Title: A NIGHT TO REMEMBER
Author: Jean Robinson (jeanrobinson@yahoo.com)
Disclaimer: Characters from the X-Files are the
property of Ten Thirteen Productions and the Fox
Television Network. All others are property of the
author. No infringement is intended. 
Rating: PG-13
Classification: S
Archive: Please ask permission.
Spoilers: Post ep for "all things," but spoilers from
the "Pilot" through "Per Manum."
Summary: She never thought it would end this way. 
Feedback: Hit me at jeanrobinson@yahoo.com
Author's notes at the end 
*****************************

A NIGHT TO REMEMBER
By Jean Robinson


Of all the places she'd thought this night would end,
could end, should end, none of the scenarios that
danced so vividly through her imagination included the
emergency room.

Knowing their propensity to unearth peril in the most
unlikely places at the most unlikely times, she should
have foreseen it, but really, who would have ever
considered tea and conversation to be intrinsically
hazardous to one's health? It's not as if they were
chasing a suspect down a dark alley or embroiled in a
case involving the many shadowy conspiracy figures who
seemed to delight in breaking and entering at
inconvenient moments.

They'd just been lounging side by side on Mulder's
battered couch, feet up and comfy, enjoying a hot
drink and a drowsy discussion about life and fate and
a lot, a lot, a lot of other things she couldn't
remember, because at that point drowsy had become dozy
and Scully had nodded off in the middle of Mulder's
sentence.

And that's when the trouble started.

No, scratch that. The trouble had begun weeks earlier,
when she'd embarked on an impromptu road trip with the
Spender, Sr. to obtain a miracle cure for all the
world's ailments. The day she hadn't simply ripped up
his business card as well as kicking the bastard out
of her car. When she'd allowed her own arrogance, her
own belief that she could handle this particular kind
of solo situation with the same aplomb as her partner
had for years past, and her own desperate desire to
atone for what had happened weeks before that when
she'd ended Donnie Pfaster's reign of terror with her
weapon instead of the judicial system she'd sworn to
uphold to interfere with her common sense.

When she hadn't told Mulder the absolute and complete
truth about what had happened and what the Smoking Man
had done to her.

Because she didn't know herself, and contemplating all
the possibilities was just too horrifying this time.
And if she couldn't face up to what may or may not
have occurred during the time she'd closed her eyes in
the car and when she'd awakened in the cabin bed
buttoned into pajamas, how could she expect Mulder to
do so?

Spender said she'd merely fallen asleep through
exhaustion. Tired or not, Scully doubted she was
=that= sound a sleeper. She'd never dropped off during
med school. True, she occasionally catnapped on
late-night duty tours with Mulder, but she was always
peripherally aware of noises and movement around her.
She'd never been so deeply asleep that his voice or a
slight touch hadn't awakened her.

So if she hadn't been asleep asleep, that left drugged
asleep. As in helpless and victimized and used as an
unwilling experimental subject =again=, and that was
what Scully couldn't stand thinking about. Years ago,
she'd wanted to know as much as possible about her
abduction, had pestered her doctors and the Bureau
resources for information on who, what, when and how.
To understand what had been done to her was to gain
control over it, to take command of her life again and
make it hers, not theirs.

Now she just wanted to lock this event in a closet and
make it go away. This time =not= knowing was the more
comforting path, the one that would allow her to sleep
at night instead of staring at the ceiling, afraid to
close her eyes because if she did the blinding white
light might be waiting for her.

Except now the problem wasn't sleeping, it was waking
up. Or, more specifically, being woken up.

Scully was certain Mulder had nothing but chivalrous
intentions in his actions, and even if he hadn't, it
hardly excused her behavior.

His light caress across her face had roused her from
the deeper recesses of sleep, but that had not been
cause for immediate concern. Mulder had coaxed her
awake in the past by tickling her cheek with his
fingertips, an intimate act she'd secretly cherished
even before she'd learned to cherish him as well. The 
brush of something warm and woolly being tucked around
her, however, set every internal alarm shrieking a red
alert. Before she'd had time to adjust to the change
and fully recall where she was - or even who she was -
Mulder had touched her again and unwittingly brought
her wrath down upon himself with the force of an
exploding volcano.

