Slow Life

by Christina Simmons

St. Raphael Community Hospital

"No joy?"

Special Agent Abigail Beck stood in the doorway of the hospital room, eyes fixed on the still, silent figures within. Michael O'Leary, eyes dark from lack of sleep, shook his head and squeezed her arm, but did not reply.

It was a nice room, Abbe thought distractedly. Not stark institutional beige and cold tile; this room had wallpaper, and soft lighting, and carpeting, and flowers in vases. Pictures of family and friends, taken from the patient's apartment, adorned a side table. Manda would like it, Abbe thought... if she wasn't stretched in the hospital bed under a quilt from her family's home, wires and plugs sprouting from her like electronic tendrils, machines at the head of the bed hissing and beeping and blipping. A book lay open on the covers, Abbe noted. The Cat Who Talked to Ghosts -- one of Manda's favorites; she was addicted to that mystery series. Somebody had been reading to her, then... good. Quiet, unassuming Manda would enjoy that, the special attention.

"How long?" she asked quietly. Michael turned appraising eyes on the two agents within... Vic, who had brought Manda in himself, glanced up, face expressionless, and shook his head. It had been a full day now. Neither needed to reply... the answer would unwelcome, anyway.

It had been a normal day... nothing out of the ordinary, and she knew that for a fact as the scenes replayed themselves endlessly in her mind. She'd felt fine when she got up that morning -- fine but for the fact that she'd slept through her alarm again, the second time that week, and had to dash to regain her schedule. It was Wednesday, which meant that the natural-grain bakery would have poppy seed muffins for Abbe and carob-chip chocolate donuts for Sue, as well as the other office favorites -- she couldn't, wouldn't, forget those. Beltway traffic was anticipated, and she slipped in the agent's entryway and down into the Bullpen on the click of nine. Crisis averted.

March 16, 1996

St. Raphael Community Hospital

Vigil succeeded vigil -- Sue cheerfully keeping Manda posted as to the goings-on of departmental life, Jon playing her role on an interactive laptop game, Jake cajoling her to wake up so she could introduce him to the pretty young nurse on who worked the graveyard shift. Kennedy came supplied with files, and proceeded to keep up a chatter as naturally as if there was a desk between the two of them rather than a hospital bed. Michael, who had seen the movie "While You Were Sleeping" at Abbe's insistence some months before, opted to play poker, using Oreo cookies and Nilla wafers as chips, and complaining bitterly when Manda proceeded to beat him.

Vic, confined reluctantly to his own fixed block of hours, said nothing at all, only sat and held her hand until his successor chased him, protesting, from the room. This, Abbe later informed Michael, served no useful purpose that she could see -- with quiet stubbornness, Vic had taken up residence in the hospital waiting room... and as the days wore on, he was not alone.

Abbe and Kennedy were out on assignment; so were Quinn and Jon. Michael, as usual, was in a meeting. The others descended on the donuts, and she backed away, quietly enjoying the surrounding chaos of a basement morning. Vic asked after the case notes from their last assignment. Jake diverted himself from merrily hounding Sue long enough to comment that it must have been some date last night, if Manda was exhausted beyond words this morning. She was tired, but hadn't thought it showed; she hit Jake over the head with a sheaf of computer paper, and grinned.

By lunch she wondered if maybe she'd caught that bug that was going around. She's slept soundly the night before, but a heavy exhaustion was making even filing paperwork a strenuous process. The world around her seemed accelerated, jumpy, like a film just beginning to fast--forward. Conversational voices had a harsh edge to them, even the ones asking if she was feeling all right. When she'd tried to answer, she'd stumbled on the words, hearing them slur, then blushed and fallen silent. They'd known something was wrong, then -- insisted that she stop in at the infirmary -- and when she'd finally conceded, they'd sent Vic to see that she got there intact.

She remembered being horribly embarrassed when her legs wouldn't work properly, shuffling, lead--weighted. She remembered Vic asking how long she'd felt that way, seeing the concern on his face, and she'd wanted to reassure him that she'd be fine... but then her legs stopped working altogether and folded under her, and after that...

