TITLE: Heaven's Ashes
AUTHOR: stellar_dust
EMAIL: stellar_dust_x@yahoo.com
WEBSITE: http://katycat.net/xfiles/
ARCHIVE/FEEDBACK: Sure!  And if you tell me 
you've archived it, I'll link back to your 
site.
SPOILERS: FTF
RATING: PG-13
CHALLENGE: AU
WORD COUNT: HAHAHAHAHAHAHA you're funny.
SUMMARY: "But what about Mulder?"  "He'll never 
make it!"
DISCLAIMER: CC would never be so cruel and 
heartless.
DATE: 08/05/2004
NOTE: This was written for the Alternate
Universes challenge at 
http://www.livejournal.com/~xf_drabble . It 
turned out to be anything *but* a drabble.
EXTRA NOTE: I'm not ruling out a sequel.  Or two. 
Encouragement highly encouraged.  d-;


"C-cold. So c-c-cold .."

Her voice was barely a whisper in the throbbing 
depths of the ship. He stared for a second, 
horrified, grateful beyond belief - conscious! 
She was conscious!

"Hang on, Scully. I'll get you out of there." 
He pulled frantically at the ice surrounding 
her; it came out in ragged chunks that he 
tossed to the floor and suddenly she was 
falling, falling forward into his arms, naked, 
in a torrent of water like amniotic fluid. 
Alive. Her teeth chattered. God, she was so - 
"C-c-c-cold."

"It's ok, Scully. It's gonna be okay." He 
whipped off his parka and his snow pants, 
pulled his extra pair of thermal socks out of 
his pocket. He'd freeze on the surface but she 
needed them more -

Mulder didn't notice the convulsions until 
they'd already started. He struggled to his 
feet and got Scully next to him as best he 
could. And then he felt the tremor. It was in 
the structure of the ship, it was in the air.

With a loud *thud* (Mulder jumped) the pod 
beside him cracked. He looked up - all down the 
line they were cracking, one after another, and 
far, far down in the distance there was already 
something - unspeakable - /looking/ at him.

God, no. No! He looked back and forth, 
calculated times, distances, speeds -

There was no way they'd make it out in time.

He slung Scully's quiet form over his shoulder 
and *ran.*

*************

Mulder turned the knobs wildly on the remaining 
oxygen tanks, praying he was turning them the 
right way, breathing with relief when he heard 
the telltale hiss, shoved Scully inside the 
transport bed and climbed in after her, pulled 
the top closed just *seconds* before something 
that was all claws and teeth and eyes and slime 
*slammed* into the side -

Mulder held his breath. The seal held.

Two more crashes - three - the vessel still 
held, and the thing slunk away after easier 
prey. He breathed again.

Outside the tiny capsule of sanity, he could 
hear raucous screams and cries, loud, cloying 
wails as though a soul was torn asunder from 
its body, muted through the walls of the 
isolation chamber. Mulder shivered, and the 
entire huge structure shuddered almost in 
perverted empathy.

"M-mulder?" Scully's eyes fluttered open. "Wha-"

"Shhh, Scully." He pulled her close against 
him, sharing heat. "I'm here. We'll be okay."

With all his soul, he willed truth into his 
voice. He watched Scully's eyes drop closed as 
the screaming went on, and the giant spaceship 
he'd invaded began to shake itself into 
oblivion.

**************

It might have been minutes or hours that he lay 
there, wrapped around Scully, watching her 
breath, marveling as color crept back into her 
face.

The screams had stopped not long after Scully 
closed her eyes. He supposed it hadn't been 
long; time seemed subjective, somehow.

In the same instant, Scully's eyes opened, and 
the throbbing, rattling concussion of the ship 
dwindled into silence.

**************

She said she thought she'd be ok. She didn't 
say she was fine, so he believed her. They 
waited until the silence became oppressive, 
until they couldn't think for the cotton in 
their ears. Then Mulder told her everything - 
everything he'd done since that bee in his 
hallway. Her eyes widened and with a gasp, 
her hands moved to his gunshot wound, probing, 
gentle, ensuring.

"It's okay." He smiled and took her hand 
between his. "I'm okay." Their eyes met for a 
second, held. She nodded.

Mulder grasped the catch for the isolation 
chamber. "Then what do you say we blow this 
popsicle stand?"

She chuckled and shook her head, which he took 
for a "yes." With a soft *poof* the lid came 
off and they were free. Mulder clambered over 
the side and gave her a hand up -

- into a charnel house.

"Oh my God," Scully whispered, shrinking back 
toward the relative safety of the pod. Mulder 
could only stare.

It was death. It was all death. All around 
them, all through the cavernous chamber and as 
far down the tunnels as his eyes could see, 
they lay strewn like so many broken branches 
after a storm. Black, ichorous blood pooled 
beneath their grey, slimy bodies, sightless 
eyes coated in gelatinous, filmy death. 
Everywhere. They were everywhere.

Scully recovered first. "I thought you said it 
was a /weak/ vaccine ...?"

Mulder shook his head wonderingly. "They don't 
know what they hell they've got ..."

"Come on." He grabbed her hand and pulled her 
along after him. "Let's get out of here."

*************

The hatch wouldn't open.

He'd banged, cajoled, twisted, shot at it - 
nothing. He was positive this was where he'd 
entered the ship. No question in his mind about 
that.

It simply refused every effort he put against 
it.

They weren't stuck. He wouldn't accept that.

Mulder pulled out his cell phone. No service. 
Of course.

He slumped to the corrugated floor beside 
Scully and dropped his head to his knees.

He hadn't followed her to Antarctica, saved her 
life, only to lose them both to slow starvation 
and death under the ice. He *hadn't*. He 
wouldn't *let* it happen.

