Sharing Madness (1/1)
Maria Nicole

Rating: PG-13
Category: S
Spoilers: Folie a deux, pine bluff variant, and a lot of little
spoilers up through folie a deux.
Keywords: Mulder/Scully UST
Summary: Mulder and Scully talk after the events of folie a deux.
Sequel to Apologies.

Disclaimer: They're not my characters. They belong to Fox and 1013.

Sharing Madness
Maria Nicole

It was past seven, the past few weeks had been unusually bad, and
he was on the phone with a pompous, arrogant ass. Staring up at the
ceiling (the interior decor at this building was distinctly
uninspired), with his feet propped comfortably on the desk, Mulder
considered just hanging up and going home. Bernard Gentile, head of
the Investigative Support Unit, wasn't listening to him anyway. It
was obvious to Mulder, and should have been obvious to Gentile, that
the working profile was wrong. They shouldn't be looking for a person
who held a grudge against the men killed, but someone who wanted to
rescue them. The bodies were arranged to give peace, not to punish.
Mulder didn't think that calling to ask if the victims had been in
therapy, and then cross-referencing the names of employees at the 
buildings where they had attended therapy, was too much to ask.
   
Gentile thought it was, and insisted on keeping him on the phone
to explain why this latest (positively spooky) hunch wasn't worth 
following up on.
   
Mulder stared at the ceiling tiles, which were positively 
fascinating in comparison to Gentile. Patterson had been a sociopath
long before he had done his neat half gainer into the deep end of 
insanity, but at least he'd never been boring. Mulder silently 
thanked the very prettily dressed spirit of J. Edgar Hoover that
Gentile wasn't his boss.
   
Of course, his own boss thought that Patterson wasn't the only one
testing the waters of insanity.
   
Wait, was this a pause? Mulder jumped in. "Sir, if you just take
the two minutes to run their names through..."
   
Of course manpower was short, did he think Mulder didn't 
understand that? The last time he and Scully had had anything
approaching clerical support had been...never. "Yes, I understand 
that, but..." the ceiling tiles were losing interest fast. Mulder 
looked down, and...oh, hell, if he'd had to conjure up anyone with 
his thoughts, couldn't it have been Hoover himself, disgruntled at
being a ghost stuck in the basement of the building that bore his
name? But no, sitting across from him and looking as unreadable as
ever was his very alive, very solidly present boss.
   
Mulder sat in a more appropriate fashion for an FBI agent and 
started to pick up his sentence where he'd left off, but Gentile had
taken the ball and run with it. Mulder tried to look as if he were
paying attention, although Gentile was saying nothing new, and
wondered what Skinner was doing in the basement. Dammit, he'd been
behaving himself, sending up word perfect paperwork that pushed no
paranormal theories, avoiding anything that would get him sent to
the psych ward again without passing Go and collecting his $200.
   
Gentile was saying that the bottom line was that Violent Crimes
was short staffed, that they didn't want a profile from ISU that 
would tell them to do something different, but a refinement of 
the profile they already had.
   
"I know they don't have enough people on this case, but it won't
hurt to send two of them to check to see if..." Gentile's mother had
obviously never trained him to interrupt. He was off again, and Mulder
had a feeling of impending doom. He knew what was coming next. He
wondered what would happen if he refused to help out, as it wasn't 
technically within his job description to do Violent Crimes' work
for them. Possibly Harry Madison, the bureau shrink who had helped
Patterson and then Gentile keep the bureau's profilers on the job,
would not be so understanding next time Mulder was required to go in
for a psych consult.
   
Mulder looked across his desk at the reason why he was right now
very nervous about psych consults and mentally gave in. Should 
Madison mandate a leave of absence for psychological reasons, Skinner
would probably actually smile as he signed off on the order.
   
Gentile was getting to his point now, which was that he needed
evidence if he was going to replace the current profile with Mulder's
version. Why didn't Mulder check into the therapist angle and see if
he could find something?
   
Fine. Great. Last time he'd tried to provide evidence for a pet
theory he'd ended up in restraints pumped full of sedatives, but that
was unlikely in this case, so he said, "Yes, I'll check on it 
tomorrow morning and talk to you again."
   
Unctuous bastard that he was, Gentile was now implying that Mulder
could give this one a pass if he wasn't up to it. "Are you sure that
you're capable of handling this on top of your own workload?" On top
of the mental breakdown, you mean?
   