The hospital. She'd thought she must be dreaming -- caught in that old nightmare. She heard the whining, the buzzing -- high--pitched, painful to her ears. And the voices -- gibbering, too fast to understand... they might be human voices, but after a times she couldn't be sure. They came in spurts... some low, some whining, in fitful bursts that gabbled and vanished. Colors shifted and blurred before her eyes -- things flashing by, too fast to see. Colors and shapes and lights... she was dizzy, horribly dizzy, and the world was moving too fast, a videotape stuck in "scan" mode. She was floating, then drowning, in a blur of light and noise... and she was alone, horribly alone.

She'd tried to cry out, to call for help... but the voices kept up their overlapping babble, speaking over her voice, incomprehensible. They didn't -- or couldn't -- hear her. Her own voice was clear to her... her own thoughts plain in her mind... but nothing she tried could bridge the gap, stop the voices, slow the world. She tried, again and again, calling for help -- begging the voices to stop -- pleading for someone, anyone to answer... but no answer came, and after a time, she fell silent, listening to her own thoughts, alone...

It was easy, at first. She considered her situation objectively, analyzing what might have brought this state upon her... it must have something to do with the lab she and Vic had investigated, the one Reese had found so peculiar. She remembered Dr. Gianetti, that odd little man with his plants. His videos of accelerated plant growth, supporting his hypothesis that plants were living, thinking organisms. They certainly acted like it... in accelerated film motion, plants writhed and climbed, shifted. "Slow life" the scientist had called it. The same life as human, only moving at a fraction of the pace. It was the entire foundation of his work... modifying plant DNA to fuse with a human biology, to slow the process of terminal illness... a noble cause, if he hadn't been experimenting on humans.

She played the fight over in her mind... they'd found the room. The beds of blank--face, wide--eyed children, lying, unmoving, surrounded by plants and flowers, lit by growth--lights... a sinister pastoral landscape, terrifyingly surreal. They'd been attacked... that sweet little man going entirely mad, trying to drive them away from "his children"... she remembered the sharpness of the needle, driven hard into her side, and remembered herself insisting to Vic that it hadn't been more than a light wound, that it didn't need attention, that she'd keep an eye on it...

March 17, 1996

St. Raphael Community Hospital

"No change at all?" Vic heard the doctor ask. They might think he couldn't hear; they were certainly staying outside of the room, speaking in low enough tones.

"We still can't get her to keep her eyes closed, but she's quieted down, at least... not a peep out of her." came the reply, the older nurse who kept tabs on the machines and fluids. "We can be thankful for that much, at least... it was frightening the younger nurses, and a few of your interns. Eerie, if you ask me, doctor." As if they'd noticed his abrupt glance, the two fell suddenly silent, and moved down the hall, out of Vic's line of sight.

Thankful, my ass... he thought. When they'd brought Manda in, he'd been just as unsettled as anyone by her moaning... the drawn--out sounds, guttural, groaning, like poorly--imitated whale cries. She'd started it not long after the machines had been connected to her... started, and sometimes kept it up for an hour or longer. The staff had finally taken to filling her full of sedatives, claiming that the noise would disturb the other patients...

If he'd had his way, Vic thought, they'd never have made it through the door with the needles... for as chilling as the steady moan had been, rising and falling in no particular cadence, it had at least proved for certain that Manda was alive, without the machines to make that claim for her.

It was hard to keep thinking. She was tired, so very tired... but when sleep came creeping, odd thoughts followed it... random memory, phrases so jumbled in grammar and context that they were meaningless... and the fear lurking over and around it all. The endlessness of it... she didn't want to sleep; she was afraid of what dreams might come. The outside voices came and went, weaving about her own thought--voice...

Is this what it feels like to lose your mind?

It was a cold, cold thought, but she was too tired to chase it away.