She'd drifted off sitting up with her head angled
awkwardly against the couch back. Now that she'd had
time to think it through, it was clear Mulder had only
meant to cover her and shift her to a horizontal
position, making her more comfortable. But in his
desire to keep her warm and spare her a brutal neck
ache, he'd snapped a hidden tripwire that had been set
during her jaunt with Spender.

When she'd felt hands on her shoulders and under her
knees, lifting and pulling, her body reacted to the
stimuli without hesitation.

In full attack mode.

Hunched over her and off balance, Mulder didn't stand
a chance when she came to life underneath him, a
veritable battering ram of fists, elbows, feet and
knees.

Her onslaught was blunted somewhat by the blanket, but
it still drove him backwards, cracking the back of his
head on the edge of his table. Before he could
regroup, Scully kicked the cover aside and landed on
top of him, driving the air from his lungs and
pummeling him in the face, still half asleep and
mostly unaware of anything except that her body had
registered a deadly threat and she would neutralize it
or die trying.

"Scully!" Unable to grab her flailing arms, he'd tried
to bat her fists aside and deflect the blows until he
could gain her attention.

Scully was having none of it. She heard someone
calling her name, and somewhere inside she thought the
voice sounded vaguely familiar, but the instinct to
fight the intruder who'd dared to try and pick her up
while she'd been vulnerable was too overpowering.

"Scully, STOP IT!!"

Hell, no. Especially if her attacker knew her name. If
he knew that, he knew her, knew everything about her,
just like the Smoking Man, like all those men who
burned in that warehouse had known everything about
her, God knows what they'd done to her when they'd
sent Duane Barry after her all those years ago and she
was not, damn it, not going to let them take her again
and for once =they= were going to know what it felt
like to hurt the way she did and. . . . 

Strong hands suddenly locked around her forearms with
a grip that squeezed all the way down to the bone.
Scully cried out in pain and the body underneath her
heaved upward, twisting and wrenching. She was
abruptly spun around and thumped face down on the
floor, one arm yanked up behind her back and the other
immobilized by her attacker's knee. Pinned to the
hardwood floor like a proverbial butterfly, she
nonetheless continued to struggle.

Her assailant pulled her arm higher and pressed his
knee more firmly into her spine. The pain was
excruciating and she bit her lip to stifle a scream.
The man holding her leaned down, his breath warm on
the side of her face.

"Dana, WAKE UP!!!"

And she did. Because when Mulder, who'd felt her
freeze when he'd spoken and was now cautiously
releasing her, used her first name, something was
terribly, terribly wrong.

What the hell had happened?

"Scully, what the hell happened?"

Had she just said that out loud?

No. As she unbent her left arm with a groan and rolled
stiffly onto her back, Scully realized she hadn't. The
words of shock and bewilderment had come from her
partner, whose reddened, lumpy face held an expression
of fear and concern.

"I. . . I. . . Are. . . ." The incident had
short-circuited her normal thought processes, causing
her mouth to move without assistance or direction from
her brain. The meaningless words petered out.

Mulder, apparently sensing her confusion, took over.
"Are you all right?"

She sat up, rubbing her arm. Her shoulder throbbed
like a rotted tooth, but she was reasonably certain he
hadn't dislocated anything. "Yes. I'm fine."

He snorted in disgust and looked away, and Scully
couldn't blame him. Her traditional response sounded
idiotic to her own ears. I'm fine, Mulder. I think I
just tried to beat the crap out of you because I
thought you were someone else, specifically someone
attempting to abduct me to Planet X for the next round
of human/alien hybridization, because, you see, I
neglected to tell you that I experienced more than
nine minutes of missing time during my adventures with
our nicotine-addicted friend. But other than that, I'm
just fine. Swell, even.

