Kingdom of Shadows

by Amy Watson
envagle@aol.com


Title: "Kingdom of Shadows"
Date: 22 Jul 1998
Spoilers:  "Demons"
Rating:  PG-13 for language.
Summary:  If you thought that everything was hunky-dory between Mulder and
Scully after "Demons", this vignette isn't for you...
Archiving:  Please...I'd really appreciate it!

The characters and the events behind this story are property of 1013, Chris
Carter, FOX, and God only knows who else...  Thanks to Rachel Noble for the
inspiration and to Val for prodding me on.  Gratuitous praise to Pellinor for
the 'Deep Background' site.  Wow!  

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
"Kingdom of Shadows"  
by Amy Watson (envagle@aol.com)
        
Scully blustered into the office, a spring chill clinging to her too baggy
overcoat.  She dropped her briefcase onto her desk and stripped off the wet
coat without any indication of surprise at my presence.  I fought against
glancing up from my computer screen despite the awareness that she knew I was
present and just chose not to acknowledge me.  The blue glare of the monitor
reflected on my glasses, so I focused on that rather than face my partner's
more intense glower.

Scully sighed and I clicked on my mail icon.  I picked at some lint on my
sweater while I pretended to read my email, suddenly conscious of the fact that
without the usual Bureau issue suit and tie I was naked.  My dress was a
betrayal of sorts and it wouldn't be long until Scully called me on it.  If she
ever spoke to me again, that was.  I tried to ignore her out of self-defense,
but it couldn't last much longer.  Typically Scully would find some excuse to
start a conversation; and whether or not she took the direct route she'd
eventually force me to confront the true issue at hand.  Although she has never
been the type to prattle incessantly on just to avoid silence I don't think
she's very comfortable with the morbid brand of silence I tend to fall into.
This time she seemed more than willing not to talk to me.

I wished I could tell her it had nothing to do with her; but that's not
entirely true, and I don't lie well to Scully.  Actually, I don't lie well to
anyone except myself.  If I learned anything over the past week it was that I
was capable of self-deception to the point of delusion.  I couldn't tell any
longer what was real and what I'd created as a lie to myself.  My past was
sundered and I didn't know what to believe.

Finally I couldn't stand it any more.  I looked up to find my partner giving
some medical journal more concentration than I'd seen her give most autopsies.

"Hi."  My voice sounded shy to me and I wondered at it.  I pushed my glasses up
the bridge of my nose, the nervous gesture half obscuring my view of Scully's
face.

"Mulder."  She didn't set down the journal, just lowered it slightly in order
to peer at me.

"I...I came to work,"  I managed.  The utter neutrality of her gaze started to
unnerve me.

"I see that."  She folded the journal around her index finger to mark whatever
article she was reading.

"I'm not really...I'm not officially working,"  I spat out into the thick
silence, "I just thought I'd come in, you know-"

"No,"  she said slowly, cutting me off, "I don't know, Mulder."

I had known this was going to be uncomfortable but I'd hoped she had chalked
the whole incident up as just another example of Spooky Mulder's recklessness.
It had been more than recklessness though, and we both knew it.  It had been
desparation.  She just didn't know why.  She refused to ask me.

"I have to requalify on the range before they'll let me come back officially."
There was a lot more to it than that, but I wasn't about to mention this to my
partner.  "I can't drive for six months."  

Scully nodded noncommittally.

"And the EEG?"

I was suddenly fascinated by a ragged thumbnail.  She knew the answer to this
one, she just wanted me to say it aloud.  I doubted it gave her any pleasure to
hear and I wished she'd leave it alone.  I shrugged.

"Tomorrow.  The last one still showed some spikes of...activity."

Her eyes were hard and that scared me.  I couldn't tell if she really didn't
care anymore or if she'd just reigned herself in that tightly.

"And that was?"

"Yesterday,"  I admitted.

"Uh-huh."

She turned back to her journal.  Rage built inside my head, pressed against the
backs of my eyes.  Didn't she even want to try to understand why I'd had to go
through with the treatment?  Did she have such a low opinion of me that she'd
jumped to the conclusion that this was just another one of my attempts to ditch
her for some selfish motivation?

I rubbed my eyes behind my glasses without removing them.  I didn't want her to
know about my vision problems yet.  I hoped they'd disappear as the seizures
faded.  If the seizures faded...

"Look, what else do you want me to say?  That I'm still having seizures?  Fine,
Scully.  I'm still having seizures.  They're real deuzies, too."

She was not expecting this.  She jerked back at my barrage and stared across
the room at me.

