Dana was tired, tired and bored. She couldn't sleep for missing Mulder; he was in her head, accusing, threatening, crying. "Where's my son?" he said. "Why don't you look for me? Why won't you?" The same song played in her head every night, and she was sick of it: the meaningless, stupid accusations that Mulder would make if he were here, charges that had nothing to do with the life she was living or the struggle he'd left her with.
Dana didn't have a psychiatrist or a regular priest, didn't think it was wise to have a designated secretkeeper when a secret government and an alien conspiracy watched her and feared for their secrecy. But the exhaustion had gotten so bad Skinner remarked on it, so she talked to a guy at the Bureau. Everett was a nice guy, he worked with the profilers; he was only a little exasperated when he told her, "Agent Scully, I can prescribe you drugs or we could try talk therapy. Since you won't do either of those, the only advice I can give you is to not self-medicate with alcohol and get out of your bed to do something if you don't fall asleep in the first half hour. You don't want to turn your bed into a place you don't sleep."
That's what she was thinking about, the first night Dana got up, got dressed, got out of her house. It was too late for a midnight movie and she hated eating alone at restaurants, so Dana drove by John's place.
Monica's SUV was in the driveway.
Dana kept right on rolling, headed to Skinner's house in Crystal City. There was no one in his driveway, so she parked there and sat in her car, just thinking. She saw a blind twitch, so she got out of the car, nice and slow. She leaned back against the car with her hands out in front of her, visibly empty when Skinner came through his door.
He walked out, drawstring pants snug against his waist, bare chest glinting silver in the street lamps, good but huge, too big for her. "Agent Scully? Has something happened?"
"No, sir, I just—," she shrugged and he nodded as if something had been communicated. She followed him inside.
"Inasmuch as it's the middle of the night and we are't in a struggle for our lives right this instant, why don't you call me Walter?" He pointed her to a chair in his kitchen and pulled a small saucepan from the rack above the stove. From the fridge, he pulled out a carton of milk. "Do you want plain warm milk or hot cocoa? This time of the night, you'll have one or the other."
"Cocoa, sir," she said, and held out a hand when he turned and growled at her. "Navy brat, sir. My dad would have beat me for calling a superior by his first name."
Skinner rolled his eyes but turned back to the stove and put the milk on. "So, why are you here and not at home asleep, Agent Scully?"
"It's too lonely there. I miss him."
"Mulder or William?"
"Yes," she said, and sighed. "No. I had hobbies, sir. I had friends and interests. I had a life. The aliens took Mulder and I gave up William for his own good, but where did the rest of me go?"
Skinner stirred in the cocoa and said, "You may have to add some sugar to this. I prefer my chocolate fairly bitter."
Not the next night but one soon after, Dana found herself sleepless in the same way. She drove to Skinner's place, but there was a party at the house across the street and her paranoia kicked in. She didn't know who would be there, be watching.
She made her way to John's and his driveway was empty. She parked there, five minutes, asking herself what she was doing. She wasn't going to John's house for cocoa, hadn't gone to Skinner's for that sort of thing.
She peeled out of the driveway and set her alarm clock for fifteen minutes early. She called her mother just before she walked out the door, talked a little about Charlie and his kids, and made plans for lunch later that week.
The next time the insomnia hit her, she noticed the feeling early, around eleven. She checked the internet, then went to the back of a closet she used for long term storage. From a box marked 'Frank' she pulled a corset, black panties, fishnets, a leather boa, and stack heels.
She came back from the midnight showing of Rocky Horror with her jaw set and her lips pursed. 'Rocky' made a pass at her after the show, and Dana had been tempted to accept, to have sex with him and leave before morning without giving her name. But then she worried that they would talk on the way to his place, that he'd turn out to be smart and funny. That she'd like him and want this to go somewhere.
So she'd smiled and sighed and said, "I can't give away any more hostages to fortune," and the guy looked at her as if he'd just this moment caught sight of her second head. He took off.
The restlessness showed up, not as insomnia, but as a nightmare. Mulder wouldn't shut up, kept saying, "Why'd you let him go? Why'd you let Skinner take me into the woods, Scully? What were you thinking, Scully? Why did you let it all fall apart?"
Dana slammed awake, shivering, sweating. She nearly screamed because she was in a strange bed, but she remembered in time that she and John were on a case, investigating a disappearance, two teenagers in the wood where there were lights in the sky, and John was in the adjoining room.
She stood up, then, shivering so hard she almost fell, and knocked on the door.
"Dana, what's—"
She put a hand on his mouth, another on his chest, covering some baseball player's cartoon head. She pushed, slow and steady, until John stopped, legs flush to his bed. She dropped to her knees, pulled his sweats down to mid-thigh, and blew him.
