SUMMARY: Post-ep to "Our Town."
DISCLAIMER: X-Files doesn't belong to me, nor does the quote from "End Game" or dialogue taken from "Our Town." I'm not making any money from this story.
A/N: For Rowan Darkstar, who scored a perfect 10 on a livejournal quiz then requested speculation about Dana Scully's past. I think that she taught me some things in the process.
Major beta thanks to LadyKate – for the beta, for doing it in a fandom she's not familiar with, and for her continual prodding not to chicken out.
Major thanks to Rowan Darkstar for the same prodding not to chicken out. You know what I'm talking about.
Blinding
by Alicia
Then Enoch walked with God, and he was no longer here, for God took him.
-Genesis 5:24 NRSV
Dana Scully was eight years old when she attended her first funeral Mass. Mr. Patterson was an old friend to her entire family. He was ninety seven years old. He had passed away quietly in his favorite armchair in the nursing home. The newspapers gave more complicated reasons that Scully could already attempt to understand, but the priests said simply that God had called Mr. Patterson from this life and into the next. Not only could he walk, but he could run and fly; not only did he hold hands with his wife but he feasted at a table with Moses and Elijah.
Dana prayed for her old friend. She felt sad, but she also felt content. Everything about Mr. Patterson's life and death made sense.
She was thirteen years old when she attended her second funeral Mass.
In the intervening years, her knowledge of the way the world worked had increased dramatically. She understood some of the underpinnings of life: the common threads between the library computers and the human brain, the connection between nutrition, oxygen, and individual body cells. She also understood some of the things that prompted people to destroy each other's lives. She was familiar with the ideas of war, vendetta, and crime.
In the intervening years, she had shot a snake with a BB gun. It had died. Her guilt had overpowered her. She had destroyed something sacred that she had not made. Everything else in her world could be explained, but not Life. That simply was.
Until it was not. Her second funeral Mass was held for a classmate of Bill's. There was no explanation. Bryan had simply died. The priests said the same words as they had before and asked God to welcome Bryan into His house and comfort all of those who gathered to bid him farewell.
But why? He had been seventeen years old, surely it had not been his time. And why was there no physical explanation?
Bill didn't want to talk about it, and Missy was nowhere to be found, but Dana's younger brother Charles was at the height of his tasteless joke immaturity and must have seen the signs of the chinks in his sister's armor.
"Wooooo, they're coming for us next."
"Go away, Charles."
"The demons. They took Bryan and now they'll be taking all the kids older than twelve…"
"There's no such thing as demons," Dana said, speaking as she headed backwards, still facing Charles, to her room where the door could be locked, with as much speed as she could possibly muster and still maintain her dignity.
"Sure there are. Just last week the Father said…"
"Charles," their mother said, mercifully coming out of the kitchen to face her two children in the hallway. "Come with me."
Charles shot Dana an "uh-oh" look, to which Dana was not all sympathetic, and followed their mother out of the room.
The next day Charles apologized.
Dana accepted with typical big sister grace – meaning that she said, "I'll forgive you as long as you go out in the front yard and yell, 'I'm a moron' for all your friends to hear."
Charles marched proudly with Dana to the middle of the lawn and yelled, "She's a…"
Dana clamped a hand over Charles' mouth, then used her other hand to shove him into a pile of freshly raked leaves.
All was forgiven. The fact that little brothers torment big sisters with ghost stories faded back into the general order of things.
Dana never told anyone how badly the idea of those imaginary demons had frightened her that afternoon. She lay in bed with the light on that night and the puffiness in her eyes the next day and tried not to think about the inevitable ending of her own life. There were no invisible evil creatures out there that could just take her away. Her life was sacred. Life was sacred.
Two months later, the headache pills Bryan had been hiding from his parents surfaced among his leftover things. It was too late for an autopsy, Bryan already having been cremated and the ashes interred at the cemetery, but whispers flew around the community that he'd had a brain tumor. His death was no longer unexplained.
Dana thought that would make the fear go away. It didn't.
That Christmas, Dana's mother gave her a gold cross necklace. There was a little card in the black jewelry case. It said, "You belong to God, for the one who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world."
She fumbled with the awkward chain at the back of her neck, but in the end fastened it without needing to ask for help. She met her mother's eyes and smiled.
From that moment forward, Dana Scully had a protector. She never understood whether her protector was God, against the invisible demons which could steal in during the night and take away a boy in his sleep, or science and reason, which could create sense out of life and sense out of its end, which promised that Scully's own death would not be unheralded or without meaning.
Many of the things I have seen have challenged my faith and my belief in an ordered universe, but this uncertainty has only strengthened my need to know, to understand, to apply reason to those things which seem to defy it.
When FBI agent Dana Scully had first been assigned to discredit FBI agent Fox Mulder, she had told herself that she would find the truth. If Mulder was really as full of bullshit as those in charge would have her believe, she would bring back indisputable proof in a few days. Then she would collect her gold star and report for her next assignment.
Fox Mulder turned out not to be full of bullshit.