"I know."

Scully finally set down her journal and I noticed that it was the Journal of
Neuropsychiatry.  Not her usual easy reading.  My eyes narrowed and for some
reason I was angry with her.

"Mulder, what *are* you doing here?"  she asked calmly.

"What do you mean?"  I demanded.  I knew exactly what she meant.

"You shouldn't be here,"  she said, motioning around the office with a sweep of
her hand, "What if someone..."  She broke off and just stared at me.

"This is *going* to go away.  No one is going to see me have a seizure, if
that's what you're worried about,"  I snapped bitterly.  I wasn't so sure.  It
had been over a week since the first treatment - the one I still didn't
remember.

My partner rose from her desk and for a moment I was afraid she was going to
deck me.  I was rather surprised she hadn't already done so.

"You shouldn't even be driving."

"I took the Metro,"  I retorted more sharply than I'd intended.

Scully stepped away from her desk and turned her back on me, as if terribly
intrigued with something on one of the bulletin boards tacked haphazardly
around the room.

"How long have you been out of the hospital?"  she spat out after a long
silence punctuated only by the high electric hum of my computer.

I frowned and ripped off my glasses.  Scully faded into a small emerald and
auburn blur a few feet in front of me.  I didn't want to be able to see her
expression if she turned around.

"I went home last night,"  I replied evenly.

Scully didn't turn.  She'd made a big show of pretending she hadn't been around
when they carried me away from the summer house in an ambulance, restrained and
barely conscious.  I remembered her presence and I knew instinctively that it
wasn't another hallucination.  It was the only thing I could recall with any
certainty.  By the time the seizures had lessened to the point where I was
coherent between attacks, she was gone and I'd been too exhausted to wonder
where she was.

The doctor's hadn't given me anything to treat the seizures until they got a
handle on the drug Goldstein gave me.  They were afraid of an adverse reaction,
I guess.  In the meantime what had started out as hallucinations progressed
into grand mal convulsions.  All I can remember of this was the sensation that
my heart was going to burst through my ribcage, and then nothing for more than
a day.

Scully was absent from the hospital for the remainder of my time there.  The
doctors prodded my brain, running so many tests that they blurred together.
The cause of the seizures was clear enough - I'd let some quack give me an
overdose of Ketamine and drill a fucking hole into my frontal lobe.  What they
couldn't figure out was that the injury was apparently in the wrong spot to
cause the type of seizures I was suffering from and didn't explain the blurred
vision.  I wasn't sure how much of this Scully was aware of but the neurology
journal worried me.

"I spoke with your mother,"  Scully said lowly, turning to face me.  I think
she wanted to gauge my reaction.  By the time I got the glasses back on I
couldn't read anything from her expression.

"Oh?"  I tried hard to keep my tone bored.

My mother.  I didn't remember much of what I'd said to her before I'd abandoned
Scully there but I did remember the slap.  By that time reality and the
hallucinations from my childhood were fairly tangled.  All I could focus on was
the need to exorcise my demons.  Melodramatic phrasing, I know.  According to
Jung, demons are 'hidden affective themes, liable to provoke permanent
disturbances in our psychic life.'   They make us 'mistake the shadow for the
substance; they symbolize the inevitable imperfections of the kingdom of
shadows.'  A pretty accurate statement from my recent experience.  I doubt ol'
Carl took an o.d. of Ketamine to come to that conclusion, though.

"She wasn't as shocked as I would have expected by the fact that you were
having seizures,"  Scully said, still dead neutral.

My face was hot and I fingered the change in my pocket.

"Scully-"  I choked, wishing to God she'd shut up.  Whatever it was...whatever
my mother had told her after I'd fled...I didn't want to hear it.

"Your father apparently pulled in quite a few favors when you applied to the
Bureau,"  Scully continued relentlessly.

A brief flash of my father's stern disappointment when I'd arrived home from
Oxford to pick up the last of my belongings on my way to Quantico.  The only
thing he said to me before I left was that I was wasting my talent in a
shithole like the FBI.  He didn't attend my graduation from Quantico and I
didn't speak to him for another five years.

"What...what kind of favors?"  I managed.  So the bastard had tried to keep me
out of the Bureau.  It didn't surprise me.  Fucker.

My partner's eyes constricted to slits and she studied me as if searching for a
crack.

"The usual kind.  I take it you don't know anything about this?"

I shook my head, struggling for words.  In a sick way it amused me to find out
that the asshole still had the power to render me speechless two years after
his death.