It was terrible, for him and for her. She couldn't get a rhythm going and felt herself choking on his penis. She could hear the gagging noises she made and an angry growl deep in her throat. He didn't get very hard. He kept talking, saying words Dana wasn't listening to. He didn't push her away, and she kept licking, kept sucking, until his fingers pressed tight into her shoulders and she pulled back.
He got semen on her t-shirt. She stood up and went back to her room. After a short, hot shower, she climbed into bed naked and slept.
The next morning, a hiker found the kids' bodies. They'd been hit by shotguns. The sheriff figured it was drunk, scared hunters, and Dana thought he was most likely right. As usual, John was eager for the normal and natural to be the truth, no matter how tragic.
Another bout of insomnia, but this night's harridan wasn't Mulder, it was Reyes. That woman made Dana crazy without trying. Mulder wanted to believe, but Reyes did, unquestioningly, thought all of it was true. Mulder could think about the aliens, the conspiracy, the supernatural, even if, Dana could admit to herself, he didn't always do it that well. Reyes just…believed her way through things. It made Dana crazy, made her pace. She got in bed but couldn't even manage to close her eyes.
She got up and out, went straight to John's place. No visitors were there, the windows all dark and driveway empty. She took her keys from the ignition. When her pregnancy had started to show, she'd insisted they all exchange keys. She used the one to his house now.
Inside was dark, warmer than she really liked. She took off her coat and shoes, left them by the front door. She made her way back, looking for the bedroom.
John stopped her at the kitchen. "Dana—." She put a hand over his mouth. She wanted to tell him to stop calling her that, that it wasn't her name. She kept her mouth shut and put a condom in his hand.
"You know, Dana, we should do this more often. I always think of your job as sad, but sometimes—" she laughed, an airy little chuckle. "This writer story of yours is just hilarious. You used to tell me what was going on every day when you were younger." Her mom smiled slowly, stopped halfway through.
Dana picked up her glass, let the ice's cool move into her hands. "It's hard to talk about the X Files, Mom. Some of it is really funny, but so much more is awful, even when we close the case." She looked up through her lashes. "It's dangerous, even just to talk about some of it. I feel like you keeping away is keeping safer."
Her mother reached out and took the glass from Dana and linked their fingers. "If you keep everyone safe by keeping everyone away, you're going to be alone, Dana."
That night was a nightmare straight out of Pink Floyd's The Wall: shouting English schoolteachers, chanting children, and brick after brick between her and everyone she'd ever loved: Emily, William, Melissa, and Mulder all getting farther and farther away.
She drove past John's house, but the lights were on and Monica's SUV in the drive.
She got to Skinner's house and he offered her a choice of coffee and finance report or ice cream and cable tv. She picked the finance reports and took care of two, but on the third her head kept sinking to the table.
"Dana, go to bed. Use the same guestroom as last time. I'll be up myself in a little while."
She got up and went. She tripped on the bed's dust ruffle and wound up on her knees. She almost prayed, but she didn't feel like she had anything to be thankful for, and there was nothing she wanted she thought she might get, so she got up and went to bed without saying anything to God.
Monica was bright and energetic the next morning, almost bouncy. She talked up a case she'd found, animal mutilations in the same area as a child abduction.
Just from the the verbal summary, Dana thought two different UNSUBs were at work. The abduction was complicated, a child picked up from preschool by an aunt the school staff were familiar with but who claimed to be a hundred miles away at the time of the pick up. The animal mutilations, on the other hand, were sloppy and amateur, and in a neighborhood adjacent to, but not the same as, the abductee's. "I think the pet mutilations are a disturbed child, Monica, not anything requiring our attentio. And the Hampton sheriff's office should look into Ms. Twohey's alibi a little more closely before they call in federal help. It's horrible that a child is missing, but the obvious and ordinary answer is still the strongest possibility here, Monica."
"I don't know, Dana," said John. "I think, if you look at the animal mutilation photos, there's a rising level of sophistication in those. Maybe at least one of us should go check it out."
Dana could feel the tight, narrow look on her face, and looked away from John to see something like it on Reyes'.
"Half-assing this isn't going to help anyone, John. Why don't you and Dana actually read the file, try to get a better feel for whether or not the mutilations and abductions are related? Let's make a decision on a visit versus feedback once you know what you're talking about."
John's driveway was empty again that night and he met her at the doorway to his bedroom. She cried a little, while he was inside her, tears because she was physically exhausted but couldn't wrestle herself into bed for more than three hours' sleep at a time. She needed to get away from the Mulder in her head. She needed to get back the life she'd had, or some life, to get a return on all the things and people she had lost. She had sacrificed so much, trying not to let Them take over. It was sad really, because she couldn't imagine how she would tell if she had won.
