Character: Dana Scully

Fandom: The X-files

Rating: PG-13

Word Count: 3233

Prompt:

I am just a worthless liar

I am just an imbecile

I will only complicate you

Trust in me and fall as well-Tool Wk 46

Setting: Second Season Episode: "One Breath"

____________________

"Are you sure you are ready to return to work, Agent Scully," Skinner's dark eyes glanced her up and down from head to toe, his taciturn frown just on the shade of worried dubiousness. This was despite the release forms and file she had just brought with her from the Office of Professional Review, clearing her for a return to active duty. If she hadn't gone through the same song and dance with OPR just an hour before, she perhaps would have been touched by her former bosses concern. Already she was tiring of the stares by those in the office, others who knew her, or at least knew of her, who had no doubt heard of what had happened, and now stared at her as if she were some sort of Lazarus, returned from the dead.

Perhaps she was. For certain no one else in the Bureau had expected to ever find her alive, no one except for Mulder. And in the three weeks since she awoke in the hospital, she had only a handful of visits and phone calls from him checking in on her, ensuring she was there, that she was alive, and she was well. But he said nothing about work, about anything normal, about anything that routine in their lives. She craved the routine, to be just another agent, to take back the life she had before Duane Barry. This was her first step.

"I've been released by my doctors to return to work, and have completed the psych evaluation and the weapons recertification needed to come back full time." She nodded towards the paperwork lying on Skinner's desk. "I had expected of course to return straight back to Quantico, sir, I was surprised when they told me in OPR you had requested me personally to report to you?"

She might as well cut straight to the matter. Skinner's eyes glittered briefly as he leaned back in his large, leather office chair, watching her for the longest of moments, as if thinking. He then reached across his large desk towards a stack of neat files, pulling out from near the top and handing it over to her.

"There's been a request for your services, Agent Scully. A new assignment, of sorts," Skinner's face was inscrutable as always as his blunt fingers passed it over to her. Puzzled, she read the file, torn between confusion and delight, as her eyes flew up to meet Skinner's in surprise.

"You've opened the X-files again," she was stunned. When did it happen? How did it happen? And why didn't Mulder say anything to her about it?

"How," she began, before Skinner cut her off with an impatient wave of his hand.

"You're disappearance led to some questions that many couldn't answer, or perhaps wouldn't. I…took it upon myself to allow Mulder the ability to gain those answers." His grave face was stern in the face of her shock. "I had to cross quite a few people to do this, Agent Scully. This time, we can't have any screw ups, no half-assed work, no mysterious men dying under strange circumstances. I need answers, results, and good ones with clear and logical evidence. And if you have to sit under Mulder's ass all day making sense of the shit he spews, then so be it. Because I don't know if I can pull another rabbit out of my hat on this one, if you understand what I'm saying."

Scully nodded, her mind still trying to wrap itself around the fact that the X-files were open again, and she was to return to it. She had thought she would return to Quantico, to more autopsies, to once again turning into Mulder's pet lab monkey. But he had requested her personally, despite the fact that he had a new partner, Krycek. Or had he even allowed the newer, younger agent anywhere close to his precious body of work.

"Excuse me sir, why would Mulder ask for me," she asked curiously, and was met by the sort of frown that she expected the Assistant Director to give to a three-headed dog, or a person spouting tongues suddenly in his office.

"I'm afraid I don't follow you, Agent Scully. Do you not wish to be return to the X-files?" There was concern there, and true empathy. She realized that somewhere in the back of Walter Skinner's mind, he must have thought there was a very real possibility that Scully might not want to return to the work she once did with Mulder, and with very good reason.

"No," she clarified quickly, "No, it's not that, but Agent Mulder already has a new partner, Agent Krycek. They seemed to work well together, I thought that…"

Skinner's eyes grew stormy as his face hardened nearly imperceptibly. "Yes, well Agent Krycek is no longer with the FBI, Agent Scully. Given the circumstances, I was going to grant Agent Mulder's request. I thought, perhaps given the fact that the two of you seemed to ignore your respective reassignments and worked together anyway, it shouldn't take much for you step back into the role of Agent Mulder's partner again, correct?"

If Skinner was annoyed by the fact she had worked behind the scenes for months while the X-files were closed, assisting Mulder with his cases, he hid it well. He seemed more or less resigned to the fact now. But it was Krycek's disappearance that disturbed her. He had worked so hard to gain the trust of both herself and Mulder, and in a few short weeks was gone from the Bureau. What had happened? Recalling Melissa's words about Mulder, about the darkness her sister had described seeing in him, Scully hoped that whatever happened to Krycek, it had nothing to do with the Mulder and his infamous temper.

