Title: Interregnum I: Secrets (1/1)

Author: Horatio

E-mail: Horatio1013@aol.com <mailto:Horatio1013@aol.com>

Summary: How well can we really know another person? Scully 
and Doggett attempt to answer the question.

Rating: PG (mild language)

Category: V, Scully/Doggett partnership 

Spoilers: Everything up through Salvage. Takes place the 
night the Salvage case is concluded.

Archive: Fine with me! Just let me know.

Disclaimer: Characters from the X-Files are the property of 
Ten-Thirteen Productions and the Fox Television Network. No 
infringement is intended, and no money is being made from 
this endeavor.

Author's Notes: This story is part of a loosely-knit series 
of Doggett/Scully vignettes. While each stands alone for 
the most part, the stories make most sense if they are read 
in order. The stories assume a relationship between Scully 
and Mulder, but present an altered season 8 emotional 
landscape in which Scully and Doggett actually open up to 
each other a little bit. Later stories may introduce S/D 
UST, but "Confessions" should be safe for all readers.


INTERREGNUM I:
SECRETS


Muncie, Indiana


John Doggett inspected the cartons of Chinese food he had 
just taken from the hands of the delivery boy. Lots of 
brownish sauce, lots of noodles, a few slabs of meat, and 
here and there an anemic-looking vegetable. "Should've 
eaten out," he muttered.

But Agent Scully had wanted to eat in, and he hadn't 
argued. She had looked tired and drawn, and anyway, food 
was food. A good night's sleep, finish the local paperwork 
on the Pierce case in the morning, and they'd be home soon 
enough.

Doggett picked up the phone next to the bed and dialed 
Scully's room. "Food's here," he said. "My place or yours?"

"I'll come over there," Scully said.

Doggett took the few moments before she arrived to wash up. 
When he emerged from the bathroom, sleeves rolled up and 
stomach growling, Scully was standing at the table where 
the cartons of food had been deposited. 

He paused to admire the view. She had taken off her jacket, 
and was wearing a blue turtleneck over dark slacks. Her red 
hair fell in soft waves around her face. All the years he'd 
been a cop, he'd never been partnered with a woman before, 
and he was still getting used to it. Sometimes he missed 
the easy, ribald camaraderie one had with another guy. But 
there were a hell of a lot worse things than having to work 
alongside a beautiful woman every day. And a smart one. A 
brave one, too. 

The only thing he'd wish different was that she be less 
impenetrable, less closed than she was. But considering 
what she'd been through with her partner's disappearance, 
he was more than willing to cut her some slack.

Doggett noticed that Scully was holding a file in her hand, 
one of the many that he had left strewn over the tabletop, 
and was staring at it solemnly.

"Cleaning up my mess?" he asked amiably as he advanced 
toward her. Suddenly he stopped. Something was off. Scully 
didn't reply to his question, but stood staring at the file 
in her hand. 

Finally she turned to him, holding it up. "Why do you have 
this?"

Doggett couldn't see which file it was. "What?"

"Mulder's file."

Hell. He was getting sloppy. Might as well own up. "I 
always bring it with me." 

She arched her eyebrows in question. "Everywhere you go, 
you bring it?"

Doggett nodded, trying to gauge her state of mind. Was she 
angry? He couldn't fathom why she would be. She seemed to 
want an explanation, so he tried to oblige. "I failed to 
find him. It was my assignment." His eyes wandered from 
hers. "I don't take failure well." He considered the 
painting on the wall, a landscape of mountains and fir 
trees, as though it could teach him about failure. 

He returned his gaze to her. "I keep studying it to see if 
there's anything I missed."

She looked at him for a long moment. Finally she asked 
softly, "Well, is there?"

Doggett inhaled deeply, and blew it out. "No." He combed 
his fingers through his hair. "I keep trying to make sense 
of it, though."

Scully tossed the file onto the table. "You won't. It will 
never make the kind of sense you want it to."

"Well, I'm not gonna blame it on aliens." His voice was 
edged with irritation, and she shot him an angry look. 

"Then you will fail. You'll never find him."

He felt the ire rise in his gut again, as it had out in the 
desert. "Damn it! I *am* gonna find him!" *Alive or dead*, 
he thought grimly. He began to pace up and down the small 
space of carpet alongside the bed. "This case here, Ray 
Pierce, it got me thinking."

"The metal man?" Her eyes widened. "What does he have to do 
with Mulder?"

"I figure, if a man could turn into a kind of metal 
creature through some weird science gone haywire, then 
maybe something like that could've happened to Mulder. 
Something that would explain why he could fall off a cliff 
and walk away."

