She's a hostage.

She had been a hostage too many times. When he stood in the remains of her destroyed hotel room after fifteen minutes of running aimless in the dark and another thirty of finding his way back, he remembered another hotel room and the sound of her voice too many hours after the fact, bruised and bleeding at the hands of the bounty hunter.

Because she had watched those tapes. Just out of curiosity, she'd said, and he'd wanted too badly to catch a few hours of sleep to protest. Maybe another hour of cable news and he would have snapped too, as sudden and violently as he had when his water was dosed and he'd nearly killed Krycek.

He regretted not doing it when he had the chance and he regretted the bullet scar in his shoulder and he regretted shrugging at her and going back to his room while she subjected herself to it. Starting from the age of twelve his life had been a steady stream of regrets, one after another. If only he'd found the gun, if only he'd been nicer to Sam before she had been gone, if only he'd caught Duane Barry in time...

Saying he was red-green color blind was easier than saying that whatever control he'd had, had vanished a long time ago. He already saw eyes in every dark corner and heard the click of wiretaps on his phone. Paranoia was no longer reserved for nightmares or sleepless nights. He lived and breathed it. His enemies were legion and all around him, save for her.

And she was gone. A few imagined clicks on a phone line and she was gone.

He picked up the phone and smashed it into the floor. The sound was only momentarily satisfying. The manager had disappeared back into his hole of an office and Mulder was alone in his partner's hotel room, staring at a stack of videotapes.

She's a hostage.

He flicked out his switchblade and dug one of the rounds out of the door. Standard issue. She had fired. She had fired at him. And now she was gone.

He sighed and made the phone call he always dreaded making. "I need a team."

Fingerprint powder confirmed that she and a thousand other people had shared this space. But hers were the ones smudged on the tabletop, the air vents, the inside of the phone he had managed to only partially destroy. No sign of foul play. Every sign of foul play.

She's not herself.

Maybe she would stalk through backyards, murdering golden retrievers. Everyone else saw their worst fears made flesh, but he had no idea which of the many nightmares would step out of the shadows and come for her. Donnie Pfaster with an expression of mute dumb rage and cunning. That one kept coming back to him, that was the one that haunted his nightmares. He had so few dreams. When he closed his eyes he saw burnt elongated corpses and his father dying in his arms. He saw his sister slipping away from him a thousand different ways.

This can't be it. A carrier signal on a news broadcast and she's gone?

She had taken her gun with her and who knew how many bullets.

He tripped over her first name when he used it with her mother. She wasn't Dana; Dana was the word drawled by serial killers who used it as leverage against her, Dana and Duane on a little field trip to the stars. He was careful not to lie, careful to keep the panic from rising in her voice until he hung up and confronted Skinner over the other officers.

When the phone call came from the hospital he was running on coffee and denial. It was the natural order of things. She's gone, a hospital calls; she's gone and she turns up hours or months later in a bed with no knowledge of what happened to her.

Especially no knowledge with a bullet hole in the center of her forehead.

From that moment words were nothing and sympathetic looks were nothing and his face in the mirror was a careful blank. She can't be dead. I've finally killed her.

He had not smoked a cigarette in years but he almost stopped the car and bought a pack. He couldn't stop moving. All that he'd have left when he saw her and knew, knew, would be the momentum of this moment, this ride, the anger and denial building in him. When the smartass informant pulled up and interrupted it took every ounce of will to keep himself from pulling his service gun and blowing him away. Bullet buried in his brain, just like her. Maybe once he saw her and knew he would go on that same killing spree, and would say every single one of them, Krycek and the bounty hunter and all of them, every single one of them, the cigarette-smoking man, he would say every single one of them had been the devil and he would spend the rest of his life in some sunny corner of a psych ward, playing checkers against the orderlies and sleeping in five-point restraints.

He studied every line of the corpse beyond the window, to be sure that the thin thread of hope wouldn't blow from between his fingers at the last instant. She was stronger than this, worth more than an execution-style killing and an inelegant disposal in a roadside ditch.

"It's not her."

With those three words the apocalypse that would have been his retribution was averted.

--

Only that night did he realize that it wasn't all of them he wished dead anymore.

She was pale and she looked sick and part of him knew that she was but the other part was listening to her words. He'd cried in relief after leaving the hospital, only a few tears, but his throat was thick with them as Scully told her mother all the reasons that she should just let Scully blow her partner away.

"He put that thing in my neck," she cried.

It was all true. Every single word of it was true, and he hated himself for it. But he had always trusted her. Even before he should have. Even when she'd come to his hotel room in a burgundy bathrobe and he had hesitated the barest instant, thinking that if his enemy had sent a fiery redhead to seduce him, maybe they were smarter than he'd ever given them credit for being.

Every word made a bullet look sweeter.

"You are the only one I trust."

I'm just relieved you're alive. They can fix you, Scully, they can make you better, I thought you would be broken and bleeding on the side of the road, I thought...

Donnie Pfaster wasn't her worst nightmare. His betrayal was her worst nightmare.

When did it come to this, he wondered, watching Maggie Scully talk her daughter down. When did we ever let our guards down. When did she become the only person I trust above myself.

Scully collapsed into her mother's arms and Mulder began to breathe again.

--

She said her name was Cindy and the moment he heard her pronounce the unfamiliar syllable he knew she was looking for a meaningless fuck.

She had impossibly long legs, bright green eyes and long tapered fingers toying with her third, fourth, seventh drink. She had walked over and brushed her breasts against his upper arm as she leaned over to ask the bartender for another, and then she had sauntered back to join her giggling friends, very aware that he was watching her. They had continued their bar crawl and she had stayed behind, and at his invitation she joined him, one pump dangling from her toes. Gradually he loosened up and put himself on autopilot, falling back on years of this. Light touches on her knee, exaggerated laughter at her jokes.

"You want to split a cab?"

She had perfect teeth. Beautiful skin. What he wanted was to pin her against a bathroom stall and forget the sight of his partner screaming that he had killed her sister. Quick and rough and desperate. He wanted her gasping against his neck.

He wanted someone to want him.

"Sure," he said, throwing a bill on the table to cover the tab. "Let's do that."

--

"I guess we're even now."

Mulder looked up from the requisition form on his desk. "Hmm?"

Scully smiled. Only rarely did she smile, and this one was soft and brilliant and quick as lightning, her hair falling into her face as she ducked her head. "Losing our minds to government experiments. At least you didn't shoot me."

One corner of his mouth curved up. "Wouldn't shoot you, Scully," he said. "Then I'd have to fill out twice as many of these while you were recovering."

"Glad to know I have something to contribute to this partnership," she said. Then she paused. "I shot at you."

"Don't worry about it," he said."Least this time I didn't drop my gun while we were trying to break into your room."

"Must be a new personal record."

He turned to gaze at her. "Scully..."

She sighed. "Mom told me about... some of the things I said to you." She walked over to him, put arm around his shoulders, and he linked his arm around her waist. "You're the only one I trust, you know that," she murmured.

He shook his head. "Look, you ever see me with that cigarette-smoking bastard and I don't already have my gun out, feel free to shoot me."

She chuckled. "I'll hold you to that."

Then she released him, and he put a palm against his cheek.

Why do you trust me, when all I do is take.

"You think you're up to another monster, Scully?"

"Always," she called back.