"No sir, I am happy to hear of the X-files reopening, and will be more than pleased to work with Agent Mulder again. I'm just…surprised is all."

"I would have thought Agent Mulder would have mentioned his request to you. About the opening of the X-files," Skinner frowned ever so slightly, but whatever thoughts passed at that moment, he shrugged them off and signed off on her re-instatement paperwork. "It's Friday, Agent Scully. Take the weekend to catch up. I'll expect you in the office bright and early first thing Monday morning." He passed the paperwork back across the desk to her as she rose, and stood to take her proffered hand. For the first time Scully could recall since meeting the distant Assistant Director, he actually smiled as he shook her hand. "I'm glad you're back, Scully. I hated to loose a good agent like you."

There was genuine warmth in his words, and she found herself returning it with a brief, grateful smile of her own. "Thank you, sir."

Kimberly, Skinner's assistant, seemed less awed by Scully's appearance back at the Hoover Building than most of the rest of the agents and staff roaming the halls, but even she stared wide eyed as Scully moved quietly and quickly out of the office, smoothing her professional looking, gray suit protectively around herself as she moved past the murmured whispers and surprised looks in the hallways. The basement office was where she belonged now. She wondered if Mulder even expected to see her. She doubted it as she took the elevator down to the very lowest level, for the first time since she had first stepped into Fox Mulder's office a year-and-a-half ago nervous as the doors opened to the murky mustiness of the lower floor.

She didn't know why she thought it would be different or changed. As she rounded the corner of the doorway into the office, it occurred to her suddenly that it had been only four months since she had last been in this office, hardly a blink of an eye. Yet in those four months the world had changed, her life had changed. No longer was she merely an outside observer into Mulder's weird world of the unexplained. She was herself an X-file now, as intertwined in all of this as Mulder himself was. Her life had become part of his obsession…. now her obsession as well.

But the world outside of the familiar, dusty, dank office might have been turned on its head, the inside of the office stayed eerily the same. Mulder's "I Want To Believe" poster still hung, tacked on the corkboard behind his desk, his strange collection of newspaper clippings patiently pinned and displayed along side it. Her table still sat in the corner she had carved out for herself in the clutter of unwanted, ancient office equipment, and stacked boxed of files Mulder hadn't been able to cram into the ancient, creaking metal filing cabinets lining the far way. And sitting beside them, at his light board, dark head bent patiently over what Scully could only assume were slide photos of something completely bizarre, was Mulder, his back to the door, completely unaware of her presence there.

"You've grown awful trusting for a man as paranoid as yourself," she murmured teasingly, forgoing the politeness of knocking in the hope of seeing him jump and whirl on her in delighted surprise. To her disappointment he hardly flinched. Rather he kept methodically looking over his slides, his voice lazy and preoccupied.

"The doctors finally set you free, Scully," he murmured, as he sat up enough to stare at one paper edged slide, before setting it down and picking up another.

"Cleared it through OPR, I'm back in the saddle again come Monday."

"Monday, that soon," Mulder turned to look at her now over his shoulder, his eyes straining in surprise around his gold-wire rimmed glasses. "I thought you would take more time, you know…get better."

"I am better, Mulder," she sighed, rolling her eyes in the sign of frustration she could show to either OPR or Skinner upstairs. She moved to lean comfortably against his desk, a position she used to often take when they had worked together before, crossing her arms as he turned to face her fully. "Whatever it was that was done to me, whatever it was I was infected with…it's gone now, and the doctors can't even explain it." She shrugged. "Short of feeling bloated and not being able to fit into a single pair of jeans at the moment, I feel physically fine. Besides, how much more daytime television could I stand. If I have to see one more unwed mother trying to discover the paternity of her child, I'll shoot myself. And there is only so much All My Children a human being can stand before they realize that this tripe is utterly ridiculous."

"So did Erica and Dimitri ever get together," Mulder asked with teasing seriousness, the corners of his full mouth twitching in a vain effort to stay perfectly sober.

Scully narrowed her eyes, unable to stop the laugh that bubbled up despite her biting her tongue. "And you would know this because?"

"I'm an insomniac, and they like to show repeats late at night? I was always a fan of Tad and Dixie."

