Alien

Disclaimer: I don't own the characters of the X-files, nor do I intend on making any money from this fic. The lyrics to the song below are for "Alien" by Bush, and I don't own those either.

Authors Note: Wow, I'm actually going somewhere with this. It's going to have chapters and a plot, and maybe even a meaning about the nature of identity. *Shock!* The only problem is, I'm a busy university student so anywhere I go with this I will be going slowly. If you're interested in the fic at all, just leave your email address in the reviews, and I'll email you with a little reminder whenever it gets updated. Maybe leave a little review in there as well. You know, while you're there. (Nothing burns me more than having a story with 2000 hits and only 4 reviews! Even if you think it's shit, at least tell me.)


Satellite comes and goes
We give each other all we know
In silence we still talk
By the light of the stereo, waltz
And will you rain down
In your cinematic love truck
I want to hold you like nothing's going stop us

She comes to take me away
Its all that I needed
I don't breathe another lover

Flicker on a TV screen
Everything's more than it seems
Mighty backward fall
Stare at the light on the wall
I swear to this
She felt like velvet
Second blonde child, like velvet

She comes to take me away
Its all that I needed
I don't breathe another lover

I'm an alien
You're an alien
It's a beautiful rain
Beautiful rain
Beautiful rain

***

Mulder woke up feeling like shit. His head was acheing, throbbing in time with his pulse. His limbs managed to feel both heavy and completely unsound. He was shakey, nauseous, and his mouth tasted like a barn. Without moving his actual head, he cast his eyes downwards to look at the empty bottles that cluttered the floor, made a mental note of the number under "too much." The last thing he remembered that night was drifting into frustrated sleep watching old porn and cursing his temporarily unresponsive dick. Definitely too much. Slowly and unpleasantly, he peeled the side of his face from the leather seat of the couch to prop himself up on one elbow. He caught a whiff of his skunky odour and grimaced. A shower sounded like heaven; he could practically hear the water running. Actually, he COULD hear water running.

Mulder half rolled, half fell from the couch, the empties he landed on bluntly bruising his ribs and hips.

"Fuck," he muttered, addressing the world and life in general.

He fumbled for the gun on the coffee table. As his fingers reached it it he attempted to sit up, but only caught his head on the edge of the table.

"Fuck!" he repeated, more emphatically, and pushed himself to his feet.

Clutching at his injured and still throbbing head, he shuffled through bottles towards the bathroom. In no particular hurry, and frankly still a little drunk, he took a moment to scratch himself and sigh before getting into a proper defensive postion, crouched with gun at the ready. He counted to three and kicked in the door.

"Hands Up! FBI!" he shouted, unable to surpress the wince as his head pounded three-fold from the excersion. Spots floated before his eyes momentarily.

The atmosphere of the bathroom was thick and soupy, making it difficult to breathe. Steam was billowing from the shower and for a moment Mulder couldn't see anything. But as the fog rolled out through the open door into the hall, the air cleared and slowly the slender figure of a girl was revealed.

She was crouched on the floor of the tub, her hands up as Mulder requested, her hair plastered to her face and breasts, her expression bewildered.

Lowering his gun slowly, Mulder took a moment to try and process the scene before him. Of all the questions battling in his head, the first that managed to escape was a nervous "Oh my God! How old are you?" It was only then that he noticed she was trembling violently, a thin trickle of bright blood winding it's way slowly from her left nostril, blurring in the stream of water that was beating her face.

Mulder sighed, and brought the muzzle of his gun up to massage his pulsating temple. Thoughts of pulling the trigger flickered across his consiousness.

"You wanna go get some eggs?"

*

Sitting across from Scully, in the cheap diner down the road from his apartment, picking at his eggs, Mulder felt tired and kind of ridiculous. Then again, Scully often made him feel a little ridiculous. She was looking out at him from under skeptically knit brows, her attractive mouth turned down at the corners. She shot a look over his shoulder at the mystery girl, who was cleaned up and sitting at the counter, a slight ways away from thier booth, drinking a choclate milk. Mulder could hear her thoughts, but listened to her voice them anyway.

