Chapter VII

He isn't at the hotel.

"He said to take you to dinner," Gordon says, waiting by her room for her to return. Scully has it on her lips to say no, that she isn't hungry, that she's tired, that she'd rather order in. This is a clever tactic, and she gives Mulder credit for it. Peter Gordon, a man she already likes. She will eat with him, eager to keep up appearances. With Mulder she would order in and pick at Chinese, or use any of her excuses she's been flirting with lately, because he'd never make her do anything she didn't want to.

"Where?" she asks, hoping he doesn't think she'll want to change. If she were to change clothes now she would fall right into bed and not wake up till morning.

"There's an Indian place about five miles away."

Scully nods, relieved, and hopes he hears no desperation in her voice when she asks, "Where is he?"

"At the station. He's determined there's more to it than we're seeing."

She laughs softly.

Their dinner, like the lunch he took her to, is surprisingly pleasant. They hardly bring up the case, which Scully appreciates. She learns that Gordon graduated from Yale, worked with the B.S.U straight out of Quantico, just like Mulder. He is quietly brilliant. Scully thinks she wouldn't have pegged him as an F.B.I agent had she not known he was one.

"What, then?" he asks, amused.

"A veterinarian."

"You're kidding!"

They talk about work. Gordon wants to know about the X-Files. Scully tells him there isn't much to tell.

"When we worked together, Mulder used to try and get me to catch onto his theories. 'The truth is out there', he used to say," Gordon smiles fondly at the memory.

"He still says that."

Gordon laughs, then sobers. He takes a sip of water with lemon, sets his knife and fork down on a diagonal across his red plate. "I think people have caused trouble over the existence of extraterrestrial life since…forever, really. Even when there was nothing to believe in with certainty. They still didn't know what truth was. We have never had the truth." He pauses, looks up from his glass of water to her face, pale in the light. "Not even with your autopsies, your science." My cancer, my abduction, my religion, Scully thinks.

"We use it to search for the truth. 'The truth will set you free.' I believe that."

Gordon smiles, and Scully senses that his heart is not behind it. "Most of the time in our world, truth is just opinion."

Exhausted, Scully falls into bed without brushing her teeth or washing her face. Her shoes lay as if she had shook them off mid-step. After a moment, Scully shrugs out of her jacket, wriggles out of her pants, and attempts to fully undress while still fully laying on the bed. After a moment, feeling annoyance rising in her head and wanting to fend it off so it did not invade the delicate place between her eyes, Scully stops struggling. At least here she had medicine for that. She falls asleep half-dressed, half under the sheets, her mind troubled.

Scully dreams.

Amygdala.

The name sounds foreign when Scully hears it. Interning at John's Hopkins in Maryland, having cut tissue away to reveal a small knot of fibers made up of nerve cells. Near the stem of the brain. The doctor standing beside her gives her the word for it. Amygdala.

"What does it mean?"

"Nothing. It's a location. It's the dark aspect of the brain."

"I don't-"

"A place to house fearful memories."

"Just fear?" Her voice is trembling, and she closes that inside her. That way of the body revealing fear, unease.

"We're not too certain of that. Anger too, we think, but it specializes in fear. It is pure emotion. We can't clarify it further."

"Why not?" Scully is reminded of what Gordon said hours ago. Most of the time in our world, truth is just opinion.

"Well-is it an inherited thing? Are we speaking of ancestral fear? Fears from childhood? Fear of what might happen in old age? It could just be projecting fantasies of fear in the body."

"Dreams."

"Dreams," he agrees. "Though sometimes dreams are not the result of fantasy but old habits we don't know we have."

"So, it's something created and made by us, by our own histories, is that right? A knot in this person is different from the knot of another, even if they are from the same family. Because we each have a different past."

He pauses before speaking again, and Scully realizes that she does not know him. She has never before seen him in her life. He is surprised but not thrown by her degree of interest. "I don't think we know yet how similar the knots are, or if there are essential patterns. I've always liked those nineteenth century novels where brothers and sisters in different cities could feel the same pains, the same fears…But, I digress. We don't know, Dana." Dana.

"It sounds like another language, but not Latin," Scully presses.

"Well, check its derivation. It doesn't sound scientific."

"No. It sounds like some bad God."

The man, he's not a doctor now, he's taller than her, a look of pity crosses his face. "Oh, Dana…" he whispers. She raises her eyebrows.

"You have so many fears, Dana," he says. Who is he? "What are you so afraid of, Dana?" Dana. It sounds foreign to her ears.

Death, she thinks. Dying. Failing. Crying. Leaving. Loving.

"God can help you. God can help you." Scully's eyes flash up to the man who is towering over her. She is certain she's never seen him before. Dreams aren't supposed to be this vivid. Maybe this isn't a dream. She wants to wake up. Instead, she asks,

"Who are you?"

"If you spoke to me more, you would know."

Scully shakes her head, tears pricking at her eyes. "No!"

"You're dying, Dana. God can help you."

Scully wakes up with a rush, drenched in sweat, her face sticky with tears. Four in the morning. She gets out of bed, tripping over her trousers and tumbling toward the washroom. In the mirror she looks gaunt and scared. She wipes smeared makeup from her eyes and turns on the shower. She will not fall back asleep after a dream like that. It was a dream, a dream, a dream, a dream, she chants as she showers. A dream.

In the morning, early, Mulder and Scully look for each other, each too shy to make the first move. Finally, Scully knocks on Mulder's door. It opens almost immediately, giving him away. They both attempt to school their expressions. His of relief that she's still well and whole. Hers of peace; he's evidently gotten some sleep, from the way his hair is sticking up at odd angles.

