1For gillyAnne.
For the X-Files Angst exchange (April 2020) and for gillyAnne. who requested:
Any cancer arc angst OR revival MSR angst is okay. I'd LOVE a piece about Scully's feelings towards being with Mulder again in the revival/S11 but if you'd rather write a different season go for it!
I really enjoyed writing this - I love getting into Scully's head, so this was a perfect prompt - and I hope you like it!
"As you can see, it's got everything you could possibly need." The real estate agent — she's already forgotten his name — is gesturing towards the immaculate kitchen. "State of the art appliances. All brand new. This particular unit comes fully furnished, although you can choose to supply your own furnishings if you'd prefer."
Scully shakes her head absently. "No. That's fine. It's what I wanted anyway."
She follows him and his perfectly tailored suit into the living room, half-heartedly listening to him going on about the gas fireplace and the ultra plush sofa with mahogany end tables. This place is nothing like her, nothing like anywhere she's ever felt comfortable. It's sterile and artificial, a strange high-tech hybrid of a hospital and a luxury hotel. It's stream-lined, clutter-free. Cold. Everything about it feels wrong.
"I'll take it."
The agent — Randy? — blinks in surprise as she's interrupted him mid-rave over the burnished copper hardware in the ensuite bathroom. "I… uh, great!" His façade shifts almost instantly to a smile that glints with the sweet taste of a commission he's hardly had to work for at all. "I can send the paperwork over to you first thing tomorrow morning."
"Sure. Please send it my work address at the hospital."
"No problem at all. Whatever works best for you." He takes her hand and shakes it with a hard squeeze. "I'm so glad you were able to find the time to come see this property today, Dana. It looks like it was a perfect fit for what you were looking for. Possession for the first of the month is definitely doable as well."
She manages a weak smile, trying to hold back the wave of nausea that's about to overtake her.
She's doing this. Really doing this.
Afterward, she sits in her car and sobs.
At first, she keeps the keys to her new place in her pocket at all times, shifting them from her jacket to her lab coat to her jeans; the weight of them a constant reminder of what she's done. The funny thing is that she doesn't even need them, not really, as the security system and locks are all electronic anyway. These are just the backups, the real estate agent had told her at their final meeting, just in case something were to malfunction. But she didn't need to worry about that—everything was fool proof, top of the line, zero maintenance. She'd shrugged and taken the keys.
One morning, she takes them out of her pocket and leaves them on the kitchen counter beside the coffee maker. They're still sitting there when she gets home from work, although there's an empty mug and a plate on the counter now. Mulder's office door is closed.
How is it that the distance to Antarctica or Africa was somehow shorter than the number of steps from the kitchen to his office?
She eats dinner by herself at the kitchen table—leftover salad and a grilled chicken breast along with a glass of white wine. As she showers and gets ready for bed, she wonders if Mulder will ask her about them: what they're for, why she left them there, if they're hers.
Once she's changed into her pajamas, she turns out the bedroom lights and opens the window. She stands there for a long while, listening to the quiet chorus of crickets and bullfrogs, watching the moon. She's going to miss this. The stillness. The comfort of the life she never could have dreamed she could walk away from.
Leaving the window open, she turns back the covers and gets into bed. She swaps her pillow with the one on Mulder's side, just as she does every night, and buries her face into the pillowcase. How can it still smell like him, like he's still here? Of course, he is here. But not in the way that matters. The tears roll down the side of her face, wicking into the soft fabric. She doesn't even make noise when she cries now. She feels like she could be one of the religious relics her very Catholic grandmother loved to tell them about when they were kids; her form turned to stone but inexplicably still unable to contain the grief that wells up within her. No heavenly miracle to see here. Simply despair.
She falls asleep, clutching his pillow, and wakes up alone.
The keys sit beside the coffee maker for another week, then two, before she packs up the first box of her clothes and puts it in the trunk of her car.
"You're leaving?"
He's looking at her, meeting her eyes, for what feels like the first time in months. He reminds her of when he'd first started staying over weekends at her place; his hair tousled and bed-worn, sleepy half-blinking eyes and a jawline rough with stubble. Her heart contracts almost painfully and she clenches her jaw as she nods. "You don't need me anymore, Mulder."
That, there, is the truth of it. The mouthful of nettles she's been chewing on for months, trying to come to a peace she hasn't been able to find. He's gone somewhere she can't reach, and she doesn't know what else to do.
It's killing her to watch him like this.
