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poeticsandaliens · 6 years

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stella/scully prompt: scully going to visit stella in the hospital after being attacked by paul or even seeing the ordeal happen on screen

Howling Ghosts

This is not set during the events of The Fall, but after. Scully sees Spector attack Stella on tape. This was an emotional gut-punch for me to write, and I hope I did these characters justice.

Rated M for canonical violence, which is why everything is under the cut. Title taken from the song “King and Lionheart” by Of Monsters and Men. Tagging @today-in-fic.

“Stella?” Scully peeks into the study. Stella sits at the oak desk, her blouse glowing sickly peach in the lamplight. She remains frozen in front of her laptop, her arms crossed tightly over her chest. Her fingers clutch at her ribs. “Are you all right?”

A strained sigh escapes Stella’s lips. “He should have stood trial.”

She knows instantly who Stella is referring to. “He should have,” she says softly, “but there’s nothing you can do.”

“I should have insisted he never be left alone. He should have been made to face his crimes, stared into the eyes of everyone who suffered at his hands. He should feel for the pain he caused and feel for every woman who is not sitting in that courtroom. They deserve to see him punished.”

She’s never heard Stella speak this way. Like molten a steel blade, hot and metallic and punctuated with a needle-sharp tip.

“It’s been over a year. What brought up the Spector case?”

“Katie Benedetto killed herself yesterday.”

Oh. She takes a couple steps forward, lingers between Stella and the filing cabinet. Fuzzy black and white footage flickers across the computer screen. “Is that—”

“My interview with her.” A pause. “I should have done more.”

“What more could you have done?” Sometimes she wonders if Stella shoulders the responsibilities for strangers’ suffering because she cannot bear to think of anyone closer. She shoulders the pain in their hearts and dares not examine her own.

The silence prods at Scully’s bones, settles in the crook of her stiff limbs and clings to the wrinkles of her shirt. The video freezes and disappears, and she sees the little loading symbol spiral in the corner of the screen. The next video plays automatically. For a moment she thinks that Stella has set Katie’s interview on repeat—but no, that’s not Katie in the far chair, but a stiff, wild-eyed Paul Spector.

Scully knows right then what she’s watching. She squeezes the back of Stella’s chair until her knuckles turn white. Her eyes flick to the tiny scar along Stella’s eyebrow, shining pale blue in the glow of the laptop screen. Stella gets migraines, occasionally, jarring reminders of past trauma, splitting her open at ungodly hours of night. Scully expects her to stop the video, to close it out or something—something besides sit there, tighten her lips, steel herself.

“Stella, can I stop it?”

Stella shakes her head. “No. I have to know. I have to know what he did to me.” She looks up, and the look in her eyes leaves Scully unnerved. Wide open, drained of color in the screen light like cold, hard silver. “You don’t have to stay here, if it makes you uncomfortable.”

She speaks with assurance, but Scully can hear the stony cadence behind it. Something in Stella is determined to process the footage alone. If she can face her injuries, watch the attack play out before her eyes, she has won. It’s a test—to prove to herself once and for all that she needs no one but herself. She can withdraw.

Scully knows better; she knows trauma doesn’t work that way. She knows it better than most people, and she suspects Stella does too. Stella, who stares into the eyes of women who have been raped, who have survived assault and abuse, and promises to listen, to be present, to try to bring them justice. Stella, who can promise them nothing more, because she knows—how well they both know—life makes no guarantees.

Stella, who championed the healing power of human connections for anyone but herself.

The footage plays on.

Scully has seen it all before—the young officer at the door, the hard-knuckled detective laying out a case. Pushing for a confession of guilt, jabbing at the volatile criminal and hoping for a reaction. She’s seen it so many times that she doesn’t need sound to know what’s happening or what’s being said. Stella’s told her the things she said to Spector, the way her rage bubbled out and the she just kept talking. How at some point, it stopped being her job. How she doesn’t regret a single word.

Every time he moves, Scully’s fingernails dig into the back of the chair. She won’t leave, no matter how many hairs stick up on her spine. It reminds her of Donnie Pfaster’s trial, a lifetime ago, only Paul Spector is not a scaly monster lurking beneath human skin, but a living man. An ordinary man, one might even say.

