Character: Dana Scully

Fandom: The X-files

Rating: PG-13

Prompt:

Setting: Season Three Episode "DPO"

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If she had children someday, Scully decided, she hoped to God they were nothing like Fox Mulder.

"Ow," he hissed as she ignored his petulant looks, slapping an ice pack on his scorched and blistered palm. All that damage, just from one, spontaneously burning cell phone, she frowned, as he immediately jerked his injury away from her, cradling his hand close to his chest.

"Two minutes on, two off, Mulder, and use some of this on it," she passed him a simple burn cream she managed to grab at a pharmacy on their way back to the hotel from visiting Darren Oswald at his place of employment. "Honestly, I don't know how you got burned so bad." She frowned worriedly at his right hand.

"I tell you, the plastic was melting practically in my fingers," he muttered as he sat back on his hard-as-rock hotel bed, clutching the ice pack tightly in his injured hand. "It was as if everything short-circuited inside and caused the battery to heat up and explode."

"Which is probably what happened," she responded, putting away her now ubiquitous medical kit, a necessity she was discovering on any case with Mulder. "How is it that if you aren't infected with alien viruses, you are shot or burned or something else horrible I have to patch up?"

"I don't know, I must tend to hang with people who like shooting at me," Mulder responded obliquely.

Scully glared at him, un-amused. "I suppose you can't help an exploding battery, though I would tell you to go to your cell phone company and lodge a complaint. You could have been seriously injured."

"I don't think it was the cell phone," Mulder shook his head, frowning briefly. "The phone's brand new. I lost my old one in the boxcar in New Mexico. I bought that one last week."

"Brand new phone, perhaps there's a glitch with the battery," Scully replied sensibly, preferring not to think of the boxcar in New Mexico and how close she came to losing her partner.

"No," Mulder muttered vaguely. "I would have noticed it getting continually hot, a slow build up, I would have pulled it out earlier. But it exploded on me spontaneously, almost as if someone wanted it to catch on fire…perhaps to distract my attention."

"Distract your attention…who, Darren Oswald?"

"I don't know, Scully, don't you think it's a bit strange that he was present at two, strange, electrical anomalies which, while not totally unheard of, are quite rare occurrences on the whole?"

"Mulder, the boy wasn't even touching you? What do you suggest, he can blow things up with his mind," she closed her medical kit and crossed her arms in front of herself. "Honestly, when can coincidence just be enough?"

"When has coincidence ever been that simple in any of our cases," Mulder retorted, sitting up again swiftly. "Think about it, the human neuron is simply an electrical system, rigged between our brains and our organs and extremities. What if Darren Oswald's survival from lightening strike wasn't just a fluke?"

"Mulder, I will grant you that there have been known to be cases of humans whose personal electro-magnetic fields have been out of whack. But we are talking about people who can't keep watches on time and accidentally short out their earphones. They can't control lightening any more than people can control the winds or the rain. It's stuff of comic books and video games."

"Funny analogy, Scully, when you put it that way," Mulder set down his ice pack on the bedside table and restlessly rose, pacing the room. "I think Darren Oswald became just like one of his own video game characters. Maybe he can control electricity?"

"How," she challenged, glaring at him as paused his pacing just in front of her.

"I don't know," he admittedly thoughtfully. "Perhaps his accident…perhaps being struck by that much energy at one time, racing through his body, it fundamentally changed his ability to process and store vast quantities of potential, electric energy."

"Did your mother ever yell at you for watching too many scary movies as a child," Scully deadpanned as he shook his head and began pacing again. "Mulder what you are suggesting is impossible. I will grant that Darren Oswald was damn lucky he wasn't killed by that lightening strike. But what you are suggesting is a basic change in his body chemistry."

"Do you want to buy that Jack Hammond's death was as simple as a lightening strike, Scully," Mulder challenged as he pivoted at the end of his pace, turning to face her. "Is the scientist in you really satisfied that this death was caused simply by fate and weather conditions?"

Mulder knew her well, and he knew she wasn't happy or satisfied with this outcome either. "No," she admitted. "But in the face of any other evidence against it, Mulder, it is the most plausible explanation we have, whether we like it or not."

"Plausible…but not the right one," he murmured slowly as he came to a stop less than a foot in front of her again, close enough she had the momentary, fleeting desire to back away an inch or two, to put more space between herself and Mulder's suggestions. "Whatever happened to following your intuition, Scully? Your intuition is speaking here, it's telling you something isn't adding up. Why are you letting the science drown that voice out?"

Scully stared up at him, her sister Melissa's words from their last conversation together ringing in her mind. You are so shut off to the possibility there could be any other explanation except for your rigid scientific view of the world.

"There is a difference between listening to intuition and ignoring facts, Mulder," she replied evenly, her heart aching as she reached behind her for her medical kit. "Perhaps you should ask yourself why it is you are so dead set on looking for the outrageous when there is a perfectly acceptable explanation right in front of you."

"Did you accept the fact that I was dead," Mulder asked quietly, his stoic expression marred by the pained curiosity in his eyes.

She swallowed, feeling slightly trapped, resenting that he could so easily turn her own words back on her like that. Glaring at his hand, she nodded towards the ice pack still sitting on the table. "You better reapply that, Mulder, it will reduce the swelling."

She slid away from his physical presence, trying her best to keep her face neutral, her posture ramrod straight, to hide the anger and sadness their argument had surfaced in her. Would every argument between them be this way from now on, Mulder unwittingly pushing buttons that recalled the loss of her sister, their last argument, the guilt she felt over it…the fact that she knew, deep down, Missy had been right. "Don't forget to apply the cream before you go to bed," she glanced back over her shoulder, before quickly moving out of the door.