Behind The Walls
by Mischa
mischablue@crosswinds.net

Rating: PG (language)
Category: VA
Keywords: Doggett, Scully, D/S UST
Spoilers: 'The Gift', 'Via Negativa', S8 in general.
Summary: Just another day in the X-Files for Special Agent
John Doggett, only... not.
Disclaimer: The characters of John Doggett and Dana Scully
aren't mine -- they are the intellectually and creatively
the property of 1013, Fox, Chris Carter, and Robert Patrick
and Gillian Anderson.
Archive: SHODDSters, yes; XFMU, yes; will post other places
myself
Author's Note: A response to the Summer/Mischa challenge --
Elements. See end of fic to find out what the
improv elements were.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

It was too late in the morning to even begin considering
going home and getting some sleep.

He leaned back in his chair, looking around the basement
office. Weariness clung to every pore, the weight of fatigue
pressing down on his mind. Another sleepless night in the
depths of the Hoover building.

Only this time there wasn't a plethora of case information
newly imprinted into his memory. No pages of scrawled
notes piled into a corner. There was only him. An
innocently blank computer screen. Dim light through the
tiny window, filtered by a grey sheet of rain. The office
felt like a prison when it was like this, and sometimes the
people who wandered down here were prisons
themselves. He thought of his partner's shuttered gaze.
Behind the walls the walls begin, he thought, and behind
the bars are bars.

It wasn't the first time he had considered this. Nor was it
the first time that he'd looked around the basement office
and felt a growing sense of frustration at its static
environment. It was just another day in the X-Files for
Special Agent John Doggett, only... not.

He ran a hand wearily over his face.

It wouldn't take much to just grab the keys and head home.
To shut himself in his house, to stare at himself in the
mirror, to try and work out what the hell went down in
Squamash. He pictured himself sitting on his couch, book in
hand, the buzz of the television filling his empty house
with sound, and shook his head. He wasn't a quitter, and
going home wasn't the best option right now anyway. Not to
his silent house in Falls Church with his books and his
loneliness and the echoes of a family resonating along the
walls. Not now, when he had a whole other aspect of survivor
guilt to struggle with.

He was dead. He should be dead. And yet he was alive.

Doggett didn't take much stock of the prying eyes and hushed
whispers of the other staff members walking the halls of the
JEH. If they wanted to waste their time, that was their
business. As long as the perps got caught and justice was
served they could waste their time in idleness Doggett knew
he didn't understand. When he had walked along the halls
early that morning to deliver an acknowledgement to A.D.
Skinner, he'd felt the occasional stare of a worker catching
up on too much paperwork in the bullpen.

Shock still lay thick under his skin, made him acutely aware
of the curiosity. He didn't seriously believe he was being
watched, but he felt it all the same.

The X-Files Division was the FBI's personal brand of
reality television; the bizarre human experiment was not
only addictive, but now interactive thanks to his presence
in the basement office. He made a conscious effort to get to
Skinner's office and back without making the usual stops to
check if any of his colleagues had come in early, without
stopping to say hello. The feeling of isolating himself had
stung. He had wondered if this was how Scully permanently
felt.

And now he was back here in the office, staring blankly at
the walls. His eyes were playing tricks on him, Doggett
decided. Fatigue had been threatening to overtake him all
weekend as he had worked, and now he was too restless
to sleep properly... Occasionally he would blink suddenly
and see dark shadows pooling around corners, enough to
startle him back into wakefulness. Micro-sleep. He knew
it well from rigorous watches out on Lebanon, stakeouts
back in New York, but somehow its frequency lessened
since joining the FBI.

Until he had joined the X-Files, of course.

They only appeared when fatigue made him vulnerable to the
machinations of the mind. The X-Files were a study in
contradictions; the curiosity of his investigations leaving
him open to his own failings, even as his logic told him
that the paranormal was a cop-out excuse for a lack of
answers. In the wake of dreaming darkness, of seeing his
partner's head fall from his hands, he sometimes thought
that it was the shadow of his own shortfallings that crept
along in his peripheral vision. Other times, he merely
placed his mind on his task and worked.

It was a familiar feeling. He was going in circles here. No,
not circles. It was like all he did in his life was learn in
a spiral; always finding himself at the same place, just
with a little more wisdom than before, a little higher, a
little lower, but the same place. Doggett closed his eyes
and waited, hoped that the events of the last few days were
just delusions. They had to be. He wasn't prepared to accept
that he had been given life by a man who could take death...
but there was no way around it.