She came into work and felt clearer, steadier. She saw Monica and John, heads together over a file, absorbed, and the feeling diminished, not gone but not as bright.
She put a giant stack of files on the desk in front of her, then put her real paperwork on top. When she sat down, it came even with her head. "Today is a paperwork day," she said.
"Oh, good morning, Dana," said Reyes.
Dana didn't say it back, she never did, but she did manage a nod before she dove into a stack of supernatural events, genetic mysteries, and people killing each other for thoroughly irrational reasons.
That night John's driveway was blocked, and she turned right around and went to her mother's instead of Skinner's. She used her key to get in, disengaged the alarm, and then blinked at the white rectangular box stupidly. She didn't have the code to reset the alarm.
"Who are you?"
Dana turned to see the barrel of a .22 pointed at her. "Mom! It's me!"
"I've listened to Dana's stories about shapeshifters and bodysnatchers. I listen to everything my daughter tells me. And this, this is not the way she acts. My daughter would never show up without calling first."
"Except I wanted to be here, be home, for a little while, but I didn't want to wake you. I couldn't sleep." Dana looked up, briefly, to see the face, make a visual connection. Her mother had that same scared, mad look on her face she'd had when she went to Dana's high school to insist that Dana was ready for advanced science courses in her freshman year.
"Bullshit," said her mom.
Dana started, couldn't help herself. Her mom never cursed, at least not in front of Dana. Dana really didn't like how this conversation was going. "I don't know how to convince you, Mom. You're right, there are things out there, dangerous things and people, that can mimic others' shape. What do you—? I don't know what to say. Please, put down the gun, Mom."
"Tell me something only you would know."
"You bought me condoms when I was fifteen, when you caught me and Tony Shattuck making out in Daddy's study."
Her mother nodded once, sharply, then checked the gun's safety, and put it down on a bookshelf behind her and out of Dana's reach. Then she stepped forward and grabbed Dana's upper arm. "For Christ's sake, girl, call first." She let go and fiddled with the alarm, then pulled Dana back into a hug. "That's set to ring in the bedroom, if it's disabled using you kids' code. It'll call the alarm company if it's not reset in five minutes, so you didn't save me any sleep.
"Let me fix some warm milk, and then we're going to bed. You can talk in the morning."
The insomnia and nightmares retreated for a while after that. Lunch with her mother helped Dana keep herself together. The first night that she felt shaky and restless again, she was able to stay home and sleep. The next day, she mentally prepared herself for a midnight excursion. First, she had dinner with Skinner, a personnel review at a family-style Peruvian place he knew off Mass Ave. They started the evening talking about John and Reyes, and they wound up talking about Mulder and the X Files in general. The ache in her face the next morning let her know the jaw-clenching had been mutual, but at least she'd gotten some sleep.
Things changed the day she left for lunch and saw a family come in for the tour. They had a baby, a toddler really, and a cute little girl with bright red hair. She thought, my children should be just that age now, and she didn't even bother to go home that night.
She had dinner with her mother, then caught a ten o'clock showing of a completely unconvincing horror picture. She cruised past John's house just after midnight. The driveway was empty, so she moved the condoms and lube from her purse to her pocket and went in.
She didn't feel the same, didn't feel grounded by the physicality of it, the stretch and the sweat and the smell, the way she had before. The next time the insomnia hit, she called all the gyms in the area until she found a twenty-four hour one with a pool. Two hours of laps and another half hour on a ski machine, and she felt better than John had ever managed to make her feel.
She'd forgotten, during the years of deskwork and research and struggles against creatures bigger and faster than she, that her body could be a resource, a place of strength. The cancer was probably part of that.
She had lunch with her mother at a quiet Italian place near Farragut Square. Mom was fascinated by pasta and pasta sauces these days and kept shoving them at her daughter. Dana finally asked, "Why are you trying to fatten me up? I'm an adult, and I eat regularly."
"I know, I know, I see you eat lunch at least three times a week, but you're getting rid of it all, somehow. You look," she paused, swallowed, "you look like you did during the worst of your cancer, Dana."
Dana blinked and ordered a bowl of fettucine with an alfredo mushroom sauce. Excercising for hours every night of the week, going on three hours sleep everyday, it was the sort of autosomatic disregard Mulder indulged in. And if she was too badly off to recognize it in herself, she was too far gone on this path.
She had lunch with Skinner, and the insomnia stayed away for about a week. His huge solidity comforted her, made her feel protected. She knew it was illusory, knew he was as much a pawn in this battle of theirs as she or Mulder. But he looked large and strong, and he was the only person willing to talk to her about Mulder. When he called her Agent Scully, she felt like herself.