As he turned his head to stare at the window instead
of her face, however, he revealed evidence that even
if she was lying about being fine, he couldn't do the
same. "Mulder, you're bleeding." A thin line of red
trailed down the side of his neck from his hairline.
"Let me see."

He allowed her to examine the wound, wincing as she
combed through the short hair at his nape to find the
source of the blood. "Ow. Watch it, Scully."

"This needs stitches." The blows to his face she could
ignore; apparently her aim and strength were somewhat
lacking when she was semi-conscious. A judiciously
applied icepack would cure what minor damage her
knuckles had inflicted. A head wound was not be
trifled with, although, as expected, Mulder tried his
best.

"It's nothing. I think I hit the coffee table when
you. . . " he hesitated, looked away again and
eventually settled for repeating the statement without
any qualifiers. "I think I hit the coffee table."

"It's not nothing, and you need to go to the emergency
room." She stood up, every muscle protesting with such
vigor that for a second she wasn't sure she could stay
up. She took a deep breath and released it slowly.
Everything still ached, but at least she wasn't afraid
of her legs collapsing under her. Scully held out her
hand. "Come on, Mulder."

Her partner ignored her and got up, clearly intending
to dismiss her request and wash and dress the cut
himself. Unfortunately, he didn't fare as well as
Scully had in mastering his body's response to injury.
Mulder got exactly one step towards the bathroom when
he wobbled, grabbing frantically for something stable
to prevent him from going all the way down.

She doubted he meant to snag onto her, but she was the
closest immovable object, and it did prove her point
quite nicely. "I'll drive."

Mulder slouched in the seat beside her during the
ride, leaning forward slightly to keep the tender bump
at the base of his skull from making contact with the
headrest. Scully concentrated on the road, trying to
ignore the heavy drag in her shoulders and the
soreness that had set up residence along her spine and
across her ribs. By the end of the trip, even the
power steering was too much for her abused limb. She
surreptitiously let her left arm slide into her lap
and turned one-handed into the hospital parking lot.

"Are you going to tell me what that was all about, or
do I have to find out with the rest of the class?"

They were the first words he'd spoken in the last half
hour, but this wasn't the time to address the topic.
There really wasn't any time she wanted to explain
this to him, but she'd already resigned herself that
at some point she'd have to come clean.

But not now. Not when he was looking at her with eyes
that were murky with more than just simmering
emotions; there might be a concussion causing that
unfocused green gaze, and Scully didn't want to have
this conversation more than once.

"Let's take care of you first, please, Mulder?"

He sighed as if her answer was nothing more than he
expected, but she honestly didn't intend to keep him
in the dark forever. "Do we need our story straight,
Scully? Before we go in?"

"Story?" She blinked at him, perplexed.

Mulder flapped a tired hand in her direction. "You
need to have someone look at you, too. At your arm, at
any rate. I almost had to pull it out of the socket
before you'd listen to me. We're not on a case; we
can't claim this as some sort of occupational injury.
They're going to see the two of us and think we've had
a domestic dispute. We'll be lucky if they don't call
social services or the police or both. So yes, I think
we need a plausible story or someone will make a phone
call and eventually wake up Skinner and our names will
be mud when we get back to the office. If we get
back."

She saw his point; oddly enough, it comforted her. She
couldn't have hurt him too badly if he'd already
discerned what consequences their battered appearance
might bring. "Training accident?" she offered.

"Sounds good to me. Self-defense course, if they press
you."

"I'm not bringing it up if they don't ask, Mulder."

"They will." He reached for the door handle and
carefully levered himself out of the car, holding onto
the hood for balance until she could come around and
help him. "You know they will."

They did. The blood on Mulder's neck guaranteed him
immediate attention when they hobbled in, but she'd
never planned to seek treatment, despite what Mulder
thought.

Of course she'd underestimated her partner's capacity
to second-guess her, because as she sat in the waiting
area after relinquishing Mulder to the care of a
solicitous intern, the same disheveled young man
reappeared and made a beeline for her.

