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“He was evil, Mulder. I'm sure about that, without a doubt. But there's one thing that I'm not sure of.”
“What's that?”
“Who was at work in me. Or what. What made me... what made me pull the trigger.”
“You mean if it was God?”
“I mean... what if it wasn't?”
Mulder spins to sit beside her on the bed. When he raises his arm, she hesitates for only a moment before tucking herself against him. His hand comes to rest on her shoulder, his thumb stroking lightly over flannel and taut muscles just covering bone. She melts into his side, sighing as her head tilts to lean against him.
“I think…” he says slowly, “that whatever happened, whether or not there was anything at work here beyond trauma and survival instinct, you did the right thing. And that’s what matters.”
She stays quiet, but her arm snakes around behind him, her hand finding his waist and squeezing. He holds her gently, lets her be the driver of how much contact she’s comfortable with after her harrowing ordeal. The room around them stands in evidence of the violent attack against her, broken glass and splintered wood screaming out a story of a man hell-bent on hurting her, on finishing what he started four years ago. But almost before he even finishes the thought, Mulder realizes something else: the destruction in here also testifies to how hard she fought back.
He raced over here to save her, but she had already saved herself.
“Come on, Dana,” he whispers. “Let’s get out of here.”
He feels her nod against him, and she takes another deep breath before pulling away. He stands along with her, his hand moving out of habit toward her lower back but stopping just short of touching her, hovering there instead. When she steps forward toward the dresser, he makes his way carefully behind her to walk over to the closet. He finds a medium-sized suitcase and sets it down on the bed; it goes without saying that she will stay with him for at least a few days. They work in quiet concert as she pulls clothes out of drawers and hands them over for him to pack.
He watches her while trying not to let her catch him at it. Outwardly, she appears calm, her movements methodical and unhurried. It is only because he knows her as well as he does that he can see the tension in her posture, the anxiety at war with bone-deep exhaustion. It may well be for the best that she’s going on 24 hours without sleep; fatigue has a way of dulling the edges of pain, of drawing a gauzy film over emotions that might otherwise sting so much more sharply.
He hasn't slept either, of course. He’s been running on adrenaline and energy reserves born of necessity, the kind that only spring into being when it’s life or death. He will crash just as hard as she does, when all of this is over.
“This is enough.” She meets his eyes only briefly over a handful of socks, but in them he can see her thoughts still spinning over gods and devils.
He wants to tell her it will all be okay. To wrap her in his arms and tell her not to worry. The very notion of anything evil at work in Dana Katherine Scully is utterly inconceivable. But it will only sound like empty platitudes coming from him, the believer in everything but this.
So he buries the impulse and nods, zipping the suitcase and picking it up. He gestures toward the bedroom door, to let her lead the way out, but she shakes her head.
“I want to change out of these pajamas. I’ll be right out.”
He nods again. “Okay. I’ll make sure the officers don’t need anything else from us, and we can leave as soon as you’re ready.”
***
She spends most of the drive to his apartment fighting to keep her eyes open. It’s a fight worth having; each time she loses ground to exhaustion, and her eyes slip closed, all she can see is Pfaster’s face, frozen in the moment before he crumpled to the floor.
After she jerks her eyes back open for the third time, she reaches out for Mulder’s leg, needing somewhere to ground herself. His warm hand covers hers, tentatively at first, then more heavily when she doesn’t pull away. She wants to tell him to stop worrying about her, that she’s fine, but she swallows the familiar lie. She’s not completely broken, but she’s not completely fine, either.
The truth is, she can still feel Pfaster’s hands on her, can hear the harsh whoosh of his breath in her ear. Every bump in the road jostles her against the seat, angering the scrapes and contusions on her back, sustained when he slammed her into her vanity mirror, into the wall. There isn’t an inch of her that won’t be sore tomorrow.
Today. Whatever.