A great way to start off a meeting with Skinner, Mulder thought as
he reassured Gentile of his basic functionality and hung up. "Sorry
to keep you waiting, sir." Wasn't that what a good little employee
said?
   
"Not a problem. Bernard Gentile?"
   
Mulder nodded, wondering how long Skinner had listened to him on
the phone.
   
"I didn't know you were working on a case for him." The other man's
tone of voice wasn't particularly informative, and Mulder wondered if
he was irritated that he hadn't been told of the case. He didn't seem
so, but...chain of command.
   
Just in case, Mulder downplayed it as a consult and waited to see
if Skinner would buy this.
   
"I didn't realize you did fieldwork for him." Damn. Busted.
   
"I suggested a course of action that didn't agree with the current
profile. He doesn't want to change the profile until there's evidence
to support that change."
   
"Providing the evidence isn't really your job."
   
He was probably the only agent who could get into trouble after
spending a week avoiding his boss, the paranormal, and even his own
partner. Skinner wasn't reaming him out about the chain of command,
though, only looking at him in that measuring, assessing way he had
that made Mulder feel about thirteen. Skinner had been an ally more
often that not, and Mulder was even willing to acknowledge that 
Skinner had put him into the psych ward not because he was part of
a conspiracy to discredit Mulder and get him out of the way but out
of a genuine belief that Mulder needed help--but he still found it
unnerving that he couldn't get a read on Skinner's thoughts.
   
"Is Agent Scully still here?"
   
Maybe he wasn't in trouble after all. "She's checking the lab for
some test results. She should be back soon. Did you need to talk to
her?"
   
"No, actually. Leamus stopped by my office just now."
   
Leamus, the U.S. Attorney with ties to terrorists, who had 
engineered yet another government coverup, whose name had always
reminded Mulder of the word 'weasel.' "Why?"
   
"Ultimately, I'm not sure. He dropped by a videotape. All that's
on the tape is the time they broke your finger."
   
Skinner had handed over the videotape as he said this, and Mulder
glanced it over automatically for identifying features before 
Skinner's words clicked. "August Bremer had that taped?" They'd taped
that? Skinner had seen that? Damn. It had been embarrassing enough to
describe that incident during debriefing.
   
Scully would never have flinched if they'd shoved a toxin into
her face; Skinner would probably have stared impassively as they'd
broken all his fingers. But the thing was, it had *hurt.*
   
"I assume so. He said it arrived in the mail."
   
"Yeah, right." Hand delivered by Bremer, more likely.
   
"I'm not sure why Leamus sent it on."
   
Probably just another pinprick to remind him of who had power and
who didn't. "Did he give a reason?"
   
"He said you'd done good work on the case. Mentioned the
possibility that I should forward this to Quantico for instructional
use."
   
Skinner courteously didn't laugh as he said this. Mulder, 
personally, did not find Leamus's joke amusing--didn't he have 
enough to worry about without everyone in Quantico knowing what had
gone on? "I'm sure the whimpering and crying will be very 
instructive." What not to do in the situation, perhaps.
   
"The tape is yours, Mulder, not Quantico's. But Leamus was right,
you did do good work."
   
"Thanks." Well, he had gotten out of the situation alive, a 
victory that would have had more personal resonance if his own
government hadn't set him up. Skinner was regarding him with that
same measured look again.
   
"I'm not sure what I could have done differently with the Pinkus
case. I wish that I had been able to think of a better solution at
the time."
   
Damn, what was this? He'd thought they'd tacitly agreed to ignore
the Pinkus affair until enough time had passed to return to normal.
Mulder examined the videocassette to give himself more time. He
rather wished that Skinner had thought of a better solution at the
time, too. "You could have looked." 
   
"What?"
   
"Behind you. When you were holding me down. I kept telling you 
to look, because he was...whatever he was, then. You could have 
looked." He hoped that he wasn't buying himself a one-way ticket into
restraints by insisting that he'd been right.
   
"You think I would have seen what you did?" The other man sounded
interested instead of doubtful, which made it easier for Mulder to
take the question seriously.
   
