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sigritandtheelves · 1 year ago

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All Along, Like Fire (Part 6)

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5

Mature | 2.9k words | MSR, AU

A/N: I’m sorry this part took so long, I’ve been working at it bit by bit for like 2 months 😣

—

September, 1995

Washington D.C.

Diana Fowley knew that her life was in danger. She’d failed in monumental fashion, and she could insist to her dying breath that it hadn’t been her fault—that Fox’s stumbling onto the DAT tape happened while she was out of town and there’s nothing she could have done to stop it, but it wouldn’t matter. They would crush her like an empty soda can if she ceased to be useful, and especially if she proved a liability instead.

The city was under a late-summer heat wave that made the air feel even thicker than the tension around her alone. Violence seemed imminent as tempers so easily flared with the temperature. Diana paced the apartment she shared with Fox, a man that she told herself she still loved, despite the lies between them: her secrets, his shifting devotions. His basketball peeked out from the closet and his dirty clothes were in the hamper. Diana picked up one of his shirts and fingered the ratty collar above its FBI logo. She held it to her nose and felt a wave of sadness, of longing. He was a good man, and she’d lost him, let him slip away from both herself and the project she’d hoped he would come to embrace. But in the last year, the deceptions had become too much. She’d had to spend more and more time away in order to live with herself, and after the plan for Scully’s abduction had backfired, she knew that he had crossed some kind of invisible barrier. He would never be hers again. Everything she had done to try and put a wedge between him and his partner had only drawn them closer together.

Diana had a right to be jealous, didn’t she? In spite of her lies? At least she hadn’t fallen in love with someone else. She sat on the bed worrying her lower lip between her teeth. She knew she’d lost her husband, but perhaps she could still make it through this with her life.

What she needed was leverage.

—

Farmington, NM

The public library had three computers connected to the internet for public use. Mulder and Scully sat huddled around one of them, carefully wording an email to the Gunmen from a temporary account.

“Where should we meet?” Mulder kept his voice low.

“I don’t want to put the Hosteens in any more danger,” Scully said. “Maybe Albuquerque?” She oriented herself to the map in her head. “Or we could head north into Colorado.”

Mulder nodded. “Yeah. Get the map.”

They decided on a tourist town called Pagosa Springs, where they could blend in like late-season vacationers. “Hey, if things go downhill, we can always hide out in the mountains,” Mulder said.

“Too bad I forgot to pack my skis.”

He smiled at her, but it was only a half-smile. They both knew how dangerous this was—how much was a stake. They had aligned all their pieces on the board, and now it was the other team’s turn. He just hoped Skinner was really on their side.

—

FBI Headquarters

Everybody wanted a damned meeting, had a plan, had a dog in this fight, it seemed. Walter Skinner was giving himself a headache with all this jaw clenching. He was everyone’s middleman, though he was just as vulnerable to the powers circling them all like sharks. This playing field was full of snares and trapdoors.

“Agent Fowley, you said you had reason to believe your life was in jeopardy? Why not go to your own AD about this?”

The woman seated across from his desk maintained perfect composure, but cleared her throat before answering. “My work has put me in a somewhat compromised position—something I’m sure you can understand, Sir.”

The eyes were so deliberate. Skinner frowned, not liking either her implications or the fact that she seemed to have a lot more information than he realized. “How do you mean?”

“I’m afraid that Fox’s acquisition of the D.O.D files has put more than a few lives at risk, my own included. I was out of town when the DAT tape was handed over to him, but certain… factions,” she paused to choose her words carefully, “seem to think I can be held accountable.” Again, she looked directly at him. “They’re willing to set more than an underground train fire to keep that information in check.”

Another jaw clench. That cigarette smoking bastard had been in here again today trying to weasel information out of him, and Skinner had no doubt that there would be more bodies if the tape, and the information on it, didn’t reappear soon. “I didn’t realize you were involved at all,” he said.

“Not with the tape directly, but it’s been made clear to me that I need to protect it,” she said cryptically. “I have to get in touch with Fox. It’s essential that I arrange a meeting soon.”

Skinner grunted. “Well, you’re in luck on that front.”

Diana’s eyebrows raised. “You know where he is?”

“Not exactly, but I know someone who does.” He eyed the brunette suspiciously—so cool, always—and wondered if it were safe to bring her to a meeting with her own husband. It was a risk he thought he'd have to take if they were going to make any kind of bargain. “Meet me at Dulles tomorrow morning at the United counter. Seven o’clock.”

Diana nodded briskly and stood. “Thank you, sir.”

—

Pagosa Springs, CO

Mulder and Scully sat at the back of Brenda’s Diner, which looked like the kind of restaurant Cracker Barrel was trying to be. The tables were glass-covered wagon wheels, and there were more than a few cowboy hats between their booth and the door. The two agents barely looked away from the entrance to sip their coffees.

“There,” Mulder said when he spotted Skinner’s bald head and glasses. Then he stiffened when he saw the brunette with him. “Shit.” He reached under the table to quickly squeeze Scully’s knee. “Diana is with him.”

