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When Mulder closes the interrogation room behind him, he’s surprised to see Scully sitting in one of the previously vacated seats beside the two-way mirror. She looks as tired as he feels, a thick dossier they were both issued upon arrival today is propped underneath her arm. Her eyebrows raise when their eyes meet, and a silent question passes between them. Mulder shakes his head, and joins her in the chair beside her. His own thick dossier finds solace on the cold floor.
They both silently observe the young man he left in the room until Mulder starts filling Scully in on the details: that the young man isn’t just young; he’s twenty-three, today was his first day on the job, and he unwittingly found shelter into the city’s police station filled with, quote, “people that will bite your head off—literally, I watched them chew on another cop’s neck”. He mentioned little about his college age companion, and the Birkin girl that allegedly was fed with a “virus that changed you”. Inevitably remembering something else after a few lines of questioning, Mulder watched his face close on itself and he refused to answer any more questions.
Scully watches the young man put his dirty face in his cuffed hands, his similarly matted hair hiding both.
“I wasn’t allowed to see the infected survivor,” she says shortly. She relays this in a matter-of-fact way, but there’s a dull edge Mulder can hear. “All they wanted me to do is report on the remains of the corpses.”
Mulder’s eyebrows shoot up in surprise. “From what Kennedy told me, I’m shocked there’s barely anything left of ‘em to look at.”
“The cadavers they let me look at exhibited severe cell and epidermis putrefaction and frayed blood vessels—even the bones, if they had them, were in an advanced stage of decay,” Scully rattles off. She pauses, her eyebrows bridging together in concern. “The medics said they had died just hours ago, but the organs looked like they’ve been decomposed for years.”
She sighs, pausing again before she says with obvious reluctance, “Mulder, it’s like something straight from Night of the Living Dead in that morgue. When I discussed it with the agents, they didn’t seem surprised at all.”
“They’re coming to get you, Dana,” Mulder intones grimly. He can see Scully press her lips into a thin line out of the corner of his eye.
“I heard no one will be coming out of that city for a long time.”
This perks him up. “Who said that?”
Scully shifts in her chair. “Heard it from some of the remains’ handlers. I requested to assess the infected girl—she needed to be quarantined immediately, they said, and one of the handlers mentioned they need to close off the city too.”
Mulder shakes his head. “I can’t believe we’ve been here all day just to do some contractual work and then leave. Scully, if what that kid is saying is true—and I believe him—this is the biggest ecological disaster in the United States’ history. And we’re just going to be dismissed.”
Indeed, both of them—after being summoned around 5 A.M. to headquarters—had been given explicit instructions from the acting head of this investigation that Mulder’s psychological questioning of the male survivor and Scully’s autopsies of victims would be needed for a case. However, they’d also have their names redacted from any internal files due to its high level of secrecy. Having no choice but to comply they parted ways; as they did, he could sense in Scully’s drawn expression a similar indignance at their assigned roles. The flat out admittance of a cover up gnawed at the back of Mulder’s head as the Raccoon City cop recounted what had happened to him in the last twelve hours.
“Don’t talk about any covers ups,” Scully says quietly, the yet unspoken. “They’ve probably bugged outside here, too.”
She stands up abruptly and stretches, checking her wristwatch. In a normal voice she comments: “We’ve been here all day.” She yawns. Mulder imagines they’re sporting matching dark under-eye circles. “It’s six now—and I mean six at night. Want to go get dinner?”
He retrieves his fallen dossier and gets up. “Sure. But I’m letting you know, if you order a burger, I’m going to throw up.”
She grimaces. “It’ll be a salad for me tonight.”
They leave the interrogation outer-room and return the dossiers, where their coats and access badges are returned by a serious looking agent that appears to be guarding the area. When they get to the parking garage, about to separate for their respective cars, they make plans for a familiar hole in the wall restaurant that will attempt to quell their uneasy stomachs and sleep deprived bodies.
“Scully?”
She had just barely turned away from him when she stops and turns her head in his direction, her keys already in hand.
“Yeah?”
Mulder can’t help but be rooted to the spot in the quiet parking garage. He’s painfully aware of empty cars around them, with the only person he wants to be with leaving him, if only temporarily—maybe it’s the circumstances, or maybe he’s just needy, but Mulder is suddenly seized by an intense feeling of loneliness. Maybe it’s because that Kennedy kid’s vivid descriptions of wandering the streets and catacombs, alone, all for a sign of life, are wedged firmly in his mind. (And Mulder’s guilty of just leaving him there, too—not even looking back. Not even assuring him everything would be fine. He offered that kid nothing.)
He knows he’ll see Scully within the next ten minutes’ drive, including parking, but a world akin to Raccoon City’s grave of a city might be there waiting for him. And the thought of a world without Scully—the only word that grips him in that moment is meaningless. He wonders if that’s how Kennedy, or the Birkin girl, or the Redfield girl feels, too.
But all that comes out of his mouth is, “If you get there before me, order two shots. Think we both really need it after today.”
“If it’s just two I can do that,” she promises, and Mulder watches her retreating back take several steps to her car, unlock it, and slides in. He turns around and does the same.
+++
They crash at Mulder’s because it’s closer. Mulder’s car is left at the restaurant and Scully supports him as best she can as he clumsily unlocks his apartment. Once they stumble in they make a beeline for his couch, where Mulder surrenders to gravity and flops his body face-first on the cushions.
“Scully,” he says loudly. His mind is swimming, and in the dark the apartment seems to go on forever.
“I’m here,” Scully says, sounding close yet far away, and he hears the thump of something falling to the floor. “I’m taking your shoes off. The rest I’ll let you do.”
He hears another thump. He must have drank more than a few shots, but he lost count after the third.
“You okay?” he asks.
“I’m more sober than you,” she says. “Okay, you’re good.” He hears her footfalls move away, and return. “I’ll stay tonight just in case. And…” she hesitates slightly, but Mulder fills the silence.
“I don’t want you to go,” he manages. “That kid … he lost someone. I just know it. I don’t want to lose you.”
Scully doesn’t respond immediately. Finally, she says, quietly, into the dark: “I don’t want to lose you, either.”
Mulder shifts his body on the couch in what he thinks is in her direction. She’s turned on a lamp in the living room area, and she’s sitting in an easy chair, eyes alert but tired.
“I know you’ve been thinking about him,” she said, voice barely above a whisper. “Mulder, I have too. Him and the other survivors they have locked up there. It’s difficult for me to believe everything he’s saying is true, but…” she swallows thickly on nothing. “If they’re striking us from the record, and quarantining that little girl, it’s deeper than that—we’re going to see a version of the truth in the newspaper that won’t include anything we saw or heard today.”
Mulder allows Scully’s words to wash over him. He wants to say he agrees, he wants to crack a joke that she’s sounding more like him every day now, he wants to start crying about the little girl who may be forever stuck in a lab getting poked and prodded at because Kennedy said the Redfield girl said her mother used her as a lab rat. He won’t entertain the thought that Scully and Samantha were treated the same, but only Scully managed to come out the other side (changed— but it’s still her).
He wants to say all of these things, but feels his eyes closing on his own and consciousness slipping away into an uneasy sleep.
(He does, however, feel the comforting scratchiness of a blanket descend over him, and a very warm body conform by his side.
He won’t think about Samantha or the newspaper headlines or Kennedy or the Birkin girl or the agents he’ll never see again until tomorrow.
He has himself. He has Scully. And he prays, somehow, the kids that escaped their firey grave will find each other again, just as he and Scully does, and keep up the fight.)