March 1st, 1998
Washington, D.C.
When Scully is released from the hospital by the end of the afternoon, Mulder is there with a change of her clothes that she had previously asked him to get from her apartment – picking out a set of bra and panties in her underwear drawer had almost killed him, but he had managed to survive by repeating to himself over and over that this was a favor for his best friend and not the time for him to be focusing on his sexual fantasies. Before leaving the medical facility, she showers and readies herself for the last-minute appointment with Dr. Werber that Mulder had managed to arrange for her – the doctor had been more than eager to help her once he talked to her over the phone about her lost time and agreed to meet with her immediately, even if it was a Sunday –, and then he drives her to Silver Spring, Maryland, mostly in companionable silence, except for minor conversation about her well-being.
They make their way into Dr. Werber's office once Scully's name is called by the doctor's assistant – her partner joins her at her request, even if he is not expecting anything in particular out of this session, having suggested it only to indulge her need for her memories basically. Scully herself feels a little bit skeptical that hypnosis would work, but, as soon as Dr. Werber directs her to close her eyes and take deep breaths, she is suddenly in a trancelike state, shouting in astonishment at the clear image she sees behind her closed lids. Unbeknown to her, she's sitting there on the doctor's leather couch describing her experience from two nights before, her witnessing of an unidentified flying object, of men with no faces setting people on fire, of another unidentified aircraft attacking the faceless men and then taking Cassandra up in the air and aboard the ship. Throughout this experience, her hand searches for her partner, who sits dutifully by her side, in distrusting wonder of the events she is recounting but still concerned for her, and he takes her hand as soon as he notices her movement, knowing that she needs him and that he is there for her, that no matter what he believes he will always be there for her when she needs him.
When she comes out of the hypnogogic trance, she is panting from reliving the experience, and also surprised to see her partner by her side holding her hand. She doesn't know exactly what happened, but by Mulder's reaction when he drops her hand, gets up from the couch and walks out of the office, she knows that whatever she said was not something he wanted to hear. She exchanges polite goodbyes with Dr. Werber, takes the audiotape in which he recorded her session and leaves to meet her partner in the building hallway. He is pacing back of forth in front of the elevator doors and when he spots her he stops, presses the button to call the elevator car and keeps his body turned towards the metal doors.
"Mulder –" she begins, staring down at her feet, unsure of what she wants to say.
Without giving her a chance to address whatever it is she wants to say and not even attempting to make eye contact with her, he interrupts, "I'll take you home, you need to rest."
She looks up at him, surprised, but he keeps his face steadily away from her. When the elevator car arrives, he steps in and turns around to face forward, yet still refusing to look in her direction, and she can only follow him into the car and stand mutely by his side, ignoring this tension between them that she doesn't even know the reason for.
Their ride to her apartment is even more silent than the drive to the doctor's office, but this time there is nothing warm about their quietness; they are strained, each lost in their own thoughts and unable to start a conversation about what happened with Dr. Werber. After thirty minutes of near torture, he parks outside her building but keeps the engine running.
"Try to get some sleep," Mulder says in the form of a goodbye.
"I will. Skinner told me I could take a sick day tomorrow, but I want to come back to work. I'll just be in after lunch," she details, before trying to steer the subject into what she has been practicing the entire time she's been sitting in this car. "Mulder, what happened in there?"
He looks at her, aware that she's talking about the hypnosis. "I guess you have to listen to that tape yourself," he replies, pointing at the cassette in her hands. "I just don't want you to mistake what you think you saw for what's actually real," he explains, staring into her eyes.
She can see his concern and fears and nods once. "Good night," she announces as she steps out of the car to enter her building, not staying behind to watch him drive away.
After coming inside her apartment, Scully doesn't do much of anything except take the audiotape she's holding and put it in her stereo. As the sound comes on, she recognizes her own voice there but not the words she's hearing. Once the taping of the hypnosis session is over, she rewinds the cassette and plays it again, and again, over and over, no less confused than the first time she played it, until it's close to one in the morning and she's tired but still unable to believe the recollections she speaks of in the tape. She wants to discuss it with her partner, needs to be with him or at least hear his voice, but she felt him distant when he dropped her off and she has reservations about what would come out of them discussing her memories in the middle of the night without a chance to organize their thoughts.
It's for this reason alone that she decides to go to sleep with all this uncertainty inside her, and the only thing she truly knows for sure at this point is that she wouldn't have simply made any of the things she said on that cassette up.
March 2, 1998
Washington, D.C.
