"My tongue will tell the anger of my heart; Or else my
heart, concealing it, will break."

~ Wm. Shakespeare

Part 1: Penance
by J. Morningstar

She checked her beaded, black evening bag one last time before allowing the heavy, hotel room door to close behind her. Cash, room key, lipstick, and tissues. Everything was in order. In exactly the manner that everyone had come to expect from her. Meticulous. Thorough.

As she waited for the elevator, she scrutinized her reflection in the hallway mirror. She had spent more time than usual getting ready, and was mostly pleased with the results. The black dress, which was deceivingly plain and unpromising on the hanger, looked as she hoped it would once she slipped it on. Her makeup, more dramatic than her daytime look, highlighted her eyes and mouth. But it was her hair that both entranced and disturbed her most. She was learning not to cringe at the sight of its shining auburn color.

//"You're the one that got away. You're all I think about."//

Gone was the sleek and chic coif she usually sported. She had treated herself to a session at the ridiculously expensive salon off the hotel lobby, charging it to her room, and the result enchanted her; frothy, auburn curls that fell in tousled elegance about her face and shoulders. Even the stylist seemed surprised by the results, and, caught up in the spirit, suggested a manicure.

//"Who does your nails, girly girl?"//

She suppressed a shudder and politely declined. Her hands were fine.

Back in her room, she looked longingly at the deep tub. It had been so long since she indulged a nice, long, soul-restoring soak.

//"I'm going to run you a bath."//

She told herself that there wasn't enough time for a bath; that a quick, efficient shower was all she needed.

//"Now, be good and don't cause me any problems."//

She was learning to live with that voice. That pasty, benign voice that hid so much evil - that voice that could find and exploit even the smallest impulse towards evil in others. But soon, very soon, the voice would no longer echo in her head. Already it was fading. She would tell the story again and again, until she had was nothing left to say. Until the voice spoke no more.

She focused again on her reflection in the mirror. Everything looked right, but she was not content. In fact, she was no longer surprised that it was easier for her to ignore the flesh-crawling revulsion that the memory of Donnie Pfaster's voice caused, then it was to dismiss aching wound of guilt and regret that had settled somewhere under her heart.

For weeks now, she woke each morning in a haze of oppressive misery. Even before her waking intellect recalled the nature of her sin, her unconscious mind recognized that there was something was terribly wrong in the world, wrong in a deep and abiding way. Her mouth twisted as she acknowledged that the mirror did not show the weight she carried -- that appalling weight of guilt and regret that hung like an albatross about her slender shoulders. Only a mirror to her soul would reflect that part of her, and she knew in whose eyes she could find that looking glass. She cringed to know those eyes would be there tonight, that *he* would be there tonight, accusing her, haunting her and disturbing her peace of mind.

She closed her eyes and shivered as she remembered the incident a month earlier. It had been that shrieking, irrational outburst that finally led her to seek real help.

She had been swimming in a well-concealed fog since evil, in the form of Donnie Pfaster, had broken into her home, shattering forever her sense of security, her illusion of safety. But even that trauma was not responsible for lingering wounds to her psyche - wounds that turned her into a stranger.

Beyond the awful feeling of being defiled, the appalling feeling of helplessness, was something worse, much worse. It was the tortuous knowledge that Pfaster had awoke in her a monster as capable of evil as Pfaster himself.

She had killed. In cold blood.

Between them, she and Mulder could have subdued Pfaster and taken him into custody. But reason had fled and left in its wake a tiny devil sitting on her shoulder, stabbing her with white-hot pincers, screaming in her ear, "Kill him. Shoot him. Destroy him." The pounding headache that came on nearly dropped her with it's ferocity. Mulder's voice was indistinct, as though she were listening from under water. But the voice in her head was explicit:

"Kill him. Shoot him. Destroy him."

And she did.

Where had it come from, that voice, telling her to kill? And the headaches, pain like she had never experienced before? Not even Mulder knew about them. She thought if she kept them to herself, she could find a way to control them. She has always counted on the strength and stamina of her body, the logical reasoning of her intellect, and the constancy of her evenly-regulated emotions. But these headaches stole her own faith in herself. They left her feeling out-of-control, like a ship ripped from its moorings, with an impulse to shrewish pettiness she could barely control.

She remembered the first time she exploded at Mulder. He stared at her as though she were some psychological anomaly. "Are you alright Scully?" Concern and bemusement evident in his voice.

"I'm fine" she snapped, ready to drop the matter. But her head ached, and with it rose an impulse to hurt, to have someone else feel the pain she was suffering. So she turned on him. "How typical of you to try to turn this into some kind of pathology." She sneered, "You and your psycho-babble profiling. You act like an inconsiderate ass, and instead of owing up to it, you find a way to blame it on a deviance in someone else."