"You are so disturbing," she shook her head in amused perplexity, pulling away from his desk and glancing at the piles of papers already accumulated. It didn't take him long to get back to business, she realized, as she picked up one case file with a recognizably newer case number on it. "Skinner told me he reopened the X-files. He said you requested me specifically." She glanced sideways at Mulder who nodded, shrugging nervously as he pulled off his glasses and set them carefully by his slides.

"I thought that if you wanted to come back, you might want to help me out on a more full time basis…rather than just run around as my lab monkey?" She had accused him of doing just that on several occasions. "I know you've been dying to get back into real field work again, and I know it's not anything upstairs." He shuffled his long legs, avoiding her gaze as he twiddled one of the stems of his glasses on the table nervously, as Scully realized that Mulder right then was worried…painfully so. Afraid, she realized, that she would tell him that she wasn't coming back. "I'd understand if you wanted to go back to Quantico, hold out for something more glamorous in another department. I can put a good word in Violent Crimes, for what it's worth, but Bill Patterson over there is a raging asshole, never has liked me…"

"Mulder," Scully stopped him, her mouth curving softly upward as he shot her a studied, sideways glance. "I agreed to the transfer. I want to come back, don't worry." Her smile faded ever so slightly. "I have work to do…unfinished work. I have my own truths now to try and understand."

Like clouds rolling in over a bright, summer sky, all hint of Mulder's shyness or frivolity fled as his face darkened to a stoic calmness, and something inside of his shifted ever so slightly. All of the sudden, Melissa's words of warning about Mulder and what he had been through came back to her, as for an instant she could see exactly what her elder sister was talking about, that darkness and anger that Melissa had found so unnerving.

She should leave it and him to his brooding, move on to something else safer, something lighthearted and silly. She was back now, safe and sound, they could move on…or could they. She noted how in the last three weeks, not a single mention had come from Mulder on work, on the X-files, even on Krycek. He had carefully neglected to tell her about any of it, and yet had requested a transfer for her to work with him again. He was avoiding the issue, avoiding the discussion on what happened, on what he thought happened…about why in the hell he blamed himself for it. Mulder's over-whelming sense of personal guilt aside, there was more to the story than Mulder was sharing. Mulder never kept secrets from her. Perhaps he would neglect to tell her when he was planning to do something stupid, but keeping secrets was not something that happened between them. And it frightened her that now he was…deliberately so. And she feared the reason for it perhaps more than the secrets themselves.

But then, wasn't she here for her own truths?

"What happened to Krycek, Mulder," she asked simply, waiting for the explosion. But there was none. Mulder averted his stormy gaze from hers, and pretended to busy himself gathering slides, sliding them into the empty carousel in front of him with precise fingers. He was silent for long moments, and Scully wondered if he would answer her at all.

"I should have listened to your good judgment, Scully," he finally replied, his voice soft and low as he slide one cardboard frame after another into the round, slide holder. "You warned me not to trust him, you warned me not to listen to him. You sensed it from the start. You were right, I'm always too quick to listen to anyone who agrees with me."

"What do you mean?" Fear stabbed at her, nameless and troublesome, as something vague nagged at the back of her brain, something Duane Barry had said. It was there and then it was gone, and like everything about that horrible night she couldn't remember anything beyond vague words, images.

"We checked out Krycek, you and I. We talked to him, Mulder, he was as clean as a whistle, and you told me that. I had Frohike look him up…"

"Well either he is a very good actor or a very enterprising son-of-a-bitch," Mulder rose, carousel tray in hand as he moved effortless towards the slide projector. For all the world he looked calm, collected, in charge of himself. But there was a tension around him, wariness in the air, the same feeling Scully remembered right after Reggie Purdue died months ago.

"I borrowed Krycek's car to…see someone," Mulder shrugged as he carefully set the tray on its mechanism. "Someone had been in his car…smoking." When Scully was silent, he turned to face her pointedly. "He didn't smoke."

"OK, well that's not to say someone he knows couldn't have…" Scully began reasonably.

"Morley's….his friend smoked Morley's. Sound familiar to anyone you know?"

"Hell, Mulder, Morley's are popular, anyone could smoke them." She knew whom he was driving at; however, she could see his face as surely as she could smell his smoke. The shadowy figure who tended to lurk around Skinner's office, the man who smoked, but had no name, who watched her with his hard, sharp eyes.

"You know as well as I do who smokes those, Scully," Mulder replied softly. "And he had everything to do with your abduction."

Something jerked in her consciousness, like a lightning bolt, a gravely voice under a haze of tobacco, "I think she's been through enough, don't you?"

"Mulder, I don't remember what happened," she replied automatically, but she knew that was a lie the moment the words fell from her lips. He had been there, she thought…maybe.

