========= Chapter Eight ========= She's riding in a car, and she's consumed by guilt .... She should have remained silent; she shouldn't have said anything. All her training and experience tells her that her captor is using her to get what he wants. He's using her, somehow, someway, to hurt her partner. To hurt Mulder. She should not have cooperated with this plan; she should have refused to speak, even if it meant her death. But he thrust the phone in front of her, and she couldn't help herself .... //He's got my gun,// she'd said, trying to ignore the blood trickling down her face. //He says he's going to kill me if you don't give him what he wants.// Already knowing what her partner's response would be .... //All right,// Mulder replied. //Tell him we'll negotiate ....// //He doesn't want to negotiate.// Trying and failing to keep the desperation from her voice. //He says he wants to make a trade ....// And now they have arrived. She's dragged from the car with a gun to her head, and her partner is there, he came for her -- as she knew he would. The dark-haired woman gets out of the other car and walks slowly towards her. It's Samantha, she realizes; he's exchanging his sister for her. And even as she brushes past the other woman and hurries to the safety of her partner's car, her feelings of guilt and culpability rise a thousandfold .... Dana awoke slowly; so very, very slowly. She was lying on the ground, she realized, and she was cold. And she was hungry. And it was dark. Suddenly she was wide awake, and struggling to a sitting position. Her gaze flitted about, trying to make sense of the shadows looming all around her. Something moved, and Dana rolled to her hands and knees and scuttled frantically away -- From a tree branch, swaying gently in the cool, night breeze. Just a tree branch. Only a tree branch. Not Alex, and not Donnie. And not a cold, implacable man, come to use her as a weapon against someone she loves. Just a tree branch. Dana remained where she was for a pair of minutes, crouched down in the underbrush, trying to get her thoughts in order. It had been a dream; she knew that much. And yet, at the same time, it had seemed so real -- almost as if it were a memory. She shook her head sharply. It was impossible. None of those things had happened to her. It was only a dream, and she shouldn't be wasting time worrying over them. She needed to get herself oriented, find her way out of this forest and fly away home. That should be her first, last and only priority. Dana took one more deep breath, still trying to steady her nerves, and then she stood up and looked around. While she'd been crouched there, thinking, her eyes had adjusted to the dark, and now she was able to make out a fair amount of detail. She was, of course, still deep in the forest; that much was clear. The trees in her immediate vicinity were packed closely together -- so closely that she couldn't help but wonder how she'd been able to run between them without tripping over a root or in some other way injuring herself. She remembered low-hanging branches slapping against her face, and she carefully stroked her cheeks and forehead with her fingertips. It was hard to tell in the dark, but it didn't look like there was any blood. And this still wasn't getting her anywhere. The real question that needed to be examined was which direction she should walk to find her way out of the forest -- or at least, to find a place where the trees were thin enough to allow her to take to the air. Unfortunately, she could see no clue of the answer -- the forest looked equally dark and menacing, no matter which way she turned. Finally, she just chose a direction, and started walking. Almost immediately, the ground clutter began to diminish, giving Dana a clue that she had chosen correctly. She carefully controlled her emotions; however. She'd jumped to quite enough unfounded conclusions in the past two days. A few more minutes, and the trees started to thin out, just a little -- and Dana began to walk a little faster. This really was the right direction; somehow, she could tell. And now she could hear something that sounded very much like surf pounding on a beach, and suddenly there was the smell of salt in the air. Dana started running, but this time she wasn't fleeing from the strange and terrifying -- she was running *towards* the familiar and friendly. The ocean, the sea -- it had always been her friend, for as long as she could remember. It reminded her of so many, many happy times; it could never mean anything to her but goodness and joy. And then, with almost no warning, she burst out of the forest, and found herself running across a wide beach towards the water. She slowed to a walk as she approached the waterline, finally stopping just short of the high tide mark. She was here; she was home. Not literally home, of course -- although her real home, her parents' house, was surely waiting for her, just across the horizon. But the soft, white sand sifting between her toes and the gentle surf dancing softly at her feet -- these things said //home// to her as surely as if someone had whispered the word in her ear. And yet, something wasn't quite right. She had run up to the waterline intending to wade out into the surf, just a little ways -- just far enough to get her feet wet, and feel the water rushing around her ankles. Just far enough to get reacquainted with the sea. But she couldn't do it. She'd come to a stop here, just past the reach of the incoming tide, and something wouldn't let her go any farther. Something was making her shy away from it. //Let's just say there are monsters in the water.