57 : Almost Honest
Title: Almost Honest
Spoilers: "Trust No 1"
Words: 7123
Rating: PG
Summary: Looking from the outside in at the history between Scully and Mulder makes Stark and Doggett take a second look at their own shared past.
Stark Patrick was a morning person, and on the morning when everything would start to spin out of control, that was no different. She'd had work left undone from the day before and so had come in early, even earlier than her partner. She was sitting alone in the X-Files office, listening to some old pop album and attempting to write her report before everyone else came in and something else ended up on their plate. Little did she know that free time was about to run out.
The phone on the desk bleated, and without even really looking at it, Stark grabbed it with one hand. "Agent Patrick," she said, the same thing she had said to begin every phone call over the last four years. Except this wasn't any ordinary phone call.
"Hey, Stark. You got a minute?" The voice belonged to Richard Garvey, which immediately made it worth listening to. Garvey had been on her father's squad at the Department of Justice and had taken his position as supervising agent after his death seventeen years earlier.
Now she stopped entirely, shifting in the chair so she was facing the phone. Her eyes widened a little, and she sort of wished that someone else was in the basement so she knew that this was actually happening. "In fact, I have several, Rich," she replied. "I'm just a little surprised that you're calling considering we haven't talked in at least a couple of years."
"I know, which is why I'm making the call," he told her, causing her to arch an eyebrow. "I had someone contact me today asking if I knew how to reach you."
"That's strange," she said needlessly. It wasn't as if she had ever actually been closely affiliated with the DOJ, except for following her father around when she was younger. Certainly not for more than a decade. "Somebody we know? Did they say what they wanted?"
"No, on both counts," Garvey explained. "I tried doing a phone trace but I couldn't get anything off it. He said he'd try your office. Stark, one more thing -- it came through our internal extension. This is somebody who knows how to use official channels."
"All the more reason you'd think they would know where to find me," she muttered. "Okay. Thanks, Rich. I'll check it out." She hung up the phone and just looked at it for a long minute. People needing them, if they knew where to find them, went to Scully. Not to the junior agent on the team. And anyone with access to channels like those would have to know that she wasn't anywhere near the Baltimore DOJ office.
She was still contemplating that when the phone rang again. Sighing, she picked it up one more time. "Agent Patrick."
This time, the voice on the other end was one that she didn't recognize. The man on the phone said simply, "Agent Patrick, we need to talk. I need to speak to Fox Mulder."
Twenty minutes later, when John Doggett walked in the door, he was greeted by the sight of a thoroughly spooked, half-triumphant partner standing out of her chair. "That same guy called again," she said, circling around the desk. "The one that keeps wanting to reach Mulder."
"What?" he replied, looking a little incredulous as he hung up his jacket and moved immediately toward her. "Did you get anything out of him this time?"
She nodded. "This time, it makes a hell of a lot of sense," she replied. "He says he's got classified military files on these alien super-soldiers. That he can give us names of who they are."
He just stared at her. "You've gotta be kidding me," he said. "You know what we could do with that information? We'd know exactly who we're looking for." A pause. "Even if you seem to have a sense for 'em."
He had a point: she'd hated Gene Crane and he was an alien. She'd hated Knowle Rohrer, and he was an alien. She'd hated Shannon McMahon...almost everyone she'd vehemently hated had turned out to be a super-soldier. She wondered what that said about Kersh but it wasn't time to crack jokes.
"I'd take a federal document over my gut instinct any day," Stark replied. "But he insists Mulder's the only one he'll give them to."
Her partner had that determined look in his eyes again. As much as he knew Mulder's safety was paramount, he also knew this was the kind of gamble Mulder himself would have taken. The kind of advantage that was too valuable to pass up. Maybe he was thinking about what Knowle Rohrer had done to the both of them only a month or so earlier. His tone left no room for argument as he said, "Then we go to the one person who can help us get to Mulder."
****
FBI National Academy
Quantico, Virginia
They had been keeping this a secret for long enough. Figuring it for a crack job, nobody on the X-Files had bothered to mention these mysterious phone calls to Scully. But with real substance now, Doggett and Stark - along with Monica Reyes, who had been very quickly brought up to speed in the car after passing them in the lobby of the Hoover Building on her own way into work - had to tell her. She deserved that and she was also their only real chance at holding up their end of the possible bargain.
"Can we talk to you for a second?" her partner asked Scully when they caught up to her.
"It's about Agent Mulder," Reyes added, making potentially the understatement of the year.
Scully arched an eyebrow. "What about Mulder?" she asked warily.
Doggett explained, "We got a guy contacting us through intelligence channels. This morning it was a back channel through one of Stark's buddies at the Department of Justice. He keeps saying he wants to talk to Fox Mulder only he won't say why."
"Well, who is he?"
"We don't know," Reyes said. "He always covers his tracks."
Stark nodded. "My contact at DOJ was suspicious, tried to run a phone trace. Nothing. But this morning we finally got him to tip his hand. He says he has highly classified military files."
"Files on what?" Scully asked.
"These bio-engineered soldiers we've all come in contact with," Doggett amended. "So-called super-soldiers. The same ones threatening Mulder's life, forcing him to live underground."
"What does he want with Mulder?"
"He wants to give him the names of these super-soldiers, and Mulder's the only person he'll give them to."
There was a long and pregnant pause between all of them. Everyone knew what that meant. Everyone was leveraging the viability of that information and how it could possibly change their lives with the risk of possibly getting Fox Mulder killed.
Scully spoke first. "Well, even if this was a good idea, I don't know how to contact him."
She walked out without another word. Stark would have been more than willing to drop it, at least for the time being. She had the flickering thought across the back of her mind that had it been her, it would have been difficult to process. But John had something else on his mind, and she watched him follow after Scully.
Stark stood where she was, momentarily thrown by her own train of thought. She had never imagined her partner just not being there anymore. And yet that was what Scully had to live with every day.
****
Arlington, Virginia
8:09 P.M.
She had a hard time getting that question off her mind, even after they had all gone home for the day. It was just any other ordinary evening for Stark, who was making dinner while watching the late edition of Baseball Tonight on the TV in the next room. But the question bothered her. She had no idea what she would do if John just disappeared for months at a time. No doubt, it was the same feeling Rich Garvey had when her father had died. And that made her think about her father...
She almost dropped the pasta sauce when the phone rang. Checking the caller ID, she eyed it carefully. "What's up, John?" she asked, replacing the jar on the counter.
"Our mystery date just called my cell phone," he explained. "I'm running a trace right now. Meet me at the office. Let's see where this guy's hiding out."
"I'm on it," she said without a second's hesitation, stopping only to turn off the gas on the stove before she finished the call and went running to get her things.
It didn't take her long at that hour to make it back to the Hoover Building. "Did you get an address?" she asked, when she found him waiting for her in the parking garage with the keys to a Bureau sedan in his hand.
He shook his head. "No, but I got a cell node. Six city blocks in the Bethesda area. I did a little research and I think I might know where this guy is," he continued as she locked her Impala and joined him in the passenger seat of the sedan. "We've gotta get more than this. We need to know who we're talkin' to and if this information is legit."
"The million-dollar question," she agreed sagely. She had spent a lot of time on stakeouts from her work in the Fugitive unit and this was nothing new, except for the doing it in jeans and a T-shirt part. "All right, I'm game. Let's do this."
He just smirked a little. "I knew you'd be easy to convince," he said as he backed the car out. They both knew there really wasn't a time when it was hard. When she said she'd follow him anywhere, she meant it.
That was how they ended up sitting across the street from an old, three-story weathered brick building in an otherwise deserted area of Bethesda, Maryland. Her partner's next phone call was to Reyes, but it would take some time before the other agent could join them. It was just the two of them in the car, Stark watching John with his eyes lazered on the front of the building. He was on to something. She envied him the pure talent that he had at making something out of nothing.
"It's kind of scary," she found herself saying.