"Let me get this straight. You got very drunk last night -drunk to the point where you might not remember your actions clearly or even at all, I might add- then you awoke this morning to find a girl in your shower. And your first assumption is that she's a victim of alien abduction?"

"Well, not my FIRST assumption." Mulder smiled a little sheepishly, not quite meeting Scully's eyes. "But it all became clear quite quickly. She exibited all the classic signs of abduction: nose bleed, diorientation." He looked at her encouragingly.

Scully was not impressed. "Mulder, I don't think that aliens were the ones probing her last night." She glanced again at the girl, frowning. "Mulder, how old is she?"

Mulder buried his face in his hands for a moment. "She's 17," he mumbled through his fingers.

"Mulder!"

"It's really not what you think, Scully. I remember falling asleep, and she definitly was not there. And even if she was, nothing could have happened because I had...." His sentance trailed off into his palm as he wiped his mouth, obscuring his last words.

"What?"

"Whisky dick. I had whisky dick!" he hissed.

Scully's expression flickered towards amusement, which she did a poor job of trying to hide. "I'm not even going to ask how you're so sure of that," she smirked. Scully's levity vanished quickly, however, as she went back to studying the girl.

She was wearing some of Mulder's old clothes, a black T-shirt and black jeans. The ridiculous oversized fit only served to make her seem even more childish. Beneath the baggy fabric it was easy to discern that her body was slender towards thin; collarbones and one slight shoulder peeking from the neckline. Her fingers as they clasped the chocolate milk were delicate and long. Her skin was ghostly pale, and her hair was white blonde, falling in gentle ripples nearly to her waist.

"She says her name is Ella Wallace. She claims to be from Maine, says she has no idea how she got here. Last thing she remembers is going to bed in her parent's house."

The stool she was perched upon was just high enough that her feet did not touch the ground. Mulder's gigantic shoes had fallen from her and lay on the floor. Unconcerned, Ella's legs swung gently, her bare toes brushing the side of the counter periodically. A loud slurping noise was heard as Ella finished off the chocolate milk. She glanced over at the two FBI agents questioningly.

She had already finished her breakfast when Scully had arrived to meet them at the diner, and Mulder had bought her the chocolate milk to occupy her while he and his partner talked in private. Mulder waved at her, letting her know it was alright to join them.

He leaned forward and whispered quickly to Scully: "Look, she's really upset. She woke up freezing cold and naked in a strange man's bathroom with no idea how she got there or what might have happened. The fact that I'm FBI is probably the only thing keeping her sane right now. I don't want you grilling her about any kind of probing, all right?"

"Give me a little bit of credit Mulder, I'm not completely tactless."

Looking chastised, Mulder glanced up at Ella as she approched, shuffling in the reclaimed shoes. Thier eyes met, and Mulder was struck by thier strange quality. They were large, heavy lidded, and slightly farther apart than normal. It wasn't an unattractive effect, but it made her look either sleepy or sly, he couldn't be sure which was the stronger impression. Their color was also odd: a shallow, murky turquoise, which seemed to defy the illumination being offered by the overhead flourescent lights.

She slid in beside him, quietly, and stared down at the chipping formica of the counter.

As Scully regarded her she noted how postively lurid the shiny bright red vinyl of the booth seemed when compared to her stark black and white countenance. As the silence grew, so grew Scully's discomfort, until she was compelled to break it.

"I was in such a rush to talk to Agent Mulder when I arrived that we havn't had a formal introduction." She smiled brightly, extending her hand. "I'm Special Agent Dana Scully, Agent Mulder's partner at the FBI."

Ella looked up, fixing Scully with her peculiar gaze for a moment, before accepting the gesture. Ella took Scully's hand and squeezed it gently.

"How do you do. Ella Wallace."

Ella's hands were tremendously cold, and Scully felt a vague sense of unease settling over her, and she let the girls hand drop as quickly as possible. 'It's from holding her chocolate milk!' Scully scolded herself. She felt silly, and smiled that much wider for it, as if a show of teeth would scare her ill-humours away.