// That was Pan's voice, she realized, echoing inside her head. He'd spoken the words to her casually, the day they'd arrived at Neverland, as part of the explanation of why he didn't dare approach the pirate ship. //Let's just say there are monsters in the water.// Dana couldn't keep herself from shivering at the memory. Monsters. In the water. She didn't believe in monsters. But somehow, she had believed Pan when he told her, in an offhand, by-the-way manner, that they exist. The water slipped up the beach a little farther, dark and glistening in the moonlight, and now filled with nameless menace. The cold wetness lightly kissed her toes, and Dana stepped back hastily, suddenly not wanting any contact with the sea. She realized she was standing transfixed, staring down at the waves, and she forced herself to look away .... And she saw the ship. It was an old-style sailing vessel, several hundred yards from shore, moving up and down on the incoming swells, its motions deceptively gentle at this distance. A line of breakers, frothy and luminscent in the dim lighting, marked the presence of a reef -- and Dana realized that, somehow, she had found her way to the cove where the pirate ship was anchored. The pirate ship. It never occurred to her that it could be a different ship. She'd only had a brief glimpse of it, the day she and Pan arrived in Neverland, but that brief look had been enough to burn it into her memory. And this was the same ship, she reassured herself, as she allowed her gaze to travel over the shape of the hull -- and the rigging, silhouetted against a night sky filled with stars, confirmed the identification. It was the pirate ship. The one that had fired on her and Pan that first day, driving them into the clouds to hide. It was the Smoker's ship. //Yeah. The Smoker. The leader of the pirates. He's the one who took my sister.// Once again, Pan's words rang in her head. The Smoker was the leader of the pirates, and he had taken Pan's sister. Samantha -- that was her name. Samantha. Dana shook her head in frustration. No, no, no. That was from the dream; it wasn't real. She didn't know what Pan's sister's name was -- but it didn't really matter. What did matter was that she had been taken, and she was on that ship. At least, that's what Pan believed. He could be mistaken, after all -- although he hadn't been mistaken about Diana. At least, she amended, he hadn't been been mistaken about where the woman was being held, although he certainly did seem to be blind to her evident treachery and disloyalty. Dana shook her head again, and pushed thoughts of Diana from her mind. This was about Pan's sister -- Samantha, or whatever her name really was. And she *was* on the pirate ship; Pan had been sure of it, and for reasons she wasn't able to articulate, Dana was also sure of it. His sister was there; she was being held captive -- in durance vile, to quote those old sea stories Ahab was so fond of reading to her. Pan's sister was there, and she needed to be rescued. But how to go about it? All thoughts of returning home were banished as Dana considered the matter. There were only two ways to gain access to the pirate ship, she thought: she could fly, or she could swim. And Pan had warned her against either approach. What was it he'd said, that first day, as they perched together at the edge of a cloud? //You fly too close to that ship, and they shoot at you. You try to swim -- well, let's just say there are monsters in the water.// Monsters in the water. So it was back to that again. She knew she couldn't fly -- the pirate ship *had* fired on them, after all; she'd seen it with her own eyes, and heard it with her own ears. That left swimming -- but she couldn't swim either, because even though she hadn't seen any of these monsters, somehow Pan's words had penetrated all the way to her marrow. She hadn't seen them, and she didn't want to believe in them -- but she did. And that made them real, somehow, whether they were actually there or not. Dana found herself pacing along the beach -- pacing, stalking, prowling. There had to be an answer; there had to be a way. And she, Dana Scully, was going to find it -- or die trying. She realized that she had stopped pacing; she'd stopped her implacable movement along the waterline. She was standing still now, hands on her hips, staring blindly ahead of her, looking, staring -- At a small field of driftwood, scattered carelessly across the sand, looking like a child's collection of Lincoln Logs, left strewn about the living room carpet at the end of a long day of playing. A field of driftwood. Dana's eyes widened as she realized what that meant, and she ran eagerly forward. It was the answer. ================END CHAPTER EIGHT================