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Dana Scully sat at her desk in the X-Files office, deep in the bowels of the Hoover building, casting furitive glances at the door lest anyone see what she was up to. Of course, this being the aforementioned bowels of the building, the only person who'd actually come inside would be the last person she wanted to see: her partner, Fox Mulder.
Not that she didn't like the man; far from it, they had an excellent rapport and deep friendship that astonished her at times. Heck, she was even getting used to hearing whispers of "Mrs. Spooky" whenever she walked by her fellow agents on the higher floors. Scully really didn't want Mulder to see her pour through the dusty file folders while not actively working on a case, since he would naturally ask why and she was hesitant to tell him that she was really looking for any history to an incident in her life that she couldn't really explain.
Not long before, the two agents had been assigned to a case in New York City, one that had taken them to a very high-class nightclub and private party that was being hosted by one of the most powerful defence contractors in the country. Mulder, ever the believe in all things weird and unnatural, had heard rumours that an artifact of extra-terrestrial origin was being put up for auction and had somehow sweet-talked AD Skinner into letting them go.
The party itself wasn't that bad, though Scully thought that several thousand dollars a head would've bought more. The auction afterwords though...That's where her memory started to get a little fuzzy. At first she'd thought that her drink had been spiked with something, but after the last few weeks of her mind working on the fog Scully realized that something else had happened.
Wine being poured...
Laughter bubbling around the room...
The powerful-looking man taking the stage...
Women from the audience being invited up...
The women trying on a bracelet of sorts...
Gunfire erupting... Loud bangs... Large men rushing the stage... More gunfire...
The next part was clear. Mulder yelled something, then was shot in the shoulder. He sank down to the floor and Scully dived after him. Her hands red with his blood as she held the wound tightly. Trying to stem the bleeding, she was unprepared for gunfire to scatter off the ground around her, but she focused on Mulder. Then felt a sharp pain in her right hand and the world went fuzzy again.
Fear...
Indecision...
Suddenly a rush of power... A feeling of overwhelming euphoria, and yet a strange form of detachment. Like she wasn't really in charge of her own body, instead an outside observer.
Her arm, swinging... A healthy weight in her hand... The highs of adrenaline coursing through her veins...
The next clear thing she remembered was coming back to herself, covered in blood. Some was Mulder's from when he was shot, but she didn't know about the rest. She was unharmed physically, though the paramedics responding to the emergency said she was mostly catatonic when they'd arrived.
Getting back to Washington lead to herself and Mulder being put on leave, pending a review of the incident. Mulder's wound wasn't bad at all, though he still wore a sling. Scully privately thought he was milking it for all the sympathy he could get, but she humoured him. Sleepless nights had compelled her to seek out answers, but she couldn't ask Mulder. Not yet. So she dug around in the old files, looking for anything related.
Scully had just about given up hope when she suddenly hit paydirt. In one of the oldest X-Files on record there was a report of a bracelet being placed on auction, of a high-calibre party being used to mask the reality of what was being offered, and a black and white photograph of the man running the auction. Scully's blood turned to ice when she saw the exact same man from the party she'd attended. He looked like he hadn't aged a day, despite the near-century from when the photo was taken.
But more than that, there was a picture of the item itself. It looked identical to the bracelet Dana Scully now found around her right wrist at all times. Whenever she tried to take it off, she felt a powerful compulsion to put it back on. Best of all, the original investigating agent had found a name, a label to give form to her fuzzy memories. She whispered as she read aloud, "Witchblade..."