"He admitted as much to me, Scully."

"Admitted as much? You spoke to him?"

"I confronted the son-of-a-bitch in his lair," Mulder didn't look pleased or cocky about it. "He admitted to all of it."

Admitted to all of what? Scully felt her head spinning as she leaned harder against his desk, shaking the vertigo as she tried to comprehend what Mulder was saying. "How do you know he wasn't lying to you?"

"Would a man lie with a Sig Sauer in his face?"

"Mulder," she gasped, stunned by how utterly nonchalant he said it, as if he, and officer of the law commonly drew guns on unsuspecting people. "Please tell me…"

"I didn't, Scully." Behind the façade lay the tiniest hints of regret….and hurt. "I didn't, if that is what you are wondering. But at least you have one of your answers. It's not much, but it's what I have to give you."

Give her, Scully marveled, her eyes burning unexpectedly. "Mulder…I…you don't have to give me anything." She stared up at him, for the first time not just looking at Mulder as if he was her partner and co-worker, but at him. Fox Mulder, a man who had amazing intelligence, incredible wit, and a smile that could melt the iciest of hearts. He did not give friendship or respect lightly or easily, both were earned, and she highly suspected after meeting Phoebe it was the same with his heart. But when you did earn it out of him, it was yours unconditionally and without limits. It was so rare a commodity that Scully couldn't think of anyone save herself who had so much of it in Mulder's very narrow, small life. And he had nearly lost her. She now understood, finally, what her sister was saying. She was beginning to see the pieces of just what her loss meant to him, and to just what lengths he went to get her back.

"Fox," she didn't care if he did laugh, or snort, or flinch away from using his first name. Hell, her mother and sister had been using it on him for weeks, and she never was allowed. "None of this was your fault. Whatever that man…that cigarette-smoking man told you, it is lies. It was the actions of one crazed man…"

"Do you honestly believe that, Dana?" Since she used his first name, he used hers, and it was both gentle and cutting, challenging her to ask herself that same question. "Think about it. They killed Deep Throat. Why wouldn't they try to take you?"

She stared at him mutely, without a response. She thought of Deep Throat that night, warning it had never been more dangerous. "Why, Mulder, what could they possibly…."

"You proved we didn't need to be an office together to continue this work."

"But I did little more than the occasional autopsy, and now and then lent a hand. And these were conventional cases…"

"You flew to Puerto Rico for me," he murmured, slowly pacing forward in the area between them, crossing his arms across the tie laying on his chest challengingly. "You plucked me out of a set up I'm sure they would have killed me in."

"Yes, but…"

"Scully, I asked you back for a reason," Mulder stopped only a foot in front of her, well into her comfort zone, the area around herself that she mentally barred everyone from…everyone save him it seemed.

"For all your arguing, your challenges, your questioning, never once have you ever stopped believing in me personally. You said it yourself at the hospital that day." He reached one long, elegant finger into the space between them, to the golden cross now laying at home once more against the skin of her chest. He pressed it there for a moment, as if branding her with the crossed golden pieces of metal. "You had the strength of my belief. Even when I didn't believe in myself."

She stared up at him as he removed his finger, and felt the cross burning against her skin. Her fingers moving towards the charm on its chain, holding it tightly, warm from the contact against it.

"I didn't tell you the full impact of what working with me would mean, Scully," his soft voice was hoarse and rough as he pulled away from her, behind his desk, to his chair, where he collapsed, long legs and bent shoulders. "I never was honest with you about that. I kept thinking eventually you would wise up, you'd get as far and as fast away from Spooky Mulder as you could."

"Mulder," she turned around to stare at him with half-hearted exasperation. "I'm not an idiot to be coddled, I knew what I was getting into. I told you, I wouldn't put myself on the line for anyone but you…"

"These are men who will kill indiscriminately, Scully. Presidents, Senators, world leaders, innocent people if they have to…I knew that, and still…" He looked down at the new case file sitting in front of him, so fresh the white folder lacked any of the wrinkling and bending of being well leafed over and picked at. "Still I let you remain involved, I kept going to you even when I knew better. And I am sorry for that, Dana, because it means I'm as responsible for what happened to you as they are. I asked you back because…." He paused, staring at the file in front of him regretfully and somberly. "Because while you were gone, I was a man who couldn't even believe in himself. I had failed you, I had drawn you into this without full disclosure, and you paid the price for it. And I did things…many things that I'm not proud of. Things I shouldn't have done." He passed her the file he held on to. She took it with shaking fingers, holding it in front of her.