"Look Scully," Mulder tried to placate her, "We can find another motel."

But Scully was not ready to be appeased. "No Mulder, I'm not moving. I want to unpack, get something to eat, the go to bed. But next time I'm picking the hotel."

"Yeah, sure, whatever." he mumbled, then stepped back at her frosty glare.

"I'm going for a run." she announced just before she slammed the door between their rooms shut.

If he wondered at her inconsistently he wisely kept it to himself. He leaned against the closed door and raised his voice. "You hungry?" A pause. "Maybe your blood sugar is low." Another pause. "I'm thinking of ordering a pizza."

In her own room, Scully leaned against the closed door, staring at her reflection in the dresser mirror. The woman who stared back at her was wild-eyed and bewildered - overrun with unspoken questions. What was wrong with her? Where had that come from? She was shaking. She quickly stripped and pulled on her workout cloths. Slamming the door behind her, she ran into the night, ran until her lungs hurt and her legs ached. Back in her room, she stood for long moments under the shower, until she sobbed in fear and frustration. She found Mulder and apologized in a low voice, her eyes downcast.

"No problem Scully, I always thought you were a little too passive." He wiggled his eyebrows at her and smirked, "It's kind of nice to see some spirit in a red-haired Betty like you."

She smiled in return, but they both knew her heart wasn't in it. And they both pretended that nothing was wrong. As she wandered back to her room, leaving the connecting door ajar, she wondered if he too was recalling what she said that night after she calmly drilled a hole through Donnie Pfaster's chest.

//"He was evil, Mulder. I'm sure about that, without a doubt. But there's one thing that I'm not sure of." she whispered.

He crouched down in front of her, and stroked the cold hands that lay passively on her lap. "What's that?" he asked gently.

She swallowed convulsively, unable to meet his eyes. "Who was at work in me. Or what... what made me...what made me pull the trigger."

"You mean if it was God?" Mulder asked.

"I mean... what if it wasn't?"//

She went over that conversation again, as she had a dozen times before.

At first, her greatest fear was the tumor. Had it come back? Had it metastasized? Had it invaded some section of gray matter than regulated mood and emotions? But the scans showed nothing, and her oncologist referred her to a neurologist, who ran test after test, but found no physiological reason for her headaches or her uneven temper.

The neurologist referred her to a psychiatrist.

That's when the soul-numbing fear overtook her rational calmness. What if the malevolence that surfaced in her the moment before she shot Donnie Pfaster through the chest was not a one-time thing? What if it took up permanent residence and became as much as part of her as her red hair, her scepticism, and her dispassionate intellect?

Wasn't that what her mother feared when she joined the FBI? That she would become stained with the filth of those she sought to bring to justice? That some part of the evil and hatred would seep into her own soul, like a pure lung that turns black and tar-plagued from years of exposure to second-hand smoke.

Had she become what she had fought for so long?

She was Catholic. She knew of good and evil. Of deadly sins. Of damnation. The fear of cancer faded to nothing in the face of this new terror.

It was enough to drive her, in desperation, to see a priest.

She had driven across the beltway to find him. She was unknown to him and this was important, because the anonymity of the confessional would not be enough. She needed to work this out face-to-face.

He was compassionate and kind. One of the modern priests who sought to find a place for Catholics in today's world. He was also forgiving. Maybe too forgiving. Because in the end, she left without the solace she hoped to find.

She kept the psychiatric referral in a zippered pocket, deep inside her purse. She was determined to find her own way back from the dark precipice.

After the incident with Mulder, she became a student of this new aspect of her psyche. She carefully monitored and charted her moods, her breathing, her heart rate. She learned the warning signs of an impending explosion, and developed a long list of reasons for a sudden need to be "somewhere else", whether it was on the road with Mulder, with her family, or at a briefing with Skinner and a dozen other Agents. She found a closet down the hall from her basement office where she could close the door and scream into a pillow she smuggled in for just such a purpose. Sometimes she got in her car with an excuse of getting lunch or coffee, then drove around until she was all cried out. And at the gym she had taken up boxing and worked out strenuously on a punching bag.

She hoped she had learned to control this cruel and spiteful "Dana," and truly believed she had until that night in Skinner's office. Dear God. She still blushed with shame and mortification when she recalled the things she had said.