"I'm not sure," he replied. "But it wasn't like I was always 
seeing Pinkus as a monster. I didn't in the first situation until 
Gary told me to look around at a certain time and I turned around 
and..." saw a great big giant monster. Maybe Skinner wouldn't have
seen it. Most of the monsters that he'd directly encountered through
his championing of the X-Files had been human, and yeah, Mulder could
accept that it was easier to acknowledge the possibilities of monsters
than to look them in the eye.
   
"I should have," admitted Skinner, in what was probably the closest
thing to an apology that Mulder had ever gotten from him. 
   
Of course, he had to ruin it by brining in the Scully factor, 
insisting that Mulder never should have ditched her. Scully had 
already made it quite clear that he should never if he valued his 
life assign her to an autopsy like a lab flunkey, and Skinner didn't 
need to bring it up again.
   
They wrangled a bit more about the Pinkus case, but it was oddly
reassuring to have the other man snap at him about evidence and 
proof and skepticism. He could handle Skinner's slight irritation
with him running off on his own, and they were on amicable enough 
terms by the time Scully returned from the labs. Skinner even, in the
same tone of mild vexation, insisted that he had never thought Mulder
was a nutcase, which Mulder didn't really buy. However, at least
Skinner didn't look at him as if he expected Mulder to flip out, a
facial expression that everyone else in the bureau had perfected.
Mulder figured that Skinner thought he had already flipped out, but
in a useful enough way.
   
Skinner left when Scully came, after another reminder about the
quarterly expense reports, the bane of Mulder's life. He left an 
uncomfortable silence behind him. Mulder and Scully had spent much
of the last week working quietly on different projects. Mulder had
been licking his wounds and ruminating about insanity; Scully had
been...thinking about something, he presumed. They weren't on bad
terms, exactly, but there had been a distance between them.
   
He hoped that she wouldn't want to talk about the Pinkus case, but
knew she did. Usually they used passive aggressive avoidance and
denial as a way of getting past their rough spots, but sporadically
one of them would try to talk about their problems, and he could feel
her intent to hash it out in the air like ozone before a storm.
   
He broke the silence first. "Anything unusual on the lab reports?"
She'd been working on a consult for the labs; they'd claimed it might
be an X-File in order to get Scully's expertise. She looked tired
and almost rumpled, an unusual look for her and one he appreciated
seeing every so often.
   
"Not even close." She yawned before asking, "What, exactly, was
Skinner dropping off?"
   
He supposed he couldn't really avoid this. "Candid camera...only
I wasn't smiling. Bremer taped the finger thing."
   
He'd tried to say that lightly, but she looked at him intently,
and a dozen messages passed between them. Unspoken communication was
a pain in the ass, sometimes.
   
By the time she spoke again, he had resigned himself to an 
evening of watching himself whimper. "What a joy. How about we head
over to my place, start the damn expense report, eat some lasagna,
and watch you bang heads with the...how did you put it...that 
sadistic skinhead fuckface asshole?"
   
Despite himself, he was cheered. Scully fed him infrequently, but
her dinners were worth waiting for, and it was very like her to
emphasize the one moment in the interrogation fiasco that he didn't
mind remembering. He still wasn't sure he wanted to get into a 
discussion of their recent cases, but..."Can we shred the tape into
confetti afterwards?"
   
"We can shower it over Leamus's head for his next birthday, I
promise."
   
   
So, they went to her place and ate lasagna. He'd stopped on the
way to pick up some ice cream, cookies 'n cream, which made Scully
happy, and might make her complacent enough to let the matter of
watching the tape drop.
   
They ate the lasagna in front of the TV, watching CNN and making
snide comments about the politicians and generally amusing 
themselves. Mulder had ditched the last conference they should have
attended for the possibility of monsters, but he suddenly wished that
they had gone, solely to sit in the back of the classroom and be the
disruptive element. After five years of sparring with him, Scully was
nothing if not a master of the snide comment.
   
After, she dished huge amounts of ice cream into bowls and slid
the tape in the VCR.
   
The tape quality wasn't the best, but it was good enough to see
events, and their ice cream still started to melt as they watched. 
She leaned forward, intent on the screen, biting her lip slightly.
He watched her reactions instead of the tape, as his memories of the
event had already shown up in his dreams several times.
   
When the skinhead went crashing across the room, she smiled, a
fierce little smile of triumph rather than amusement (she had a 
protective tendency when something of hers was threatened).
   