"Good morning," they say at the same time, but do not laugh.

"You weren't awake when I got back," Mulder explains.

"I was tired. What time did you get back?"

"Around eight." Jesus, she'd been asleep before eight?

Scully shifts her weight from one foot to the other. "Do you want to get breakfast? Do we have time?" Mulder brightens considerably, and looks as if he'd like to give her a quick hug. She wishes he would. No one has in quite some time, and the need for physical soothing during illness does not vanish with childhood.

"Yeah, let's get breakfast, Scully."

"Scully?" Mulder asks, reaching for the sugar to pour in his coffee.

"Mmh?" Scully looks up from the newspaper.

"Does God love everyone?" His tone assures her that he is not joking, and Scully is thrown. Both by his question and the tone accompanying it. She considers it for a moment, then nods.

"Of course."

Like a child, he prods her. "Murderers?"

"Yes."

And, like Mulder, he jokes, "Coffee?"

Scully tips her head, allowing it. "Coffee isn't a living thing."

"But if it were, God would love it?"

"Yes." Scully looks back at her paper, then back at her partner. "What is this all about, Mulder?"

He shrugs and stabs a piece of sausage with his fork. "Just curious." She looks at him for a moment longer, then turns the page to the crossword puzzle.

Minutes later, Mulder's phone rings. A missing girl, returned. Scully throws a twenty dollar bill on the table as they walk out.

Caroline Fellows is a tall, thin girl with a laceration above her left eye. Scully thinks she can't be more that twenty, maybe twenty-one. No parents, no siblings.

"Caroline, do you have any sort of degenerative eye condition? Macular? Retinal?" Caroline turns to Scully, next to her.

"How did you know?" she lightly touches the small wound above her eyebrow. "I have dry AMD."

Scully nods while Mulder is kept in the dark at the other side of the table. "I don't suppose there's any chance of you knowing what he looked like…"

Caroline nods. "He was wearing a plaid shirt," Mulder takes out a pen and begins scribbling. Caroline closes her eyes for a moment. "Yeah, a plaid shirt and…he had brown hair. I couldn't tell you what color eyes, I'm sorry."

Scully smiles sadly. "You've helped us more than you know, Caroline. Do you know where he took you?"

Caroline nods emphatically. "Yes. He took me to his house, I think. A blue house. I don't know what street, but it was in the wealthy area. Near L.A. I ran all the way to a parking lot with a phone booth. It was dark, I don't think I could tell you how to get there again."

Mulder taps his pen on the table and stands, leaving the room. Scully watches him go, the way he doesn't look back at her even to say goodbye, and she frowns.

Caroline Fellows is brave. "Are you two together?"

Scully looks at her. "We're partners, yes."

"That's not what I meant."

Mulder is driving alone, against protocol. Never go out on an assignment alone. He went anyway. He had felt Scully's eyes on him as he had left, the betrayal there. He is driving toward the affluent side of town, but will not look for the suspect's home. He has not come here for that.

There is so much that Scully doesn't know about him. For example, it is not known to her that his favorite flower is the poppy. That as a child he had often dreamt about earthquakes. That his favorite form of punctuation is the question mark. That he sometimes imagines his own death. That he thinks it is wrong to love the woman that he does.

Mulder is here to leave her. To go away, if even for a moment. It is as if he is training himself to live without her. He thinks it would be too strange to live in a world without her in it. And, as if he had scheduled it, his phone rings.

"Mulder."

"Mulder, it's Scully," Gordon says.

"What happened? What's wrong with her?"

A pause from the other end. "She was in a fender bender, passed out at the wheel. She's fine, now."

"Where?"

"We're at UCLA. She's in the ER."

Mulder nods, flicks the turn signal on. He's on the other side of town. Idiot.

"There you are," he says, gently. The lights are off, and she's both cold and hot at the same time. Scully blinks, disoriented.

"Where am I?" she swallows dryly. "What happened?"

Gordon sits on the edge of her bed and sighs. "You got in a bit of a car accident on your way back to your motel."

Concussion, then. "I don't remember-"

"You were having one hell of a nosebleed."

Scully looks to her left, sees the bag of blood they've hung next to her. Cancer, then. "That bad, huh?" Gordon nods. Scully props herself up on her elbows, then promptly sinks back into the bed. The movement had caused a stabbing pain between her eyes, the blood loss had taken most of her strength. "Where's Mulder?"

Gordon squeezes her hand lightly. "I called him. He's on his way."

"Was anyone injured? In the crash?"

He shakes his head. "Just a fender bender a couple miles after you pulled out of the parking lot. Barely a scratch. It was more the blood loss that scared everyone."

Scully rolls her eyes. "Who else knows?"

"Me, Powell, Detective Armstrong-" Scully groans.

"It's fine, don't worry about it."

Scully shifts her feet and the sheets whisper with the movement. She looks up at Gordon again.

"Anything I can get you?"

She nods. "Maybe some water."

He nods and squeezes her hand again. "Anything for the lady." Scully smiles.

Author's Note: This chapter is kind of all over the place, and brings up a number of points I wished I had gotten to explore in the finished story, so thanks for reading even if it might have been difficult to understand. Also, I'm working on a post-colonization fic (currently at about 20k words) and I'm desperate for a beta reader, even if it's not proofreading and only just someone who'll let me bounce ideas with them! If you're interested, or know someone who might be, please drop me a PM! Once I feel confident in it (and hopefully wrap it up) I'll publish that in installments as well! It's very different from what I usually do. Way more action, less introspective stuff, and written in past tense, which is difficult for me after falling in love with writing in present.