walls, a bloody handprint on the wall directly in front of her…someone trying to escape, being dragged back…the place looked like a massacre had occurred here, a merciless, bloody massacre. How could anyone have survived when this much blood had been spilled?
Parker pulled her cell phone out of her coat pocket and dialed Mulder’s number again. It was ringing, but nowhere in the house. She tried Scully…the same. Jarod next…and she could hear it, coming from upstairs. Jarod’s phone was still here, but was Jarod? Still holding her weapon out front, glancing occasionally back over her shoulder, she advanced up the stairs.
The fight had apparently started downstairs, then moved up. There was evidence that there had been two groups of shooters, one firing down the stairs, the others firing up. The defenders had been forced to retreat though, evidently into the spare bedroom where Ryker had been taken when she had first come here. All the other doors had been broken down, the rooms wrecked, but the only blood she saw up here was at the head of the stairs and in that one room. The window here had been smashed, the apparent escape route, if in fact anyone had escaped. If the amount of blood in the hall out here could be taken as evidence, the defenders had taken down at least two of their attackers before they had fled, or succumbed, but any bodies had been cleared away. There was a clear spot on the floor in here where another had fallen, close to the door, so probably an attacker forcing his way in. There was more blood near the window, on the window frame, and behind the bed, which had been tipped over for the defenders to hide behind and shoot over, but there was not as much here elsewhere. The defenders had clearly won this fight at great cost to the attackers, but how many of the defenders had lived to tell about it.
Jarod had been in no condition to fight, or move for that matter, finding it too great an exertion even to talk for long periods of time. And he had been downstairs, where the battled had initially begun. That handprint on the wall downstairs stuck in her mind. She dialed Jarod’s number again, listened for the sounds of the ringing…
The closet. He was, or his phone was, in the closet to her right.
She opened the door…
“Oh shit. Oh God no.”
Jarod was there all right, beaten and broken. The wounds in his chest and leg bled anew, his face was barely recognizable, swollen and discolored and bloody. He bled from his mouth and nose, from his temple, from his chest his leg and his abdomen. Limp and propped up in a corner, his head lolled to one side and his breathing was so shallow she would not have though he was breathing at all if not for the soft wheezing of the air moving in and out through damaged lungs. He held an empty forty-five in one hand, his still-ringing cell phone in the other.
“Dammit Jarod,” she whispered. Tucking her gun in her waistband, leaving the safety off, she moved swiftly to his side, pulling him into her arms and rocking him gently as unwanted tears flooded her eyes. “Dammit.”
The floorboards groaned.
Parker drew her gun, holding it out in front of her as the found of footfalls advancing on her position drew nearer. In her arms Jarod trembled. She could feel his blood soaking her clothes, warm and damp against her skin.
“Who’s there?” she demanded. “Come any closer I’ll blow your head off.”
“That would be a bad idea Miss Parker,” called a familiar voice. “You’re not going to carry him out of here by yourself.” Fox Mulder, his gun drawn but down and to the side, stepped into her line of sight. She dropped her own weapon.
“Why the hell weren’t you answering your phone?”
“Up until a few minutes ago for the same reason he’s not answering his.” One side of the agent’s face was badly bruised, as though someone had cracked him with the butt of a pistol. “I was caught in the backyard covering their escape.”
“Who?”
“What do you mean who? Scully and Maggie and the boy.”
“No,” she said, exasperated. “Who caught you?”
“Stupid question.” She nodded, understanding.
“Why was he left behind?”
“Look at him Miss Parker. Remember how he was when you saw him this afternoon. Was he in any condition to jump out a second story window? He stayed to cover us, just like I stayed back to cover in the yard. Ryker was pissed, but that’s the way it had to be.”
“I thought he was shoot to kill,” she said softly, stroking her fingers through Jarod’s damp hair and fighting a new wave of grief and rage that threatened to overtake her. “Why do they do this to him?”
“I have a theory.” She looked up sharply, seeing for the first time the quiet sadness in Mulder’s gentle pretender eyes. “But not now. We have to get him out of here before they come back to finish the job.”
They were half way down the stairs before Parker thought to ask her next question. “Mulder?”
“Yeah.”
“Why didn’t anyone call the police?”
“They did.” Her confusion must have been evident, for he continued. “The police never came Miss Parker, because the police have a chain of command just like everyone else, and it looks like my people and your people are on the same side these days.” His people? Who the hell...
“Shit,” said she.
“Yeah.”
