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i.
When she fires at the shape climbing the wall she thinks, fumbling for something normal, of how Mulder has always had a gift for shadow puppets. But Mulder’s hands are tied.
This isn’t exactly right, if she’s being honest. She only thinks of the shadow puppets later, driving him home as he sleeps in the passenger seat. She is only a scientist when her gun is in its holster.
So: When she fires at the shape climbing the wall what she really thinks is He was right, which sounds suspiciously like Of course, which is less a conscious thought than a feeling. Like the click of the right prescription in an eye exam. Like seeing a zombie behind a hospital desk.
“Scully,” Mulder rasps. “Get away from the window.”
“It’s gone, Mulder.”
“Just get back.”
He’s straining, struggling against his restraints to reach her. She unhooks the belt across his chest and he grasps for her, pulling at the straps around his wrists. When she takes his arm in her hands his skin burns hot and pink, rubbed raw by cheap canvas.
She could play his scrapes on a turntable and the vinyl would sing a slow tragedy, a myth reborn in jazz. Cassandra the cursed prophet, reincarnated as a boy who believes in aliens.
She loosens the strap and he slips his hand out, grabbing her cheek. “Did it get you?”
“No,” she says, but she leans closer anyway, until her nose is inches from his, and lets him look into her eyes. He wraps fevered fingers around the back of her neck, brushing back her hair.
“No Alaskan ice worms, either,” she breathes.
He smiles. Mulder, with his split lip and bruised chin.
She crosses to the other side of the bed and frees his other hand, the swollen knuckles that should really still be taped. She should put his hand back on ice, her cursed boy. She should lock him away, and herself with him.
“Scully—” he starts.
“Hang on.” She pushes him forward by the shoulder and studies the back of his neck. He waits.
The skin is unbroken. His brain, his fine brain—of course.
In the car she will think of shadow puppets, of how good he is at projecting a story in the dark. Of how that’s not, exactly, what happened here.
“Where are your clothes?”
He points. “Drawer.”
She retrieves his suit, so artlessly folded, and sets it on the bed.
“I’ll close this curtain so you can change,” she says. “I’ll be right here. But you should hurry.”
Mulder nods and starts to stand. He’s barely on his feet for a second before he blinks and tumbles back onto the bed.
She stops drawing the curtain. “Mulder?”
“Dizzy,” he says, screwing his eyes shut. “She gave me something. Nurse Zombie.”
She touches his forehead and he opens his eyes to study her thumb. No fever. She checks his chart.
“Just a sedative,” she confirms. “Enough to discredit you.”
“Why?” He bunches the sheet in his hand. “They didn’t think I’d be alive by morning.”
Get him out of here. It’s primal: feeling, not thought. Get out, get him out.
She kneels on cold linoleum to slip his socks onto his feet and tie his shoes. She tucks Mulder’s wrinkled suit under her left elbow, bends down, and fits her right arm around his back.
“Come on. We’re leaving.”
Mulder leans on her, stumbling into the hallway in his G-man shoes and hospital-issued scrubs.
“This is against protocol,” the nurse says from behind the desk, with a robotic voice and color in her cheeks. I saw her face, Scully reminds herself. I saw it.
She keeps walking, dragging Mulder along with her. They stop for no one.
ii.
Folie imposée: a sub-classification of folie à deux in which a dominant person (known as the ‘primary,’ ‘inducer,’ or ‘principal’) initially forms a delusional belief and imposes it on another person or persons (the 'secondary,’ 'acceptor,’ or 'associate’), with the assumption that the secondary person might not have become deluded if left to their own devices.
Which is to say that she probably would not have shot at a monster on a patient’s wall had she chosen to practice medicine.
iii.
She drives him to her place, tucks him into her bed. When she takes off his shoes she remembers being in Catechism, practicing how Mary poured perfume on Jesus’ feet.
Is it worship or penance, what she has with him? Her primary. Her inducer.
She’s stuck on this: that she wouldn’t do one autopsy, and it almost killed him.
(She would have done Mulder’s autopsy. She would have sewn him up, left the morgue, walked to her mother’s. Would have left the morgue and walked until she bled. Wouldn’t have left. Would have sewn herself up inside him.)
But she wouldn’t cut into Backus, couldn’t give credence to Lambert's delusions without admitting Mulder shared them. Too soon after almost starting a national security incident to justify her faith in her partner. Keep it professional, Agent Scully. Sweep it under the rug, free him from a hostage situation, take him home. Take off his shoes. No, no.
iv.
The first documented case of folie à deux, in 19th-century France, involved a young married couple with a persecution complex. They believed people were breaking into their home and wearing their shoes.
v.
Mulder gasps awake in Scully’s bed, knows it’s her bed before he opens his eyes. Light from the street lamp outside cuts across the rug. A grayscale nightmare crackles to static at the edge of his vision.
He kicks his way out of the sheets and finds his wrists are doctored, wrapped in loose bandages and greasy with ointment. Scully. He pictures her balanced on the edge of the mattress with his hand in hers. What has he done to her?
You have to believe me, he said, and the universe finished the sentence: or I’ll die. Dress my wounds forever and ever amen, Scully, it’s in your contract.
There’s a drawer in her dresser with an extra overnight bag, his bag, tucked into one side. He tears off the scrubs and changes into sweatpants.
In the living room he can barely make out Scully, curled up on the couch under a blanket with the Pincus file spread across her hip. He’s considering whether to wake her, to offer the bed for the rest of the night, when he collides with a vase on a side table.
Scully jolts, fumbling for her gun.
“It’s me,” he hisses, palms up. “It’s me.”
“Mulder?” She switches on a lamp. “What time is it?”
It’s 5:35. They both squint at the clock, question answered.
“Are you okay?” she asks. He nods dully. He’s an escapee of the psych ward, marked for death by a rogue monster and his undead army, and possibly unemployed. He’s fine.
When he doesn’t elaborate, she shakes her head and laughs the ghost of a laugh.
“What?”
“Nothing,” she says. “I was just thinking. Hiding in the light.”
He waits, expectant. She bites her lip.
“Coffee?” she asks.
And he nods again, like she’s pumping air into his lungs.
vi.
She leans against the kitchen counter in the orange glow of the early dawn, watching the coffee drip into the pot. He sits at the table, a plain turquoise mug in his hands. They wait.
“Are these the same grounds you got in Maine?” he asks.
She nods, proudly. She says, “I’m rationing.”
“Oh,” he remembers. “Thanks for the, um—” He motions at his wrist, spinning his finger around it like a bandage.
“They’re not too tight?”
“Just right, Goldilocks,” he declares with a flourish. “I’ll be all healed up by the time they slap the cuffs on me.”
Scully frowns. “Mulder, for what? The hospital couldn’t hold you. That nurse is out of this time zone by now, along with everyone else in Pincus’ orbit.”
“The Bureau, then.”
“I have a meeting with Skinner this morning.” She straightens her shoulders. “You’ll be found fit for duty.”
“What are you going to tell him?” he asks.
She studies her mug, tracing the rim with her fingernail. “I don’t know.”
The red light on the coffee pot blinks. The rising sun lands directly on her face.
“Scully?” he risks. “You saw it, didn’t you?”
She looks at him, lips parted. The room ignites like it’s been lit from within.
“Scully?”
“I saw what you saw.”