When the tape went gray with snow, she leaned back against her
sofa and frowned, regarding the bowl of ice cream in her lap as if
it contained answers. Her shoulders were hunched and tight.
   
"Your ice cream's melting," he told her.
   
"Why do you think Leamus gave this to Skinner?"
   
"I don't know. The usual. To confuse me, distract me. Just to make
me wonder why he did it. To throw the fact that I can't prove that
Bremer was government in my face."
   
"You didn't tell me it was like that."
   
"You saw my report."
   
"You didn't write it like that."
   
"Like what? I described events. What was I supposed to add, that
I was scared out of my mind?"
   
She shook her head, more in frustration than in negation. Her hair
curtained her face. "At least it wasn't the other time," she said
softly.
   
"The bank robbery?" he asked.
   
"No, the...when Bremer let you go." She frowned. Scully didn't
dodge facts. "The execution."
   
"Yeah, I guess."
   
"Mulder?"
   
"Yeah?"
   
"When you were...this wasn't the first time you've been in danger,
what do you think about? I know it's cliche, but does your life flash
before your eyes?"
   
He'd never even understood what that phrase meant, although he'd 
heard other agents say that it had happened to them. Usually, danger
came and went too quickly for him to process knowledge or regret,
his mind focused not on impending death but on how it might best
be avoided. Walking towards his execution, though, he'd known that
there would be no last minute rescue by Scully, no cavalry charge
from Skinner. As with any other time he'd been close to death, he'd
felt a keyed up adrenaline, a deepening awareness of his own breath
and heartbeat, and no sensation at all of his life flashing before
his eyes.
   
Instead, unique to this instance, he'd walked to his death through
a cascade of Scullys, memories flipping through him like one of the
slide shows that Scully always suppressed a smile at. Strangely, they
hadn't been the moments that he would have said defined their
partnership, the searing moments of pain and fear and love when they'd
held a gun on the other or reaffirmed words of trust and commitment.
He had remembered mostly minor, inconsequential moments--if remembered
was the right word, for the memories had settled through not only
his brain but his body as well so that he had walked to his death
through both the past and the present, caught between them.

***
 
Her curvy, jeans clad body bends to sight along a pool cue in
a cheap bar in North Dakota that they have been dragged to by an
agent who wants to impress Scully with his prowess at pool. The 
jeans have a tiny, tiny hole at the seam on her right hip that he
wants to touch, but he holds onto a cool, sweating bottle of beer
instead (the ground beneath his feet is slightly damp)...
   
Scully, wearing a hideously unflattering hotel-bought swimsuit
and the smeared remnants of mascara, splashes him in the pool of a
Texas hotel with broken air conditioning (the gimp looks at him and
smirks)...
   
Her disembodied voice, teasing and affectionate over the phone
wires, asks him if he's sure it wasn't a girlie scream (his hand
throbs dully)...
   
Her arm rests against his on the armrest of a plane flying over
Idaho, the gold of her watch pressing lightly against his forearm
(Iamgoingtodie)...
   
The supple muscles of her back shift under his touch as they flirt
about genetic possibilities in Home (the sky is a clear, light 
blue)...
   
She grimaces slightly as she washes down Midol with stale 
coffee (torn white plastic sways in the slight wind)...
   
He breathes in the smell of shampoo and perfume as her head falls
onto his shoulder on a plane somewhere over the Grand Canyon (the
lingering smell of the burnt money drifts to him)...
   
Her eyes are serious and his own voice brittle and quick as she
listens to him talk about Phoebe on a stakeout, a month after Phoebe
has left the States (the manure smell of the country beneath the
residue of ash)...
   
Her weighs the inexplicable smallness of her feet in his hands,
as she lets him give her a footrub after a long, grueling autopsy
in ridiculously high heels (a drop of sweat trickles down the back
of his neck)...
  
The fine vertical lines between her eyebrows crease as she writes
yet another report reconciling evidence with belief (his fingers
clench and loosen)...
   
Her hand closes strongly around his arm to pull him away from a
confrontation with an agent in Arizona (IamgoingtodietodayIamgoingto
die)...
   
Scully's face stills into that of a sorrowing Madonna as she holds
a sleeping baby on a plane a month after Emily (a slight breeze 
touches his face and he inhales deeply)...
   
