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She has no idea what’s going to happen to her.
No idea at all.
Which scares her more than she likes to admit, because ignorance has never done her any favours.
It’s never let her have the upper hand in any situation, never let her see through the smoke screen of all the unsettling and horrifying things that come into her peripheral more often than they should.
Two days ago, she’d been investigating a murder. A stoning by the side of the road, a man so badly beaten to death that despite being in his early 20s had lain in the autopsy bay with the shattered spine of a 90-year-old. And now here she is. Trapped. Kidnapped. Restrained. So, if anything, she knows the outcome. She knows what’s going to happen to her if she stays in this town any longer. The cultists will surround her with rocks and hammers, and before she gets the chance to run, she’ll be the one in the autopsy bay, with her bones crushed to a million pieces. If no one ever comes for her, then this is what’s going to happen.
She thinks the worst part about it is; -
Mulder will never know.
Wherever he is right now, lost, taken, abducted, somewhere on a spaceship hovering over the Pacific Northwest;
He’ll never know what got her in the end.
He’ll never know that she was screaming his name when the darkness came for her; never even know that she was pregnant. The shattered bones of their unborn child will be mixed with her own, laid out flat on a Utah morgue table, and he’ll never know that he had a son, much less have the chance to know him.
And to hell with the person who came up with the phrase ignorance is bliss, because right now ignorance is hell. Ignorance isn’t helping either of them. Ignorance is what led her down this path, on the quest for answers, running straight into a trap without stopping to look at any of the warning signs.
And the one bit of hindsight that’s haunting her now is;
She shouldn’t have come out here alone.
At the end of last week, Agent Doggett had been lounging about in the basement office, said ‘see you on Monday’ with such forced camaraderie that she’d taken this little detour more for her own peace of mind more than anything else.
But it’s a choice that’s going to cost her her life.
It’s a choice that’s going to mean she spends the last few moments of it screaming, in agony, in understanding, because by that point all the ignorance will have been taken over by the blinding knowledge of how completely powerless she is.
How completely… vulnerable.
She knows she should have been thinking about the two of them; her and the baby; when her car ran out of gas she should have gotten out of there as fast as she could; walked the eighteen miles to the state road if that’s what it took. But the desire to know had kept her there. Right here, in the clutches of archaic religion, in the middle of absolutely nowhere.
Her ignorance has finally led her to her doom.
And just once, more than anything, she wants Mulder here.
She wants him to ram his way into this room like he has countless rooms before, shoot all the bad guys, untie the ropes, and sweep her off her feet into his arms. She’d trade in all the other times he’s ever saved her just for this one moment. More than anything. She wants him to hold her and touch her and make sure that both she and the baby are okay, because she has to think like that now, even if she wants to put it off, and this is the ridiculous ludicrous fantasy she’s chosen to think about when she has nothing left to lose.
Determination is certainly a long shot. It has been even from the offset. She hasn’t been quite as stoic ever since she lost him into the haze. She likes to pretend she knows what’s coming, but ignorance rears its head. This is the first time she’s ever been in a situation when she doesn’t know for certain that he’s going to save her.
This is the first time in her life that Mulder doesn’t have her back.
And this is the last time in her life she’ll ever be able to think like that.
Twisting around in ropes, feeling the hot flush of blood up her spine, the whispers of her captors getting closer and closer, she wishes ignorance was really bliss, to be swept up in the painless relief of it.
But ignorance is hell.
And he’s not coming for her.
Not the one time she needs him the most.