It occurred to that a twenty-four hour gym was open in the early evening as well as after midnight. She went to the gym straight from work and stopped eating light or diet anything. She gained back a few pounds and lowered her sleep deficit. Her mother stopped looking at her as if she were already gone.
She caught a cold, a regular summer cold, and she stayed home from work a few days. She didn't go to the gym for about a week. The insomnia returned. Her dead and her taken didn't haunt her this time. She felt trapped in her body, felt a darkness in her, the cancer's return.
She went to see her oncologist immediately, then got a second opinion. They were both positive that nothing had changed, that she was still in remission and overall good health. They even showed her the films and she looked at them intently, as if she remembered what to look for from her radiology elective in medical school. She didn't see anything, anyway.
She spent, two, three, four restless nights pacing and prowling her apartment, before she caved in and picked up her keys. She drove to John's house and was pleased to see his empty driveway.
She drove to John's house once every three nights from then on. She snuck in his house, covered his dick, applied some lube, and fucked him.
The sex wasn't a pleasure of itself. She couldn't fault John's technique as a lover. Any time he tried to kiss or touch her, to move anything besides his hips beneath her, she said, "John, please," in the tone she'd used to quell Mulder at his most ridiculous. She made him do exactly what she told him to, she made him come, and then she could walk out with no harm to anyone.
If Monica was there, she went back to her gym for a second session and had an energy bar on the way. She used weights late at night, because of the discipline it took to keep from clanking, because she could decide just how sore to make her body before she ever began.
Work had ended on a bitchy note, with Reyes silently accusing John and Dana of ganging up on her when they said that the case BSU had referred to them should be sent right back and referred to a Santeria expert. The killer was clearly religious but not supernatural.
On a day like today, Dana knew John's driveway would be empty, and it was. But the lights were on although it was already after midnight, and that was not the usual pattern at all. She parked further away than usual and took a spanner from the toolbox in the trunk. She would have brought her gun, but she didn't take it with her on these night time expeditions.
She walked to the front and peered in a window. John was sitting in a chair in his living room. He was reading a paperback, so thin she thought it might be a children's book.
She went to the door, unlocked it, and went in. She couldn't see anyone else in the room, although that wasn't a guarantee things were all right.
"You forgot something when you were here." John held out his hand. Dana saw two pearl earrings she had lost. "You should take these and go, Dana."
She came forward and folded his hand over them, then left without saying a word.
Reyes put in a request to investigate a Sasquatch sighting at 9 a.m., followed by a request to look into some suspiciously classic crop circles at noon, and ended the day wanting to check out some fraudulent mediums in New Orleans. All of these requests took the form of three page memos filled with typos.
Dana denied all three requests, forwarding the last one to the fraud division since the mediums were high volume, and then sent back a memo directing Agent Reyes to use a day of personal leave tomorrow, and authorizing an additional eight hours for the day after that.
John watched the silent paper war and said nothing, but every time one woman put something in the other's inbox, he dropped a pencil or some paperclips or something.
That night Dana didn't go home from the gym. She went straight to Reyes'. She still had her key from before, and she let herself in.
Reyes walked out of her kitchen, gun in hand. When she saw who it was, she checked the safety and stuck it in her pants. "What do yo want, Dana? I'm not on Bureau time now. If this is about John, you can leave. I'm not going to discuss him with you."
Dana walked further in the front room, sat herself down on a plain, brown couch. "You don't think this is about the Bureau, do you? You don't think the job is why this," she shrugged, groping for some word other than, "catfight is a problem?"
Reyes looked at her for a second, eyes narrowed and nostrils flared. Then she walked away, into the kitchen, and Dana heard something opening and closing. When Reyes came back, the gun was gone and she had a soda can in each hand. She thrust one at Dana. "Yes, I know that They are out to get us. But, god, doesn't it make it that much more important for us to carve out what happiness we can? Why would you—?"
"Monica, I cannot and will not place anyone else on this firing line. Mulder, my children, my sister, and my body have all been taken to be used or killed by conscienceless men for iniquitous purposes."
Reyes blinked at her and mouthed the word iniquitous but said, "So fuck Skinner, if it's just sex you're looking for."
Dana shook her head. "It's not like that, between us. He…matters."
"And John and I don't?"
Dana stood, put her unopened can on the glass end table. "Mulder's whole life revolved around the aliens. They took Skinner's body once, they took his wife. You know my story." Dana put a hand on her stomach, to see if Reyes would flinch. She did. "We can't leave. This is in our blood." She put a Request for Transfer form on the chair she had just vacated. "Figure it out, Reyes. Is this personal for you?"
Dana went home and went to sleep.