Mulder had gone home after dropping Scully off at her place yesterday battling a sea of emotions, feeling irritated by the lengths of this conspiracy and angry at the men behind it, but also aggrieved by what he had been led to believe in the past. There was no doubt in his mind then that Scully had seen what she described during her hypnogogic trance, but he was just as certain that the event had been staged. It made him even more anxious about what these happenings at Skyland Mountain and Ruskin Dam meant for the big picture; if the government had been testing a classified military project or covering one up. That also frustrated him, because he just knew he would have a hard time convincing people of his convictions.
As he had laid down to rest last night, Mulder was aware that he was fearful, not to say downright terrified, for his partner's safety. He needed to get to the bottom of it all so he could protect her, and he was sure being protected was something his partner would definitely not agree to.
Today, as they both had expected before leaving their own homes, had been a tense day at the office. Scully still couldn't make sense of what had apparently happened to her on Saturday, and Mulder still couldn't believe people – maybe his partner, certainly his boss – were buying into the alien invasion fabrication. For this reason, he had made himself scarce as much as he could during the day, actually dodging Scully to avoid any conversations he hadn't been ready to have in a collected manner, and that had freed her up to reconsider if her memories had been a result of too much exposure to extraterrestrial abduction stories (something that Agent Spender had suggested when he approached her in the early afternoon to discuss Dr. Werber's methods of therapy). That rationalization had certainly made her more comfortable, and it had also pleased her in the sense that Mulder would most likely appreciate that she had reverted to her accepted beliefs and that they would finally see eye-to-eye on this matter. She even went to see him in the FBI basement about an hour ago, only to notice he had already left the office.
That's why she is currently outside his apartment door, hoping to find him here so they can actually talk now that she has cleared her mind.
After knocking on his door and hearing his come in, Scully lets herself into his apartment and finds him just sitting on his couch leisurely, all the lights off except for barely-there, indirect soft, amber light. "Mulder?" she asks, fazed. "What are you doing sitting here in the dark?"
"Thinking," he announces without much ado, watching her sideways as she reaches the living room doorway.
She watches him back, trying to gauge what's going through his mind by his posture, and then follows up, "Thinking about what?"
"Oh, the usual – destiny, fate… how to throw a curve ball," he says with dry humor. "The inextricable relationships in our lives that are neither accidental nor somehow in our control, either," he adds, resigned, averting his eyes from her to stare ahead.
"Well, I've just taken a long walk," she starts, uncomfortably, "and I've reconsidered that I may have been wrong about what I believed happened to me," she tells him. Might as well rip the band-aid off if he's in one of his moods.
He looks at her and then barely curves his lips upwards, in something that could pass for ironic understanding. "I've been doing some reconsidering of my own," he tells her getting up and handing her a piece of paper as he reaches her side.
"What is this?" she questions as she looks at it, reading the words. Things are looking up is written on the side upwards; Wiekamp Air Force Base on the back.
"Maybe an answer... to a question you and I seem to have been destined to ask," he replies walking past her.
She turns to follow him as he grabs his keys from the dinner table. "How did you get this?" she keeps on questioning, indicating the piece of paper as she reaches the hallway outside his apartment and waits for him to lock his door.
"Our friend Krycek decided to pay me a visit earlier this evening with tales of a war being waged between alien colonists trying to take over the Earth and alien rebels trying to prevent it," he explains as they make their way to the elevator, which is already on the fourth floor. "He told me one of these rebels is being held captive at this base, and that he's our chance for resisting the plans for occupation."
She keeps silent as they ride down to the ground floor, in thought. "Do you believe him?" she finally asks, as they leave the building going to his car.
"I don't believe in the pureness of his intentions," he assures her before getting in the driver's seat and waiting for her to join him in the passenger side.
"But you expect this to lead to something," she guesses. At his silent nod, she continues, "Information about the government's conspiracy and maybe even to evidence of extraterrestrial involvement."
"Now you're just putting words in my mouth," he jests.
"Well, I don't know what we'll find, but I'm glad to see you back, Mulder," she smirks at him.
Off to Wiekamp Air Force Base they go, and, unfortunately, in the end, they don't learn any real information there – Mulder does manage to infiltrate a military truck on its way out of the base while Scully remains in the car at the facility's gate, but they both end up imprisoned and he doesn't even have any memories of what happened to speak of when he rejoins her. In any case, the military's insistence on keeping the pair of agents detained in their custody – it takes Skinner using his position as an Assistant Director of the FBI and a former member of the Marine Corps to get them off any charges – pushes Mulder into deciding to open an X-Files about these events after they get debriefed the next morning by their boss. Something about all of this must be really worth hiding, and he needs to know what that is.
As compensation for spending all night in a military holding cell, both of Mulder and Scully get to leave work early on this cool Tuesday. By mid-afternoon, they are already driving together in his car back to his apartment, both keeping quietly to themselves, acknowledging that their complicity has been paramount for the success of their professional and personal relationships. Throughout the ride, the two of them get a chance to do some soul searching of their own, about numerous different things.