"What is?" he replied, not taking his eyes off the building.
"This whole situation. With Mulder being gone and Scully having to go through this." She bit her lower lip as she scanned the street, unable to keep her brain from being in 'work mode' even if her heart was going on about stupid emotional quandaries. "I don't know how she holds it together. If it were you I'd have started crawling the walls within the first week."
He snorted softly, but gave her a barely imperceptible nod. "Yeah, well, that's the difference between me and Mulder. It's not gonna be me. I'm not the leavin' kind." He paused, perhaps considering his words before he said, "How you doing?"
She blinked. "What do you mean, how am I doing? This has got like, nothing to do with me. I'm fine."
"I know you don't like dealing with the Department of Justice guys. You always say it reminds you of your father."
"It does, but..." She sighed then and leaned back in the seat. "It's not like I don't like them. They're fine, at least the ones I knew. I just think that's my father's place and not mine. It's never going to be easy for me to operate in that sphere. But don't worry about me. This is not about me right now."
"Saying it isn't going to get me to stop caring about you."
"I know. I'm just saying." If she was honest Stark appreciated the fact that she had a partner who remembered such things. Her aversion to dealing with the Department of Justice because of her father's legacy was something that hardly came up, but yet he remembered not only the what but the why. She loved that about him, and it did make her feel better as they settled in and waited for Reyes to arrive.
The clock on the dashboard read 9:32 when they saw her car pull up behind them. A moment more and Monica exited her vehicle, slipping into the back seat of the sedan. "What do you have?" she asked.
Doggett still had his hawkish gaze trained on the building. "This source of ours decided to give my cell phone a call tonight. I ran a trace."
"Did you get a number?" Her interest was clearly perked.
"No, but I got a node. A sector of six city blocks. The area's pretty vacant, except for this building here."
Monica paused, her face taking on a slightly wary cast as she looked between the two of them. "Say this source is for real, and this is Mulder's chance to come home. We spook the spook, and maybe that chance goes away. Or worse, it drives Mulder deeper."
No one got a chance to answer her. A dark car pulled up in front of the building. They watched a man exit the car and enter the building, looking behind him to make sure he wasn't being followed before he disappeared inside. Less than a minute later, Stark watched her partner unbuckle his seat belt and lean on the door handle.
"Where are you going?" Monica asked, concerned.
He nodded out at the street. "Take a little look into his car."
"I'll say it again," she replied. "What we risk is compromising Mulder's return."
John's lips just quirked. "I don't plan on getting caught," he replied, and then he, too, was gone.
Monica glanced out the window and then back at Stark, who continued to sit there with an impassive look on her face. "You're just going to let him do that?" she asked. "You don't think it might backfire?"
"I've learned two important lessons over my career," Stark replied, turning her head to look at the other woman. "The first is that I trust my partner no matter what. The second is that sometimes to gain what you want, you've got no choice but to take a risk."
****
Twenty to six and they were still in the damned car.
Stark had, somewhere around midnight, ceded the front seat to Monica so she could stretch out in the back and take a nap. She was awake now, though, sprawled out with a bag of apple Jolly Ranchers she had picked up from the 7-Eleven down the block when she went on the coffee run. Her partner was reading the paper, Reyes was unconscious and Stark was trying to decide if she really wanted to go to work after spending all night awake in a Bureau sedan.
"Did the Orioles win?" she asked randomly.
He glanced down at the box scores on the sports page. "By two."
"Damn. My MLB Extra Innings package is going to waste," she remarked with a soft laugh. She was about to open her mouth again and ask him to see how Josh Hamilton's line was when she saw what he saw: the same man leaving the building, finally. She sat upright in the back seat and buckled her seat belt as he woke Monica up and, once the car had disappeared down the street, turned the sedan to follow.
Maybe they'd all just be a little late to work.
Especially when it became apparent where they were going. It wasn't as if she and Dana Scully were coffee buddies, but she knew Scully's apartment building when she saw it. She swore lightly under her breath as her partner stopped the car, already on his cell phone before she could even get out of the sedan and take up her usual position at his hip.
"Agent Reyes and I just tailed a car onto your street," he explained as they headed toward the building. "We watched a guy go into your building. A guy we're guessing you've got no business with." A pause. "You there, Agent Scully?" When he got nothing but silence back, he snapped the phone shut. No one needed to be told that it meant it was time to haul ass.
And if there was anything Stark was good at, being a former college athlete and one-time potential Olympian, it was hauling ass faster than anyone else. She would never be able to run as fast as she had on the day she set that university record, but she could still fly. She bolted up the stairwell, gun clutched at her thigh, her partner and Reyes behind her. Blowing through the door, everything happened in a blur: her partner moving past her, tackling to the floor the man who was attempting to break his way into Scully's apartment. Reyes moved to the door, trying to get Scully's attention as Stark stood there with a service weapon ready to fire.
The look on the other agent's face, standing there with a gun to some woman's head when she saw the lockpick Doggett pulled off the guy he had pinned to the carpet, pretty much said it all. No one had any idea who to trust.
"Looks like we need to have a talk," Stark commented, stowing her gun back in its holster as her partner hauled the man to his feet.
Admittedly she wasn't much for talking. Whenever she and her partner had an interrogation to do, she always let John take the lead, choosing instead to sit back quietly and see what she could pick up. It was the same this time, Stark leaning against the wall with her arms crossed, just watching as her partner and Scully began to ask questions of the two people they had sequestered on Scully's couch.
"Start with who you work for," Doggett suggested flatly.
"I'm not at liberty to say," the man replied.
John glanced at the woman. "Is this your wife? Maybe she's at liberty. Maybe she doesn't want to accompany you to prison."
"You staged this, didn't you?" Scully cut in. "Arguing on the street. Everything."
"No," the woman protested.
"It's a con job," Scully continued. "What are you after? My baby?"
"No, no. I want to protect William."
Two things popped in Stark's mind. One was that they had totally lost control of this interrogation, and the second was the one she voiced as she pushed off the wall. "How do you know her son's name?"
"That's enough," the man interrupted, looking at his wife. "You want to get us killed?"
But now the woman was coming undone. "You said...you said that they could help us. You told me that. That's what you said."
"What the hell is going on here?" Doggett wondered out loud, speaking for the rest of them.
The man's eyes finally met his. "They're watching," he said simply.
"They're watching?" John retorted incredulously.
Scully, on the other hand, seemed to know better what was going on. She moved to the window and closed the blinds, before turning a harsh glance at the man. "You got something to say, say it."
He did, after sucking in a long, slow breath. "I work for the National Security Agency. The name on my driver's license is false. If you were to call the police I would be detained only long enough for another NSA agent to authorize my release. I don't exist as a citizen, nor does anyone I work with."
Doggett arched an eyebrow. "So what are you doing here?"
"As you can see, my wife is upset. I was coming to get her to stop this very event."
"What's she so upset about?" Reyes asked.
The woman was the one to answer the question. "We have a daughter...Joy. There's something about her. Something different. Just like there's something different with her son William."
From her space in the corner Stark could see the shocked look on Scully's face. Not that she could blame the other woman. If she had a family that she was close to, she would feel the same way.
Her partner was still skeptical. "Different how? How do you know anything about her or her son?"
The man eyed him. "I know virtually everything about you," he said. Then, as if he'd known she was there all along, he eyed Stark. "And her," he continued. A look at Reyes. "And you." Then he fixed his gaze on Scully. "And you. Several months ago, you saw your son affect the movement of the mobile over his crib. He spun it, as if with his mind. It happened to us the same way."
Stark figured it out first. "So you've been watching this apartment with what...cameras?" she guessed.
"Various forms of technology."
"Then it's you who's been contacting us," Reyes replied.
"Not directly. My scope is limited. I only look at what they tell me to. But I have a supervisor who I've told everything I'm telling you about my daughter, and her son, and he started to look into it. He learned things about a super-soldier program. Things he won't tell us. Crimes, he says, against innocent people."
