> Date: Tue, 5 Dec 1995 18:15:41 +0000 (GMT)
> From: "Avril A. Brown" <avril@handel.ednet.co.uk>


LAPSE


"Get in the car, Mulder."

Mulder didn't move, instead he glanced curiously from the gun Scully
held firmly in a textbook perfect stance, to the tall ascetic man he
vaguely remembered as a reporter from the local rag.

"Get in the car, Mulder!" 

At last he finally responded to the strident note of urgency in her
voice.  He started to move jerkily towards her, as if he couldn't
quite make his legs obey him. With a thrill of horror, Scully realised
that he was a mess.  His hair stuck out at crazy angles, his jacket
was hanging sloppily from one shoulder, and his eyes were heavy and
red-rimmed like he hadn't slept for about a week.

There was no blood on him that she could see, nor any obvious bruises;
in fact, there was nothing at all to suggest that he had been beaten
or abused in any way.  Yet there he was, disorientated and swaying
like he had had seven kinds of crap kicked out of him.

As Scully watched, the security officer stopped Mulder, said something
that she couldn't catch.  Mulder simply stared at him,
uncomprehending, then clambered awkwardly into the car.  Scully flung
herself in after him, throwing the car into drive and spinning the
wheel, rocketing them clear of any interference. Only when there were
some miles between them and the base, did she slow down enough to
study her silent partner.

Mulder was sitting upright in the passenger seat, staring straight
ahead.  His silence was even more unnerving than the total lack of
interest in his surroundings.  In the short time that she had known
him, Scully realised that Mulder was the kind of person that had
something to say about everything.  She had expected him to be full of
what he had seen on the base - and whatever it was that had been done
to him - regaling her with his theories and plans and other
improbabilities.  His rumpled, and somehow damaged, silence scared
her.

"You okay, Mulder?"

"I think so," It was the first thing he had said, and it sounded as if
years had gone by since he had last spoken, instead of a matter of
hours.  He was frowning faintly, like everything were new to him.

"How did I get here?"

Fear clutched at Scully's heart.  She hauled hard on the wheel,
pulling the car onto the narrow verge.  She shifted the transmission
into park, but left the engine running - just in case.

"What's going on, Mulder?  You said yesterday you were going to shower
and pack, but instead you ran out on me.  Next thing I know, the kids
are telling me they showed you the way to Yellow Base and I got Mr
I-Am-Base-Security-Pretending-I-Am-A-Reporter on my case.  Now here
you are, looking like some kinda refugee from the Twilight Zone!  What
gives, Mulder?  What happened to you in there?"

Mulder had sat through her tirade in a kind of astonished silence.
There was no deceit in his eyes, she noticed, no dissembling.  The
surprise gave way to a dawning of fear.

"I can't - remember," he said.  "Scully, I can't remember!"  He raised
shaking hands to his face.  "After the motel - nothing."  There was a
fine mist of perspiration on his forehead and upper lip.

"You might've been injured in some way, and this is just a temporary
memory loss related to that." Scully touched his shoulder lightly,
seeing his eyes so pale for once they might almost have been gray.
"Let's go.  See if we can find where you left the car and get the hell
out of here."

Mulder nodded, and she pulled off the verge.  They hadn't gone much
more than a mile or so, when he clutched at the dashboard.

"Scully, stop the car!"

As soon as she slammed on the brakes, he was shoving open his door.
He managed to stumble clear before falling to his knees.  Scully ran
round to his side in time to see him throw up violently.  Her anger
and frustration gave way to concern.

When he had finished, he knelt in the grass for a long time,
shivering.  Scully sat side-on in the passenger seat, holding his
head. and she wanted to say: You okay, Mulder? again, in that sardonic
way she kept especially for him. Slumped bonelessly in her arms,
Mulder's hair was drenched in sweat, and he was shivering as if in the
grip of a high grade fever.  He looked terribly young and vulnerable,
and her sarcasm was totally inappropriate.

What am I doing?  Scully thought desperately, yet still looking for
something warm to drape around Mulder's shoulders.  This guy is a
grade-A nut, a loon two steps from the psych ward who's going to have
me in there with by the weekend at least, and here I am out in the
middle of nowhere holding his head while he tosses his cookies.  It's
not even as if I like him.

But was that sentiment even true any more?

The previous night she had picked at a solitary dinner, all the while
cursing whatever Fates had enticed her superiors to partner her with
the obviously delusional and quite probably psychotic Fox Mulder.
Scully had easily cursed him to Hell and back for keeping her up half
to night,one hand on her gun, wondering if the chambered round was for
their mysterious assailants or for her errant partner.

She sighed and wished Mulder would open his eyes.

Mulder was too embarrassed to open his eyes, even though he was aware
of how heavily he was resting back against Scully.  He still couldn't
think of her as a partner, although she'd just pulled his butt out of
the proverbial fire.  All he could knew was that he had committed the
ultimate sin, and showed his vulnerability in front of this capable
and independent woman who hated his guts already.

The day she had walked into his office, Mulder had been determined to
dislike her, convinced she would be some dried-up twerp with neither
life nor looks.  Instead he got Scully, full of fire and verve, who
confronted him, challenged him and lobbed his verbal grenades straight
back at him.

She was wonderful.