He smells gunpowder and tests the weight of the gun in his hands
on the shooting range, knowing that Scully is one person over (in the
far, far distance, a car starts up)...
   
Her thin, sharp, post-Melissa face tightens with anger at his
insistence on telepathy (his heart beats too fast)...
   
Her voice tells him of her check up visit to the oncologist, three
months after remission, and his hand rises involuntarily to the pulse
in her neck. Her skin is warm under his fingers, the thin chain of
her cross cool. Realizing sluggishly that her voice has faltered,
he looks up slowly from the quickening beat of her heart to see in 
her eyes something akin to wonder (Iamgoingtodie)...
   
One of a hundred different Scullysmiles, each catalogued (the
other men halt), the rare and infinitely precious Scully laugh 
thisistheend).

***
   
So. Maybe his life had flashed before his eyes after all.
   
When Bremer had told him to kneel, he had turned slightly, 
wondering how he could explain to Bremer the worth, the indescribable
richness that was Scully, and how this would be too much for her,
his death another loss too soon after Emily. But how could he 
translate a Florida forest into words, captured as he was in the 
sensations of pain and security as he lay cradled in Scully's arms
listening to her sing?
   
The Scully memories had stopped abruptly as he had knelt in the
dirt, leaving him with only his own heartbeat. His last thought
before the gunshot had been directed not towards Bremer, or Scully,
or even God, but towards Skinner (don't make her ID the body).
   
Noise. Numbness. An indrawn breath and the thump of a body 
beside him. He'd thought at first, not unreasonably, that Scully or
Skinner had come through after all, and had stayed down, expecting
more gunfire. When none came, he'd looked up cautiously at Bremer,
and the world's alliances had shifted once more.
   
He would have preferred a rescue by Scully. The thought that she
could do anything was comforting if intimidating; the thought that he
had been returned to her only through indulgence of Bremer was not.
   
"Mulder?" she asked him hesitantly, and he realized that he had
never answered her question, and too much time had elapsed for him
to pass it off with a joke.
   
"Sort of," he admitted. "Not everything. Not Samantha. Mostly
stupid things. Like, remember that one case we had in North Dakota?
I think it was North Dakota, with Agent Harricks?"
   
"Mark Harricks. The arsonist...or spontaneous combustion. Yes."
Her voice was dry. He was sure that if he pressed the point, she
would insist even now that it had been a clever arsonist, although
it still would have irked her that the arsonist had been so clever 
that he'd left no trace at all.
   
"I remembered being in the bar that night; we'd finished with the
case but the airport was gonna be closed for two days until a storm
blew over, remember?"
   
"Yeah." When he stayed silent, she looked at him carefully. "What
about the bar?"
   
"I don't know. I just remembered drinking beer and watching you
play pool. I don't know why that memory stuck."
   
She smiled reminiscently. "I remember that you bet on me against
Harricks and we used the money to get drunk the next night."
   
"It was a lot of money," he said.
   
"The odds were heavily on Harricks," she said even more dryly. If
he recalled correctly, he had been the only one to bet on her, a move
that most of the agents had attributed to misplaced loyalty until
Scully had soundly whipped Harricks' butt.
   
"You know I'll always bet on you," he replied, half teasing and
half completely serious. For a moment, their eyes met and clashed
in a way that was deeply familiar but still made his heart lurch.
Would this be the time that she took his teasing comment and sliced
it open to the deeper truth that they both knew was there, when they
would tell each other what they have meant by all their cryptic,
coded admissions of longing or need or love?
   
She smiled a little at him but looked away, and he understood that
it would not be today with the confused mixture of disappointment and
relief with which he was also deeply familiar. He let his tone be all
teasing as he added, "Besides, a Navy brat with an older brother, it
was a safe bet," and the smile she gave him was uncomplicated.
   
The whole memory unrolled for him like a scroll out of the flash
that he had experienced before his almost-death. He couldn't 
pinpoint the exact time--sometime after his mother had recovered from
her stroke but before Tunguska. There'd been a freak snowstorm that
had kept them trapped in North Dakota being entertained by the local
field office, who had been surprisingly welcoming. The night before
leaving, though, they had turned down the offer of a pool rematch
and taken their previous night's winnings to a video rental place
and a liquor store, checking out all the Indiana Jones movies and
buying several bottles of a very good, very expensive wine to drink
with their pizza. It was possibly the only time they had gotten 
anywhere close to drunk with each other--they didn't drink on a case
and they didn't spend much of their rare down time together. Even
half-drunk, they had kept a tight lid on potentially embarrassing
admissions or emotions, and the only thing he had found out about
Scully was that the sight of Harrison Ford had the power to make her
eyes glaze over.
   