Scully stood up as he approached, anticipating an
update involving X-rays and sutures. The intern held
out one hand, forestalling her questions.

"Mr. Mulder is fine. No concussion. He's going to be
sleeping on his side for a while, but it's nothing to
worry about. You can take out the stitches yourself in
a few days; he said you're a medical doctor."

She nodded. "Thank you. Is he ready to be released?"

"In a little while. I'd like to take a look at your
arm while we wait."

She froze. "My arm is fine," she said stiffly.

The intern smiled, showing the blinding results of
years of fluoridated water and orthodontia. "Mr.
Mulder said you'd say that."

"It's nothing," she insisted.

"He said you'd say that, too, and that you'd be lying
through your teeth both times, and that if I believed
you and let you go without being checked he'd
personally see to it that my life would be a living
hell from now on." The white smile broadened. "I'm not
exactly sure what he had in mind, but rather than
worry about if he really can dig up everything from
whether I cheated on my high school French final to
whether I claimed my tips to the pizza guy as a
business expense on my income tax, I think I'll just
take you over to exam room 1 and have a look at your
arm. Okay?"

Defeated and fuming, Scully capitulated. To do
otherwise would have put this poor man in an untenable
position. She had no doubt Mulder would call out the
Gunmen to scare the guy silly if she didn't submit.

The intern gave the forming bruises on her upper back
a raised eyebrow, but refrained from commenting. She
let him twist and turn her arm and prod and poke her
shoulder to his satisfaction, enduring the pain with
stoic silence. He didn't ask if it hurt; Mulder had
obviously told him it did and denying it would gain
her nothing but another knowing smile.

When she finished demonstrating her range of motion,
he finally nodded. "I think it's sprained, but I don't
think there's any damage to the muscles or tendons. Do
you?"

"No. Doesn't feel that way. It's just sore."

"Take a hot shower when you get home. A long hot
shower. It you've got a shower massage, use it. Be
careful about swinging your arm in a big, overhand
circle if you haven't warmed up the joint first.
Aspirin for the pain. If it's not better in a week, go
see your own doctor. Okay?"

She nodded.

Dr. Lenway wrote something on her chart. "How did this
happen again?" he asked, looking down as he scribbled.

Sneaky way to pose the question, Scully thought. If he
could slip it in so naturally he must have a lot of
experience treating the downtrodden. "Training
accident," she replied briefly.

He glanced up at her, gauged the neutral expression on
her face, and seemed to shrug without moving his
shoulders. "Okay. Let's go get your partner and you
can go home."

Two neat stitches in the back of his head hadn't
improved Mulder's temper, especially when he learned
that the intern hadn't prescribed anything for
Scully's arm. A firm believer in better living through
chemistry, Mulder thought she should have something
more potent than Extra-Strength Bayer.

"You just want an excuse to drive," she told him in
the parking lot, pushing him towards the passenger
side. "There's nothing wrong with my arm and you're
the one with head trauma."

Grumbling under his breath, he consented to the
shotgun seat.

"And don't you dare tell Frohike to hack into Dr.
Lenway's personnel file or anything else. The man did
his job and he doesn't need to be threatened by your
friends the kung fu specialists."

By the time they got back to Hegal Place, jet lag had
more than caught up with her partner. Scully helped
him stumble upstairs, thinking she might be able to
postpone her confession after all.

No such luck.

Mulder fell into bed without protest, allowing her to
fuss over his blankets and lecture him about not
disturbing the sutures when he showered. But before
she could stand up and make her escape, he reached out
and caught her wrist. Not the punishing grip of their
earlier struggle; this time he used it as a
springboard to sliding his fingers down to grasp her
hand, rubbing the base of her thumb with his and
saying nothing, just staring at her in the dim light
of the room.

She tried to weasel out of it anyway. "Mulder, it's
late. Or early. You've been in two countries and God
knows how many time zones today and now you've got a
head injury as well."

He continued to stare, quirking his mouth slightly as
if to ask, And whose fault is that?

"Mulder, I. . . ." She trailed off, mesmerized by the
gentle stroke of his fingers over her hand.