"What does he want with Mulder?" Scully said, growing restless now.
"Mulder's the only one capable of making the connections, he says."
The woman added, "Maybe we can help you. And maybe you can help us find out the truth. About what our babies really are."
An uneasy silence fell over the entire room and Stark, who had nothing to contribute and therefore had shut up, found herself scrubbing a hand over her face. She was really sick of these supersoldiers. Two of them had tried to kill her, one of them had landed her in the hospital. What she would not give for regular, garden-variety, alien abductions. Or even a nice, normal, solvable homicide. Maybe a simple assault. Anything but these damned soldiers.
Scully was on the phone, and getting visibly upset. Doggett just eyed her as she hung up, and when she went down the hall to grab her coat alarm bells went off in his head. "Agent Scully?" he asked as they followed her. "What are you doing?"
"I'm going to meet your contact," she said, then looked past him. "I think you should watch William, Monica."
Doggett just shifted his jaw, a little incredulous. "I don't like this. I don't like the feel of it and I don't like you agreeing to it without backup."
"You said I had to trust someone, right? Well, that's what I'm doing," Scully replied, and quickly moved past them. Stark opened her mouth to offer to accompany her, but she knew from the way Scully was acting that she was determined to do this on her own.
"Brave woman," she said instead, glancing at her partner. "If it were me I wouldn't be going alone."
"Yeah, she's brave," he replied. "Or stupid."
"So what do we do?" she asked, glancing at her watch. Monica had moved back into the living room and was keeping an eye on their guests. "We're supposed to be at work in twenty minutes, John." Not to mention neither of them had really slept, showered, or changed clothes.
He exhaled slowly. "We wait and see if she ends up needing our help. Let these two go, for now, but keep our eyes on them. Monica's gonna stay here and watch the baby."
Stark nodded. "I'm going to go home, shower, find an appropriate change of clothes, and then I'm going to have breakfast," she decided. If she didn't take care of herself, she couldn't be at her best to take care of anyone else. She eyed her partner. "You coming?"
****
There was never any shortage of things for Doggett to amuse himself with at his partner's house. Unlike him, Stark's organization usually involved organized chaos and there was always something lying around, be it her paintball gun, her baseball card collection, or whatever book she was reading at the moment. As he listened to the water running from the shower, he was peering at the framed enlargement of a Sports Illustrated cover she'd put on the living room wall. "You framed it?" he asked, both surprised and amused.
"What?" The water squeaked off, and a few minutes later Stark emerged, this time much more presentable in a black suit with a light blue blouse, still toweling her hair dry. "Oh. That. Of course I framed it."
"It's the back of his head," he pointed out dryly, turning to look at her.
She narrowed her eyes playfully. "It's still Josh Hamilton," she replied, tossing the towel back into the bathroom before she eyed her watch. It had been an hour. "Still no word from Scully?"
"No. Nothin'. I thought about calling her but if there's something going on, I don't want to risk getting her hurt." He frowned at that. He didn't like not knowing what was happening, but if somebody was monitoring her calls, he didn't want to land Scully in even hotter water.
Stark sighed at that, putting a reassuring hand on his back. "I don't like it any more than you do, John, but we have to trust Scully on this. She can handle herself," she advised, not sure who she was trying to convince: him or both of them. "I'll take you by your place, then we'll pick up breakfast and go to work. It's all we can do right now."
"That doesn't bother you?" he asked, as she grabbed her backpack and he followed after her.
"I didn't say it doesn't bother me."
In fact, it bothered the both of them a great deal, especially when it continued to be an issue throughout the day. Once they had gotten themselves to work, they did the best they could to work things from their end, but it was obvious that they were spinning their wheels. Monica never turned up, and frequent calls to her confirmed that she was still watching William. When Scully hadn't turned up and it was getting into the evening there became the thought that she might even be dead. They had no idea what was going on, and they both felt handcuffed. If Stark did anything right, it was to cajole her partner to come over to her place for dinner, teasing him about the spaghetti she'd never finished making the night before. She could see this was exceptionally hard on him, and that was what partners were for.
She had seen this with him before. He took responsibility for anything resulting from something he felt was within his control. He'd had that same concerned look in his eyes when she'd had a gun barrel screwed in her ear three years earlier. It hadn't been his fault at all, but because she was his partner, he'd felt responsible. And it wasn't as if he was the only one; she still felt horrible about not having been there when he had been shot and killed in Pennsylvania, not that she would ever tell him that. He didn't like to talk about that case. But if there was anyone who could get him to open up, to understand it wasn't his fault, she was that person. They had been so close for so long.
"Don't beat yourself up for this, John," she found herself saying, nursing a glass of red wine as she idly twirled the pasta on her fork. "Whatever is going on out there isn't your fault. You aren't the one doing this and you didn't make the decision to take this chance."
He eyed her. "I'm still the one who brought this to her," he replied. "That means it has something to do with me."
"And I brought it to you. You would've brushed it off as a crank, same as I would, if that guy hadn't spilled his guts to me. So wouldn't that make me responsible? I know you're not gonna say this is my fault, so why should it be yours?" she insisted.
"I don't know." He exhaled. "You know in the car how you said this scared you, thinkin' it might be me, and I said it wasn't gonna happen?"
"Yeah, I remember."
"I've been thinking about it." Doggett took a long drink before he continued. "She's all tied up in this. To him. She's known Mulder for nine years, probably the biggest nine years of her life, he's the father of that baby. He's everything she has and I just know she's gonna do whatever for him, even if it means something bad for her, and I don't wanna see that happen."
She nodded. "I understand," she said, "but it's not any different than you and me. We haven't known each other as long and we're certainly not parenting kids, but I'd go to the end of the earth for you and I know you'd do it for me."
"Course I would." A long pause. "Just makes me think about how close she is to him. How close I am to you. I understand where she is. What it's like to care about somebody like that. Makes it all the more scary to know she could go chasing him right off the deep end." She was just looking at him now, letting him vent. "Every move she makes I think about you. I almost lost you."
"You didn't almost lose me, John," she corrected gently.
"That guy had a gun to your head," he reminded her. "He could've pulled the trigger."
"But he didn't," she replied. "He didn't because you were there for me. You saved my life. You didn't make him do what he did, but you did do everything you could for me." She glanced down at the kitchen table, not really enjoying that memory. "You kept me going, John. Because I knew you would be there."
She fell silent then, thinking on that. It wasn't as if she was fatalistic but she knew that no matter what, she had someone to take care of her. There was never any doubt. She held onto that notion for all it was worth, empowering her to risk everything, knowing that if she screwed up at least she would still have him.
He saw the contemplative look cross her face, and reached across the table with a gentle hand, coaxing her to meet his eyes. The unbending, unwavering, unconditional loyalty she had for him was clear there and he had no idea on some days why. Why she stayed and she cared so deeply when all that had happened since she'd come down to the basement was get beaten down again and again. And even despite that she still didn't think any less of him.
He wondered sometimes if she regretted that but he knew from that look in her eyes, she never would.
"Four years is a long time, isn't it?" he found himself saying.
Stark didn't say anything. She didn't know what to say. And as it turned out, she didn't get a chance to, because her cell phone rang. Monica was on the other end; Scully had come back, and had an explanation as to where she had gone and what had happened.
****
"Preparation refers to a state in which your enemy is clearly defined," Stark ruminated the next night, sitting on the end of her partner's desk. She had yet to get a desk in the basement and she doubted that she ever would, so she just stole half of his.
"What?" he asked, looking up at her. His unsuccessful attempt at getting Scully to call off the meeting had put him in another mood all day.
"Something that I heard from Beckner once," she replied. For Reyes' benefit, she added, "Robert Beckner. He's the agent who recruited me. He said that preparation refers to a state in which your enemy is clearly defined. We need to define our enemy a whole lot better than we have right now."
