Mulder sleeps deeply. Not the deep of a quiet mind in peaceful rest, but the deep they both know too well.
The deep that follows the escape of death.
If she closes her eyes, she can almost imagine the loose weave of bandage around his head disappearing. She can almost pretend it's Just A Normal Nap. But the sickly sweet odor of antimicrobial wound ointment hangs like fog around the room; true escape into pretend is impossible.
He is lying on his back, another nail in the coffin of imagination, since he never sleeps that way when healthy. The bandage is shadowed at his brow, seepage from his wound oozing from the edges of his scalp that have been sutured back together. She checks it repeatedly, for signs of cerebral leakage. God, he should be dead.
Her focus shifts to the fact that the cigarette smoking sonuvabitch got closer than ever to killing him. Cancer Man and his consortium of thugs hacked open Mulder's skull and then left him to die, cold and alone.
But for the security key card, she would surely be sitting in his empty apartment, desperately searching for the will to survive losing him.
She has her suspicions about the key card. About how it came to her. Obviously, it was Diana. It could have been no one else.
But, the motivation is agonizingly elusive, a fantom menace to the calm she is desperately seeking. Why would Diana Fowley give her the means to save Mulder? Diana, who undoubtedly sits comfortably at the Morley Devil's table. The Judas Iscariot of the X Files; Mulder's greatest betrayer.
The longer she watches him sleep, the more the gnawing unknown burrows under her skin. She has to know. It is after two in the morning but she doesn't care; she'll wake the traitorous bitch.
Checking his bandages once more, she kisses him softly on the cheek, the warmth of his flesh easing her nerves. She's not afraid of confronting The Betrayer. Being gone from his side brings an unrest she's become all-too accustomed to. Silently, she closes the door to his room, leaving apartment 42 noiselessly.
Nearly an hour later, she turns onto Connecticut Avenue.
On the fourth floor of Diana Fowley's apartment building, the instant air of tension greets her as the elevator doors open. Instincts on high alert, her hand goes for her gun without delay. The acrid smell of gunpowder fills the hallway, and she can see Diana's door is cracked open. She draws her weapon and hugs the wall, inching cautiously to the apartment.
"Diana?"
From the darkened threshold, she hears a wet, shallow moan; the sound is familiar and she knows whoever lies on the other side of that door is gravely injured.
"FBI! Show yourself!"
Pushing the door open with her free hand, the barrel of her weapon trained on the slowly widening gap, the light from the hallway silhouettes Diana's body on the livingroom floor. There's a deep red stain on the front of her negligee, her eyes stare blankly, arms outstretched in mock-crucifiction. She checks for a pulse, finds a weak beat at the carotid, and exhales.
"Shit! Diana, hold on!"
She makes her way through the posh apartment, clearing the rooms one by one. When she moves back into the wide living room, the crimson stain on Diana's chest has spread to a grotesque puddle over the carpet; her breaths are shallow and few.
Finding no one lingering in waited ambush, she digs her phone from the pocket of her coat and dials 911 without looking at the numbers.
"This is FBI Special Agent Dana Scully! I need police and medical assistance at The Kennedy-Warren. Fourth floor. I have an agent down!"
Looking back to Fowley, she presses both hands over the bleeding hole in the woman's chest, blood oozing despite her effort.
"Diana, who did this?"
The wounded agent's eyes close with a choking breath.
"Hold on, Diana."
She can't help the words. She may despise the dying woman, but she's incapable of the indifference that was bestowed on Mulder just hours before; she won't leave Diana to die, alone. Diana opens her chocolate eyes, no longer stealy with deception, but dusky with impending death.
"Who did this, Diana?"
"He did."
Of course. The cost of that key card. The price of her betrayal.
"Dana…"
Diana is wracked with gurgling coughs, blood and sputum coming in weak sprays between her broken words.
"...don't...tell...Fox."
