Chapter One: The Predator
by jordan
It had rained all day, and now the garish colors of sunset were refracted from every roadside puddle like the lenses of a broken kaleidoscope, flashing red and orange and gold in painful splinters of light as the tires of Walter Skinner's car sliced through them. His thoughts were too disjointed to follow to any particular conclusion, so he only drove, letting his fingers grip the reality of the steering wheel, the pressure of his foot moving him forward or letting him slide backwards in time as he covered the inevitable distance between himself and the darkness that lay ahead. Everything had seemed to funnel in since he got off the last plane, the temperature dropping so drastically that his body couldn't fully adjust and he was shivering even inside the newly bought parka, as if the world, now ruined, was cooling into some eternal dusk.
A dark job, a dark future, the history of the earth coming to some dark swirling conclusion around him, and here he was, going after one of the few people he truly believed had made the struggle meaningful, so that he could arrest her and bring her back to what passed these days for justice.
"She trusts you," Kersh had told him in the office yesterday, "She'll talk to you."
"Maybe there's some kind of reasonable explanation," Skinner had ventured.
No one spoke, but a general shifting of the half dozen men in the room passed for a consensual eye-roll. No one there was Scully's friend, or his, for that matter. Because this was an internal investigation, in his department, he should have been left out of it altogether. But Scully's phone call to him had forced them to let him play. Besides that, and let there be no mistake about it, this was a test of just how far he was willing to go for to save his own future.
"Reasonable? You saw the lab reports. And if she had some sort of reasonable explanation, why did she run after she shot him? Besides, look at what all we've uncovered in the past three days. You can't turn a blind eye to the truth just because she was one of yours, Skinner." Kersh turned to the television/vcr set up in the board room and played the grainy, black and white show one more time, one more time; just one more time. Skinner had seen it twelve or thirteen times in the past hour. Close ups, zooms, computer enhancing. It was the tape that had been taken from a security camera in front of the Hoover Building three days ago, in the early morning hours, and by now he knew it by heart.
First a pre-dawn jogger trotted by, pony tail swinging, headphones black against her pale hair. As she crossed the screen, headlights blinked once, and a car pulled up from directly in front of the camera and slowly pulled between the yellow markers of the parking space. The lights blinked again and went off. The door opened, and Scully got out. She walked across the screen like an actress seeking her mark, and came to stand directly under the pool of light from an overhead streetlamp.
A man in a long raincoat came striding out of nowhere, walking straight at her.. Mulder. Later, it would be learned he had taken a cab there from his apartment. Evidently a prearranged meeting, but unclear who had called it. On the tape, Mulder said something as he approached her. Four words, the lipreader felt fairly certain of: "What have you done..." but then he turned, and whatever else he was saying was only indicated by the bobbing of the back of his head. Scully said something. Mulder seized her arm roughly. She moved, not pulling away as one might expect, but into him. Into him hard. They were in some kind of childish shoving match, like furious lovers whose passion had burned to rage and then to violence. Mulder...
Skinner swallowed hard and turned his windshield wipers on. The rain was turning to sleet now. It had been almost ninety degrees when he'd left Virginia how many hours ago? Twelve? Fourteen? How had he failed to anticipate such cold in the Canadian mountains? That was the reason a sudden shiver ran through him, that and not the memory of that next scene, which had played and replayed in his head a thousand times since he'd first seen it.
Mulder had drawn back his fist. Even under the raincoat, even in the grainy film, you could see the bunching of muscles, the weight of the man behind the upraised arm: he was going to hit Scully as hard as he could. Man hard, against a woman the top of whose head would have grazed his chin if they'd been dancing together, a woman who had been not so long out of the hospital that she'd gained back her already frail weight. And would have, would have struck her down with all his strength, if she hadn't suddenly leaped backwards, drawing her gun and firing so rapidly they had to slow the computer down a couple of times to see it clearly.
It was quick even in the slowest motion, almost as if she'd been expecting him to go berserk like this. The swift smooth grab under her jacket, the flash of the muzzle, bang bang bang like a strobe light, Mulder doubling over and falling hard from the force of the impact.