"But how?" Monica asked. "You heard it same as I did...that guy doesn't exist. Neither do the couple we spoke to at Scully's apartment. There's no names to run. No leads to follow."
"I know, that's what pisses me off." Stark sighed, running a hand through her hair as she rested her chin on her forearm. "People don't just live a non-existence. There has to be a trail somewhere, somehow. There has to be."
Doggett, who had been watching this exchange with interest, suddenly perked. "There might be something," he said. "Scully said that guy made her change clothes to make sure she wasn't bugged. He had to handle those. Maybe we can get some DNA off of them." He reached for the phone. "Maybe forensics can rush a trace."
Stark eyed the clock. "It's just before eleven."
Monica nodded, standing from the desk. "I'd better get down to the train station, make sure Dana's okay."
"We'll get there soon as we can. I'll call you if we have anything," Stark replied.
****
Twenty-two minutes to midnight and there were only two sounds in the office: the relentless ticking of the clock, and John Doggett tossing a baseball back and forth, frustration clear on his face.
Sitting on the floor staring at the opposite wall, his partner just listened to the sound, it forming a metronome for her breathing. One of them, she couldn't remember which, had caught it during batting practice at Camden Yards, and whenever he bothered to pull it out of his desk they'd at least joke about that. But now neither of them were in the mood. The evidence lab had told them that the DNA sample he'd brought down couldn't be tested; the sample had been corrupted, complexed with iron.
They were at a dead end. She had nothing worthwhile to say. She was a goddamned agent with a background in chasing fugitives, something he'd done too when he was a cop, and they couldn't find one man. Powerless didn't even begin to describe it, and she hated that feeling more than almost anything in the world. It only reinforced her fear that she was out of her depth.
She startled when he suddenly stopped, slamming the baseball down onto the desk. A glance at his face and the fact that he was already moving said he knew something she didn't. She didn't ask, just got up and followed.
****
"He's not human." The words her partner had said rang in her ears as they stepped out of the car and made their way toward the train platform. "The guy Scully met. He's one of them. This whole thing is a setup."
Stark kept those words in mind as she gripped her gun, steps behind her partner. She couldn't blame him for insisting she stay behind him; the last time they'd tangled with a supersoldier, she'd ended up with a torn shoulder muscle and two days in the hospital. She clicked off the safety, taking up first pressure on the trigger.
"You sure about this, John?" she asked.
"I'm sure. He's here, somewhere," he replied, glancing around the corner and out onto the platform.
The man that they had interrogated in Scully's apartment was coming toward her with a gun, but Reyes was already in control, pulling Dana to the ground. The man didn't stop, however, suggesting Scully wasn't his intended target. Stark felt her stomach lurch as she saw what had to be the Shadow Man appear. He closed on the other man, firing once, dropping him to the platform. Then, in what seemed to be slow motion but was only a matter of seconds, he began to close on Scully.
The next sound to reach Stark's ears, crystal clear despite all the panic ensuing, was two single shots from her partner's gun. Stepping out onto the platform, he squeezed the trigger twice in quick succession, hitting the Shadow Man in the leg and then the chest. She could only watch as his body disappeared between the rails, in front of the train.
Without even thinking about it, Stark closed the distance between herself and Monica Reyes, wondering why someone wasn't getting medical attention for the mysterious man she'd met only days before. When she saw him, it was obvious why. He was dying. The grief in Scully's eyes was obvious as she came to kneel beside him, all of them watching him slip away, knowing then that they should have trusted him.
The police were called and she spent the next twenty-odd minutes standing with her partner, inspecting the spot on the tracks where there should have been a body. There wasn't one. Nothing was said, just a look exchanged between them. He knew that he was right and there wasn't a damned thing he could do about it.
They rejoined Reyes and Scully on the platform, Doggett breaking the news that he was sure the Shadow Man wasn't human. Scully knew she had to warn Mulder, but before she could, they all heard the transmission from the station manager's radio: someone had jumped off the train near the rock quarry.
Mulder didn't need to be warned. He already knew.
****
When they arrived at the rock quarry, Stark was actually out of the car before it came to a complete stop, but she knew John and Monica would be right there with her. They had only moments to do anything that might come to any good.
Her partner left the keys in the ignition. "Agent Scully, you drive," he told her. "Head down into the quarry and we'll meet you at the bottom."
Scully didn't argue. As she turned to descend into the quarry Stark heard tires squealing. The cliff face was steeper than she'd expected, but that was where running track and field since high school came in handy. She was faster and more secure on her feet than either of her colleagues. It was how she saw the man running across the bottom of the quarry.
"John!" she said. "I think I got him."
"I can see him," he told her, calling for Monica's attention before he shouted Mulder's name. The figure stopped for only a moment, and then kept going again.
Stark thought quickly then, and began her descent. "I'm gonna keep going," she said. "You two turn around, I'll go find Scully."
"Stark," her partner said warningly.
"I'm faster than anybody else and you know it," she told him, refusing to be deterred. He and Monica would eventually catch up with her, but someone had to get to the bottom of that quarry, if only to make sure that Scully was all right. If only to figure out if that really was Mulder. But somehow, by the fact that he'd kept running? Stark doubted it was him at all.
That didn't stop her from doing everything she could to get there as quickly as she could. She thanked all those years of conditioning as she navigated around and over rocks and boulders, ignoring the protest of her legs as she pushed herself harder than she had in a long time. Maybe it was because she understood Scully's desperation. Her partner's frustration. Maybe because she was scared of coming back with nothing all over again. Whatever the reason, she made better time than she expected she would.
It still wasn't fast enough.
She found the car just as Scully was getting into it. "Dana?" she asked. "Dana, what the hell happened?"
"Get in the car," Scully replied, with a snappish brusqueness that was a clear indicator that something dangerous had just happened. Stark obeyed, slipping into the passenger seat and barely closing the door before tires squealed as Scully pulled away. "Where are Agent Doggett and Agent Reyes?"
"They're meeting us back where we came from," Stark replied. "I told them to wait there. What just happened?"
Scully glanced at her. "I just watched a supersoldier be destroyed."
****
Arlington, Virginia
Stark's fingers twisted around the chain of the silver ankh pendant around her neck. "I should probably be happier about this than I am," she found herself saying.
"What do you mean?" Doggett asked, glancing at her. They were standing together on her front porch, his hand gently holding hers to stop the shaking he'd noticed on the way home.
She glanced over at him. "We know a way these supersoldiers can be stopped," she said. "These things that have scared the hell out of me for a long time. We know how to beat them. I should be happy about that, and I am. But I just think of how much heartbreak Scully had to go through to figure that out."
"At least Mulder's still out there," he said after a moment. "We'll get him back."
"Yeah. I'll certainly do anything I can to help." She sighed. "You spend so long with one person, you get so close to them, and then all of a sudden they're not there anymore? I haven't known you half the time she's known him and I'd be terrified if you just stopped being here. Especially if I knew you were out there, wanting to come back, and you couldn't. It makes me appreciate what I have with you. Reminds me just how lucky I am."
Something crossed his face at that moment, something she would never be able to identify. He hesitated for a moment, studying her, just looking into her eyes and the way she looked at him. She was about to ask him if he was okay when he said, "Can I tell you something?"
"Yeah, sure. You can tell me anything," she said.
There was a long pause as he saw the pain and the exhaustion in her eyes.
What she said made him smile slightly, tempered by the events of the night. "I think I'm pretty damn lucky," he corrected, before he tugged her toward him and pulled her into a hug. He felt her relax into his arms, looking for the reassurance that he would be there for her. He knew every day just how much she had done for him, and vice versa, and sometimes they just needed to be reminded that they had each other.
"John?" she said after a moment, from where her face was pressed into his neck. "Would you...mind staying? I don't want to be alone tonight."
"Yeah, sure." He nodded a little, before leaning in and pressing a gentle, barely-there kiss to her cheek. "I'm not going anywhere, Stark, not without you. Trust me."