Sounds, edging into his senses. Brisk footfall on linoleum.
A stride which still held the length of small steps taking
double time to catch up with one. Scully's face was lined
with her own problems as she walked in, removing her
rain-soaked overcoat. She was drenched, practically drowned,
and a smile touched his lips.

The smile didn't survive his musings.

She always looked so damned weary when she was
unaware he was looking; an age beyond his comprehension
permeating her features. Worn cerulean eyes stared blankly
at something far off in the distance, or something deep
within, he wasn't entirely sure. He always tried his
damnedest, but he could never quite work her out. She was
placing her coat on the hook and smoothing her hair when
he decided to catch her attention.

"Mornin', Agent Scully."

She stiffened and turned, chagrined to have been caught in
even such a necessary primping as this. Something shuttered.
Scully closed off again. Another prison in an already
solitary room.

"Good morning, Agent Doggett." She paused, and for a
moment it almost sounded as though she cared, that he
mattered in her world. "You're here early."

"Catching up on a few things."

Scully gave him a look and he realised she could call him
on his excuse. Friday afternoon, he remembered, he had
been pleased to wind up the paperwork on their last case.
Eager to get back onto his running search for Mulder.
Knowing that the details he had requested would be
waiting for him in his inbox. He had felt braver then,
enough to ask her if she wanted to grab a bite to eat, and
as he picked up the envelope from his inbox Scully had
declined with enough genuine regret in her eyes for him to
know that one day, she could take up his offer.

Then he had read what his sources had to say. Everything
went to hell from there.

Three days ago, the nature of time and life and death had
seemed so much simpler. You lived. You died. Two simple,
indefatigable rules. There was no way around it -- you
weren't supposed to wake up mere hours later after your
death to find yourself alive again. It just... well, it
wasn't an option.

Scully cleared her throat, and Doggett came back to himself.

She was looking at him hard from where she stood, all
unconscious openness extinguished. The efficient, alert,
analytical Dana Scully had risen to the forefront and
removed each line of weariness from her skin. She couldn't
completely hide the age in her eyes, but the sharpness in
them masked it well enough.

How do you do it, he wanted to ask, how do you push back
that much time with so much ease? Because Doggett knew he
carried the weight of his own existence in his face, in his
stature, in his eyes. He could never quite conceal it, and
never from her.

And Doggett knew it by the way she was watching him, her
gaze indecipherable and complex as always. A beat of
silence. Another. He took a breath.

"Assistant Director Skinner called me last night," Scully
said, "and he said that you'd been on a case. About Mulder."

He'd told her that?

Doggett nodded. "Yeah," he admitted. "The lead ran cold."

It wasn't just cold, it was dead. A dead end.

"Okay." A distracted look crept into her eyes. Where was she
in her mind? Doggett wondered. The world of the analytical,
filing away his information for later use? Or somewhere
else, a place in her mind where this craziness all made
sense? Her voice was a little softer, a little more
introspective. "Anything... I need to know?"

He watched her carefully, sharpened his own senses. There
was no trace of nervousness in her voice, nothing to
indicate that she knew either the events of the weekend case
or of her own indirect involvement. Doggett was glad he had
trusted his instincts, trusted his partner enough to
recognise that she had played no conscious part in the false
reports. His spirits lifted slightly at that.

"No," he replied, and hoped she would accept that. "Just an
old case I'd thought Agent Mulder would take a personal
interest in."

Scully smiled slightly, and it felt as though a shadow was
pulling away from her. "If you tried that, you'd be off
investigating every weekend all over the country, Agent
Doggett."

Doggett wondered what it would take to get her to really
smile. What she would look like. How much younger she
would seem. "It was worth a shot," he said. "I haven't given
up on finding him, Agent Scully. I won't."

He would promise himself to find Mulder for her, but he
could never promise it to her face, because he knew it
wasn't his vows she was interested in. Not now, anyway. For
a moment, Scully's gaze focused on something not quite in
the room, looking within herself, searching without... he
could tell she wanted to be away from here, far from this
place, and if he had any hope of taking her there he would
have.

"I appreciate you trying," she told him, and it had to be
enough.