Scully shook her head impatiently. "That was not Mulder."

"Right." Doggett began to recite in a singsong voice, "'It 
was someone who looked like a man but who wasn't a man.' 
I'm sorry, Agent Scully, I've never bought into that tale 
and never will. There has to be another explanation."

"And that other explanation would be that he turned into a 
metal man?" 

Doggett brushed away her sarcasm with a wave of his hand. 
"Of course not. But maybe something else happened to him 
that had a similar effect."

"Agent Doggett," Scully said, her patience fraying, "that . 
. . that whatever-it-was that looked like Mulder was seen 
only three days after Mulder disappeared. Ray Pierce took 
months to develop his condition. What kind of science could 
turn a man into an indestructible creature in three days?" 
She gave a mirthless laugh. "Now you're the one talking 
science fiction."

Doggett had to admit, she had a point. He threw his hands 
up in frustration. "Hell, I don't know. I admit it's far 
out, but it's all I've got to go on right now."

"And it's all wrong. That was not Mulder on the cliff."

Damn, thought Doggett, the woman could be infuriatingly 
adamant sometimes. "And how can you be so sure it wasn't 
him?" Despite his attempt to maintain control, his voice 
rose. "*I* saw him, Agent Scully, not you. I know what 
Mulder looks like. I SAW him!"

Her nostrils flared. "How can I be so sure?" she mimicked 
him icily, cocking her head. "Easy. Because Mulder would 
*never* kidnap a child."

"It's been my experience that people sometimes do things 
that surprise the hell out of people who thought they knew 
them."

"I don't care what your experience is!" she snapped. 
"Mulder couldn't kidnap a child any more than he could walk 
away from a fall off a cliff."

The hell with this shit, he thought. If she could toss 
aside twenty years of experience like so much window 
dressing, then she could take what she dished out. He 
hammered at her again. "How can you be so sure?" Her eyes 
shot sparks at him but he pressed on, oblivious to any 
effect his raised voice might have on their neighbors. "How 
can you be so sure he wouldn't take Gibson if he was 
desperate enough?"

"Because I KNOW him!" 

He poked his finger in the air near her face, badgering 
her. "You say you know him, but how well do you *really* 
know him?" 

"Cut the crap, Doggett!" she spat. "You're a good 
detective. I think you've got a pretty damn good idea how 
well I know Mulder."

There. The truth was out. Finally. Doggett let it hang 
there a moment. Scully's eyes bore into him like drills, 
and his did not leave her face. His voice when he finally 
spoke, however, was quiet, all the anger gone from it. 

"Yeah. I think I do."

The tension which had been like a taut wire strung between 
them suddenly snapped, and Scully dropped heavily into the 
chair behind her, breathing as though she had been running. 
Doggett moved to sit on the bed opposite. He wanted to 
reach out and touch her, make human contact, but he didn't 
dare. He continued quietly. "I've known it since I first 
met you."

Her gaze, which had dropped to her lap, shot up. She 
figured he had put two and two together when he discovered 
her sleeping in Mulder's bed. But now she realized he had 
earned his detective's stripes even before that, when he 
baited her with talk of the "other women" Mulder supposedly 
confided in. 

In the heavy silence that hung between them she floundered 
over what to say next. What had they been arguing about 
anyway? It was hard to remember. She was so tired, and she 
missed Mulder so much. Her eyes were imploring. "Then you 
have to believe me when I tell you that wasn't Mulder you 
saw with Gibson Praise."

Doggett tapped his fingers on his knee. The anger might 
have blown away, but difficult territory still lay ahead. 
He said gently, "Look, even the people we love the most 
can, under extreme stress, do things we don't expect. That 
we'd swear they'd never do." Challenged by her disbelieving 
eyes, he decided he had to do whatever it took to make her 
see the possibility of the corruptibility of the human 
heart. He had to risk opening an old wound.

"I know this for a fact," he said, "because my wife did 
something just like that."

"Your wife?" She might have said "your orangutan" for the 
astonishment she felt.

"Ex-wife," he amended. "We had a. . .a crisis several years 
ago. About our son."

Scully's eyes widened. A wife, and a child. Both of which 
were clearly absent from Doggett's life now. She waited 
while he gathered himself to continue. Whatever it was, it 
was costing him a great deal to speak of it. His fingers 
twisted and twisted, and his mouth worked with the effort 
to control emotion.

"He was killed."

"Oh my God. I'm so sorry. How--"

He waved it away. "A long story for another time."

Scully nodded.

"The point is, I thought I knew my wife as well as you can 
know anyone. But what she did. . ." He shook his head.