Spoilers: "Trust No 1"
Words: 7123
Rating: PG
Summary: Looking from the outside in at the history between Scully and Mulder makes Stark and Doggett take a second look at their own shared past.
Stark Patrick was a morning person, and on the morning when everything would start to spin out of control, that was no different. She'd had work left undone from the day before and so had come in early, even earlier than her partner. She was sitting alone in the X-Files office, listening to some old pop album and attempting to write her report before everyone else came in and something else ended up on their plate. Little did she know that free time was about to run out.
The phone on the desk bleated, and without even really looking at it, Stark grabbed it with one hand. "Agent Patrick," she said, the same thing she had said to begin every phone call over the last four years. Except this wasn't any ordinary phone call.
"Hey, Stark. You got a minute?" The voice belonged to Richard Garvey, which immediately made it worth listening to. Garvey had been on her father's squad at the Department of Justice and had taken his position as supervising agent after his death seventeen years earlier.
Now she stopped entirely, shifting in the chair so she was facing the phone. Her eyes widened a little, and she sort of wished that someone else was in the basement so she knew that this was actually happening. "In fact, I have several, Rich," she replied. "I'm just a little surprised that you're calling considering we haven't talked in at least a couple of years."
"I know, which is why I'm making the call," he told her, causing her to arch an eyebrow. "I had someone contact me today asking if I knew how to reach you."
"That's strange," she said needlessly. It wasn't as if she had ever actually been closely affiliated with the DOJ, except for following her father around when she was younger. Certainly not for more than a decade. "Somebody we know? Did they say what they wanted?"
"No, on both counts," Garvey explained. "I tried doing a phone trace but I couldn't get anything off it. He said he'd try your office. Stark, one more thing -- it came through our internal extension. This is somebody who knows how to use official channels."
"All the more reason you'd think they would know where to find me," she muttered. "Okay. Thanks, Rich. I'll check it out." She hung up the phone and just looked at it for a long minute. People needing them, if they knew where to find them, went to Scully. Not to the junior agent on the team. And anyone with access to channels like those would have to know that she wasn't anywhere near the Baltimore DOJ office.
She was still contemplating that when the phone rang again. Sighing, she picked it up one more time. "Agent Patrick."
This time, the voice on the other end was one that she didn't recognize. The man on the phone said simply, "Agent Patrick, we need to talk. I need to speak to Fox Mulder."
Twenty minutes later, when John Doggett walked in the door, he was greeted by the sight of a thoroughly spooked, half-triumphant partner standing out of her chair. "That same guy called again," she said, circling around the desk. "The one that keeps wanting to reach Mulder."
"What?" he replied, looking a little incredulous as he hung up his jacket and moved immediately toward her. "Did you get anything out of him this time?"
She nodded. "This time, it makes a hell of a lot of sense," she replied. "He says he's got classified military files on these alien super-soldiers. That he can give us names of who they are."
He just stared at her. "You've gotta be kidding me," he said. "You know what we could do with that information? We'd know exactly who we're looking for." A pause. "Even if you seem to have a sense for 'em."
He had a point: she'd hated Gene Crane and he was an alien. She'd hated Knowle Rohrer, and he was an alien. She'd hated Shannon McMahon...almost everyone she'd vehemently hated had turned out to be a super-soldier. She wondered what that said about Kersh but it wasn't time to crack jokes.
"I'd take a federal document over my gut instinct any day," Stark replied. "But he insists Mulder's the only one he'll give them to."
Her partner had that determined look in his eyes again. As much as he knew Mulder's safety was paramount, he also knew this was the kind of gamble Mulder himself would have taken. The kind of advantage that was too valuable to pass up. Maybe he was thinking about what Knowle Rohrer had done to the both of them only a month or so earlier. His tone left no room for argument as he said, "Then we go to the one person who can help us get to Mulder."
****
FBI National Academy
Quantico, Virginia
They had been keeping this a secret for long enough. Figuring it for a crack job, nobody on the X-Files had bothered to mention these mysterious phone calls to Scully. But with real substance now, Doggett and Stark - along with Monica Reyes, who had been very quickly brought up to speed in the car after passing them in the lobby of the Hoover Building on her own way into work - had to tell her. She deserved that and she was also their only real chance at holding up their end of the possible bargain.
"Can we talk to you for a second?" her partner asked Scully when they caught up to her.
"It's about Agent Mulder," Reyes added, making potentially the understatement of the year.
Scully arched an eyebrow. "What about Mulder?" she asked warily.
Doggett explained, "We got a guy contacting us through intelligence channels. This morning it was a back channel through one of Stark's buddies at the Department of Justice. He keeps saying he wants to talk to Fox Mulder only he won't say why."
"Well, who is he?"
"We don't know," Reyes said. "He always covers his tracks."
Stark nodded. "My contact at DOJ was suspicious, tried to run a phone trace. Nothing. But this morning we finally got him to tip his hand. He says he has highly classified military files."
"Files on what?" Scully asked.
"These bio-engineered soldiers we've all come in contact with," Doggett amended. "So-called super-soldiers. The same ones threatening Mulder's life, forcing him to live underground."
"What does he want with Mulder?"
"He wants to give him the names of these super-soldiers, and Mulder's the only person he'll give them to."
There was a long and pregnant pause between all of them. Everyone knew what that meant. Everyone was leveraging the viability of that information and how it could possibly change their lives with the risk of possibly getting Fox Mulder killed.
Scully spoke first. "Well, even if this was a good idea, I don't know how to contact him."
She walked out without another word. Stark would have been more than willing to drop it, at least for the time being. She had the flickering thought across the back of her mind that had it been her, it would have been difficult to process. But John had something else on his mind, and she watched him follow after Scully.
Stark stood where she was, momentarily thrown by her own train of thought. She had never imagined her partner just not being there anymore. And yet that was what Scully had to live with every day.
****
Arlington, Virginia
8:09 P.M.
She had a hard time getting that question off her mind, even after they had all gone home for the day. It was just any other ordinary evening for Stark, who was making dinner while watching the late edition of Baseball Tonight on the TV in the next room. But the question bothered her. She had no idea what she would do if John just disappeared for months at a time. No doubt, it was the same feeling Rich Garvey had when her father had died. And that made her think about her father...
She almost dropped the pasta sauce when the phone rang. Checking the caller ID, she eyed it carefully. "What's up, John?" she asked, replacing the jar on the counter.
"Our mystery date just called my cell phone," he explained. "I'm running a trace right now. Meet me at the office. Let's see where this guy's hiding out."
"I'm on it," she said without a second's hesitation, stopping only to turn off the gas on the stove before she finished the call and went running to get her things.
It didn't take her long at that hour to make it back to the Hoover Building. "Did you get an address?" she asked, when she found him waiting for her in the parking garage with the keys to a Bureau sedan in his hand.
He shook his head. "No, but I got a cell node. Six city blocks in the Bethesda area. I did a little research and I think I might know where this guy is," he continued as she locked her Impala and joined him in the passenger seat of the sedan. "We've gotta get more than this. We need to know who we're talkin' to and if this information is legit."
"The million-dollar question," she agreed sagely. She had spent a lot of time on stakeouts from her work in the Fugitive unit and this was nothing new, except for the doing it in jeans and a T-shirt part. "All right, I'm game. Let's do this."
He just smirked a little. "I knew you'd be easy to convince," he said as he backed the car out. They both knew there really wasn't a time when it was hard. When she said she'd follow him anywhere, she meant it.
That was how they ended up sitting across the street from an old, three-story weathered brick building in an otherwise deserted area of Bethesda, Maryland. Her partner's next phone call was to Reyes, but it would take some time before the other agent could join them. It was just the two of them in the car, Stark watching John with his eyes lazered on the front of the building. He was on to something. She envied him the pure talent that he had at making something out of nothing.
"It's kind of scary," she found herself saying.
