That night, despite Fury's orders, Scully found it hard to sleep. After only four hours she found herself wide awake and staring at the ceiling of her quarters, her brain running at a million miles an hour. How would they pull the aether back inside the Wellspring? How would they destroy it? What would happen to her and Mulder in the future?
She was still going around in circles when her cell phone buzzed. Rolling over she picked it up and tapped on the message.
Tony: Meet me in the main training room. Come alone.
Scully frowned and put the phone back on her nightstand without replying. Tony liked to try and get to her with cryptic messages like this and her usual response was to ignore them, but when, ten minutes later, she was still lying in bed unable to shut her brain down, she decided to go down and see what he was up to this time.
Five minutes later, Scully pushed open the door to the helicarriers main training room and found that it was already set up in one of her preferred arrangements. Tony was sat on a block near the edge of the space playing with his phone and had managed to coerce the room's sound system into playing heavy rock music. Looking up, he cocked an eyebrow at her.
"Ah, she finally appears."
"What is it, Tony? I have better things to do than stand here listening to your sarcasm."
"Better things to do, or better people to do?" Scully narrowed her eyes and started to turn to leave, but Tony quickly hopped down from his perch and shoved his phone into his pocket. "I have a present for you," he added quickly.
"A present?" Scully was confused but interested enough to stay put. Tony shot her one of his infuriating grins and crossed to the side of the room. He reappeared a moment later carrying a case, one Scully recognized as coming from a S.H.I.E.L.D. lab. "Where did you get that?" she asked. Tony grinned again.
"It's a little something I've been working on, with some help from Fitz and perhaps a little input from Banner, though he didn't know what he was working on." He put the case down on one of the smaller blocks and turned it so the clasp faced Scully. "You wanna open it?"
Scully took a step closer, ran the pad of one thumb across the clasp, and flicked the catch. She lifted the lid and stared inside. Two objects lay inside the case, a pair of fingerless, elbow-length gloves, each with a metal disc in the center of the palm. She looked up at Tony, wide-eyed.
"Are they..?"
"Yes."
"Can I..?"
"Yes."
She reached down and picked one up.
"They're made of the same material your uniform is made from, so they're super strong and incredibly durable." Tony reached in and picked up the other glove. He flicked the top part inside out to show Scully a line of metal running along the inside seam, it would rest along her inner arm from her elbow to her wrist, following the path of the median nerve. "When you activate it," Tony pressed the disc in the glove's palm and Scully failed to suppress a gasp as thousands of impossibly fine, metal barbs shot out from the metal stripe, "these will connect the gloves directly into your nervous system. The disc then becomes a sort of battery, allowing you to store energy inside it and deploy it at will. Given a little training, well.." He stopped and pressed the disc again, retracting the tiny, needle-like barbs into the lining.
"I wanna try them," Scully told him, not looking up.
"I figured you would."
Tony watched as Scully pulled the two gloves on and adjusted them so the seam was positioned correctly. Here, they looked incongruous, paired with her casual leggings and a large sweater with the sleeves rolled up, but Tony knew they would match the rest of her Avengers uniform perfectly. Not that fashion counted on the battlefield, but hell, the Avengers did have a certain media profile to live up to, one that he himself was more than a little responsible for creating.
"Here goes nothing," Scully said, her hands interlocked so each thumb rested on the opposing palm's metal disc. She pressed and Tony felt a shiver of guilt when she gasped in pain, the barbs deploying through her skin and becoming part of her nervous system. "That'll take some getting used to," she hissed, face still contorted, but already the pain was dying away, replaced by a powerful tingling sensation through her hands and arms. The sensation was entirely alien to her, but she liked it. She flexed her arms experimentally and the glove moved perfectly with her body, keeping itself in exact alignment. "OK, now what?"
"Now, we give you something to shoot at."
Tony walked over to the wall panel and activated the room, bringing out a single, static, unarmed target. He turned back.
"Imagine you're healing someone. Try to replicate the way it feels, but focus on holding that in your hands for now." Scully took a deep breath and tried to visualize an injured person in front of her, imagining the motions her body went through to impart its healing to another. Immediately she felt the telltale tingling racing down her nerves and into her hands but as she moved her hands around, the sensation dissolved away.
"I have an idea," she told Tony, pulling at the gloves and adjusting them slightly to make the metal discs sit flat against her palms instead of resting above them. She tried again, visualizing the cool metal as a person, and this time she felt it the tingling shot down her arms again but this time it began to build in her palms with no path to escape to another person. She felt the power building like static electricity in her hands and wondered if this was how Thor felt before a lightning strike. "It's working," she told Tony, slightly embarrassed by the trace of awe and perhaps fear in her voice. "What do I do?"
"Try to focus it, channel it at the target." Scully held her hands palm up towards the target and pushed the energy outwards with a jolt towards the figure. It missed entirely.
"Try again," Tony urged but Scully didn't need telling, the next charge was already building in her hands and she adjusted her stance, held her palms out and pushed. This time the energy blast was on target, the two of them watched as it sailed across the room and annihilated the target figure. Scully turned to look at Tony, their eyes were both wide in shock.