As he turns off the engine on his car outside his building, Mulder turns to Scully companionably. "You coming up?"
"No, I think I'll just go home, if that's okay," she tells him softly. "I think I really need the rest."
She came with him just to pick up her car that she had left here yesterday, after all.
He watches her with tenderness and notices that, even though she doesn't look troubled exactly, it seems she is not merely tired from the night's events either. She looks pensive – too pensive for his liking, really – which prompts him to address her in a quiet, intimate voice, "You okay, Scully?"
She becomes aware of the concerned tone he is using and, to comfort him, replies with softness in hers, "I'm definitely okay, Mulder," her eyes briefly smiling at him. "I just think these past days made me realize that we don't have any real control over our lives, except for the choices we make. And that overthinking maybe is just a way to unconsciously postpone some of these choices," she tells him, using cryptic words as she ponders about her life. Like for instance the fact that she's been trying to strategize for a perfect scenario to somehow bypass her infertility diagnosis when she could maybe just deal it with one step at a time, starting with simply making an appointment to actually find out if in vitro is indeed a possibility.
He is taken off-guard by her enigmatic speech, his mind in overdrive with the possibilities. Is she talking about our work? Has she finally reached her limit? Is this something about me? About us? He can't really keep from experiencing a case of nerves, even if he excels at hiding it. "Care to share with the class?" he questions, wishing he sounds nonchalant enough.
She smiles briefly, knowing him well enough to see that even if he does look unburden he is probably tormenting himself over probable and improbable scenarios. "I hope you know that everyday we're working at our best together I become even more certain that we are meant to do this, to be a part of this quest to answer the questions out there, as you said last night," she assures him, looking down at her hands. "It's not about the X-Files; I'm right where I want to be in this regard," she adds, happy to open up to him but timid nevertheless.
Her words of assurance help him feel less anxious, of course, but not completely relieved as he pays attention to what she's saying. "But not in others ways?" he ventures.
It takes her about four seconds to decide to be honest with him. "Did you know I still haven't gotten a second opinion on my ova?" She asks, looking up at him, as means of reasoning. "The eggs you recovered," she clarifies unnecessarily.
Oh. So that's what's bothering her… Yes, I did, he thinks. The Gunmen had kept him apprised of the fact that her eggs had never been re-tested nor checked out of the lab. All of this goes unsaid, though. "Why is that?" he asks back, sympathetic.
"At first I didn't want to deal with the possibility that the doctor would confirm the eggs are not viable and thus cement the fact that I'd never be able to get pregnant," she admits. "Then earlier this year I figured it was time to address it, but, um, I don't know… I wanted to make sure I had everything planned out thoroughly before ever going down this road."
That's so very Scully of you, he considers fondly. "And now?" he asks, keeping his voice barely a whisper.
She takes a deep breath before speaking, "And now I guess it's time for me to face the music. Even if I find out that I can't indeed bear a child, at least then I'll know."
He watches her for a few seconds before smiling tenderly in encouragement. He wants to tell her that he's happy for her, that she should go through with it, that she certainly deserves a chance to have a joyful, fulfilling, normal life, but at the same time he is dreading the fact that this means they will most likely drift apart, that he won't be able to be on her side for this part of her life, will never be allowed to give those things to her. So he remains quiet, because if he opens his mouth to give voice to his wishes for her, he might end up letting his fears out as well. He can't even consider the possibility that she won't be able to get pregnant, that's not something that he wants accepts as true, no. He realizes now that another reason for him to have not told her about her eggs before last year is that he desperately wants, needs her to have this, to have a flake of unadulterated joy in the vastness of sorrow storms that has become her life.
She can see a whirlwind of emotions on his features that he's trying to hide, mostly contentment but also slipping into something like melancholy, and then then she oh-so softly grazes the back of her index finger over his cheek in reassurance, calling him back to her, a warm barely-there smile on her lips. "Good night, Mulder," she offers, looking blissfully at peace for some reason. And then she opens the car door and gets out, leaving him alone.
Suddenly, it actually becomes clear to him, plain as a sunny day: even if he finds his sister, even if he finds the answers to all mysteries of the universe, his own life will only ever be truly, blissfully fulfilled if he gets some sort of a normal life for him as well. And she is the only one he wants and needs to share this part of himself with. He just needs to learn a way to change his ways to permit this kind of relationship to evolve.
What an odd moment to come to life-changing realizations.
Author's Notes:
Can we just take a moment to enjoy how our babies are becoming mature adults? I mean... seriously, look at those two! :)