Neither, however, did he turn out to be traditionally rational. His sister had been taken from him. He firmly believed it had been by aliens. Thus, he had made it his life's work to prove that aliens existed. It was a logical, if completely harebrained, chain of reasoning.
Mulder's mission was not only to prove the existence of aliens, but to find out everything he possibly could about anything that scientists dismissed as ridiculous before carefully examining it. Scully respected that. Rather than his accuser, she became his ally, and eventually his friend.
In situations where Mulder needed to be defended against their employers – which happened at least every other week—Scully was his protector. In situations where Mulder needed to be protected from himself—when he didn't realize that the folly in dismissing ideas one doesn't understand and the folly in accepting ridiculous ideas without examining possibilities are equally dangerous—Scully was also his protector, their leader. But against a world that had only grown consecutively crueller since Scully had joined the FBI, Mulder protected Scully's back. Sometimes the world narrowed to nothing and no one she could trust, except him.
It was not the first time Scully had been tied and gagged.
Mulder would remember to pull off the tape slowly, rather than ripping it from her lips. He always did, when he came for her. Which he would come. At any moment.
It could have been any other summer cookout, except that it was way too late for dinner, all the guests wore masks, and the dish was a soup made out of human flesh. The idea that this grotesque behavior could somehow prolong the lives of the silent figures grimly accepting their portions was somehow the most horrific of all.
The man wearing the mask forced Mr. Chaco into a steel contraption suited for yoking horses. He clamped the steel around Mr. Chaco's neck. "Kill me," Mr. Chaco said quietly, "And you kill us all."
The axe swung. Scully couldn't look. She'd seen violent death before. She conducted autopsies as a regular part of her work. There was nothing that could be inflicted on the human body that she could imagine that med school and FBI work had not prepared her for. But there was something fundamentally wrong about the taking human life to extend human life. Chickens feeding on chickens. The demons of Scully's childhood coming in unseen and unheard to snuff out life, without a god to stand in their way. Even if the tribal cannibalism by the fire was death with a rational explanation, it was death without meaning. You kill us all.
"Bring her over."
Rough hands forced Scully forward. She was going to be next. It was the end of the journey – all the answers she had already found, all the good she and Mulder had accomplished together—it would end here, and this last puzzle would remain unsolved. The hands pushed Scully to her knees and clamped cold metal around her neck. I'm sorry, Scully thought. She tried to hold on to the idea that she had chosen her career and its consequences, but in a place much deeper than all her resolutions, she was desperately afraid. Without warning or motive those invisible demons could carry her away in the dark. Her life would be over with no other purpose for her death than to cover a purely human despicable crime. Her protector did not exist.
A gunshot shattered the sounds of the ritual. Scully couldn't see. She didn't know who had been shot, or where the shot had come from. All around her, the sounds of pounding footsteps vibrated through the air and ground back to her ears. She couldn't see a damn thing. Just the ground. The man with the axe would be back any moment. The reprieve was false. She would live. She was already dead.
And then, hands removed the cold metal from Scully's neck and the moment the pressure abated, she sprang to her feet. Mulder took the tape off her mouth, quickly, gently. "Are you hurt?"
There was no way to answer that question. Scully answered as she always did, by shaking her head "no."
Mulder answered as he always did. He gave her an "are you sure?" look as he helped her to her feet.
Whether Mulder bought the act or not, and he ultimately never did, Scully had to hold herself together long enough to see the case through to the very end. Together, they unmasked the trampled man who had ordered Mr. Chaco to be killed. It was Sheriff Arens.
It was too late at night to get on a plane, so even though Scully wanted nothing more than to leave the home of Chaco Chicken in the past and the bad dreams, they returned to their hotel rooms. Mulder walked her to her room. Which, being Mulder, meant that he opened the door for her and ushered her inside, then came right in and began to make a pot of coffee.
Just as Scully wasn't sure whether Mulder had come as her protector or had abandoned her almost too long in his pursuit of answers, she wasn't sure whether she wanted him to stay or to leave. The longer he stayed, the longer Scully would have to remain in tight control over the images still dancing behind her eyes. But once he left, her protector would be gone.
It was all so confusing.
And damn it, she could still hear the voices of those damn ritualistic cannibals who thought the world stopped and started with their damn town.
Keeping her back to Mulder, Scully walked toward the end table where her research was spread out from the night before. There would be no such thing as sleep tonight, but perhaps writing a report would create sense out of the nonsensical.
"Are you all right?" Mulder's voice tickled Scully's ear.
Go away, you're too close and it's too tempting just to let you protect me but you won't, Mulder, you won't, you didn't tonight, you're too caught up in your own beliefs to understand, you have to go away or I'll trust you. "I'm fine."
Mulder stood behind Scully. Both faced the lamp on the end table that was as yet the only light in Scully's room. Mulder wrapped his arms around Scully's shoulders. He didn't speak, but the action was enough to say, I'm not letting go.
She shook. That was worse than crying. People cried for a lot of reasons: because they were angry, because they'd just brought bad guys like Donnie Pfaster down, because there was a grief and loss that permeated every aspect of this job. But people only shook because they were afraid. Scully's protector was allowed to see her weakness. But that made him her protector. She couldn't help shaking, couldn't help letting him see. All the fear that had been compressed into a few horrible minutes at that bonfire stretched itself over time, and all she could do was hold on.