"What is?" he replied, not taking his eyes off the building.
"This whole situation. With Mulder being gone and Scully having to go through this." She bit her lower lip as she scanned the street, unable to keep her brain from being in 'work mode' even if her heart was going on about stupid emotional quandaries. "I don't know how she holds it together. If it were you I'd have started crawling the walls within the first week."
He snorted softly, but gave her a barely imperceptible nod. "Yeah, well, that's the difference between me and Mulder. It's not gonna be me. I'm not the leavin' kind." He paused, perhaps considering his words before he said, "How you doing?"
She blinked. "What do you mean, how am I doing? This has got like, nothing to do with me. I'm fine."
"I know you don't like dealing with the Department of Justice guys. You always say it reminds you of your father."
"It does, but..." She sighed then and leaned back in the seat. "It's not like I don't like them. They're fine, at least the ones I knew. I just think that's my father's place and not mine. It's never going to be easy for me to operate in that sphere. But don't worry about me. This is not about me right now."
"Saying it isn't going to get me to stop caring about you."
"I know. I'm just saying." If she was honest Stark appreciated the fact that she had a partner who remembered such things. Her aversion to dealing with the Department of Justice because of her father's legacy was something that hardly came up, but yet he remembered not only the what but the why. She loved that about him, and it did make her feel better as they settled in and waited for Reyes to arrive.
The clock on the dashboard read 9:32 when they saw her car pull up behind them. A moment more and Monica exited her vehicle, slipping into the back seat of the sedan. "What do you have?" she asked.
Doggett still had his hawkish gaze trained on the building. "This source of ours decided to give my cell phone a call tonight. I ran a trace."
"Did you get a number?" Her interest was clearly perked.
"No, but I got a node. A sector of six city blocks. The area's pretty vacant, except for this building here."
Monica paused, her face taking on a slightly wary cast as she looked between the two of them. "Say this source is for real, and this is Mulder's chance to come home. We spook the spook, and maybe that chance goes away. Or worse, it drives Mulder deeper."
No one got a chance to answer her. A dark car pulled up in front of the building. They watched a man exit the car and enter the building, looking behind him to make sure he wasn't being followed before he disappeared inside. Less than a minute later, Stark watched her partner unbuckle his seat belt and lean on the door handle.
"Where are you going?" Monica asked, concerned.
He nodded out at the street. "Take a little look into his car."
"I'll say it again," she replied. "What we risk is compromising Mulder's return."
John's lips just quirked. "I don't plan on getting caught," he replied, and then he, too, was gone.
Monica glanced out the window and then back at Stark, who continued to sit there with an impassive look on her face. "You're just going to let him do that?" she asked. "You don't think it might backfire?"
"I've learned two important lessons over my career," Stark replied, turning her head to look at the other woman. "The first is that I trust my partner no matter what. The second is that sometimes to gain what you want, you've got no choice but to take a risk."
****
Twenty to six and they were still in the damned car.
Stark had, somewhere around midnight, ceded the front seat to Monica so she could stretch out in the back and take a nap. She was awake now, though, sprawled out with a bag of apple Jolly Ranchers she had picked up from the 7-Eleven down the block when she went on the coffee run. Her partner was reading the paper, Reyes was unconscious and Stark was trying to decide if she really wanted to go to work after spending all night awake in a Bureau sedan.
"Did the Orioles win?" she asked randomly.
He glanced down at the box scores on the sports page. "By two."
"Damn. My MLB Extra Innings package is going to waste," she remarked with a soft laugh. She was about to open her mouth again and ask him to see how Josh Hamilton's line was when she saw what he saw: the same man leaving the building, finally. She sat upright in the back seat and buckled her seat belt as he woke Monica up and, once the car had disappeared down the street, turned the sedan to follow.
Maybe they'd all just be a little late to work.
Especially when it became apparent where they were going. It wasn't as if she and Dana Scully were coffee buddies, but she knew Scully's apartment building when she saw it. She swore lightly under her breath as her partner stopped the car, already on his cell phone before she could even get out of the sedan and take up her usual position at his hip.
"Agent Reyes and I just tailed a car onto your street," he explained as they headed toward the building. "We watched a guy go into your building. A guy we're guessing you've got no business with." A pause. "You there, Agent Scully?" When he got nothing but silence back, he snapped the phone shut. No one needed to be told that it meant it was time to haul ass.
And if there was anything Stark was good at, being a former college athlete and one-time potential Olympian, it was hauling ass faster than anyone else. She would never be able to run as fast as she had on the day she set that university record, but she could still fly. She bolted up the stairwell, gun clutched at her thigh, her partner and Reyes behind her. Blowing through the door, everything happened in a blur: her partner moving past her, tackling to the floor the man who was attempting to break his way into Scully's apartment. Reyes moved to the door, trying to get Scully's attention as Stark stood there with a service weapon ready to fire.
The look on the other agent's face, standing there with a gun to some woman's head when she saw the lockpick Doggett pulled off the guy he had pinned to the carpet, pretty much said it all. No one had any idea who to trust.
"Looks like we need to have a talk," Stark commented, stowing her gun back in its holster as her partner hauled the man to his feet.
Admittedly she wasn't much for talking. Whenever she and her partner had an interrogation to do, she always let John take the lead, choosing instead to sit back quietly and see what she could pick up. It was the same this time, Stark leaning against the wall with her arms crossed, just watching as her partner and Scully began to ask questions of the two people they had sequestered on Scully's couch.
"Start with who you work for," Doggett suggested flatly.
"I'm not at liberty to say," the man replied.
John glanced at the woman. "Is this your wife? Maybe she's at liberty. Maybe she doesn't want to accompany you to prison."
"You staged this, didn't you?" Scully cut in. "Arguing on the street. Everything."
"No," the woman protested.
"It's a con job," Scully continued. "What are you after? My baby?"
"No, no. I want to protect William."
Two things popped in Stark's mind. One was that they had totally lost control of this interrogation, and the second was the one she voiced as she pushed off the wall. "How do you know her son's name?"
"That's enough," the man interrupted, looking at his wife. "You want to get us killed?"
But now the woman was coming undone. "You said...you said that they could help us. You told me that. That's what you said."
"What the hell is going on here?" Doggett wondered out loud, speaking for the rest of them.
The man's eyes finally met his. "They're watching," he said simply.
"They're watching?" John retorted incredulously.
Scully, on the other hand, seemed to know better what was going on. She moved to the window and closed the blinds, before turning a harsh glance at the man. "You got something to say, say it."
He did, after sucking in a long, slow breath. "I work for the National Security Agency. The name on my driver's license is false. If you were to call the police I would be detained only long enough for another NSA agent to authorize my release. I don't exist as a citizen, nor does anyone I work with."
Doggett arched an eyebrow. "So what are you doing here?"
"As you can see, my wife is upset. I was coming to get her to stop this very event."
"What's she so upset about?" Reyes asked.
The woman was the one to answer the question. "We have a daughter...Joy. There's something about her. Something different. Just like there's something different with her son William."
From her space in the corner Stark could see the shocked look on Scully's face. Not that she could blame the other woman. If she had a family that she was close to, she would feel the same way.
Her partner was still skeptical. "Different how? How do you know anything about her or her son?"
The man eyed him. "I know virtually everything about you," he said. Then, as if he'd known she was there all along, he eyed Stark. "And her," he continued. A look at Reyes. "And you." Then he fixed his gaze on Scully. "And you. Several months ago, you saw your son affect the movement of the mobile over his crib. He spun it, as if with his mind. It happened to us the same way."
Stark figured it out first. "So you've been watching this apartment with what...cameras?" she guessed.
"Various forms of technology."
"Then it's you who's been contacting us," Reyes replied.
"Not directly. My scope is limited. I only look at what they tell me to. But I have a supervisor who I've told everything I'm telling you about my daughter, and her son, and he started to look into it. He learned things about a super-soldier program. Things he won't tell us. Crimes, he says, against innocent people."