March 18, 1996

St. Raphael Community Hospital

"I wish she'd close her eyes..." Sue said quietly, shifting her own eyes about the room. "It gives me the creeps, just looking at her like that." Manda stared, as she had since her admission into the long--term care wing, at nothing at all... eyes open, glazed, looking straight ahead, but not seeing. If it were not for the blinking... the slow--motion open--and--shut that seemed to take forever in itself, she would resemble too many fresh corpses... Sue shuddered.

"Don't say that." Kennedy replied evenly. "She might hear you."

"I had a roommate who used to sleep like that..." Sue patted Manda's shoulder, almost apologetically. "I never got used to it from her, either..."

"They tried closing them for her..." said the nurse, entering the room with fresh linens. "And we thought it would work, for a while. But she only opened them again, after a bit. So we decided to leave her.... she knows what's best for her, the dear... here, would you girls mind helping me shift her?"

She couldn't keep the voices away. They were disembodied now... drifting, sometimes accompanied by a visual flash of something... terrifying in their insistence. In mounting desperation, she'd tried to shut them out, to block them out by focusing on her own thoughts... thoughts that were growing too strange, too random, too frightening. The loneliness was pervasive... it prevented her from sleeping, forced her eyes wide, praying for a glimpse of the familiar, of a friendly face.

My friends... where are my friends? And my family. Has everyone gone? Have they left me again?

March 20, 1996

J. Edgar Hoover Building, X Files Division Offices

"Well, you can damned well ask him again!"

Abbe slammed the phone down, drawing tired glances from the bullpen. Michael, sitting opposite her desk, closed his eyes in resignation. He hadn't expected much from the "good doctor;" Giannetti, for all his protestations that he would try to help, if only they would let him to his laboratory, claimed to have no idea what could have brought on Manda's waking coma. The hospital physicians, the specialists from the university, none of them could even find a name for the condition... not a true coma, with vital signs reading as high as hers did, but too low still to be considered a vegetative state. It had been a full ten days, and no change at all...

Well, Abbe thought, at least the condition wasn't deteriorating...

There was no time at all... not now. She'd long since stopped even trying to guess where she was, what had happened... right now, it was as much as she could do to remember who she was. The world was false, if it was much of a world at all... the noisy void, the bright abyss. She was floating and alone, and sometimes, repeating her own name, silently, was as much as she could manage...

March 21, 1996

St. Raphael Community Hospital

"Do you think it helps?" Jon glanced up at Abbe, at Vic's silhouette in the doorway. The agents had arranged a system of shifts now with Manda's family... with her mother and youngest sister. Still, there were more watchers than time slots, and often visitations overlapped.

It was Vic who nodded, seconded by Abbe. "It helps us." he said quietly. "We hope it helps Manda. We do what we can."

"I didn't really know her that well, you know." Jon looked down now, wondering why he should feel regret at the admission. He didn't like that, the awkwardness of it. It wasn't his fault, or his choice, really. In a normal division, even working friendships were luxuries. Colleagues could go weeks without seeing one another, and that was accepted as commonplace.

But how well did any of them know each other, really? And Manda had always behaved as though she knew him as well as anyone... the clowning, the water balloons in downtime, the shared friendship with Abbe and Michael. He wondered if she'd told anyone else that her old partner, Krycek, had called her "kid" -- that was their bond, their common ground. She, out of all the agents, refused to call him that... it was always "Jon," or "little brother." And she never forgot his favorite donuts... not once, since the day he'd mentioned it in passing.

Abbe touched his shoulder briefly, offering a smile.

"You think that would matter to Manda? Miss Basement Rat Congeniality?" she asked, almost teasing, and even Vic cracked a smile. "Come on... you know she's loving the attention."

The hands she could feel. Sometimes brief touches, almost a caress... sometimes lifting her arms and legs for a moment. There and gone again... warm and cold, but at least she was sure of them. And sometimes the hands stayed... warm, present, folding around her own in a grip she could feel even through the numbness and the chill that was growing in her. They anchored her to the moment, kept her from drifting wide, into the odd thoughts and fear. No voices came then... the colors slowed, the world slowed, and for that time, she could relax into sleep.

