The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the
source of all true art and science.
-- Albert Einstein
With the sound of the gunshot still ringing in her ear, Scully ran out of the Hoover Building, towards her car, towards Mulder. The distance, while not far in physical miles, seemed like light years; it was a mental distance magnified by the fear in her heart.
As she drove wildly with one hand, she used her cell phone to call for a plane ticket to Africa. Speed wasn't merely of the essence here, it was life or death. Her life. Mulder's life.
Mulder's life, which was the only thing that mattered to her life right now. It was a likely possibility that both Fowley and Skinner were still there; she might have to do some fancy footwork to get past them, but the facts would at least speak for themselves and the doctor -- Mulder's doctor -- would have to acknowledge that. It didn't matter to her in the least that no one wanted to admit how important it was that it was Scully's name Mulder had been shouting on the surveillance camera. No one else's.
Once at the hospital, she scanned the hallway, then peered back into the monitoring station. The doctor was there, but no sign of Fowley or Skinner. Scully didn't even remember the doctor's name, didn't care. She knocked on the door, then opened it, not waiting until he answered. He bristled immediately. So she would be in for a fight. Tired of this, she thought. I'm so damn tired of this.
"I want to see him," she said simply. Before he could protest, just as his mouth opened, "I don't care what Agent Fowley or Assistant Director Skinner told you. What they may have neglected to mention is that I'm his physician of record. I'll wait while you check on that." Her mouth was set in a rigid line.
"I don't have to," he answered. "But I don't recommend it. It's dangerous." He pointed at the monitor. "As you can see, he's calming somewhat, but not enough." He put a clipboard back on a hook.
On the monitor, Mulder was standing in the corner, his arms wrapped around himself, rocking back and forth.
"And I want that monitor turned off." She walked out of the room, giving him no opportunity to argue.
"Agent-- Doctor Scully! This is the worst possible idea," he said from behind her.
"There were worse ideas already this evening."
The doctor unlocked the door and opened it. She drew a deep breath as she stepped inside. Now Mulder was crouched in the corner, rocking, arms around knees, curled up in a ball.
Something inside of her cracked, an ice floe breaking up across a dark, cold sea. Its echo rang in her soul. She could not have imagined him like this, even in her worst nightmares about Mulder's sanity. His eyes, unfocused, had a grayish light in them, overcast and cold. The sky over that frozen sea inside her. Gradually he looked up at her, and the blood melted in her veins.
He saw something inside her. It was not a warm, loving insight; it was chill and malevolent, bitter. She could not name it, but she knew it; something like trust when it curdled to doubt. Or maybe fear, if he loved her enough to be afraid of her.
Mulder heaved himself up with a shout and Scully instinctually stepped back, found herself quickly glancing up at the camera. No, he would not hurt her. She had to be absolutely certain of that. He would feel it, that hesitancy.
"Scully." His voice was raw, wounded. He grimaced as he said it, digging his fingers into his forehead.
"Mulder, I'm here. I'm here." She moved forward a step, reaching out her hand towards him, but he brushed it away violently. "I don't have much time. I have to leave right away. For the Ivory Coast."
He stumbled around in a circle, not looking at her, rubbing his hands over his face in repeated motions. Like an autistic, she thought.
This room was hideous, so cold and inhumane. There was no room for the humanity in him; it was frozen outside somewhere. The smell about him was different, something rank and stale that carried fear. Usually his scent was a characteristic she loved. Light, clean, nothing like an aftershave or cologne, but original. Something solely his. There had been times when just a breath of his scent had fueled her fantasies of what it would be like to make love to him, to smell it in its intensified state.
"Scully," he said again, finally fixing his gaze on her.
"Why were you with Diana Fowley?" she asked. "How did she come to bring you here?" She started to take his hands in hers, but he suddenly jerked back. "Mulder, I want to help you. You must let me help you, but I can't do it without you." There was no point to loving someone this much, not someone like Mulder, she realized. It ravaged you from the inside, a slow, insidious virus worse than anything science had yet to discover.