Her mouth opens in a futile last-gasp, a shudder of death vibrates weakly through her limp body, and she is dead. Scully stares into her empty eyes, reaching a bloodied hand to close them for the last time.
With a strange mixture of satisfaction and sadness, Scully swallows hard and finds she's fighting tears. She has her answer. The motive behind the key card. Diana made her deal with the Devil. She willingly signed on for the endgame, likely believing she would somehow save herself in the alliance.
But she never anticipated all the costs. Even after they took Mulder, she didn't see. She never realized she would have to stand idly by and watch him die.
Not until Scully opened her eyes. Scully had given her the crisis of conscience both women needed to save his life.
'Don't you think he'd be out there busting his ass to save you?'
(suspend most of what you know of The Sixth Extinction: Part 1 & 2)
He kicks the back tire of their rented Taurus, a puff of desert dirt issuing itself across the toe of his Cole Haans. He hates rentals. He hates Fords.
He hates flat tires and no spares and being stranded in the middle of nowhere with Scully, who has steadfastly been holding him at arm's length.
Usually, being stuck anywhere with Scully is, at the very least, tolerable. Even in the worst of places, he's been able to focus on the fact that there really isn't anyone else he would want with him. She has that way with him. That way of making things seem just a little less like hell. That way of making him feel just a little less like an outcast. She makes him feel like a person.
And he's made her feel the opposite. He invalidated her importance. Disregarded her intuition and turned his back on her loyalty. In true Fox Mulder fashion, he screwed up everything with one breath.
'You're making this personal.'
As if there could have been any other way for her to see it.
He had chosen Diana. Climbed right out of Scully's good graces and into an ugly FBI-issue sedan with Diana. He'd chosen Diana's shady past over Scully's proven trustworthiness, and, a genuine partnership Diana had never been capable of.
He stares at his dust-covered shoes and wonders why on earth Scully is even in the car. He looks through the the back window, her head silhouetted against the setting sun and thinks how beautiful her auburn hair glows in the dusky light.
He's lost if she leaves him. She deserves more than he can promise, but he needs her. And if he loses her over the likes of Diana Fowley, all his other failures will pale in comparison.
With determined strides, he walks to the driver's door and slides into the genuine imitation leather seat.
"Scully, we need to talk."
She doesn't look up.
"About what, Mulder?"
"About Diana."
She still doesn't look at him.
"What about her?"
Without hesitation, he says words he knows are a day late and a dollar short. He prays she hears the sincerity in his voice.
"I'm sorry, Scully. I'm sorry I didn't listen to you. I'm sorry I didn't trust you."
She looks up without speaking. If she's surprised by his apology, she's hiding it well. He hopes he can explain without sounding like he's trying to make an excuse.
"She was the first person to ever believe me, Scully. The first one who didn't laugh behind my back. She was the first to tell me I wasn't crazy for believing. I didn't want to believe that she would betray me."
There is nothing else to say. Anything else would be insecure babble, so he bites his tongue in the stifling silence.
Scully blinks deliberately, long lashes resting peacefully on the skin of her cheeks. Lingering in the quiet of her personal darkness, his words float around her until she feels them settle against her heart.
"Mulder…"
Reaching across the console, across the pain of his rejection, she holds her hand in invitation for reconciliation. She knew his whys and wherefores before he knew them himself. But she wanted to be mad. To feed the hurt and the anger, if only to feel something beyond the fear and confusion.
"I know."
Scully practically bounces off the basement elevator with lighter steps than usual; she had a brilliant night's sleep for the first time in months. No trouble settling down. No tossing and turning. No nightmares. She woke positively refreshed, ready to take whatever paranormal ridiculousness Mulder is waiting to throw at her with gusto.
She breezes into their office with her hands full of coffee, breakfast treats and all the accoutrement needed to enjoy such delicacies.
"Good morning, Mulder! I brought coffee and donuts. I know, it's 'police food' but we're kind of police, right. Anyway, I snuck a few of the gingerbread flavored creamers you like; don't worry, nobody noticed and they wouldn't guess they were for you anyway. They're in the bag with the napkins."