Doggett took a deep breath and looked back at the empty case
report, closing the document and switching off the computer.
The screen's blankness had unnerved him, almost taunted him
with the knowledge its emptiness held. He was glad to be rid
of it. He hated lying to his partner. He saw Scully glance
away and head to Mulder's desk, sitting down and looking
through the file inbox.

He cleared his throat. "Nothing new's come in this morning,
Agent Scully," he said. "Slow day."

"The day's just started," Scully replied, grasping one of
the older files and flipping idly through it. "You've
probably just doomed us for rest of the week," she added.
Off-handed. Unthinking. Unknowing he had probably already
doomed himself, simply by waking up.

"Yeah. Well... there's nothing new."

Scully nodded and took a deep breath, almost unsure of
herself. "You haven't slept."

He blinked. "Agent Scully?"

It was concern in her eyes; a worry that he had sometimes
seen reflected in her gaze. "You've been here all night,
haven't you, Agent Doggett?"

He was disconcerted, but not uncomfortable. It was
directness he could handle, and he was glad of her approach.

"Skinner called me soon after he left this office. That was
almost midnight. I come in early today," she continued,
shooting a significant look at her watch, "very early, I
might add, and I find you're here." There was genuine
concern in her eyes, underneath the wariness. "You didn't go
home last night, did you, Agent Doggett?"

"He also said that under his recommendation you weren't
going to write up the case. I can understand that -- you did
this in your own time -- but is there... another reason?"

The lie tasted bitter on his tongue as he threw up his own
wall, distanced himself from the case, from her, from
everything... "The case didn't lead anywhere."

The words tasted bitter as a casual throwaway line. It was
the same old song as always. The X-Files had taken him away
from the world of smug 'no comment's and yet here he was,
using the same typical bullshit with the one person who
didn't need it and wouldn't buy it anyway. He wondered how
many times that line would run through his head today,
trying to justify his choice and Skinner's recommendation.
The case didn't lead anywhere. It panned out. It was a dead
end. Anger coiled and snapped within, and he couldn't hold
it.

"Look, I'll be okay, Agent Scully," he burst out,
frustrated. "I caught a few winks on my desk here this
morning. I got my sleep. Okay?"

She blinked, startled, and eased off. "Okay." Her gaze
slowly lowered to her desk; older files were plucked from
her inbox and she started going through them. Throwing up
her defences again, retreating behind her walls. Doggett
watched the emotions flicker across her face only to vanish
and he frowned.

Here's how it worked, Agent Scully, he said in his head as
the silence slowly consumed them whole. Somehow Mulder got
you to sign off on false case reports, taking the time to
try and find a cure for his brain disease under the guise
of... protecting someone. He shot a man, you know that?
Killed him, or so everyone imagined. Only it wasn't -- not
what you would think, not what anyone would think, that to
kill this man was to save him, to put him out of his misery.
And here's the kicker, Agent Scully. Here's where -- where
it doesn't make sense anymore, where some sort of twisted
logic takes over, where there are no clear winners or losers
you could've backed. The man was some kind of a -- a
soul-eater. Beyond a man. For the townsfolk, somethin' less
than a man. He could take away their illness... their death.

The brutal memory of the bullet slamming into his back made
him tense in his seat, abandon his train of thought. They
always said in the case of point-blank kills that the impact
was too quick, death too instant for the victim to register
pain. He could never prove it, of course, but Doggett knew
better now, remembering the burst of sharp heat tearing
through his flesh. His fingers shook and he gripped the desk
to maintain balance. Post-traumatic stress disorder; he
recognised the signs, recalled military debriefings,
remembered the patronising tone of the resident police
psychologist back in New York. Knew what had to be done, but
this was a case that would never exist in any record, under
circumstances which would never be believed.

It wasn't like he'd never been shot before. He was a goddamn
ex-Marine, for Christ's sake -- knew the rigours, the
discipline, the risk. He'd felt the flash of flame ripping
through his skin, the flare of pain blooming for a single
firestruck moment before sinking into a temporary darkness.

Only this time, darkness should have lasted a longer than it
had. Far longer. He shivered at the thought, unwillingly,
enough to catch his partner's attention.

"Agent Doggett?" Scully was sitting straighter in her chair
now, looking at him. He focused on her. Her eyes were wide,
alarmed.

"You okay?"

"Yeah."