A moment later he felt her hand on his arm. 
"Mulder. We're here. Let's see what we can 
find." And she was on her feet helping him up.

Mulder felt a surge of shame. *He* was supposed 
to be the strong one; she'd just been poisoned, 
experimented on, imprisoned. He shook her hand 
off and rose on his own.

"You're right .. you're right," he breathed. 
"Okay. Let's go. We'll find a way."

She looked him in the eye and nodded, then 
picked the right-hand corridor at random and 
led the way. She'd changed into her old clothes 
from the isolation chamber, and once again wore 
her cross around her neck; the clack of her 
heels echoed reassuringly in the silence as 
Mulder followed her into the belly of the 
beast.

******************

Scully stopped short in the doorway. Mulder 
tensed and moved up beside her, mentally 
preparing himself for more gruesome bodies, 
half human, half alien, littering the floor as 
they'd seen in countless dozens of rooms just 
like this. /So many of them/, he thought. /So 
many. And so few of us./

No bodies, was the first thing his mind 
registered. The second was the opposite wall.

Or more precisely, the lack thereof.

It was black, pure black, deeper than the 
deepest black of an alien's blood. Tiny pricks 
of light seemed to glimmer at the edges, but 
disappeared when he tried to focus on them 
directly. Dominating the picture was a tiny, 
glowing, blue ball, mottled with brown and 
streaks of white.

It was all moving slowly, ever so slowly 
inching itself beyond the left wall.

Mulder's throat constricted. He could almost 
reach out and touch it - it was the most 
beautiful, precious, evocative thing he'd ever 
experienced. The Apollo photographs were 
nothing. Nothing ...

"Oh my God," Scully croaked.

/Oh, *shit*./

"Scully, that .. " Mulder swallowed. "That 
can't be what it looks like."

She turned to him, eyes wide and breathless. 
She shook her head in a wordless denial.

Mulder had nothing to offer, and she took it. 
She turned and ran, back the way they'd come, 
away, far away from this impossible truth.

Mulder couldn't run. He fell to his knees and 
started panicking.

****************
FOUR DAYS LATER

Scully paced the hallway outside the control 
room. They'd found the room on the second day, 
filled with instruments (luckily) labeled in 
English, along with quite a few boxes of 
hastily abandoned food, bottled water, and 
Morley's cigarettes. Mulder had been glued to 
the instrumentation for 48 hours, desperately 
trying to find something, anything that would 
start the engines again and take them home. In 
the end he'd had to settle for short, modulated 
radio signals, but even those were beginning to 
weaken. The artificial lights had started to 
dim, too ..

Scully had occupied herself in the rest of the 
ship, trying to find a mechanical cause. It was 
a small favor that the alien corpses didn't 
smell ... In the end, though, it hadn't been 
her physics degree that solved the problem.

She massaged her forehead. She didn't want to 
tell Mulder .. he'd been so quiet since the 
first day. She knew he was blaming himself, 
taking all the guilt and anger, subsuming it 
half into action and the other half to 
brooding. At first she'd felt vindicated - let 
him stew. It *was* his fault. *Everything* was 
his fault, everything ...

But working alone, in the bowels of this odd 
ship, she'd calmed. Thanks to him, they were 
alive; and life was hope. She needed to tell 
him that, but she didn't know how to start - 
and this news was *not* how she wanted to open 
the lines of communication.

The spaceship was biological. With the vaccine, 
Mulder had killed it as surely as if he'd 
crushed the engine of a Model T beneath his 
boots.

She whipped around. She couldn't. She wanted to 
see the Earth first. She needed to pray.

The ship was rotating at a rate of about once 
every two days. She didn't know the exact size 
of the craft, wasn't sure if the spin 
contributed to the obvious artificial gravity. 
Come to that, was it her imagination, or did 
she feel lighter today ....?

Anyway, if the spin hadn't slowed, the Earth 
should be back in view right now. Scully strode 
purposefully toward the observation room.

Mulder was already there, head bowed, facing 
the screen. Scully hovered in the doorway, not 
wanting to leave, not wanting to be seen.

"We're not going home," he said, without 
turning. "Are we." It wasn't a question.

Instantly, Scully was next to him. "You don't 
know that. We aren't *that* far. Just barely 
outside of lunar orbit. Someone will hear your 
message."

He shook his head impatiently. "It's getting 
weaker. You /know/ that, Scully."

She didn't have an answer.

Scully licked her lips, swallowed, stared 
sightlessly out into space. /Literally./ She 
didn't appreciate the irony at all.

"This ship. It's huge. They'll come for it, 
they won't just -"

"The ship's dead. I killed it. It's 
contaminated. It has to be." He spoke briskly, 
hoarsely. He didn't add: they won't come.

She had no answer for that, either. She knew 
the lights were dimming, and the gravity ... 
she knew exactly how much food and water 
remained. She had no idea about the air, but 
somehow, she thought that would be the least of 
their worries ...

They stood like that, still, contained, 
separate, staring at the marble embedded in the 
void, for what felt an eternity.

"Scully," Mulder rasped out. She looked at him. 
His eyes were clenched shut, his face 
contorted. "I'm so, so s-"

"Mulder, don't." She touched his arm. He 
jumped.

Scully took a deep breath. On the count of 
three, she pulled his arm around her and leaned 
into his side, her own arms wrapping tight 
around his waist. She leaned her head on his 
chest and turned again to the window.

Instinctively, he wrapped her in his embrace.

"It's so beautiful, Mulder." She worked hard to 
keep the tremor from her voice. Failed. "I'm so 
glad I'm alive to see it with you."

He pulled her closer, starting to chuckle, and 
pressed his slow sad smile against the crown of 
her head. She felt his tears on her scalp as he 
murmured into her hair. "I always wanted to be 
an astronaut."