Scully forced herself to breathe deeply, to keep her anger tucked inside her, despite everything they now knew. She watched Mulder’s face as Diana approached, as he bottled his own rage into a careful mask.

Skinner spoke first, nodding at them and sliding into the booth. “Agents.”

Diana reached out to touch Mulder’s arm. “Hello, Fox.”

He didn’t meet her gaze or reciprocate her touch, but instead focused on his boss. Diana glanced at Scully only long enough to take note of her husband’s protective position and body language toward the other woman. She sat beside Skinner, and the wooden table was like a vast ocean between the two parties.

“First,” Mulder began, “you should know that we’ve read everything in the files.” He looked pointedly at Diana, who paled, but to her credit, didn’t flinch.

Skinner nodded. “I had assumed as much, based on your prolonged absence.”

“But we're not the only ones who have read it. If their plan is to kill us, all of that information will go public. We have multiple contingencies in place.”

"And you don't think the men we're dealing with could hunt all of those down?"

"No," Mulder said, displaying a confidence he was only half sure he felt. "Not all of them."

The older man grunted in acknowledgement.

“We want to go home,” Scully explained. “And we want to keep our jobs. But there are things we learned from that tape that we can’t pretend we don’t know. Personal things.”

Skinner cleared his throat, as if to speak, but Diana beat him to it. “I realize that you’ll want to distance yourself as much as you can from me,” she said to Mulder specifically, her eyes pleading, "Especially after the things you read." She couldn't bring herself to look at his partner. “But I can also help you make your bargain with them.”

Mulder had tried to keep his calm, but his anger bubbled up beyond his self-control. “Diana, why are you here?” he asked in a sharp whisper. “Are you representing the project’s interests? You’re gonna take our bargaining chips back to that smoking son-of-a-bitch so he can twist us around even further?”

“No.” Her voice was firm and steady; she had her own anger to contend with. “You don’t know what they have on me, Fox. You don’t know what they threatened me with, how I worked to keep you safe—keep you alive—by stopping you from knowing too much.”

Mulder’s jaw dropped open for a moment before he barked out a humorless laugh. “So that was your role in this sham of a marriage? Gatekeeper of what I was allowed to know?”

“Partially,” she said, perfectly frank. “Their plan was to bring you in slowly.”

“Bring him in?” Skinner asked.

“To the project. He’d always been slated to take his father’s place.” She locked eyes with Mulder, and there was something pleading and earnest in her gaze. “Fox, whatever you may think about the things you read—about me and about the project—no matter how horrible they sound, you have to know that the goal has always been to save humanity. The project has always been about helping people survive.”

“Which people?” Scully asked, her voice sharp. “The women you abducted and rendered infertile? The children and family members you took as collateral? Or the hapless people you’ve tortured and experimented on in the name of ‘progress’? How are you any different than the Nazi scientists you’ve collaborated with?”

“I’m not the devil here,” Diana said quietly. “I didn’t devise these methods or decide who would suffer.”

“No, you just carried out their orders,” Mulder said. Their voices were hushed, but some restaurant patrons had noticed the tension at their table. Mulder sat back and took a sip of his coffee.

“Look,” Skinner said, “we could argue about this all afternoon, but we need to decide—“

“Tell me about the babies,” Scully interrupted, unable to contain the question any longer, to let the conversation move too far away from her burning need to know. “The children. Do I—“ her voice caught. “Are there babies out there with my—“ and she couldn’t finish.

“Yes,” Diana said. “Just one viable specimen at the moment, an eight-month-old in California.”

The breath went out of her lungs, and Scully squeezed her napkin so hard, it was shredding to pieces. Specimen. The word was like a hot fist crushing her heart. Mulder’s face had gone grey, and even Skinner looked stricken. Her baby—genetically, at least. An experiment. A specimen.

“Is it… okay?” This from Mulder, who was also trying to find words. Scully heard the subtext in his voice: is it human?

Diana fidgeted, like she didn’t have time for this, like she wanted to talk about more important things. How she’d weasel out of this situation with her own life, for example. She sighed. “Yes, for the most part. It’s a girl.”

“What do you mean for the most part?” Scully asked. It’s a girl, it’s a girl, it’s a girl, she heard over and over in her head. She couldn’t help it: she thought of pink blankets and solemn blue eyes looking out of a round face. At eight months the baby would be crawling, smiling, almost pulling herself to stand. Then Scully imagined cold surgical gloves reaching down to pick up the child and hold her with curiosity and detachment instead of love, to poke her with needles and test her in a cold white place.

“The child has an induced condition that manifests as a form of anemia. She requires regular treatment from a specialist.” Diana’s voice was deadpan, but Mulder and Scully both caught what she was saying. A “specialist,” meaning a project doctor. They locked eyes in understanding.

Skinner, however, was confused. “Induced condition? What does that mean?”

Mulder turned to him, his voice low. “They made her sick on purpose,” he said. It wasn’t a question, and Diana said nothing to either confirm or deny.