Scully narrowed her eyes and silently assessed him, her
medical training kicking in. Doggett wished he could hide
behind his walls as effectively as she could behind hers.
She silently questioned him, all intense eyes and mind too
quick at mentally weighing his confusion.

"Agent Doggett..." She got up and walked over to his desk,
leaning slightly on the edge as he looked up at her. "You
don't look okay. You look tired. You look as though you
haven't slept all weekend."

Her gaze roamed over him. He took a breath. "S'okay. Just
had some work I had to do. You know how it is."

She pursed her lips slightly and glanced away. "Look, go
home. Take the day off. I'll cover for you."

He couldn't believe it. She was offering him a temporary
out, and he wasn't going to take it. "We got a job to do,
 Agent Scully."

"All the same." Scully looked him in the eye and
straightened, touching his shoulder subtly with her
fingertips as she turned away and headed back to her desk.
His business shirt tingled over his skin. It wasn't his
imagination.

"The things you see," he said suddenly, causing her to turn
around. "These... cases. Everything you've seen here," he
added, waving his hand in the general direction of the filing
cabinets. "Cases where there's never an air-tight solution,
or where you can't prosecute, or where the answers
themselves are -- are sloppy... how do you react to them?"

Something changed in her eyes and she stood by her desk
staring at him. Maybe it was hope that he'd started having
an open mind. Maybe it was a silent thankfulness he was
asking. Maybe it was bitter understanding of where he was in
the game.

"I try not to... react, Agent Doggett," she said. "There's
what the evidence tells us," she added, and he nodded, at
least understanding that. "There's what can be explained, by
science, by fact, but also by belief. We..." Scully spread
out her hands. "We see things, that we can't always explain
by science, or logic, or evidence. There's a human element
we can't overlook, and because of that, personal involvement
is something I try to put aside. You know that. You've been
in this long enough to be aware of how it works."

"I know that," he responded, and it felt as though he was
taking a leap, a faltering step into the unknown. He had
seen it himself, recognised that a man's belief's controlled
him enough to control his victims; understood the power of
the mind to be a dangerous, deadly entity.

But although there were monsters in this world and
governments played dirty, he hadn't seen enough hard
evidence to believe himself that there were little green men
running around on the earth or that there were supernatural
explanations of everything they came across. All Doggett had
as evidence were other people's beliefs, and without proof
he believed they were convinced but crazy.

Scully knew that, and that was why the brief moment of
connection flaring and forming between them flickered and
faded. How was it that she could throw up so many barriers
between them and still stare him down with those eyes? "And
how do you react to them, Agent Doggett?"

There was no point in talking around it -- it was honesty
that kept him here, that he appreciated the most to clear
the air. "They confuse me. At best."

And then... progress, perhaps. Because there was that
mysterious little smile again, the one that held no
explanation in the limited mental dossier he had on his
partner. "Well, Agent Doggett, perplexity is the beginning
of knowledge."

And how did you cross that line? he wanted to ask her. What
happened? When were you aware of it? And why? He knew he
wouldn't get his answers. Not from her. Not right now. There
was a quiet respect in her eyes, telling him it was
something he had to work out himself. Questions upon
questions, walls upon walls, and he could only nod in
response. If to be perplexed was to teeter on the edge of a
greater truth, then he was already there, walking over the
precipice. Falling already.

"Are you okay, Agent Doggett?" There was that look in her
eyes again. The understanding. He met her gaze and saw her
expression change subtly, but he didn't want to read it and
didn't try.

"Yeah. You?"

She stared at him for far too long and then nodded, quietly
excusing herself from the office. Doggett leaned back in his
chair again and gazed up at the small window, out into the
greyness outside. A prisoner, beginning to understand
the meaning of the bars and walls around him. So this was
how it all worked, Doggett thought. As much as he knew that
each assignment, each day, could change a man... he still
hadn't stopped to consider this. The walls here, in this
office, in the X-Files, didn't end where they begun. A man
free enough to walk outside them would not be, could never
be, the same as he was when he went in.

Doggett reached for the file she had placed on his desk and
began reading. He wanted to collect his thoughts by the time
his partner returned, and he knew that when she came back
she would have retreated into her own troubles again. Behind
these walls the walls begun, he thought, and behind these
bars were bars.

~ END ~

Improv elements:

-- rain
-- a song
-- Doggett's house
-- reality television
-- The quote: "Perplexity is the beginning of knowledge."