She's done what she could: helped, jostled cajoled. He's seeing a therapist. He's on medication. Yet she still feels like she's sitting by the embers of a dying campfire and she's cold and she can't sit in the dimming light any longer before her own essence is extinguished.
He scratches a hand through his hair, searching for words. "How can you say that, Scully? I don't understand."
"I don't understand, either. I wish I did." She swallows, trying to not to notice the little things: he's wearing the red plaid pajama bottoms that were always her favourite; he's holding one of the random mugs they'd bought at a flea market — only five dollars for the whole box — when they'd had a huge empty house with nothing to put in it. Now the house is full, and she's the one who's empty.
For all that she's good at planning, at looking at multiple outcomes and coming to a logical conclusion based on the facts and data in front of her, this isn't a situation that she thought would ever come. How could she walk away from Mulder? It wasn't even a possibility. Like two trees planted next to each other, their roots had become entwined to the point where separation was no longer even an option.
How was it that he was standing right in front of her and yet she felt worse than she had when they'd all thought he was dead? At least then she'd still felt that he'd loved her, she wasn't consumed with the doubts that now plagued her, leaving her full of holes, cracked and dry and broken, like a piece of termite-riddled wood.
She watches him stare down into the depths of his coffee cup, like it holds all the answers. She forces herself to not look away, to memorize how he looks right now. She's the one doing this, causing him this pain, and she knows she'll need this mental picture later. To keep herself from coming back. Hurting him once is enough. She can't do it again by trying to pretend everything is fine, no matter how much she wishes it was.
"I don't know what to say," he manages finally.
She shrugs. There's nothing to say. He could have fought for her — she's given him so many chances, but he missed them. Didn't even swing. Strike one. Strike two. She's not sure at what point she stopped counting, but it's been more than enough.
"Good-bye, Mulder." Her throat burns with unshed tears, but she hitches her purse strap up over her shoulder. She loaded up her last box of essentials this morning and put them in her car, so she doesn't even have anything to carry out with her. It's taken her weeks to empty her side of the closet, her drawers, taking odds and ends from the bathroom and all her shoes from the front entrance. He hadn't said a word. Hadn't seemed to notice. Strike three. Or fifty. Or two hundred. What did it even matter? "Take care of yourself."
How do you walk away from the love of your life, from the person who has become your life?
She doesn't know.
She turns and walks toward the door, the finality of each click of her heels on the floor echoing in her ears. Doorknob in hand, she pauses for a second — waits — but there is only silence at her back. She opens the door, steps out into the perfection of a beautiful summer morning, and then closes it behind her.
The first few weeks in her new place go by in a daze. She hasn't cried once, which seems odd, but she's too tired to care. She'd left everything in boxes when she'd first brought them over, but now she unpacks. She puts away her clothes in the cavernous closet; she puts her meager toiletries into the pristine bathroom cabinets. She makes a trip to the grocery store and buys laundry detergent and spices and cans of soup. She makes a trip to Target and buys measuring cups and pots and pans and hangers and towels. She doesn't browse, doesn't think about what would look nice, but goes for simple and functional.
She feels like a ghost, haunting a life that isn't hers, but she forces herself into a routine. She eats three meals a day. She goes to work. On Saturdays, she does laundry: sheets and towels and then clothes. She goes for a run a few times a week. On impulse, she buys an expensive vibrator online. Why not? She finds a new dry cleaner, a new hairdresser, a new dentist.
The weeks turn into months.
She'd thought Mulder might call, at the beginning, but he hasn't. Not even a hang up as far as she knows. She doesn't call him either. They have nothing left to say to each other, after all.
Once a month, she makes an effort to go out for drinks with the coworkers she likes at the hospital. She meets her mom for brunch and they talk about how big Bill's kids are getting and how her garden is coming along this year. Thankfully, after their first initial awkward conversation, her mother doesn't mention Mulder. Scully women are good at putting on a brave face.
She took one of his t-shirts with her, a thread-bare Knicks one, but she resists the urge to take it out and look at it, to smell it and see if his scent still clings to it. It's enough to know that it's there. She keeps it neatly folded on the top shelf of the closet beside the box of William's baby things. So much pain for one person, for one lifetime. So they stay in the closet and she mechanically goes on living.