Also, that she could actually giggle, although that sound had 
possibly been a hiccup of some sort.
   
"What're you smiling at?" she asked, sounding amused herself.
   
"Just the thought of you drooling over Harrison Ford."
   
"I'm a sane woman, Mulder."
   
"So you say. We all know I'm not one to judge." That had been
intended to be light, as the jokes about his sanity usually were,
but it came out unexpectedly bitter, and he knew that he'd left her
an opening. Let it drop, Scully, he pleaded with her silently, but he
had never acquired quite her knack for shutting down conversations 
that cut too close to home.
   
She regarded her hands, wrapped around her ice cream bowl. 
"Mulder..." her voice was carefully hesitant. Scully trampled over
any boundaries he had in his life, but she did so politely enough that
it was usually only later that he realized that she had removed 
another of his defenses. She knew all the mechanics involved in the
construction of walls. "I know you're still upset about the Pinkus
case."
   
"I'm fine." Well, it worked for her.
   
"And I know you had reason to be...if I'd done the autopsy in the
first place, things might have happened differently."
   
"This an apology? Because if it is, I can add it to Skinner's. At
least I think that was an apology." He threw her Skinner as a 
diversion. She didn't take it.
   
"Yes, this is an apology. Although I'm not happy about you 
assigning me an autopsy behind my back..."
   
"Neither was Skinner."
   
That did divert her. She raised an eyebrow.
   
"He basically told me never to do it again."
   
"Hmmm. But, really, I do want you to know that I wish I'd handled
things differently."
   
He debated asking her why she hadn't, but he was fairly sure that
he didn't want to hear the truth--that the idea of his being 
delusional wasn't a new one to her.
   
"Mulder?" There were a thousand messages and questions in the way
she said his name, not all of them decipherable to him. Mostly, she
expected a response of some sort.
   
"Skinner said the same thing. I told him he should have looked. He
said he would next time, which should be good if I ever need to tell
him that there's a telemarketer right behind him trying to kill him."
   
Scully was silent. Maybe, she was disappointed. He sighed and
gave in. "You have to be willing to look, too."
   
"I know. But that doesn't always mean that I'll see what you see."
   
"Yeah, but just because you don't see it doesn't mean I'm crazy,
you know."
   
"And it looks like...well, it looks like something strange was 
going on with Pinkus and the nurse..."
   
"Yeah, like he was a roach bigger than the ones we found in that
last hotel."
   
She cringed slightly, at the memory of the last seedy hotel they
had been at (even Mulder had been disgusted, and his standards were
not as strict as Scully's) or at the idea that she would have to fit
a giant, insectoid toxic monster in her worldview.
   
"I think even Skinner thinks you're right," she continued.
   
"Duane Barry was probably right," he heard himself say, and then
fell back against the sofa and closed his eyes. Damn it.
   
"What?" Her voice was icy, although he didn't take it personally.
Ice was always her reaction to shock.
   
Damn it, damn it, damn it. He kept his eyes closed.
   
"What do you mean?"
   
"I mean..." It occurred to him that she would not be able to strip
his defenses away so thoroughly if he didn't hand over the scalpel.
Maybe part of him wanted her to reach through the layers of 
rationalizations and denials with which he surrounded himself as 
easily as she had once cut through a sticky, insect-spun cocoon to
reveal the human inside; maybe part of him feared that what she would
find would be as desiccated and reduced as the leeched, preserved
remains that they had found then; maybe all of him trusted her to
handle him gently either way.
   
He kept his eyes closed and tried to explain. "Duane Barry was
right, you know. I mean, maybe he wasn't completely, we don't know for
sure that aliens were involved, but he was right that something was
happening to him, that the government was involved, that the implants
were tracking him. And if he translated that into aliens--we both
know he had reason to."
   
"I'm not sure what you're leading to here."
   
"Duane Barry wasn't wrong." He opened his eyes finally and willed
her to meet them, to make the connections. She pulled her eyes away
from her hands and looked at him, and hers were blue and direct and
clear. "But he wasn't sane, either."
   