Suddenly Mulder made a fist with his right hand and brought it up, high above his head. He could kill her, the doctor had warned.
So he knows what I'm thinking, she now accepted. No, believed. Scully closed her eyes, waiting for it. A whoosh of air blew across her face as his fist arced down in front of her. She opened her eyes.
Mulder collapsed on the floor, his hands over his eyes.
Scully dropped to her knees, pulling Mulder's head to her chest, rocking him slowly. After a time he seemed to still, and she sat down all the way, crossing her legs under her, drawing Mulder almost into her lap. It should be comical, someone as small as she was always holding this giant man, yet this seemed to be the case more often than not.
There was no need to force him to talk. As pressed for time as she was, Scully would not do that to him, she wanted him to see inside her, know that he was safe here. Stroking his hair, running her knuckles along his cheek, she continued to rock him, silently and rhythmically. The room's institutional grey-green was so depressing. Quite a few years back, during her psych rotation in med school, she'd read a journal article about the color pink, and how a specific shade of it was found to have a calming influence on prisoners. Why, she wondered idly, could not hospitals paint their psychiatric rooms the same shade?
And these awful hospital gowns. As Mulder lay curled on his side, most of the back of the gown was open. She reached around and pulled the ties tighter, tying each loose string more securely. It wasn't as if she hadn't seen Mulder's body -- she'd seen him completely naked on more occasions that she should admit, as well as in various states of undress -- but this was so abjectly undignified. Scully despised this the most. At least if they'd put him in restraints he would have been in bed, covered.
She knew how best to cut through the noise in his head, to get his attention. "Fox," she said sharply. "Fox, listen to me." He twitched at hearing his first name. She ran her hand along his arm, petting him, back and forth. She knew these arms. The soft curve of the biceps and the twist of forearm. The elegant but strong hands. She continued her movement, farther down, along his hip to the thigh barely covered by thin fabric. He curled even tighter against her. She looked at his legs, the pale skin with their light covering of dark hair. The pale pink and beige of the soles of his feet.
"Pink," Mulder muttered.
"Yes, Mulder. Pink," Scully laughed. He *was* picking up her thoughts. It felt oddly freeing, to cast aside her doubts about this possibility and just ride with it. What the hell. Why not? There were stranger truths here she was on the path to uncovering.
They had this dance down. She knew the steps as well as he did -- her rigid doubt, her refusals, his leading. At times she thought he thrived on it, needed it. Liked playing off it, a counterpoint, an underbeat to the music. And deep down, Scully was convinced that Mulder knew her disbelief was partly an act. It was the most she could do to keep from being sucked into the vortex of Mulder's demanding world. So her own fragile spun-glass shell of control was vital; skepticism kept her from being pulled away into that whirlpool. And she believed that Mulder not only understood, but accepted it, possibly even wanted it that way. There was mystery in both their hearts. His credulity opened wide crazy new worlds; her challenge was to order those worlds. For this, she loved him. He had shown her wonders her brittle skin could not exclude.
How could she allow anyone to take this away from them?
"She works for him." His voice was raw and uncertain, as if he'd forgotten how it was used or what it was used for. His breath feathered against her leg.
"Who? You mean Diana works for Spender?"
"Yes." Mulder grimaced again, put his hands over his ears. Scully shifted him, held him tighter.
"How do you know? Oh. Mulder, could you hear her, too? What about Skinner?"
"Someone else. There's someone else."
"I know. Something's going on with Skinner. I don't trust him, Mulder. He may be working with her, I don't know. But neither of them has your best interest at heart."
That was an understatement. Could Mulder now understand that this was more than jealousy? She would readily admit there was jealousy here, at least an undertone of it, but that was not what fueled her hatred of Fowley. The jealousy only brought into sharper relief her mistrust, her conviction that Fowley was manipulating Mulder's beliefs against him.