"I know I've caused you a lot of frustration over the
years," he said quietly, "but you usually expressed
your anger with your mouth, not your fists. So how
about we try it the less painful way this time. Talk
to me, Scully." 

The words still wouldn't come. She'd kept them locked
inside for so long she was no longer sure she where
she'd left the key.

He tugged gently and drew her down on the bed next to
him, on top of the covers, perhaps thinking it would
be easier for her if she didn't have to look at him
while she spoke. Rolling onto his side, he curled her
back against his chest and held her loosely while she
found a comfortable position for her bad arm.

Five more empty minutes passed, then Mulder finally
asked, "Scully, what happened?"

The tenderness in his voice nearly undid her. Suddenly
her throat was clogged with tears. "Spender. . . ."

She felt Mulder tense slightly behind her, a signal
that he hadn't quite gotten over her betrayal, still
couldn't quite understand how his level-headed,
sensible partner had thrown pragmatism to the wind and
chosen to join forces with a known enemy. But he
limited himself to a noncommittal sound of
encouragement, so she forged ahead.

"He. . . I don't know what happened to me the entire
time I was with him." The awful disclosure came out in
a rush, a babble of noise so unlike her usual
modulated speaking tone that it almost scared her into
silence again. Scully cleared her throat, swallowed,
and tried to compose herself. "There's time. . . time
that I can't account for. Time I have no memory of,
only his word of what happened."

The rhythmic press of his chest against her back
ceased for a long second as he held his breath at this
unexpected pronouncement. Then it resumed, and he
asked slowly, "How much time?"

"I don't know. Eight or nine hours, at least."

"He moved you somewhere during that time." It wasn't a
question. Let no one say her partner couldn't connect
the dots and find the hidden picture.

"I. . . I fell asleep in the car, fully dressed, and I
woke up. . . I woke up in pajamas. In a bed."

"Alone?"

She nodded, knowing he felt the motion even if he
didn't see it, and completely unable to stomach the
dreadful reality of the possibilities.

Yes, Mulder, I woke up alone, but I have no idea if I
had company at any point during the night.

"And you think he might have. . . taken liberties with
you."

That was a delicate way of putting it, to say the
least. She was amazed at how calmly he was taking
this; it still made her shake with rage and fear
whenever she allowed herself to think about it.

The rage was at herself, at her absolute and utter
lunacy in ever trusting the man. She'd looked into his
eyes, she'd told Mulder, and thought she'd seen
something there. Something more than the manipulative
bastard she'd known and despised for so long.

Ha.

The fear went soul deep, searing a burning path across
her emotions as nothing had done since Emily's death.
Scully hadn't thought anything would hurt as much as
losing a blond three-year-old stranger.

She was wrong.

Despite Spender's admitted attraction to her, rape
wasn't Scully's primary concern. If his medical
condition was anywhere near as serious as he intimated
it to be, she doubted the man had the energy or the
ability to carry out the act even with an unconscious,
compliant bedmate. But his limitations in that area
didn't prevent him from doing her serious harm, and
that was what made her throat burn and her stomach
roil.

"What if he. . . " she drew in a watery breath,
swallowed back the bile and plunged on. "What if he
did. . . did something to me? If that's why the. . .
why the. . .  the. . . ."

She couldn't continue, the tears winning out at last.
Scully covered her face with her hands and sobbed,
allowing Mulder to articulate her worst fear, the one
she'd steadfastly refused to acknowledge since it
happened, opting for the first time in her life for
ignorance rather than deal with the consequences of
her reckless behavior.

"If that's why the IVF failed." He spoke so softly she
could hardly hear him over the roar of blood in her
ears, as if by whispering he could dull the meaning of
the words.

She nodded miserably, a fresh bout of tears shaking
her shoulders and sending out a wave of physical pain
down her arm to match the ache buried deep in her
heart, a virtual knife that had been slowly twisting
and turning ever since she'd come back with a blank CD
and a head full of regrets.