"Whatever you're doing, keep doing it," Tony told her. He crossed back to the panel and started typing. Multiple targets began appearing in various parts of the room and Scully began working to systematically take them out. Within minutes she had mastered aiming with this new weapon and built up her control enough to use each hand separately, taking out multiple targets at once. Tony typed in more commands and added in moving targets, but Scully took these in her stride too.
Less than an hour after being handed the gloves, Scully was leaping through the room using a combination of her physical combat training and her new energy bolts to power through dozens of targets at once. Watching her, Tony grinned at how obvious it was that Dana was Natasha's protege. He shut down the system and called her over. Scully had pulled off her sweater some time ago and her skin glistened with sweat, but she was grinning in a way he hadn't seen in a long time, if ever.
"I think it's time to show the others," he suggested.
When Mulder arrived at the training room, he found Scully, Clint, Tony, Natasha, and Bruce already there. Scully was sitting on the floor beside Natasha, her back against the wall while the three men talked quietly together. A few seconds later, they were joined by Thor and Steve.
"What's going on?" Steve asked, looking around the room. Tony stepped forward.
"Dana has something to show you," Tony told him, a smirk on his face and a glint in his eye. Steve stared at him, then looked at Dana. Mulder looked too and noticed the gloves she was wearing at the same time Steve did.
"Tony.." Steve rounded on him, "we talked about this and I said…"
"What about me?" Scully demanded, getting to her feet and marching over to Steve. Despite him towering over her in height, somehow Scully seemed to dominate him. "What about my thoughts about this? I'm the one who suffers Steve. I'm the one who had to feel every moment of 47 bones mending themselves after that last attack, because don't you think for one second that any amount of morphine does a goddamn thing. I feel it all, every bullet hole, every broken bone, every cut. You don't think I have the right to try and defend myself?"
The rest of the room had fallen silent. Steve lowered his head.
"I'm sorry Dana. You know I only ever want what's best for the team as a whole. I don't want you to become just another soldier, I need you to be able to focus on keeping the rest of us, and civilians, alive."
"You know that will always be my priority, but there's nothing to say I can't focus on that and also defend myself when it comes to it."
Steve nodded.
"Let's see it then."
Everyone stepped back and Tony activated the program once again, building it from a single static target to a near onslaught of armed adversaries. Scully took them all out, once again using a combination of close range physical combat and energy bolts. Looking between their faces, Mulder saw Natasha smiling with obvious pride, Tony smirking in a self-satisfied kind of way, and Steve watching closely, a carefully guarded expression on his face. Once the last target was down, Tony deactivated the program and Scully walked back to Steve, raising one eyebrow at him in playful provocation. He nodded at her slightly.
"You can do that and retain enough reserves to heal yourself and others?"
"Yes, you saw how fast it is to recharge. I'll have the same limitations I always did but it won't stop me on the field."
Steve looked between her and Tony.
"Ok. I concede, I think you were right about this. Let's hope it works as well as this on a battlefield." He turned and walked out of the door. Tony looked at Scully and grinned.
"Well, that went about as well as we could have hoped for." She grinned back at him.
The rest of the Avengers left and Tony went to the wall panel to reset the room. Mulder walked over to Scully. As he did, he saw her deactivate the gloves and watched as a look of intense pain washed over her face. When she pulled off the gloves to lie them inside the nearby case, he noticed a line of blood down both of her forearms. She tried to hide it from him, holding her arms against herself to conceal it, but he took hold of her wrist carefully and pulled her arm out in front of her to see. Already the small scars were healing, leaving behind them just the telltale streaks of red.
"The gloves did that?" he asked.
"They have to connect directly into my central nervous system to work," she told him, keeping her voice light, but Mulder could hear the strain there. He knew the sound of Scully's voice when she was keeping something inside.
"Does it hurt?" he asked so quietly it was almost a whisper. The door behind him slid open and closed as Tony left to give them some privacy. He saw her swallow hard, then raise her eyes to meet him.
"It's excruciating," she admitted quietly, "but only when I take them on and off. When they're on, I don't feel them at all.
"It's worth it?"
"Yes." There was no hesitation in her voice there, and Mulder nodded once, accepting her answer without question.
"You were amazing," he told her.
"Thank you," her voice had dropped so low it was almost inaudible. "I'm hungry."
"I bet. Why don't you stow those with the rest of your kit, then we can go down to the mess hall and eat?"
"Actually," she looked up at him through long lashes, and Mulder felt the need to swallow hard. "I was thinking maybe we could get some food down there and take it back to my quarters? Eat in privacy?"
"Spend some time alone together in your quarters," he repeated slowly, "Yeah, that sounds better than the mess hall."
"Way better," she agreed. She turned to click the case containing her new gloves closed, and Mulder could have sworn she didn't need to bend at the waist quite that much, but he wasn't complaining. She picked up the case and made for the door. "You coming?" she asked. Mulder thought of a smart-mouthed reply to that, but thought better of voicing it, Instead, he grinned and followed her from the room.