When he doesn't answer, she looks up from her busy hands. He's focused on a case file lying open on his desk, elbows even with the edge of the faux-wood work station, his forearms framing the cardboard-toned folder. He doesn't look at her, and he doesn't move.
She is instantly on alert. X files make him hyper. Excited. He practically vibrates around the musty basement, hurling details and facts and what-ifs at her like shells from a Gatling gun. This is not an X file. His stillness and silence activate a deep warning in her gut. Quiet is bad.
"Mulder? What is it?"
He takes a breath with purpose, steadying himself. Shuffling the loose photos lying on the open file, he hands one to her, still not looking up. She takes it, her eyes focused on his brow. It is smooth, without the tell-tale lines that give her some idea of his emotions; she has gotten very good at reading those lines. Not entirely unlike reading tea leaves, she thinks briefly.
Looking down at the 8x10, she is hit with a flood of alkaline saliva, followed by a near-instantaneous wretch from deep in her stomach. She closes her eyes quickly, partially to block out the vision before her, but also mentally willing her intestine back into submission.
If he notices at all, Mulder doesn't flinch at her reaction.
He's going over Diana's homicide file. The photo is glossy and detailed and it is Diana Fowley's dead body. The abstract art of coagulated blood. Smears and streaks across the satin gown where Scully's own hands had been. The unnatural angle of her left leg. Her arms spread in mock crucifixion.
Her mouth agape in silent protest.
"Why didn't you tell me?"
She flinches. His voice bears down on her as if the voice of God; his lite accusation of betrayal demanding an accounting of her actions. Her answers, no matter how justifiable in her mind, will be weighed, measured and found wanting.
But he isn't yelling at her. His voice is calm, quiet even. He's not angry, she realizes, and her heart hurts. She drops the photo back onto the open case file. Her eyes fall to the floor, not in shame, but in the knowledge that once she tells him the truth, he will add Diana to the list of innocents lost to his life's pursuit. I won't matter that she wasn't so innocent.
She tries to dodge a full confession.
"Because I didn't want you to know I was there."
He shakes his head at her incomplete truth.
"Because...I couldn't."
"What does that mean, Scully?"
She knows better than to think he will let it go.
"It means I couldn't. If I had told you I was there, I would have had to tell you she was still alive when I got there. I couldn't because she asked - begged me not to."
He looks up swiftly; she meets his piercing stare. He is indignant now.
"The file...your statement says Diana was already dead when you arrived at the scene!"
"I know."
"Scully?!"
"I lied in my statement, Mulder. I lied to you. She was alive, barely. I swept the apartment, called nine-one-one, and then I tried to stop her from bleeding to death."
"What did she say, Scully? Did she say who shot her?"
She braces for what's coming, for the look of devastation.
"When I asked who shot her, she said 'he did'."
His eyes widen in the full measure of her words. His anger dissolves into understanding, and then pain. Another life sacrificed because of him.
"The pleading in her voice... Most of her motives were tainted, Mulder. But in the end, when she realized they were going to kill you…"
She can't finish the sentence. It is no easy thing for a woman to find virtue in an enemy; especially when that enemy is another woman. Diana had been more than just a resource for the Syndicate. She had been a power-player. A deadly and precise, if hidden, adversary to Mulder and Scully.
But, in the end, she'd been Mulder's savior.
"She knew that if you knew that bastard was behind her murder, you'd blame yourself. She didn't want that. And neither did I. So I lied."
He closes his eyes and drops his head in his hands, the weight of his world falling heavier with every grave he stands over. She feels a tear slide through her subtle rouge; how much more can he take before he is completely broken?
He speaks from under his hands and she can hear the defeat.
"I understand. Just don't do it again, Scully. I don't know who I have left to lose, but - just - just don't, ok?"
"Ok, Mulder."