The physical reminders make it harder to put the whole ordeal behind her, and the silence in the car isn’t helping. She knows Mulder means well, trying to give her space and some meager sense of agency after all that has happened, but in the absence of distraction, of some other target for her focus, her mind keeps circling back to why she pulled that trigger. What made her break protocol, leaping to the far end of the use of force continuum to discharge her weapon, inside her apartment, against an unarmed man. Mulder was only half-right when he said Pfaster “didn’t give her a choice.” Pfaster was clearly dangerous, armed or not, but she didn’t shoot him out of fear for her life in that moment. It wasn’t a conscious decision, made rationally after weighing the threat and choosing the appropriate and proportionate response. It just… happened. And that’s the part that continues to scare her.
“How did you know?” she blurts out, just for the sake of saying something, anything, to break the oppressive silence. Her voice sounds strange, too loud and too quiet all at once. She swallows and tries again. “I… I didn’t get a chance to ask you, before. How you knew to come.”
He doesn’t answer right away, and she looks over to see him tilting his head, as if measuring his words. “The, uh, that song you kept hearing. It came on when I was resetting my alarm. I almost shrugged it off as a coincidence, but… Then I tried to call and you weren’t answering, so…”
He trails off with a shrug. Something about his admission takes her breath away. It shouldn’t, but it does. He believed her.
“Anyway,” he continues, “something just didn’t feel right, but it wasn’t anything more concrete than that. I didn’t know he was there.” He lifts his hand off of hers to put it on the steering wheel before turning into the parking lot of his building, and she finds herself squeezing his leg a little tighter. “I’m glad I didn’t ignore it, though.”
“Me too.”
They park and go upstairs. She lets him carry her suitcase.
Inside the apartment, exhausted though she is, Scully pauses at the doorway to Mulder’s bathroom, suddenly overwhelmed by the desire to wash away the contamination of Pfaster’s touch.
“I… I think I’d like a shower, if that’s all right.”
Mulder nods from across the room where he’s setting her things down. “Of course. Whatever you need.”
What she needs is to feel normal, not like something he is afraid he might break. She needs to not be alone with her thoughts, to have them crowded out of her head.
“Can you… will you come with me? Please?”
There is surprise on his face when he looks up. “If that’s what you want, Scully, of course I will.” He takes a step toward her, then another, his eyes questioning. When she nods, he raises his arms to the side, and she walks forward into his embrace. The moment his arms settle around her, she lets out a sigh.
“I appreciate what you’re trying to do, Mulder,” she says into his chest, the words muffled, “but right now I don’t want to be alone. I don’t want you to keep holding me at arm’s length.”
“Okay, Scully.” Her back aches as he holds her a little more tightly, but she doesn’t wince or pull away. Her eyes slip closed when she feels him press his lips to the top of her head, but the images from earlier don’t return this time.
They have showered together a couple of times before now, but the circumstances this morning are wildly different. When she undresses, a deep concern has replaced the lust she has grown accustomed to seeing in his gaze. She glances down to see the bruises on her arms where Pfaster grabbed her, finger-shaped marks already well on their way to turning an angry purple. His quiet gasp when she turns around confirms what she already suspected about the marks on her back.
“Jesus, Dana, what did he do to you?”
“Nothing so permanent as what I did to him.” She says it without thinking, and the cold bluntness of it sends a shiver down her own spine as she steps into the shower.
The hot water hits her in jarring contrast, stinging and soothing in equal measure as it finds the places where she’s been cut and eases muscles that have already begun to stiffen. She stands unmoving under the onslaught, waiting for the balance to tip more toward pleasant than painful. Long minutes pass before she feels herself start to relax; several more pass before the rush of cool air at her back indicates that Mulder has finally joined her. She turns around to face him and is immediately taken aback by the look of abject pain in his red-rimmed eyes.