March 22, 1996

J. Edgar Hoover Building, X Files Division Offices

"We've got everything from the original lab here already... notes, computer files, patient records, everything." Vic tossed the case file to the table, pacing again.

"Nothing." Jake said, pushing the folder away from him, pressing his hands to his face, then stretching. "We've got nothing to grab at. When Giannetti injected his `guinea pigs,' they were already comatose... he's got no record of tests on any human from a fully functional state."

"Animal testing?" Sue asked, thumbing through the cardboard box. "Wait... here it is... he's got three testing groups, three separate serums... each group with a sub--section, a control group. But even if we match the symptoms, we've still got no idea exactly what it was that got into Manda's system to begin with. Vic, you were following the labs, weren't you?"

"We've got nothing." And Vic's voice was almost a monotone. "We ran tests on the various serum strains... they broke down easily enough. But the residuals from the vial Manda took... they didn't match any of them." He fished around in his pocket, and handed a pocket--sized tape recorder to Sue. "This is my last conversation with Giannetti. He says..." The tall agent paused, visibly clamping down on his personal frustration. "He says that he was just beginning to test a new batch of serum, and that he has no written records of its effects on any subject, human or animal. And..." The tone dropped as Vic's lip curled. "And he says that he's very, very sorry..."

"Right." Sue frowned, but her eyes on Vic were concerned. From where he'd sat silent for most of the meeting, AD Walter Skinner straightened, clearing his throat.

"It's now up to me, I think, to bring up the unpleasant topic of Agent Fischer's living will..."

After a time, she let the thoughts come and go as they would and released herself into the numb, cold emptiness. It buffered the outside world, the noise and light... she closed her eyes, and the darkness was a welcomed oblivion. She could not stop the voices... but at that moment, it no longer mattered.

March 25, 1996

St. Raphael Community Hospital

"Open your eyes, Manda..."

Abbe was glad that Manda's mother had stepped out of the room, leaving the night shift, as always, to her daughter's friends. It bothered her more than anything that Manda's eyes had closed, and remained closed. Her living will had been contested, both within her family and among her colleagues... and Skinner had offered no objection, recounting to Michael another incident with an agent's last wishes that had almost proved disastrous, for both herself and her partner. Still, even with the assortment of machines connected and whirring -- the best the hospital could provide, and a few that the hospital hadn't, cunningly installed and camouflaged by an old friend of Mulder's -- the doctors now shook their heads when they met her eyes. A matter of time, they said... and Abbe closed her eyes, squeezed her friend's hand, and began once more to pray.

and the little girl said what did she say Abbe I don't think this is such a good thing Michael and West are not in at the moment but if the computer doesn't crash we'll be all right and no I really don't mind Alex I miss him something awful Mom I don't think at all sometimes that maybe nothing is here I am here maybe not here at all I try to remember Vic and Sue and Jake and Jon and faces all I see are faces in my memory and it is so hard and it hurts so much the nothingness of nothing and I'm afraid and I want to go home please somebody take me home and tell me that it's going to be all right

March 26, 1996

J. Edgar Hoover Building, X Files Division Offices

"You're going to have to talk to Vic." Abbe told Michael, lowering her voice. "I don't like how he's looking..."

"He's not blaming himself, Abbe." Michael said. "If that's what you're concerned about. I've already done as much talking... to everybody... as I think we can take right now. All we can do is..."

"Is wait." Abbe snapped, then relented. "I'm sorry, Michael. It hasn't been easy on any of us."

"I hate this... stupid, idiotic, piece of junk!"

Sue marched across the bullpen with her answering machine, prepared to give it a decent burial in the trash can. His attention piqued, Jon glanced up from the video he and Vic were watching -- yet another of Giannetti's "slow-life" experiments, with plant life accelerated through time-lapse photography... this one was of the human subjects, however.

