In the week after the explosion on the ship, Scully barely sleeps. When her fears about William aren’t keeping her awake, she is bolting upright at every little sound coming from the hallway outside her apartment. When she does sleep, her dreams are a parade of one calamity after another befalling Mulder, out there on his own.
Oddly, she takes some comfort in the fact that these dreams are always different; she still can’t explain the dreams she had when he was missing before, the ones Mulder quietly confirmed were somehow representative of what he had endured, but they were always the same. This time around, it is possible to convince herself that these are normal nightmares, mere products of stress and worry, nothing more.
She forces herself to leave the apartment, once a day, to check her anonymous email account from an internet cafe in Georgetown. Her stomach knots tighter and tighter each time she accesses an inbox that is as empty as it was the day before. Sometimes, if William is asleep in the stroller, she finds herself ducking into the church on the way home, praying that tomorrow will be the day she finally hears from him.
It takes two and a half weeks for those prayers to be answered.
Her heart leaps to her throat at the sight of the bolded You have 1 new message notification. Tears of relief and longing spring to her eyes as she reads the single line of text within.
“Safe for now, though I can confirm the threat was genuine. Are you safe?”
She doesn’t know how to answer that. Between the incident with the mobile, what she found (and didn’t find) on the Navy ship, and everything that Shannon McMahon claimed, two weeks ago she had serious doubts about whether she and William were safe. However, looking over her shoulder constantly since then has revealed no indication of an imminent threat. That doesn’t mean there isn’t one, but if she shares her worries with him, he might try to return prematurely, and it is clear from his message that that would be a dangerous mistake.
Her fingers tremble as she taps out a reply.
“I cannot tell you what a relief it is to read your words. Not hearing from you for so long, I feared the worst. Please keep yourself safe, and do not worry about us. I miss you very much, but I am thankful beyond measure that you are alive.
Yours, D”
That night, for the first time since he left, her sleep is deep and dreamless.
***
Two months pass.
They manage to establish a delicate correspondence; there is no pattern or regularity to it, and each time she hears from him is a gift she does not take for granted. The ability to maintain this link with him, however tenuous, affords her a measure of strength through their separation that she might not otherwise have had. Life moves on in a way that could almost pass for normal.
As her maternity leave nears its end, she finds herself feeling conflicted about returning to work. She misses it, without question, but she also knows too well the dangers that exist out in the field, and the thought of one day not making it home to William is utterly terrifying. (Never mind that the X-Files unit really only requires two agents, and she has no wish to displace Monica, who seems to be thriving in the assignment.) It comes as an unexpected relief, then, when AD Skinner hesitantly suggests, as though he’s afraid of offending her, that she might consider taking a position at Quantico.
***
“Where are you going, Monica?”
“This man Kobold can help us, John. I’m going to prove it to you.”
Monica stalks out of the autopsy bay, and after a pause, John heaves a frustrated sigh and starts to follow.
“Agent Doggett?” comes a quiet voice from behind him when his hand is on the door.
He looks back over his shoulder. “Yeah?”
Agent Scully’s tongue touches the corner of her mouth, an obvious tell that she’s nervous about saying whatever she’s about to say. “I know you’re frustrated. That you feel like… like the answer here is obvious, only no one can seem to see it but you.”
“Gee, can’t imagine why I’d feel like that.” He releases the door, turning fully and crossing his arms over his chest. “Look, if you’re gonna try and tell me that I should ignore evidence, ignore what my gut is saying on this guy Kobold--”
“I’m not. I’m not suggesting that at all.”
“Well what, then?”
He can see her choosing her words carefully, and it irks him. He doesn’t need to be patronized, least of all by her. Once upon a time, they were comfortable enough with each other to forego all this dancing around and careful tending of egos.
“The cases in the X-Files… you know as well as I do that they often require… a different approach than a standard investigation.”
“The hell they do. I’ve been at this for almost a year and a half, and not once has a case required me to believe in voodoo, or demonic curses, or aliens in order to solve it.”
“That’s not what I mean, exactly.”
Well now he’s confused. “Okay. Well, what do you mean?”
“When I worked with-- When you and I worked together, we didn’t always share the same theories about whatever we were trying to solve.”
It’s not lost on him that she was about to start with a Mulder story and then course-corrected.
“Right…” he says, not entirely sure where she’s going with this.
“And very often, those differing theories and perspectives were what kept the investigation moving forward, when it otherwise might have stalled out. In fact, that’s exactly why many of the cases became X-Files in the first place. The standard approach wasn’t enough to solve them.”
“Come on, I don’t buy that. Just because local LEOs, or even some other agent in the Bureau, couldn’t get the job done, doesn’t mean the approach is wrong.”
“Doesn’t it, though?” She’s giving him the full, earnest, Dana Scully Serious Face and goddamnit if his heart doesn’t skip a beat. “How many times did we get a break in a case just because one of us was looking in a direction the other one didn’t think of? Even if the final result was something completely ordinary.”
She’s not wrong. But…
“Yeah, and how many times did we waste days or even weeks barking up the wrong tree?”
“I guess my point, Agent Doggett, is that you get better results when you… bark up as many different trees as possible.”
“Even when I’m damned sure my tree is the right one?”
“Yes. Even then.”
He sighs. “You can’t ask me to ignore the fact that Monica is being led around by her nose on this case. Being manipulated by someone who is definitely out of his mind and very possibly also a murderer.”
“Don’t ignore it, no. And keep watching her back. But don’t stop her from pursuing her own line of inquiry, either, even if whatever she’s pursuing doesn’t make sense to you right now.”
“I don’t like it,” he says with a scowl, shaking his head. “But all right. I’ll try to give her some room to do her thing. But if I think she’s putting us in danger listening to this guy, I’m pulling the plug.”