It always satisfied Stella to call Spector ordinary. In his monstrous acts, normal was the one thing he aspired not to be. He aspired to earn a place among the Donnie Pfasters, the faeries and demons and forked-tongued divinities, mythologized for the horror they inspired—so evil they will never be forgotten, stooping so low they were deified. She hates it, how they burned themselves into human history in a way Spector never will. As tides turn, as everyone he burned himself into grows old and weary, Spector will be forgotten. The injustices that created him will not. That is what he deserves. That is what they all deserved.

He stands up so quickly his chair topples over backwards, and the young man who reaches out to stop him is unprepared for the blow. Scully is a medical doctor, trained in defensive combat, and she knows a broken arm when she sees one. Spector’s image flashes around the screen; it happens so quickly doesn’t realize she’s stopped breathing until she takes in the foreboding silence around her.

She sees Stella’s fists clench. On the screen, he knocks her over with one kick, cracks her ribs with another. Scully can’t believe how tiny she looks there, a bird-boned woman in a sharp suit. A glimpse of her blood in grey scale. And then he’s on top of her, fists tearing into her, and another face flicks into Scully’s mind: The Brazilian psychic surgeon, his right hand shoved into her sternum.

Jesus Christ. She isn’t prepared for this. She looks at Stella. Her lover’s icy gaze is fixed on the screen. Her cheekbones look like they’ve been whittled with a pocket knife. The light glints off her scar like the flash of a sniper rifle. Her chin trembles almost indecipherably, the tremor in her fingers much more pronounced.

To Scully’s surprise, Stella’s hand slips into hers, fingers locked tightly together. When the pixelated Spector hurls his fist at her zygomatic bone, she squeezes Scully’s hand. Scully tries to ignore the throb of her circulation being cut off. She lets the computer screen blur and looks past it to the dark office wall.

Why do people cling to hands when they’re hurting? She wonders if this is how it felt to Monica Reyes, when she bit down on a stick and squeezed the life out of Reyes’s fingers as she delivered William. She wonders if this is how Mulder felt, reaching for her hand across an antique hardwood floor as they bled through ghostly bullet holes on Christmas Eve. She wonders if her mother felt this same reeling cocktail of love and despair every time she sat beside Scully’s hospital cot and held her hand and saw cancer suck dry her daughter’s body.

She is not leaving. She always appreciated Mulder’s tenacity when she was injured, his insistence that it was okay to hurt. It drove her mad when she was young, but she always admired his deep empathy. She tries to channel just a little of it now.

She watches as several officers rush into the room and peel Spector off Stella’s body. She is so still that Scully almost forgets how this all ends, her shape curled into itself like burning paper. A man in uniform reaches for her shoulder, and at first she pushes him off, so decisively he takes a full step backward.

On her feet, her impossible stilettos wobble until one gives out entirely, She crumbles over, caught by the guards. The silence is broken by a sharp intake of breath, and Scully turns to see Stella’s jaw stiff and open. Stella presses her hand to her mouth, squeezes Scully’s fingers so tightly they’re tinted blue. Tears roll down her cheeks in a wash, and Scully’s breath catches. She has never before seen Stella cry.

It is this that shatters Stella’s resolve: when her ankle gives out in its heel, when her legs no longer support their own weight. It is not the violence but what comes after. The moment you realize you have been desecrated, that you are in blinding pain over which you have no control, and you must rely on someone else to heal. Scully has felt it.

Scully offers Stella her other hand, and she takes it. She presses it to her chest, above the button of her satin blouse, holds it there. Scully can feel her heart beat beneath it. She can feel the wet spots where Stella’s warm tears dropped off her jaw.

She has never been held like this. Not even when Mulder reached for her in his bright orange prison garb like she was water in the Sahara. This is a different need, not an explosive gesture of yearning but an ache, that starts out dull but seizes her over time.

“I know,” Scully whispers, because she does. She’s felt this pain, that wracks Stella. “I know.”

The tape ends, and the screen goes blank. It aches. God, how it aches.

#the x-files #dana scully #stella gibson #television: the fall #today-in-fic #fox mulder #txf fanfic #paul spector #stella x scully #tw: violence

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