"He...didn't want me in the Bureau.  I can't believe he went that far-"

The odd grimace on Scully's face stopped me in mid sentence.

"What?"  I demanded.

"Mulder...your father didn't pull strings to keep you *out* of the FBI..."
Scully started slowly.

The air in the room turned into rubber cement, thick and gummy in my lungs.

"Why?"  I gasped.

Scully flopped back into her chair and rubbed her face with one hand.

"You were ineligible for service as a field agent with the Bureau when you
applied."

Someone lifted the top of my head off and squeezed my brain and I blinked,
trying to keep focused on Scully.  Her words had substance... they floated on
the air between us and I could *see* them.

"Mulder?"  Suppressed concern crossed my partner's face.  "You really have no
idea, do you?"

"Idea of what?  They recruited *me*.  I wasn't even interested at first,"  I
stammered.

Scully nodded.  "You were their wet dream, Mulder.  A perfect candidate.  And
they were ready to crown you Prince of VCS until they reviewed your medical
file."

"B-But they knew about...about Samantha from day one.  Why would that-"

"Mulder."  Scully's tone brought me down a notch from my impending hysteria and
I focused on her voice intently.

"After you...ran off with the car last week your mother told me that you
developed temporal lobe epilepsy when you were two years old.  That it was
controlled with medication until you were twelve."

"That...epilepsy would have disqualified me from being a field agent,"  I said
hollowly,  "I don't... I don't remember that."

"You don't remember a lot of things, Mulder,"  Scully said very gently, "I
didn't realize how much until I spoke with your mother."

"Then the seizures..."  I was trying to piece it together but everything seemed
tilted.

"None of the other people 'treated' by Dr. Goldstein exhibited seizure
activity.  They only recovered their 'memories',"  Scully said quietly.  She no
longer seemed angry at me.  Instead she looked saturated with sorrow.

"And went psychotic,"  I pointed out, failing to infuse the intended humor into
a statement that wasn't funny to begin with.

"So..."  I fell into silence, overwhelmed.

"The hole in your cranium probably hasn't caused any of the symptoms you've
experienced.  You're exhibiting temporal, not frontal lobe seizures.  That's
why the doctors had such a difficult time treating you when you went into
status epilepticus."  Scully shivered a little and I realized there was *a lot*
I didn't remember about the past week.

"You think-"

She didn't allow me to continue.

"Dr. Goldstein's 'treatment' triggered a pre-existing condition, Mulder.  One
that's been dormant for over twenty years.  It's not completely unheard of."

My glasses were too heavy on my skin.  I could feel the frames cut into my nose
and ears.  Scully was watching me.  I think she was afraid the implications of
what she'd said were not going to hit me, that she'd actually have to come out
and say it.  I saved her the trouble.

"You don't think the seizures are going to stop, do you?"  I said flatly,
yanking off my glasses again.  I could just make out the narrow set of my
partner's eyes through the haze.

"What did the doctor say?"

"Don't give me that shit, Scully.  I want to know what *you* think,"  I
growled.

She gave me a level stare and pressed her lips together in a brittle line
before she answered.

"What I think hardly seems to matter anymore."

There was a finality to her statement that made me go cold.  I rubbed my hands
absently as it struck me with an awful clarity that below her ivory stillness
my partner was enraged.  I hadn't just abandoned her at my mother's place.  I'd
done it days before, when I followed Amy Cassandra to Goldstein.  I still
couldn't remember even speaking to Amy Cassandra or that first trip to
Goldstein's office, but it had been a betrayal to Scully.  Only her loyalty had
kept her from ripping my bowels out through the disaster that followed my early
morning call for help.  I wondered if I'd killed that loyalty finally with my
little weekend jaunt.

I had to apologize to her.  I didn't know how.

"Scully, I..."

She stood again.

"Mulder, I'm glad you're out of the hospital.  I'm sure you're going to be
fine.  I have to meet with Skinner now."

"What are you going to tell him?"  I asked, both terrified and remotely
curious.  Part of me didn't really care anymore what she told our boss.

She tossed me an unreadable glance.

"What do you want me to tell him?"

Somehow the question bothered me more than it should have.  A year ago Scully
would never have asked me that.  She would have told Skinner whatever she felt
needed to be said, regardless of the way it made me look.  If I'd taken the
question at face value I guess I should have been flattered that she was taking
my feelings into consideration.  It was a nice dream.  I knew that wasn't what
lay behind her words.

I didn't answer her.  She turned and left the office, grabbing her overcoat as
she went.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I'd appreciate feedback.  It's been awhile since I posted anything resembling a
story!