Mulder wrapped an arm around her and pulled her closer
without speaking, burying his face in the tangle of
her hair. It would have been his child, too; she
wouldn't have blamed him for throwing her out right
now. Except they would never know. Like everything
else on the X-Files, her failure to conceive was a
mystery that would probably never be solved by
anything, especially not Scully's science. She
remembered the first day she'd met Mulder, and her
arrogant assertion that, "The answers are there, you
just have to know where to look." How little she'd
known back then, despite all her impressive degrees.

The IVF came with no guarantees; the doctors had been
quite specific about that and Scully privately thought
her chances to be slimmer than even her doctors
believed. But there had been some chance, some extreme
possibility, and that she might have been the cause of
its downfall was simply unendurable.

So she'd bottled it up until Mulder accidentally
uncorked it tonight.

Scully realized the tears had finally stopped.
Exhausted, she pulled away from Mulder's grasp and sat
up, scrubbing the heels of her hands over her face and
grinding them into her eye sockets.

He sat up behind her and put his arms around her
waist, tucking his chin into her shoulder. "What did I
tell you? After you came back from the doctor that
day?" he whispered.

She made a choked sound. "Never give up on a miracle.
But Mulder. . . . "

"Shh." He pressed a kiss against her temple,
effectively ending the debate. "No 'buts,' Scully.
Just remember what I said."

She sighed, sudden weariness falling over her like a
fog. If she felt this tired, she couldn't imagine how
he was even still awake. "I should go."

"You don't have to. Stay, Scully." He leaned his chin
on her other shoulder, and she hissed as a jolt of
pain raced down her arm. 

Mulder pulled back, but didn't release her waist.
"What?"

"My arm." She massaged the tender area on top of her
shoulder with her fingers, willing the soreness away.
"I was supposed to take a hot shower when I got home."

"So take one. I promise the bathroom has been cleaned
since the start of the new millennium."

Typical Mulder, to think of a way to tease her in the
midst of offering comfort. "I. . . I should just go."

He lay back down, trailing warm fingers down her arm
as he did so. "Scully, you could barely drive to the
hospital. You're in no shape to get behind the wheel
now. Take a shower, see how you feel. Please?"

She acquiesced, seeing the logic in his suggestion.
The last time she'd done something desperate and
foolish, look where it had gotten her. Nodding, she
stood up and moved towards the bathroom.

"Scully?"

She paused on the threshold, addressing her response
to the doorknob. "What?"

"You don't have to stay. But you can't torture
yourself over this. I won't let you."

He sounded extremely groggy, but she knew better than
to discount his words as some sleepy rambling that he
wouldn't recall uttering, like the time he'd blurted
out, 'I love you,' after his escapade in the Bermuda
Triangle. No, this time he was serious; she knew as
surely as she knew her own name that Mulder would not
stand by and watch her wallow in guilt over what might
have been.

The pounding hot water loosened her strained muscles
and soothed her protesting shoulder from a roar to a
low growl. Undressing had been agony; now she was able
to tug her sweater over her head and smooth her hair
without flinching.

Mulder had finally succumbed to the demands of his
body and lay snoring lightly when she came out, the
comforter twisted around his legs and bunched at his
waist. For a minute she contemplated the thought of
crawling under the covers with him, dressed or not,
and hiding from the world for a few more hours. Hiding
from herself, too.

It was tempting. She very nearly did it. But he needed
some undisturbed rest, and if she was going to stand
up and face the music, she should start now.

Maybe Mulder was right. Maybe they hadn't run out of
miracles yet. 

Maybe the answers were out there, and if she could
just find where to look.


End


Author's notes: I got the original idea for this after
seeing "En Ami" and "all things." It wasn't until "Per
Manum," however, that I figured out a way to make a
one-scene idea into a story. Since the timeline for
flashback scenes in "Per Manum" is unclear, I took the
liberty of placing them where it would suit my needs.
<g> Many thanks to Shari and Jill for looking it over
for me. :-)

I delight in feedback at jeanrobinson@yahoo.com.