She had lost a hundred thousand moments in her life, slipping away from her consciousness as though they never existed. But until the day she died, she would not forget the look in his eyes after she turned on him that night, nor would she forget the nightmarish misery of the month since. When she had finally halted, her tirade finished, her chest heaving, surfacing in the strange calm that always followed one of the outbursts, she watched in growing horror as he finally made sense of her near-hysterical ravings, her outlandish accusations. The emotions flew across his face, first incredulousness, then hurt, followed by fury, white-hot; strong enough to burn. And in her shame, she welcomed the searing heat that would cauterize her guilty wounds. But that too was denied her. Because the fury seeped away. She watched with an aching sense of loss as he carefully shuttered his expression and turned from her as though nothing happened, as though nothing was different.

Part of her was surprised at his reaction. Had any other agent done the same, Skinner would have packed them off for a psych consult. It's was she would have done. But Skinner, Skinner seemed to take her attack personally. This troubled her, but she shied away from probing too deeply into his reaction.

She told herself that Skinner's reaction was of no consequence. It was her actions that needed to be examined. The Catholic schoolgirl in her knew she carried more than her fair share of guilt. That came with the territory. At the same time, she knew that in this case, her regret was justified, and not just the result of an *overactive* conscience. As a devout Catholic, she knew what she must do to atone and find redemption, and she both dreaded and welcomed it. Skinner deserved to why she turned on him, at least to the extent she understood it herself.

Then she remembered the look on his face. For a moment she considered skipping the party. She could don her comfortable pajamas, and order a large, lovely room service meal, charging it all to the room. It was, after all, on Mulder's credit card.

Mulder. Poor Mulder, springing for this business suite was his way of making-up for her earlier complaints. Didn't he get it wasn't the endless parade of flea-bag motels?

She felt bad at first, until she learned that he was ditching her again, only telling her after he was at the airport and ready to board his flight to Wisconsin. Something about cow mutilations and a dead priest. Any guilt she felt towards Mulder faded away after his phone call. A quick check at the front desk determined that his credit card was taking care of the room plus incidentals. She planned to make sure that their was nothing "incidental" about the charges she racked up on her room account. That should teach him a lesson for leaving her without an escort tonight, not to mention ditching her again.

As much as she wanted to cower in shame in this lavish suite, she knew tonight presented her an opportunity that would not come again anytime soon. What had Orison said? "You have faith... have had faith. You hear Him calling you but you're unsure what to do."

"Oh yes, I know what to do." she thought to herself. She had tried, a dozen times, to apologize, to explain. But Skinner was unrelenting in his determination to never, ever discuss the incident. So she would go there and face him, and make him acknowledge her presence, force him to listen. She knew him, she knew the world in which he lived. She counted on the fact that he would always conform to certain rules of behavior. In such a public arena, he could not ignore her, hide from her, or find an excuse not to see her. And she would be implacable. He would not want to make a scene, or draw undue attention. He would be a captive audience. She would confront him and force him into the role of listener; confessor.

She needed this. He needed this. The working relationship they once shared demanded it.

But there was more to it than that. Beyond her need to regain some level of self-respect, she had to find a way to make amends, to regain the regard and veneration in which she was once held. It grieved her to know such a man thought so poorly of her, particularly since he once held her in great esteem. She never realized how much his good opinion mattered to her, until it was withdrawn.

The memory of his regard gave her pause. She had always known that Skinner's conduct with her was slightly different than his manner the other agents in his command. She had always assumed it was due to her involvement with Mulder and the X-Files that accounted for his special behavior. For the hundredth time, she wondered how she could have missed it? Had she been so enthralled with her partner, that she failed to realize what this strong and quiet man thought of her? That her actions justified his anger and contempt only deepened her desolation.

The elevator finally arrived, and she stepped in. She perused the control pane and absently pushing the button to the mezzanine level; her mind was elsewhere.

She would have this out tonight with Skinner. And then, life could return to as it was before. She would again know the power of his direct gaze, feel his respect, bask in his infrequent approbation. They would once again share a silent and secret smile as Mulder spouted off some insane theory. She would again be rewarded with the betraying tightening of his jaw, as he held back a smile whenever she quipped a sardonic comment to Mulder Once again he would greet her as they passed in the maze of hallways, wishing her good morning, nodding only briefly, but for those few seconds, he would look at her. Not through her -- as though she meant as little to him as the countless parade of agents that swarmed through the Hoover Building.

She paused at the edge of the ballroom. Her gaze flitting over the dozens of people in attendance, there was only one person here she cared to see.

She would look into the fierce eyes that accused her of treachery and worse, the deep brown eyes that had become the mirror to her soul. She would try to explain, and then ask for forgiveness. He would assign her penance, and grant her absolution.

And life would be as it was before.

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