"What does he want with Mulder?" Scully said, growing restless now.
"Mulder's the only one capable of making the connections, he says."
The woman added, "Maybe we can help you. And maybe you can help us find out the truth. About what our babies really are."
An uneasy silence fell over the entire room and Stark, who had nothing to contribute and therefore had shut up, found herself scrubbing a hand over her face. She was really sick of these supersoldiers. Two of them had tried to kill her, one of them had landed her in the hospital. What she would not give for regular, garden-variety, alien abductions. Or even a nice, normal, solvable homicide. Maybe a simple assault. Anything but these damned soldiers.
Scully was on the phone, and getting visibly upset. Doggett just eyed her as she hung up, and when she went down the hall to grab her coat alarm bells went off in his head. "Agent Scully?" he asked as they followed her. "What are you doing?"
"I'm going to meet your contact," she said, then looked past him. "I think you should watch William, Monica."
Doggett just shifted his jaw, a little incredulous. "I don't like this. I don't like the feel of it and I don't like you agreeing to it without backup."
"You said I had to trust someone, right? Well, that's what I'm doing," Scully replied, and quickly moved past them. Stark opened her mouth to offer to accompany her, but she knew from the way Scully was acting that she was determined to do this on her own.
"Brave woman," she said instead, glancing at her partner. "If it were me I wouldn't be going alone."
"Yeah, she's brave," he replied. "Or stupid."
"So what do we do?" she asked, glancing at her watch. Monica had moved back into the living room and was keeping an eye on their guests. "We're supposed to be at work in twenty minutes, John." Not to mention neither of them had really slept, showered, or changed clothes.
He exhaled slowly. "We wait and see if she ends up needing our help. Let these two go, for now, but keep our eyes on them. Monica's gonna stay here and watch the baby."
Stark nodded. "I'm going to go home, shower, find an appropriate change of clothes, and then I'm going to have breakfast," she decided. If she didn't take care of herself, she couldn't be at her best to take care of anyone else. She eyed her partner. "You coming?"
****
There was never any shortage of things for Doggett to amuse himself with at his partner's house. Unlike him, Stark's organization usually involved organized chaos and there was always something lying around, be it her paintball gun, her baseball card collection, or whatever book she was reading at the moment. As he listened to the water running from the shower, he was peering at the framed enlargement of a Sports Illustrated cover she'd put on the living room wall. "You framed it?" he asked, both surprised and amused.
"What?" The water squeaked off, and a few minutes later Stark emerged, this time much more presentable in a black suit with a light blue blouse, still toweling her hair dry. "Oh. That. Of course I framed it."
"It's the back of his head," he pointed out dryly, turning to look at her.
She narrowed her eyes playfully. "It's still Josh Hamilton," she replied, tossing the towel back into the bathroom before she eyed her watch. It had been an hour. "Still no word from Scully?"
"No. Nothin'. I thought about calling her but if there's something going on, I don't want to risk getting her hurt." He frowned at that. He didn't like not knowing what was happening, but if somebody was monitoring her calls, he didn't want to land Scully in even hotter water.
Stark sighed at that, putting a reassuring hand on his back. "I don't like it any more than you do, John, but we have to trust Scully on this. She can handle herself," she advised, not sure who she was trying to convince: him or both of them. "I'll take you by your place, then we'll pick up breakfast and go to work. It's all we can do right now."
"That doesn't bother you?" he asked, as she grabbed her backpack and he followed after her.
"I didn't say it doesn't bother me."
In fact, it bothered the both of them a great deal, especially when it continued to be an issue throughout the day. Once they had gotten themselves to work, they did the best they could to work things from their end, but it was obvious that they were spinning their wheels. Monica never turned up, and frequent calls to her confirmed that she was still watching William. When Scully hadn't turned up and it was getting into the evening there became the thought that she might even be dead. They had no idea what was going on, and they both felt handcuffed. If Stark did anything right, it was to cajole her partner to come over to her place for dinner, teasing him about the spaghetti she'd never finished making the night before. She could see this was exceptionally hard on him, and that was what partners were for.
She had seen this with him before. He took responsibility for anything resulting from something he felt was within his control. He'd had that same concerned look in his eyes when she'd had a gun barrel screwed in her ear three years earlier. It hadn't been his fault at all, but because she was his partner, he'd felt responsible. And it wasn't as if he was the only one; she still felt horrible about not having been there when he had been shot and killed in Pennsylvania, not that she would ever tell him that. He didn't like to talk about that case. But if there was anyone who could get him to open up, to understand it wasn't his fault, she was that person. They had been so close for so long.
"Don't beat yourself up for this, John," she found herself saying, nursing a glass of red wine as she idly twirled the pasta on her fork. "Whatever is going on out there isn't your fault. You aren't the one doing this and you didn't make the decision to take this chance."
He eyed her. "I'm still the one who brought this to her," he replied. "That means it has something to do with me."
"And I brought it to you. You would've brushed it off as a crank, same as I would, if that guy hadn't spilled his guts to me. So wouldn't that make me responsible? I know you're not gonna say this is my fault, so why should it be yours?" she insisted.
"I don't know." He exhaled. "You know in the car how you said this scared you, thinkin' it might be me, and I said it wasn't gonna happen?"
"Yeah, I remember."
"I've been thinking about it." Doggett took a long drink before he continued. "She's all tied up in this. To him. She's known Mulder for nine years, probably the biggest nine years of her life, he's the father of that baby. He's everything she has and I just know she's gonna do whatever for him, even if it means something bad for her, and I don't wanna see that happen."
She nodded. "I understand," she said, "but it's not any different than you and me. We haven't known each other as long and we're certainly not parenting kids, but I'd go to the end of the earth for you and I know you'd do it for me."
"Course I would." A long pause. "Just makes me think about how close she is to him. How close I am to you. I understand where she is. What it's like to care about somebody like that. Makes it all the more scary to know she could go chasing him right off the deep end." She was just looking at him now, letting him vent. "Every move she makes I think about you. I almost lost you."
"You didn't almost lose me, John," she corrected gently.
"That guy had a gun to your head," he reminded her. "He could've pulled the trigger."
"But he didn't," she replied. "He didn't because you were there for me. You saved my life. You didn't make him do what he did, but you did do everything you could for me." She glanced down at the kitchen table, not really enjoying that memory. "You kept me going, John. Because I knew you would be there."
She fell silent then, thinking on that. It wasn't as if she was fatalistic but she knew that no matter what, she had someone to take care of her. There was never any doubt. She held onto that notion for all it was worth, empowering her to risk everything, knowing that if she screwed up at least she would still have him.
He saw the contemplative look cross her face, and reached across the table with a gentle hand, coaxing her to meet his eyes. The unbending, unwavering, unconditional loyalty she had for him was clear there and he had no idea on some days why. Why she stayed and she cared so deeply when all that had happened since she'd come down to the basement was get beaten down again and again. And even despite that she still didn't think any less of him.
He wondered sometimes if she regretted that but he knew from that look in her eyes, she never would.
"Four years is a long time, isn't it?" he found himself saying.
Stark didn't say anything. She didn't know what to say. And as it turned out, she didn't get a chance to, because her cell phone rang. Monica was on the other end; Scully had come back, and had an explanation as to where she had gone and what had happened.
****
"Preparation refers to a state in which your enemy is clearly defined," Stark ruminated the next night, sitting on the end of her partner's desk. She had yet to get a desk in the basement and she doubted that she ever would, so she just stole half of his.
"What?" he asked, looking up at her. His unsuccessful attempt at getting Scully to call off the meeting had put him in another mood all day.
"Something that I heard from Beckner once," she replied. For Reyes' benefit, she added, "Robert Beckner. He's the agent who recruited me. He said that preparation refers to a state in which your enemy is clearly defined. We need to define our enemy a whole lot better than we have right now."