He held on.
When the storm abated—or at least when there was a small break in the clouds—she turned. It was all the same thing for them, fierce storms, small breaks, re-experiencing that kind of fear wasn't something Scully would allow to go on a moment longer than she couldn't help.
Mulder loosened his grip. He met her eyes. Then rather than asking another question to which Scully would have to answer with a lie, Mulder went over to the coffee pot, poured two mugs, brought them over to the small couch at the other end of the motel room, and plunked them on the end table without coasters.
It seemed very natural for her to join him on the couch. They'd decided without any negotiation whatsoever that they weren't sleeping tonight. She wished that negotiations regarding protecting each other were so simple.
"Well," Mulder said conversationally, "do you think we should report that we discovered the fountain of youth?"
"Absolutely," Scully played along. "It's not so much a fountain as it is a soup …" and then her voice faltered. That horrible soup that didn't have a right to exist. There was life in it, and in a horrible twist of the sacrament she had cherished in her childhood, life not given freely but taken by force. By a construction of cold metal and a blunt axe. Somehow, Mulder's arms were around her again and she didn't have the speed to shy away.
This time he hugged her much more awkwardly and let go, however. He sat on the couch, shoulder to shoulder like they always sat, ignoring his coffee but not meeting her eyes. "What scared you so much?" he finally said.
"Besides the demented crazy people swinging an axe at my head while I couldn't move? Are you serious, Mulder?" Even as the words came out of her mouth, she feared that he knew her too well to let her get away with that. She was right.
"I told you why I'm scared of fire, right?"
She nodded.
"You get scared when you think they're going to kill you, but you get really scared when you're somewhere else at the same time as you're here, dying," he said, and his words took on the faraway early morning tone that they always did on stakeouts when Mulder was just about to suggest taking turns on watch rather than toughing it out. "Where else were you tonight, Scully? What made tonight different?"
She took her time finding words. That was the unique beauty in early morning conversations, that there was always time. "We face death every day, Mulder," she finally said. "Our own. Each other's. For any reason. These are armed bad guys, and we're interrupting their crimes and finding out their secrets."
He nodded.
If she said any more, she would have to trust him even to stand between her and meaningless, unexplainable death. And one of the driving purposes of Mulder's life was to believe in things that were unexplainable.
"Go on."
"Hmmm?"
"You were going to tell me why tonight was different, not why tonight was the same."
"Was I?" Scully gave a very real, and thus very convincing, yawn. "I can't think straight, Mulder. Maybe we should call it a night."
"Scully."
She took her gaze from the untouched coffee cups creating rings on the end table, and instead turned to face Mulder directly. "Let me ask you something, Mulder. If I were ever to tell you not to believe something, not to question but just to walk away, would you?"
He looked startled for only a moment, then said, "Yes." Then he frowned and said, "No. Um, why? Why would it be so important to you?"
"I'm afraid of unexplained death, Mulder. Supernatural death. Death that really can't be explained by brain tumors or swinging axes. I tell myself it doesn't exist, and I don't think it does exist, there's always a reason when someone dies. But tonight, I came a little too close to dying in a way that was wrong. Even if the axe through my neck would have been the thing to kill me, it makes no sense that my body would make all those people live longer." She was starting to ramble, and she knew it. There was a medical reason that the rituals performed by the people of Dudley kept them all unnaturally young, and when she had the time and energy she would find that reason. But she was afraid she wouldn't find it, and fear was a lot more visceral than reason. And Mulder would understand all of that. She didn't have to say any more.
He said slowly, "Rituals have power."
"Only the power we give them."
"Maybe that's all the power that they need."
"Maybe." She echoed what she had said before. "Your faith is so bright. It's blinding sometimes." Mulder would follow that faith, and she'd been a fool for offering to trust him to protect her from the things he needed to believe. She'd been a fool to trust a cross and a card with a verse to protect her from imaginary demons.
"I'll get us out. I'll stop searching."
"What?" Maybe it really was too late at night, and maybe she should have drunk the coffee when it was hot.
"If we're on a case and we're fighting things we can't see that could kill us. I won't try to find out what it is. I'll get you out."
Just like that, Scully's world clicked back into orbit. "Okay." A pause. "Thank you."
Mulder was silent for a long while. She knew him well enough to know he was debating different options—crack a joke, change the subject to something pressing and absorbing, push Scully harder and see if she'd talk any more. Mulder was strange in that, when he was on a mission that mission was everything. Scully either helped or she got her 'short little legs' out of Mulder's way. But when he gave her his complete attention, it was just as blinding as his overwhelming faith. Finally, he said, "I'm sorry I didn't save you in time tonight."
"You did."
"Not quite in time. It must have been awful."
"Yeah."
Since the world was back firmly in its place, since Mulder had made a promise Scully had never thought he'd consider, she trusted him enough simply to tell him. And to let go of the rest of the pain, both new and very, very old. It felt better this way.