"Someone died on this case, Scully. I thought I could protect her in a way I could never protect you. She didn't have to die, and if I had been in any other state of mind at the time….hell, if you had been there, she probably wouldn't have. She died trying to protect me." He laughed softly, ironically, as he reached for the ever-present basketball on his desk, rolling it between long fingers, his habit when he was disturbed or in thought. "I had to confess that to you, you know…I have to let you know how bad it can get…how bad I can get. I asked you to join me again, but you need to know this time, full disclosure, just what you are getting yourself into with this. I need you to understand, because if ever there's a time to back out, Scully, it's now. You can walk away from this, from the X-files, from what they did to you, and go back to Quantico, or to another department, and have the career you should have had before you met me. I'll vouch for you, if my word has any worth. And I wouldn't hold it against you if you did, not in the slightest."

His eyes had turned a dark, mossy gray-green, sincere and yet frightened. Was he worried she would say that this was too much for her, after all she had been through…or scared she would stay and be subjected to perhaps more. It was always hard to tell with him.

"What if I want to stay, Mulder," she murmured softly, shifting the file she held to her right hand and holding it to her side, pinning it to her hip just below her gun. "You said it yourself, I have my own truths to find now. I'm as much of an X-file as any one of these cases. I may never know why I was taken, or for what purpose. But I now share something with every one of those people you have files on. And I can't just walk away from it, Mulder." She glanced towards his poster, it's horribly bad, blurred photo of a supposed alien space ship in the skies over some nameless area of the country. It reminded her of the divvy little bar in Idaho, with its pictures of UFOs overhead. She had laughed at Mulder that day, for falling for the pictures. But he had gotten the information they needed.

It was all a matter of perspective, she realized. There may be UFOs; there may not be UFOs. But that didn't mean that what happened to these people, and to her, was invalid. That it didn't happen. There were truths out there behind all of the disappearances. And perhaps not for her sake, but for the sake of others like her, with the lingering fear, the unanswered questions, she wanted to find those answers, to help them understand. To help Mulder, with his long lost sister, to understand, because while she may not believe in aliens, she did believe in him, and that had been enough to get her home.

"I want to stay, Mulder. There is work to be done, work I want to do." She reached desperately to try to lighten the mood between them, to soften the guilt and hurt Mulder felt. "Besides, I have damn fine investigative skills going to waste over one dead body after another. If I have to do another normal autopsy, I might just cut my own wrists with my own scalpel."

She thought he might panic at those words, so close to death had she been, but his gaze softened, and he smiled, ever so slightly. "Could it be worse than trying to find out which one of five men is the father of your three children?"

She could see the tension relax visibly as she snorted, nodding her head. "Oh, you'd be surprised. Though certainly there's something to be said about Erica and Dimitri, you know I could get rather wrapped up in that."

"Wouldn't do a thing for those damn, fine investigative skills you got there, Scully, it would just rot your brain. All that sexual tension and angst can't be good for a person."

"I'm sure that we, as grown professionals could look around that," she laughed, feeling that maybe, just maybe they could put their feet back on the path they had left off four months ago, and that perhaps they could be a well-oiled machine again as partners.

"Plan to have your daily fix, sit down here in the office and watch what All My Children is up to next?"

"Why, you watch your porn?"

"I can explain why that video was in the machine."

"How about you don't, and we call it a weekend, eh?" Scully grinned; shaking her head and looking down at the file she had at her side. "I'll take your confessions home with me this weekend. Exorcise your demons for you?"

"I'm not Catholic, I don't go to confession," he replied quietly.

"Good thing I am Catholic. I think I can handle your guilt for a few days," she smiled. "Anything I should be wary about."

"Take a look at the LAPD ME's report. One of the suspects burned to a crisp in his own cell the moment sunlight hit his skin, but mysteriously showed up later that night and tried to kill me."

"Vampires," she was impressed. "Should be enjoyable, weekend reading to get me started for Monday?"

"Have fun with it," Mulder murmured as she smiled at him, watching her as she strode towards the door. As she her feet hit the hallway he called after her, "Scully."

She turned to look back at him behind his desk. "Yeah."

"Thank you….for coming back." He didn't say more than that, but his words held layers of meaning she implicitly understood.

"Thank you, Mulder, for never giving up."

She shot him a last, tight, grateful smile as she turned out of the door and back down the familiar hallway. It still smelled of mildew and mold, dust and dank, but it was strangely comforting. It was home. And she was glad to be back.