“Mulder, what’s wro--”
He shakes his head, gently cupping her cheeks with both hands and leaning down to cut off her question with the softest touch of his lips to hers. Before she has a chance to react, he pulls away, moving up to kiss her brow and then pressing his own forehead against it, his thumbs stroking across her cheeks once, twice. There is such a profound sadness to the gesture, and she has no idea where this has all come from, so seemingly out of the blue. He was fine just a few minutes ago.
“I should’ve been there,” he murmurs, so quietly that she can barely make it out over the noise of the shower. “And one of these days, I’m not even--”
He stops so abruptly that she pulls back to try and look into his face. Whatever normalcy she’d been hoping for, this is definitely not it.
“Mulder?”
He won’t even meet her eyes, dropping his hands and staring down at her feet. “Forget it, I just… I’m sorry, Scully. I’m sorry this happened, and I’m sorry that you’ve had any reason to doubt yourself or… or even entertain the notion that something evil was at work in you. You don’t deserve that.”
Ah. Now, guilty Mulder is something she recognizes, at least. The strength of his reaction is still a little puzzling, given that she came out of this alive, isn’t even lying in a hospital bed somewhere, but at least it is familiar.
“Mulder, it was just a bad day.” He looks up at that, disbelief in his widened eyes. She can't help but give a wry half-smile at the understatement of the year. “All right, it was an absolutely terrible day. But we've had worse, haven't we?”
He shakes his head. “It’s different, it’s--”
“It isn’t, though.” She reaches for his hands. “Can you honestly look me in the eye and tell me that what happened tonight was worse than what happened to you with the artifact? Worse than Antarctica or… or Duane Barry?”
He looks like he’s going to try and argue, but then he closes his mouth and shakes his head again.
“I think that maybe this feels different because we’re… because we’re intimate, now. And that is probably something we need to talk about or, at the very least, acknowledge.” She squeezes his hands. “But right now I’m tired. Can we just… can we talk about it tomorrow?”
Swallowing, he nods, and she raises herself up on tiptoe to kiss him once more before turning her attention at last to the business of washing. He helps with her back, his touch tender but less tentative than before. Bit by bit, the day’s trauma seems to fade into the background, still there but significantly less obtrusive. By the time she shuts off the water, Scully almost feels like herself again -- not necessarily unscathed, but at least decontaminated. The exhaustion descends on her again like a physical burden, and she barely manages to get dried off and changed back into pajamas before collapsing wearily on Mulder’s bed.
The bed dips behind her, and she feels him arrange the covers over them both. His arm settles around her, the reassuring weight of it soothing despite her bruises, and she sighs as he carefully pulls her snug against his chest. Sleep begins to swallow her almost immediately, and she nearly misses the words Mulder murmurs against the back of her head.
She hangs on to consciousness just long enough to whisper them back.
***
I can’t stop thinking about how I might not be there the next time something like this happens. It didn't really hit me until after we got back to my place, when you were getting in the shower. Even if you got through the attack without me (and yes, I know you are more than capable of taking care of yourself, no question), you would have been all alone after. And the thought of that breaks my heart.
I know, I need to stop thinking like this. It's still way too early to know whether or not the medication is making any difference. For all I know, it might be. Maybe I'll get better, and you won't be left alone after all.
Or maybe I’ll get hit by a truck tomorrow. Nothing is certain. It’s stupid to get too caught up in hypotheticals.
Sometimes I wish I could believe, as you do, that there is a God, that we are all subject to some divine plan. Most of the time that isn’t actually a comforting thought to me, but sometimes… sometimes it would be nice to surrender control and responsibility to something greater than any of us. To trust that even when terrible things happen, it is somehow in the service of some greater good.
I want to believe in so many things, Dana. But sometimes wanting isn’t enough.
One thing I do believe is that, no matter what you might think happened with Donnie Pfaster, your actions were just. If you acted without thinking, it was out of instinct, not because some malign entity was pulling the strings. (Or, I suppose, the trigger.)
You stopped a killer, undoubtedly saved lives. In my book, that makes you a destroyer of evil, not its agent.