“So they can keep her on a leash,” Scully added. “So they can keep anyone who tries to love her on a leash.” She looked across the table and met Diana’s eyes. The fury inside her was grounding her, keeping her still, like ice-water, but inside she was screaming. “Isn’t that right?”

Diana gave the barest of nods and looked down at her hands. Silence around the table grew heavy, broken only when their waitress came to refill their coffee cups. The woman must have sensed the awkwardness, because she left without a word.

“I want what they took from me,” Scully said after a long moment. “All of it. Every strand of my DNA, even the ones in your specimen.”

With that, she stood and walked out of the restaurant.

—

Outside, back to the setting sun over the San Juan mountains, Scully leaned against the hood of their rental car. She wanted a cigarette. Barring that, she wanted to smash something into pieces and scream into the wind. But when Mulder came up beside her and placed a hand on her shoulder, she just deflated. Her head drooped, and she stared at the dust and rock of the parking lot that flecked her leather boots.

“You okay?”

She shrugged one shoulder, not sure she could ever really be okay again. “What did Skinner say?”

Mulder had shoved his hands into his pockets, but he leaned his left side along the length of hers—a gesture of comfort that maintained the boundary between them. “He said they’re going to want a deal. Well,” he clarified, “Diana explained that our silence wouldn’t be enough, not if you really want… everything back.”

Scully reached up and touched the scar at the back of her neck. “They already have me on a leash too, don’t they? What else could they want?”

There was a long pause, and when Mulder didn’t answer, she looked up at him. He had a look of far-off anguish, of dread.

“Mulder.”

He chewed his lip for a moment, and then said, “My work.”

Oh. Scully swallowed hard. So the price for the truth was the power to do anything with it—the power to prosecute these men, to hold them accountable. “Your badge, too?”

He shook his head. “Just the files.”

Scully nodded. “They mean to drive us apart, then.”

She felt him turn to look at her in the dimming light. “What do you mean?”

The breeze coming from the mountain chilled her, and she crossed her arms over her chest. “They know I could never ask you to do that, Mulder. Or they should know it. If you give up your work, our work, you’ll come to resent me, if you don’t already.”

He tried to speak, but Scully cut him off.

“And if you let them keep my…” She couldn’t say future children, couldn’t say baby. “…ova,” she swallowed, “and everything they create from them in exchange for the X-Files…”

“How could you ever stay with me?”

She nodded again. “The thing is, I don’t even want children right now. That wasn’t on my radar, not for a while, anyway, because I have so much other work to do. I’m committed to our work too, Mulder, and I know it’s not compatible with a baby. I mean, maybe in a few years but…” She was rambling, but God, it was impossible, wasn’t it? Every choice seemed wrong, seemed designed to push them apart and alter their lives irrevocably. She chuffed out a humorless laugh. “I guess they’ve kind of won, haven’t they?” She couldn’t look at him, imagining the gears churning his thoughts into a steady resentment toward her.

He was shaking his head. He didn’t want it to be true any more than she did, but they were only two people standing against a tidal wave of power and corruption. “They can’t have won,” Mulder said, but his voice came out defeated.

She looked toward the restaurant, where she assumed Skinner and Diana were waiting for their reply, two sore thumbs in their east-coast suits drinking tepid coffee. “How long do we have to decide?”

“Diana said we should make a call tonight. They know where we are now. We need to play our hand while we can.”

Scully wanted to tell him that he should decide, that he should take this terrible decision away from her and leave her alone to lick her wounds. But of course that wouldn’t be fair to him. She watched his face, silhouetted by the setting sun, and ached for him, for things to have been different between them—no conspiracies or wives or impossible ethical dilemmas. When he looked at her, met her eyes, she thought she felt the same ache coming off him in waves.

“I love you,” he said without warning, and it made her heart skip and slam against her ribcage—warm and unexpected. “I could never resent you for wanting back what they stole from you. Never.”

Scully felt tears filling her eyes, and she bit the inside of her cheek to try to stop them from falling. “Okay,” she said, voice raspy.

“I love you,” he told her again. She was trying to believe him, beginning to, maybe. He reached out a hand to hold her cheek, and it almost undid her. She sucked in a quick breath, a half sob, and a tear escaped down her cheek. He wiped it with his thumb.

Her fingers found his against her cheek, and she turned her head just slightly to kiss his palm. Though he’d said it first, she was terrified to tell him how she felt. But now was the time for bravery, for playing their hands, wasn’t it? Scully closed her eyes and concentrated on the sensation of his skin on hers. “I love you,” she told him back.

He let out a breath into the cooling air that brushed her face. “Good,” he said. “That’s good.” He leaned his forehead down to touch hers. “They won’t force us apart, Scully. We’ll find another way.”

Despite all her rational objections and her skeptical nature, she believed him.

—

End Chapter 6

Go to Part 7

#a thing i wrote #all along like fire #xf fanfic #msr #au #part 6

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