In typical Mulderlike irony, two bullets had gone between his arm and his side, burning tunnels through his clothes but not touching the skin, while the third bullet had missed all vital organs and only caused so much blood loss because he'd been on the ground fifteen minutes before someone found him. It was the fall that had caused his head to crack against the sidewalk, knocking him loopy, and the resulting swelling was what had made him look so limp and heart renderingly helpless as he sprawled there on the pavement, sliding even then towards coma.
Scully, wiping blood from her white face, had wheeled, her jacket flapping winglike on either side of her as she ran to her car, vanishing in a dark rush of panic from the face of the earth, until yesterday morning, when she'd called Skinner and told him she had to see him. But only on her terms, and only if he came alone.
Skinner had seen Mulder before he'd seen the film. He'd run alongside the gurney in the hospital, even allowed himself a rare unguarded moment when he smoothed the younger man's hair back in a gesture of grief and tenderness while they were hooking up the fluids. Mulder's eyelids had trembled as if in a dream, and he whispered something. The attending officer and Skinner had both leaned down at the same time to hear him say it again.
In the faintest of voices, his fingers gripping Skinner's weakly, he had said, "Get...Scully."
Skinner realized he was approaching a hundred miles an hour on the long stretch of deserted highway, and he made an effort to slow himself down. Mulder lying there in a spreading pool of blood, Scully's weak, frightened voice on the telephone yesterday, Kersh's smug air of command as he was given authority in the case over Skinner-- none of them could hold a candle to the shock he'd felt when he saw that film for the first time, Mulder in that aggressive, enraged posture, about to hit Scully full force with his fist. That was the moment that replayed in his mind, that burned behind his closed eyes even in sleep, that haunted him mercilessly. It was the most un-Mulderlike act he had ever seen, a violation of everything he had believed in. There had to be some outside force acting on Mulder to make him do such a thing.
But toxicology had come back with nothing. Nothing in the bloodstream, not a drop of alcohol, no drugs, and everyone had reported his recent behavior as "normal," though with the same conditional smirking words always added: "well, normal for Mulder."
Long ago, Skinner had given up any Faustian notion of a perfect moment in life, the climax of existence when he could lean back and take a deep breath and say, this is it, we're all safe now, and I am satisfied with the world. That moment was never going to come. Life was change, and as much as he hated it, he accepted it and tried to move forward on the same philosophy he applied to a skidding car on an icy road; even though it went against all common sense, you turned the wheels INTO the skid, and only then could you hope to regain control of the vehicle at some point. If you fought it, you could be flipped, turned on your back like a turtle, rendered helpless in a world of predators, and then it was all over. He had damn near steered his life right over the edge of a cliff a couple of times by going along for the ride too long, first with CSM, then with Krycek. But he'd caught himself just in time, and that was the best he could hope for now, if he was going to get Scully through this alive. And if he had to become one of the predators to hunt her down and drag her through it, then so be it.
The sickness was in his blood like the tumor was in Scully's brain. Dormant, a sleeping evil that might awaken in an instant and cause them to do crazy things they'd never do otherwise. Like this insanity, going to find her, following these complicated directions, acting out this charade, and knowing at the end of it no matter what she said to him, what she did, he was going to have to bring her in, because that was his job.
For now, he was simply going to play the cards he had been dealt. Find Scully, formally arrest her for shooting Mulder, and bring her back to the bureau personally, so that there would be no chance of an "accident" during her apprehension. Then what? Confront her with the evidence they'd found in the past seventy two hours, the x rays, the bank account, the receipts. Let her explain what she could of those things.
But at some point there would come that moment, that instant, when he could grab the wheel and force it to obey him, some place where he, Walter Skinner, could change the course of human events and justify his existence on the planet. It was just a matter of recognizing that moment when it came.
And if it didn't come...Well, he was damned if he'd let Scully skid over the edge of that cliff, with or without him, no matter what she'd done that was so terrible, so shocking, that it had made Mulder raise his hand against her.
Bouncing back and forth between rage and regret, Skinner glared at the road as if it could feel his determination, the emotional stance he had to take for the job he had to do. No one would hurt Scully, not on his watch, but by God he would find her, he would bring her in, and he would get to the bottom of this, even if he had to wring the truth out of her with his own two hands to do it.
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