He didn't trust her, wasn't even sure if he liked her; but she was
wonderful all the same.  It was cold, sitting out here on the verge,
and at last, Mulder pushed himself to his feet.  He swayed a little,
from shock and dehydration, and he was still dreadfully pale, but his
eyes were clearer, his face no longer empty.

Scully helped him back into the car, reaching across him to do up his
seat belt.

"I got it," the old resilience was seeping back into his voice,
although his customary 'bounce' was still posted 'missing in action'.
His hands no longer fumbled, easily catching and holding her.  The
tingle raced up her arm from their entwined fingers, and scrambled her
brains for the instant it took him to whisper, "I'm sorry," and smile
in that oddly crooked way of his that easily deducted a decade and a
half from him.

In that frozen portion of time that might have been a second or an
eternity, their eyes met properly for the first time, and a small
corner was turned in their relationship.  It wasn't as momentous as
swearing undying fealty to one another, or even resigning themselves
to becoming friends. It was simply acceptance.  The truth was out
there; the same truth for both of them, even if they each had their
own way of finding and defining it.

Scully shook her head once, clearing the cobwebs.  "I'm going to see
Budahus after I drop you off at the motel.  I need to know what
happened to you in there."

"I'll go with you ...."

"No, Mulder.  No way."  Scully was determined.

"I need to know as well."  His voice trembled until he got it firmly
under control.  "Scully, don't make this any more embarrassing than it
is already.  Please?"

One abortive visit later, Scully skidded to a halt in front of the
motel.  She slammed the door so hard the car shook.  Mulder forbore to
comment that maybe the rental company would like their vehicle back in
one piece.

"Go take a shower," she ordered him.  "I'll be right out here if you
feel dizzy or anything.

Mulder raised an eyebrow, but didn't make the innuendo-ridden remark
she had expected.  He went into the bathroom and she heard the shower
start.  He was back out again inside five minutes, pale and clad only
in a towel.  He was trembling as he held out his arms to her.
"Scully, look at this."

She looked.  His wrists were swollen, chafed red raw, with lesser
marks on his biceps.  There was a smear of dried blood on the inside
of both elbows where he was bruised black around raised puncture
wounds.  Two broad, and faintly red bands crossed his chest and his
stomach.

"Sit down, Mulder," Scully guided him to a chair.  She turned his arms
over, running her fingers over the abrasions.  "At the elbow, those
look like needle tracks.  And these .... I've seen these kind of marks
on psychotic patients who've been fighting against being held in
restraints ....  Mulder, you must've been tied down while they shot
you full of - " she stopped.

"Shot me full of what?"  His voice was strained and sweat stood out on
his brow.  "Scully, what?"

She shook her head, "I don't know, Mulder, but when we get back to DC,
I'm taking you out to Georgetown.  Friend of mine works in the
diagnostic lab there.  I want her to run a few tests.  Find out what
they used on you.

Mulder rubbed a shaking hand across his eyes, then winced as they
smarted and started to water.

"Let me see," Scully tilted his head and shone a tiny flashlight into
each eye in turn.

"Your eyes are very bloodshot, and you seem very light sensitive."
His eyes were streaming in response to her examination.  "Your eyes
are very irritated, like you'd been using some kind of drops.  Is it
uncomfortable?"

He nodded, squinting against the light.  "Maybe you should see an
ophthalmologist as well, just to be on the safe side."  She rested her
hand on one tense, hunched shoulder.  "Go finish your shower, Mulder.
I'll call my friend."

He nodded acquiescence, instead of the arguments she expected.

Freshly showered and dressed in clean clothes, Mulder seemed much more
like his old self, although the irritation had yet to fade from around
his eyes.  Scully noticed he slipped sunglasses on when they were
checking out.  He still had little to say, either on the way to the
airport, or on the plane.  She missed his general chattiness, and was
even more disconcerted when he waved away the meal served on the
plane, huddling instead under the thin blanket.

She refused to let Mulder go home as he wanted when they arrived in
DC, driving them instead straight out to Georgetown.  There, Scully's
friend, a Dr Elizabeth Beecham, research biochemist and sometime med
school graduate, put him through an extensive battery of tests that
finally drained him of whatever energy reserves he had been running
on.

Mulder keeled over quite nonchalantly as they were unhooking him from
the last of the tests, and since he was basically okay, they put him
to bed to let him sleep it off while they waited for his test results.



"Dana?"

"Elizabeth!  Any news?"

Elizabeth sat beside Scully, a wad of printouts in her hand and her
forehead scrunched in confusion.  "Apart from the abrasions and the
puncture wounds - you were right, by the way, those are needle tracks
- he's physically okay.  There's some seriously weird stuff in his
blood chemistry though.  At first I thought it was one of the new
derivatives of sodium pentathol but there's something else built onto
it.  It looks like some kind of artificial neural receptor.  It
appears to be triggered by a severe adrenaline reaction, but in some
ways it seems to behave more like a hallucinogenic."

"Could it have been used to reprogram his mind?"

"Without knowing more about it, it's hard to say, but from what I've
got here it would seem entirely possible."

Scully glanced across to where Mulder lay sleeping.  She wondered what
his dreams were to tangle him in the sheets like that.  Perhaps the
clues to his missing memories lay locked inside his unconscious mind.
She reached out and touched his face gently, soothing him, wondering
if they would ever recover his missing hours, or if it was best that
they stayed lost.  ??