Her face always reflected the workings of her brain; he could see
her processing this, tracing back the conversation to work out what
he meant. He could see when it clicked. Her response was immediate
and her eyes stayed clear, and something in him relaxed at this.
"Mulder, you aren't Duane Barry, and you aren't crazy."
   
"Yeah? You know that old saying, it's not paranoia if they really
are out to get you? For me, it's the reverse--just because they're 
really out to get me doesn't mean that it's not paranoia. Can you 
honestly tell me that if I did go insane, that anyone would notice
the difference?"
   
"I would."
   
He looked away. "I used to think so, but can you really tell me
that when you saw me in the psych ward that some part of you hadn't
been expecting it? That you didn't think that I'd joined Patterson
around the bend?"
   
She coughed a little. "Um, actually, I was hoping that they'd been
drugging your water again."
   
"Scully, this isn't funny."
   
"I'm not joking. Last time I went a little nuts it was because
someone was changing my television signals. Last time you did it
was because they'd been drugging your water. I started imagining
all sorts of conspiracies with the Chicago field office."
   
It was nice to know he'd had some effect on her these last few
years. Or maybe just more depressing.
   
"I'm scared shitless of mental hospitals," he said softly. The
admission was surprisingly easy to make. "What we saw?" He pointed
vaguely at the blank TV screen. "Walking to my death? I'm not saying
I wanted to die, but the idea doesn't scare me nearly as much as the
prospect of spending my life in restraints, drooling and babbling and
so full of Thorazine or Haldol that I can't think."
   
Her hand, chilled from the ice cream bowl, covered his. "I wouldn't
have supported your reinstatement to the field if I thought you were
on the verge of insanity. And after everything that's happened, 
everything we've been through...you've had to be sane to get through
it. I mean, geez, I'm not saying we shouldn't all be in years of 
therapy, but the fact that you've kept yourself functioning all these
years...you're a strong person, Mulder."
   
"I left profiling because I was scared of what I might become,"
he told her. "I didn't like the person I was, the killers I was 
capable of being. I didn't want to be caught in their world. You 
don't know what it's like to fear that you're being lost in someone
else's delusions..."
   
The chuff of laughter from her surprised him. Her voice had a bite
when she spoke, but her hand stayed on his. "Less than a month ago,
I saw my dead daughter speak to me. I've seen what may or may not
have been ghosts. So, either the world as I've known it changes
radically, or else I'm lost in my own delusions...neither is easy to
accept. You're not the only one to wonder about your mental health."
   
He stared at her. She was his touchstone, his sanity, and this 
truth was so obvious to him that he was startled that anyone, 
especially her, could think otherwise.
   
"But you're...you're *you.*"
   
Not a very cogent argument, but she half smiled at him anyway,
a little wearily. "I'm just saying, you're not alone."
   
Somehow, their fingers had become interlaced, probably when she
had mentioned Emily. "No," he agreed, "I know that," and his statement
created another little bubble of suspension. He had never been alone
since Scully came along, not really.
   
"Hey, Scully," he asked, to break the silence, "why'd you ask
me about my life flashing before my eyes? That ever happen to you?"
   
Her eyelashes dropped down. When she spoke, her voice was a little
rueful, a little reticent. Sometimes he forgot, and was amazed to
remember, that he could deconstruct her walls as well. "No. I just
wondered what it would be like, what I would remember that I don't
even know I forgot. Usually, I'm trying to think of a way to avoid
death. Or else I'm hoping that you'll find me...soon."
   
"Yeah, I know *that* feeling," he told her. "And let me tell
you, I was pretty damn glad to see you come into that hospital room
with a gun."
   
"Not that the gun had much effect." She gave him a rare, impish
smile. "I should have dragged up Bambi Berenbaum and told her to
bring the bug zapper."
   
That remark, or maybe just the release of tension, struck him as
absolutely hilarious, and he laughed. "Eat your ice cream, and I'll
tell you everything Bambi told me about bugs."
   
"I don't want to know anything more about bugs, Mulder." Or 
about Bambi, he would guess.
   
"I wasn't the one who ate one," he teased.
   
"Shut up."
   
She was relaxed, and he liked her in this mood. Mulder was a smart
man. He shut up and ate his ice cream.

End (1/1)