Scully waited, and when he didn't continue she prodded 
softly, "What did she do?"

He took a deep breath. "It wasn't enough that we lost our 
son. She had to destroy me, too. She blamed me for what 
happened, so she made it her mission to ruin my career. 
Said I'd been negligent, overlooked evidence. She conspired 
with an asshole in Internal Affairs to falsify records in 
order to accuse me of botching the investigation." He shook 
his head. "All lies. Everything we did was by the book. We 
were just too late. Too late. . ."

His voice caught, and as he fought to steady himself Scully 
wondered how many of the lines on his face had been etched 
by this tragedy. 

Doggett went on, "I just couldn't believe how much she 
hated me." He looked up at her. "It was like she became 
something unrecognizable." 

"She obviously failed in her mission," observed Scully.

A nod. "I was cleared of everything. But I left New York 
after that, applied to the Bureau. Had to get the hell away 
from there." His twining fingers quieted. "So the moral of 
the story is, the people we think we know so well aren't 
always what they seem."

Scully inhaled and let it out. "I know." 

Doggett held his breath. His risk was about to pay off. 
Maybe.

She went on, "Every human being is an enigma. There are 
places in each of us so secret, so deep, that no one will 
ever know them." She paused, and Doggett waited patiently, 
knowing that she needed time for wherever she was going 
with this. 

"I know there were things Mulder didn't tell me," Scully 
continued softly. "His illness . . ." She faltered, and the 
stunned bewilderment she felt when she saw his medical 
records replayed on her face. "And . . . other things." She 
thought of Diana Fowley, and swallowed. "And, well, I 
wasn't always forthcoming with him either. . ." She trailed 
off, finding words with difficulty. "I was sick for a time. 
With cancer." 

Doggett kept his expression compassionate but neutral. He 
knew about the cancer -- hers was one of those files in the 
cabinets, after all -- but he didn't know if the fact would 
have occurred to her.

She met his eyes, and what she saw there must have 
reassured her, because she plunged on. "I didn't always 
tell Mulder how I was really feeling. I didn't even tell 
him when the cancer metastasized. He only found out after I 
ended up in the hospital."

Her voice had dwindled to barely above a whisper. Secrets, 
thought Doggett. She and Mulder were people of secrets. The 
image of her in a hospital bed during the Tipet case rose 
in his mind, and he wondered about that secret too. 

Scully drew a breath and seemed to find new strength. "But 
even when there are things . . . unspoken between people, 
what you *can* know is the person's essence, their soul." 
She continued with growing confidence, "You know whether at 
their deepest core they are honest and good and decent. Or 
not. When you've been through things, when you've been 
tested again and again like Mulder and I have been tested 
over the years, then you know what lines they will and will 
not cross."

She fixed Doggett with a look of steel. "And Mulder would 
not cross the line of kidnapping a child. For anything."

She impressed him again, as she had impressed him when she 
tossed a cup of water in his face; as she had impressed him 
in a hospital corridor in Arizona, when he had chosen her 
certainty over his men's. He had wanted to make her believe 
in a man's weakness. Instead, she had made him believe in 
his strength.

He nodded slowly. "All right." Their eyes met, and held. "I 
believe your judgement on this. I'll buy that the man on 
the cliff was not Fox Mulder." 

She eyed him intently. "You mean that?"

"Yeah. Yeah, I mean that." 

Her eyes searched his, and she saw that he meant it. At 
once she felt her body relax. And she wondered why it was 
so important to her that John Doggett believe her. 

"But I'd sure as hell like to know who, or what, that was 
up there."

Her eyes smiled at him. "I told you." 

He held up his hand. "Whoa. I think we better quit while 
we're ahead."

"Fair enough." 

They sat in silence a few moments more, then Doggett rubbed 
his hands roughly over his face and stood up. "Food's 
probably cold."

Scully also rose and began gathering the files and papers 
into a neat pile. "That's okay. I'm famished."

"Yeah. Me, too." 

As they helped themselves to the food, Scully observed her 
companion, and the bitterness and sorrow carved into the 
hard planes of his face. Her hand went unconsciously to her 
abdomen, to the new life within. She said softly, "What was 
his name, Agent Doggett."

He became suddenly very still, and a wave of sadness washed 
across his features. But the eyes that looked at her held 
gratitude in them. "Luke," he said. And then shyly, "I've 
got a picture of him here somewhere."

Scully smiled at him through a mist. "I'd love to see it."


End


Feedback is gratefully accepted at Horatio1013@aol.com 
<mailto:Horatio1013@aol.com>.







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