#txf s8

This case will be the end of him.

Papers make an accusatory thwock! against his desk as John's arm comes to cradle his forehead. He mentally curses himself for hiding from it and forces his eyes to scan line by terrifying line, sweat absorbing into worsted wool. They are scattered every which way around a terminal. He is the sole witness to himself, but he feels unreliable. Is he the same man who walked into that house? How can he possibly explain what happened that fateful night in Squamash?

But he'd felt it. He'd felt the creature's pain — or was it his pain? It was orphaned in his mind, an uncomfortable blend he'd been trying to push down until it sprung out — as he loaded them into his vehicle. He'd felt it up to the terrifying feeling of buckshot embedding itself into his torso, and he'd felt his own warm blood pool at his corpse. His last dying memories were of shock, anger, sadness…

He thought of joining Luke and the steed of acceptance came swift.

He thought that he'd see bright light when he died, and he thought that he'd see something beautiful. Even if it wasn't real, the cases he'd taken before the creature led him to entertain more superstitious sights. All that mattered when you were going was the comfort, a rare prize in this bitch of a life; he'd performed everything but gone more than he cared to play again. Now, he'd seen nothing but darkness and blotches of rapid purple, felt the rolling of his stomach, a sputter of his last flickering embers — water, water, rising, rising, the decay of his thoughts into an endless collapsing nothingness as each syllable faded into meaningless, crestfallen sound…

Primal fear soon after. No sight, no sound, no smell, no sensation, boxed and buried with leaden limbs and an anchor of metal embedded in his entrails.

Then, nothing. No grand gesture. Time simply ceased to exist for John Doggett as he had been.

The attacker had been Frey. What business did he have burying an agent? Were they stupid — or were they smart, aware that Doggett's involvement with the X Files made him as good as gone from the get-go, a dead man walking? Only an idiot would ignore the notion that these Files painted a target on your back. Of course he'd taken after them with the full knowledge that his reassignment would lead to his death. He'd also taken after them with the full knowledge that they would justify it.

As he'd gone out, he'd gasped back to life, the stench of something awful and rotten festering in every pore. In his first moment of dim wakefulness he cried out like a child, cheeks wet and wailing for a mother never to come, only to find his hand linked with the creature of his rebirth. A freight train of memory hits him at once: hunger. It is deep and unwilling.

John startles and sits up. It fades as quickly as it came. The sound of his skin scraping against stone reverberates off damp, cramping walls — beneath the acrid, sharp scent of vomit and death, there is mildew.

He retches nothing. His stomach burns.

Impossible, whispers sense. He heeds it, blinks his bleary eyes as they adjust to the dim light, assessing himself. His free hand wriggles and he retches again at the sight of chunks of rotten flesh and mucus scattered across his naked body like glitter. The last thing he remembered was… was…

Doggett's hands fly to his mouth in a feeble attempt to cover it as bile spills past his crooked teeth. The next thing they do is clench and beat at the stone with a fresh gurgling wail.

Luke.

Luke.

The distant sentiment pounds at the gates of his mind until it's fresh and throbbing, a bleeding wound that has always served to shoot him out of his worst terrors as much as it pushed them in.

"You!" He shouts at the creature's limp body, trying to heave himself out of the deep indent he'd been… been placed in. They do not respond, and he scrabbles himself into a sitting position with weak limbs, arm shaking their cold shoulder. "What did you do?!" John cries.

The answer is resounding silence and putrescine, an explanation of its own he is unwilling to process. The catacombs surrounding him and their living ecosystem don't tarry in struggle; they owe him none of the keys to their existence. Mold continues its merry path twining life in its most unlikely place on the nesting walls, gleefully undisturbed by his outburst.

John pushes off the ground with all his might to swing himself out, but he can't muster the strength. It feels like he's going to throw up again with each push, a gnawing hunger shriveling up finer sense, but he pushes himself beyond it to dig his fingers into stone futilely. The more he tries, the more he slips, though, and the more his brain lapses into panic.

Unprofessional.

When the tips of his silk-soft fingers begin to leave red trails on the rock, he finally allows himself to slump backwards with a useless thud.

Everything feels distinctly wrong. Like he shouldn't be here. Maddeningly, like Luke is just within reach, just out of view, lurking around every corner he can't see. There is this great feeling as if something was wrenched back into place that long left, and it wasn't quite seated right, and it wears his skin and sits behind his eyes and calls itself John.

The woman finds him, of course, shivering and twitching in the machinations of a dreamless sleep – the first since Tipet. She tells him she swaddled him and buried his 'brother', and he levies none of his character comments at it. He drinks beef broth with scallions cut up and cooked tender, orange blossoms of turmeric shooting through the bubble columns. He spongebathes and she gives him the biggest coat and pants she has, and John knows better than to ask from where. She gives him her number, and before he leaves, she brushes her fingers gently through his soft, wild hair.

It's the same gentle touch she gave the creature, and though every part of him should balk and back away, he finds himself leaning into it with emotion that feels alienated from his body. A flash of something dances across his vision like a burnt-in image, and for a moment he is small and hunched and other until he ducks away.

I'm just dissociating, he tells himself. It's fine. We're both shaken. He tries to thank her on his way out, but she thanks him first in that hard-to-understand cryptic way she'd spoke when they first met. The last thing she gives him is the first thing he'd lost, leather wallet heavy in his palm.

His identity.

John Doggett cannot shake the feeling that it is not entirely his own anymore. Even now, seated in his office, it plagues him; a thought that bounces just out of his acknowledgement, another weight he must bear.