"But how?" Monica asked. "You heard it same as I did...that guy doesn't exist. Neither do the couple we spoke to at Scully's apartment. There's no names to run. No leads to follow."
"I know, that's what pisses me off." Stark sighed, running a hand through her hair as she rested her chin on her forearm. "People don't just live a non-existence. There has to be a trail somewhere, somehow. There has to be."
Doggett, who had been watching this exchange with interest, suddenly perked. "There might be something," he said. "Scully said that guy made her change clothes to make sure she wasn't bugged. He had to handle those. Maybe we can get some DNA off of them." He reached for the phone. "Maybe forensics can rush a trace."
Stark eyed the clock. "It's just before eleven."
Monica nodded, standing from the desk. "I'd better get down to the train station, make sure Dana's okay."
"We'll get there soon as we can. I'll call you if we have anything," Stark replied.
****
Twenty-two minutes to midnight and there were only two sounds in the office: the relentless ticking of the clock, and John Doggett tossing a baseball back and forth, frustration clear on his face.
Sitting on the floor staring at the opposite wall, his partner just listened to the sound, it forming a metronome for her breathing. One of them, she couldn't remember which, had caught it during batting practice at Camden Yards, and whenever he bothered to pull it out of his desk they'd at least joke about that. But now neither of them were in the mood. The evidence lab had told them that the DNA sample he'd brought down couldn't be tested; the sample had been corrupted, complexed with iron.
They were at a dead end. She had nothing worthwhile to say. She was a goddamned agent with a background in chasing fugitives, something he'd done too when he was a cop, and they couldn't find one man. Powerless didn't even begin to describe it, and she hated that feeling more than almost anything in the world. It only reinforced her fear that she was out of her depth.
She startled when he suddenly stopped, slamming the baseball down onto the desk. A glance at his face and the fact that he was already moving said he knew something she didn't. She didn't ask, just got up and followed.
****
"He's not human." The words her partner had said rang in her ears as they stepped out of the car and made their way toward the train platform. "The guy Scully met. He's one of them. This whole thing is a setup."
Stark kept those words in mind as she gripped her gun, steps behind her partner. She couldn't blame him for insisting she stay behind him; the last time they'd tangled with a supersoldier, she'd ended up with a torn shoulder muscle and two days in the hospital. She clicked off the safety, taking up first pressure on the trigger.
"You sure about this, John?" she asked.
"I'm sure. He's here, somewhere," he replied, glancing around the corner and out onto the platform.
The man that they had interrogated in Scully's apartment was coming toward her with a gun, but Reyes was already in control, pulling Dana to the ground. The man didn't stop, however, suggesting Scully wasn't his intended target. Stark felt her stomach lurch as she saw what had to be the Shadow Man appear. He closed on the other man, firing once, dropping him to the platform. Then, in what seemed to be slow motion but was only a matter of seconds, he began to close on Scully.
The next sound to reach Stark's ears, crystal clear despite all the panic ensuing, was two single shots from her partner's gun. Stepping out onto the platform, he squeezed the trigger twice in quick succession, hitting the Shadow Man in the leg and then the chest. She could only watch as his body disappeared between the rails, in front of the train.
Without even thinking about it, Stark closed the distance between herself and Monica Reyes, wondering why someone wasn't getting medical attention for the mysterious man she'd met only days before. When she saw him, it was obvious why. He was dying. The grief in Scully's eyes was obvious as she came to kneel beside him, all of them watching him slip away, knowing then that they should have trusted him.
The police were called and she spent the next twenty-odd minutes standing with her partner, inspecting the spot on the tracks where there should have been a body. There wasn't one. Nothing was said, just a look exchanged between them. He knew that he was right and there wasn't a damned thing he could do about it.
They rejoined Reyes and Scully on the platform, Doggett breaking the news that he was sure the Shadow Man wasn't human. Scully knew she had to warn Mulder, but before she could, they all heard the transmission from the station manager's radio: someone had jumped off the train near the rock quarry.
Mulder didn't need to be warned. He already knew.
****
When they arrived at the rock quarry, Stark was actually out of the car before it came to a complete stop, but she knew John and Monica would be right there with her. They had only moments to do anything that might come to any good.
Her partner left the keys in the ignition. "Agent Scully, you drive," he told her. "Head down into the quarry and we'll meet you at the bottom."
Scully didn't argue. As she turned to descend into the quarry Stark heard tires squealing. The cliff face was steeper than she'd expected, but that was where running track and field since high school came in handy. She was faster and more secure on her feet than either of her colleagues. It was how she saw the man running across the bottom of the quarry.
"John!" she said. "I think I got him."
"I can see him," he told her, calling for Monica's attention before he shouted Mulder's name. The figure stopped for only a moment, and then kept going again.
Stark thought quickly then, and began her descent. "I'm gonna keep going," she said. "You two turn around, I'll go find Scully."
"Stark," her partner said warningly.
"I'm faster than anybody else and you know it," she told him, refusing to be deterred. He and Monica would eventually catch up with her, but someone had to get to the bottom of that quarry, if only to make sure that Scully was all right. If only to figure out if that really was Mulder. But somehow, by the fact that he'd kept running? Stark doubted it was him at all.
That didn't stop her from doing everything she could to get there as quickly as she could. She thanked all those years of conditioning as she navigated around and over rocks and boulders, ignoring the protest of her legs as she pushed herself harder than she had in a long time. Maybe it was because she understood Scully's desperation. Her partner's frustration. Maybe because she was scared of coming back with nothing all over again. Whatever the reason, she made better time than she expected she would.
It still wasn't fast enough.
She found the car just as Scully was getting into it. "Dana?" she asked. "Dana, what the hell happened?"
"Get in the car," Scully replied, with a snappish brusqueness that was a clear indicator that something dangerous had just happened. Stark obeyed, slipping into the passenger seat and barely closing the door before tires squealed as Scully pulled away. "Where are Agent Doggett and Agent Reyes?"
"They're meeting us back where we came from," Stark replied. "I told them to wait there. What just happened?"
Scully glanced at her. "I just watched a supersoldier be destroyed."
****
Arlington, Virginia
Stark's fingers twisted around the chain of the silver ankh pendant around her neck. "I should probably be happier about this than I am," she found herself saying.
"What do you mean?" Doggett asked, glancing at her. They were standing together on her front porch, his hand gently holding hers to stop the shaking he'd noticed on the way home.
She glanced over at him. "We know a way these supersoldiers can be stopped," she said. "These things that have scared the hell out of me for a long time. We know how to beat them. I should be happy about that, and I am. But I just think of how much heartbreak Scully had to go through to figure that out."
"At least Mulder's still out there," he said after a moment. "We'll get him back."
"Yeah. I'll certainly do anything I can to help." She sighed. "You spend so long with one person, you get so close to them, and then all of a sudden they're not there anymore? I haven't known you half the time she's known him and I'd be terrified if you just stopped being here. Especially if I knew you were out there, wanting to come back, and you couldn't. It makes me appreciate what I have with you. Reminds me just how lucky I am."
Something crossed his face at that moment, something she would never be able to identify. He hesitated for a moment, studying her, just looking into her eyes and the way she looked at him. She was about to ask him if he was okay when he said, "Can I tell you something?"
"Yeah, sure. You can tell me anything," she said.
There was a long pause as he saw the pain and the exhaustion in her eyes.
What she said made him smile slightly, tempered by the events of the night. "I think I'm pretty damn lucky," he corrected, before he tugged her toward him and pulled her into a hug. He felt her relax into his arms, looking for the reassurance that he would be there for her. He knew every day just how much she had done for him, and vice versa, and sometimes they just needed to be reminded that they had each other.
"John?" she said after a moment, from where her face was pressed into his neck. "Would you...mind staying? I don't want to be alone tonight."
"Yeah, sure." He nodded a little, before leaning in and pressing a gentle, barely-there kiss to her cheek. "I'm not going anywhere, Stark, not without you. Trust me."