"What's up with it, Sue?"

"Ate my tape again. Listen." Sue rolled her eyes and grumbled, plugging the machine in and punching a button. An unearthly voice, slowed to the lowest of baritones and slurred by the machine's drag, groaned from the single speaker. "See what I mean?" She reached for the plug, only to leap back in shock as Jon lunged for the machine.

"No... wait!" Rewinding, Jon hit the button again, listening intently to the garbled audio. Eyes shining, he whirled on Vic. "Listen! Don't you hear it? That's it!"

The conference room was filled with a tension that had been building slowly for days now... tension brought on by waiting, powerless, steeped in oppressive helplessness. The feel had shifted subtly, however... shifted to a tense anticipation, almost a hope. Jon had locked himself into his workshop for the better part of the afternoon, refusing all outside entry, even under threat of Abbe's retribution. Now, he presented to them a video, dimming the lights.

"I had to follow a hunch here... had to pull a few strings to get access to the hospital's security camera archives, too. Watch." In hazy black and white, the image of Manda's room was desolate, the sole occupant lying still, arms at her sides, as they'd all become accustomed to seeing her. "This is what we've been seeing... what the hospital's been seeing. Manda in a coma. A vegetable. But this..." And he hit the "scan" function triumphantly. "This is what we should have been seeing! I've modified this to run twice as fast in scan mode... and even then, it's slow... but look. Look!"

Though the edges of the scene blurred with acceleration, the room took a collective breath... on the unmoving bed, the once-motionless figure was stirring. A hand moved, achingly slow, an impossibly small distance. A head turned this way, then that, as if scanning the room, searching...

"She's been moving all along... we just didn't see it. We just didn't see it!" The lights flared up again, and this time Jon was pushing forward a simple tape recorder. "You gave me this idea, Sue... and I don't know if it'll work, if I've got the right speed, but we've got to try, huh?"

The room was suddenly filled with a groaning, a low, slurred sound. Abbe glanced at her young friend speculatively. "I didn't think we had audios hooked into Manda's room in the beginning..." she said.

"We didn't." Jon grinned. "That's me." And he flicked a switch, allowing the tape to lurch back to normal speed, into a familiar voice... "Manda. Manda, do you hear me? Can you hear me, Manda? Manda. Show us that you can hear me..."

She'd almost managed to block out the voices... everything was distant, now. Even the warmth around her hands. The maddening thoughts had subsided, and she could float forever in the void they left... if only it wasn't so cold, so cold, so cold, so achingly alone... but it didn't matter anymore. Nothing mattered. The cold would take the fear away, too... and the numbness was welcome in its place. If only she wasn't so alone...

The suddenly--returning voices, outside the darkness, gibbered for a moment and then... gone. Nothing. They fell silent, leaving her... alone again, all alone. And then... sound, blessedly clear, soft, close to her ear... a familiar sound, a coming out of the pounding silence, the nothingness. What? What was it? Words... yes, she remembered words. Words that were not her own. A voice, too... Jon's young voice, cutting through the numbness, the dull ache of the solitude.

"Manda? Can you hear us, Manda? Can you show us that you hear us?"

Her own thoughts came back to her then, loud in her own mind, unfamiliar from disuse, but haltingly coherent, melting that icy cold away as she clung to the sound of the words...

Jon? Jon... Oh, Lord, thank you... I'm not crazy, I'm not... and I'm not alone, not alone, not alone...

"Look." Abbe's voice was barely a breath, but it still held a quiver. "Look."

For more than twenty minutes they had stood silent, barely moving, barely breathing. No response at all, just that glassy-eyed stare, and the eerie, almost inhuman drone of the tape player... the vital signs did not fluctuate or flutter, and that too-still form did not stir...

Until, with agonizing slowness, the closed eyes opened... opened a fraction, no more than that.

Until the once-dead eyes began to glimmer, turning liquid, and brimmed with water... and the tears began to trickle down Amanda Fischer's face.

~ END ~