So this was what her love had come down to, Scully realized. Nothing so romantic as passion; instead a protectiveness, as if she were a mother bear with her cub. Not exactly the grand desire she'd dreamt of as a young girl, not the prince who protected *her.*
For most of her life, Scully had seen the world as lines and angles, equations and facts. Life was algebra or calculus, you solved puzzles and answered questions based on what was missing. Science gave you the missing pieces. Now she'd come to understand that life was made up of geometric shapes, none of which quite matched; ellipses and triangles and circles, which did not fit inside each other or mesh, but instead collided and broke. There were theorems and formulas to make sense of it; but you had to know them first to apply them.
"It's the secret of the world."
"I don't know, Mulder. But whatever it is, it's hurting you. And I have to find a solution." I cannot leave you here like this, because you cannot leave me. "Mulder, listen to me. I called Chuck, and Byers, too. They're going to keep an eye on you. I think Doctor Sandoz is dead. And I'm afraid that Skinner or Fowley might try to deny access to you, but Byers will do his best."
She had no idea whether he heard her, or understood. Right now it all seemed to be random; one moment he heard her heart, the next he was oblivious to the words coming out of her mouth. There was simply no way to tell what he was getting.
"Do you understand me?" she asked sharply, shaking his shoulder. All he could respond with was a keening noise in the back of his throat. It reminded her for some reason of whale song; arching and plaintive.
And it felt wrong here, for it was not unlike what she had occasionally imagined him to sound like during lovemaking; that high urgency men sometimes had, a state that drove them to the most primitive of sounds and behaviors. Scully had thought of that from time to time, usually when still drenched in sleep and less constrained by her conscious mind. It was mostly abstract, more like music in her head. Mulder the bright, yearning sounds of a violin or the crystalline straining of a flute; herself the lower, earthier, and sad undertones of a cello. This small duet flowed only in her mind and her heart.
"I have to... I have to..." Mulder's words floated somewhere outside of his mouth. It seemed as if he was not making the sounds himself, but that they existed in the air before him; she merely plucked each one of them from space.
"What, Mulder? What do you have to do?"
But he couldn't answer, he just rocked.
There had to be a limit beyond which the heart could fill no more. Surely there were absolutes to what the human soul could bear, surely there was a point beyond which torture failed to extract its precious goods. The body would simply shut down, letting go of its inner core. She could feel herself splintering into tiny pieces, the interior flying away, shedding its mortal weight.
"Oh, Mulder, I don't know if you can hear me. I just need you to know I'm not deserting you. There might be an answer in Africa. I don't know that I believe what these artifacts could be. Maybe you're right, maybe not. It doesn't matter. Sometimes I cling to doubt because it's the only thing I have left; it's like a map for me, and I'm afraid to let go of the direction it leads me. Only you have the power to frighten me that way. But I think it doesn't matter to you that I doubt. Maybe in some ways you enjoy it. Otherwise you really would have, well, chosen someone who believed with you. Chosen Diana. I keep thinking of what you said to me, about how I kept you honest. Right now, if believing this thing will bring you back, then I'll believe it. I'll be the most credulous person on earth. Something is going on, and if it will help you, I'll believe what you do."
Mulder's hand gripped her knee tightly. There was proof that coma patients could hear the world around them, even if they didn't know exactly what was being said or what they were hearing. So perhaps Mulder knew what she was saying even through the noise that crowded his mind.
The door opened then, and she turned to see the doctor, and behind him, Skinner. Bitterness rose in her throat like bile. Just when you reached a point where you thought you could trust him, Skinner would turn against you, each time. How often did she have to put herself on the line only to find out he was working against her?
Scully leaned down and whispered against Mulder's ear. "I think Skinner put a bug in our office. Whatever you do, don't trust him. Do you hear? Do not let him help you."
Mulder groaned at this, grimacing with agony. Once more, she stroked his arm, his side, his hip. She glared up at Skinner. "He's going to be fine," she said; a threat, not a diagnosis.
"Mulder, I'm going now, but I'll be back soon." Was any of this getting through to him? "I don't know if you can understand this."
As she stood, he muttered against her leg. Scully thought that his eyes were almost clear for an instant. "More than you know," he said, as quietly as a breeze.
There was a solution to every equation. Somewhere in all of this was the answer to her heart.
End
8/9/99