Chapter Text
The cacophony of the ER filled Skinner’s ears the second they burst through the swinging doors. He half-jogged alongside Mulder’s gurney as the paramedics rushed him through the space with urgency, the floor of doctors and nurses parting before them to let them pass.
“His BP is 130/80, heart rate is 150 bpm,” one of the paramedics shouted to a flock of people that began to surround Mulder as they wheeled him into a triage bay alive with the movement of doctors and nurses. Half a dozen pairs of hands began pulling off what remained of his blood-soaked button-down, applying layers and layers of gauze to his shoulder, and passing a series of tubes and needles to one another.
Through the chaos, Skinner hoveredin the corner of the bay—hands down by his sides, watching as Mulder winced and writhed at every touch placed on his shoulder. Through it all, he kept moaning, his demands ramping up to a cry, “I need her…my wife…”
Skinner frowned, but kept his place in the back of the bay. As far as he knew, his star (and simultaneously his most difficult) agent wasn’t married. I mean, how could he be? He spent most of his time between the field and that shoddy basement office of his, coming up with some new investigative nightmare that would surely send yet another wave of HR paperwork across both of their desks. And besides, from what he could remember of any of the mundanemeetings he’d spent reprimanding the man, or cases he’d worked with him, he’d never recalled seeing him wearing a wedding ring. Mulder, married? Well, at least, he hadn’t remembered going out of his way to check. The idea was far-fetched, to say the least, so why would he have looked?
Far-fetched, that is, unless one specific criterion was met. Then, the idea of Mulder, the terminal bachelor, being married might not be so ridiculous after all…
He pushed it to the back of his mind and shook his head. It couldn’t be, right? It couldn’t be, and so he was not to consider it. And that would be that.
From the gurney, Mulder’s cries became more and more desperate as they took forceps to the shrapnel in his shoulder, removing it piece by piece. “Please,” he moaned. “Please…just call her…my wife…”
The room was chaotic and loud, just as the day of chasing down a suspect had been. It had set Skinner’s nerves on edge, filling in for Agent Scully while she was confined to desk duty all day, serving a field role he hadn’t served in over a decade. This chaos, like all chaos, meant unpredictability, a state which spiked up the hair on Skinner’s arms and clouded his thoughts. It didn’t help his already frazzled state that he faced a new and daunting plane of unpredictability stemming from the words coming out of Mulder’s mouth at that very moment. Skinner could see the glistening tears on his agent’s cheeks, and hear the pain in his voice. He had no doubt that Mulder would be just fine—after all, he’d been through worse in his time with the Bureau—but if he was so desperate for this woman, whoever she might or might not be, it was his duty to him to get her here as quickly as possible. If he could be certain of one thing, it was that duty he had to his agents.
He looked out the windows of the bay, locked eyes on the nearby nurse’s station, and started for the door, pushing his way around several medical personnel to get there. He approached, and caught the attention of a young, stout nurse donning a scrub cap covered in little rubber duckies.
“Excuse me?” he began. “Would you be able to help me? I came in with my coworker, you see, and…”
“Are you looking to notify his emergency contact?” the woman asked before she could finish. Her words were delivered with a smile that consumed her entire face.
“Uhm, yes, actually,” Skinner said. “I’m Assistant Director Walter Skinner with the FBI. That man in there is Special Agent Fox Mulder. Is there any way to reach his wife? He’s insisting that she come.”
“Do you happen to know Mr Mulder’s insurance details?”
“N-no, no I don’t,” he stammered. He swallowed, then continued. “I have his Bureau badge here, and I could give you his full name and date of birth if-”
“I can probably check in the hospital’s system for you, sir. If Mr Mulder has been a patient here at Georgetown Medical before, we can probably pull up his emergency contact card from prior visits,” the woman said. Skinner nodded his assent, and the woman rounded the desk to type vigorously on a computer’s keyboard for a few moments. Her eyes lit up and she smiled when she looked back up to him. “Ah good, I found him in our system!”
“Oh, great, that’s…what does it say?”
Her eyes narrowed while she scanned the screen. “Alright…looks like he was here about five months ago…aha! Found his wife’s name and number. I’ll call her right now, then.”
Skinner’s breath hitched as the nurse picked up the receiver of a phone on the desk and began punching in a number. Could it be?
“Wait!”
She froze, and glanced back up at him. “Yes?”
He pursed his lips. Was this wrong? To ask? To see if it was her, really her, and have this whole interaction get a whole lot easier, provided that he knew what was coming? Or was it wrong, if his suspicions were correct, to confirm them on his own through an invasion of their privacy? That’s what this was, wasn’t it?
He looked down at his hands on the desk in front of him, then back through the windows of the bay. Still on the table, gauze being packed into his wounds now, Mulder’s eyes were squeezed shut and his teeth were barred in agony.
If it wasn’t her, then he’d be helping a deserving woman get her bearings on her husband’s injury in a more reasonable amount of time than the hospital would likely have given her. If it wasn’t her, the woman would never even have to know that he’d been the one to initiate the call. But if it was her…well, he’d be doing just the same thing, wouldn’t he be? She deserved to know. She knew how to help him. And Mulder needed her.
He squared his shoulders. “Would it be possible,” he said carefully, “for you to tell me her name? The wife, I mean?”
“Yeah, let’s see here, uh…”
The nurse’s eyes scanned the screen. Skinner felt the room tilt—not with some sense of preemptive shock, exactly, but with the heavy, inevitable confirmation of a truth he’d spent years politely pretending not to see.
“Dana. Dana Scully.”
For a split second, he could only stare at the nurse, the name echoing through his mind with a dull, thunderous certainty. Of course. Of course it was her. Who else would Mulder tear himself apart calling for? Who else could cut through all this chaos, and anchor him like that? Skinner wasn’t sure whether to be relieved that the truth finally had a name to it, those 4 syllables that had just exited the nurse’s mouth…or horrified that he’d been right all along.