Blinking in the bright sunlight, she sees him for the first time in forever. She's tried to steel herself for this moment, but all her good intentions and the scales from her eyes fall away. There's a lightness in him again, one she's forgotten, and it hurts — God, it hurts — to see him. She somehow manages to keep up the pretense of being calm and unphased, but inside it feels like she's breaking apart; a thousand different emotions coming at her in all directions; a flock of ravens descending and each tearing off a morsel of flesh.
He was better off without her.
Has he found someone else?
She was holding him back all along.
He seems more himself than ever, but better. Stronger.
That night, she takes the shirt out of the closet and clutches it against her cheek as she cries for what could have been.
Working together once more is more than strange, familiar but different, as they both struggle to find comfortable footing once more. She is guarded, careful, but it's harder than she'd thought it would be. It's like having the old Mulder back, but with some of the youthful arrogance polished away. He's still funny, still passionate and driven and stubborn, but he's thoughtful, too. He seeks her perspective and he listens — really listens — when she talks.
It would be so easy to fall in love with him again. Not that she ever stopped. But that's a dangerous slope to tread.
She can't.
She won't.
She forces herself to remember the pain of walking out of the house that had been theirs; of the emptiness in his eyes; the staccato heartbeat of her shoes across the floor. She can't put either of them through that again. Once was more than enough. She wraps her heart up in thorns.
She goes home alone at the end of each day, yet somehow, she feels better than she has in a long time. Seeing how well Mulder is doing now feels like a wound beginning to close and heal.
He's usually the first one in the office in the morning — some things never change, it seems — but there's always a cup of coffee, just the way he knows she likes it, waiting for her on her desk. She catches him watching her sometimes while she's working, but instead of the furtive glances and ducking of heads, he meets her eyes assuredly. It's unnerving, to feel the flushed pattering of butterfly wings inside her chest, even after all this time.
She wakes gasping, her pajamas stuck to her skin, and she's drenched with sweat. Nightmares are familiar company, but this one has hit harder than most. Her entire body is trembling as she pulls her knees into her chest and wraps her arms around them, curling into a tight ball.
She's kneeling before a headstone, and she knows, in the way of dreams, that it's Mulder's. There is a bouquet of spring flowers in her hands — daffodils and tulips and sweetly scented hyacinths — and she places them on the grave. The stone is damp and flecked with moss as she brushes away the dirt and debris that has gathered in the crevices with her fingers.
There's the sudden pressure of a hand on her shoulder, not alarming, and she turns to see Mulder standing behind her. He's old, his back stooped; his face wrinkled and worn. But his eyes, his eyes are the same.
"Why did we do it, Scully?" he asks at last. His voice is gravelled with age.
"Do what?"
He sits himself down gingerly beside her and takes her hand in his. "Waste all the years we could have had together."
She notices a small white worm wriggling on his pant leg, and it unsettles her.
"I came back to you. I thought that maybe you would come back to me." He gives a quiet sigh that reminds her of the way the wind sounded when it blew through the copse of trees behind their house. "I didn't know what else to do. So, I waited for you."
With a start of alarm, she realizes that his feet have disappeared beneath the earth, that he's slowly sinking into the ground, although he doesn't appear to be concerned.
"I waited for you, Scully," he says again sadly, "but it was too little, too late I suppose."
"Mulder!" She clutches at his arm, but he's sinking, still sinking, gradually being swallowed up as the earth collects around his legs, mounding over them as they vanish below the ground. A glinting beetle scuttles over his shoulder and she fights the urge to recoil. "Stand up! You need to move!"
He shakes his head. "I'm right where I'm supposed to be. Where you left me." He's submerged past his waist, then his chest.
"No!" She jumps to her feet, frantically pulling on his arm but his fingers slip through hers. There's no possible way for her to hold on. "You can't go! I won't let you!"
"Loneliness is a choice." Dirt is falling from his lips, his mouth full of dark brown earth that crumbles and falls as he speaks. "And you made it."
With that, he's gone, and she claws at the grave site until her hands are bleeding and she is left howling in anguish at the sky.
She keeps staring at him the next day, trying to reassure herself that he's still here, that he's whole and well and unburied.
He calls her out on it, but she shakes her head, not sure she's ready to give voice to her dream just yet, if at all.
Instead, she asks him questions about everything and nothing, at first just wanting to hear his voice, but then she listens — really listens. He's reaching out to her, but she's closed herself off to the possibility of a future between them. She made a choice when she left, but she's making another choice now, and she's no longer sure that it's the right one.
It's the best day she can remember having as they bicker good-naturedly back and forth in the elevator about who contributed more to their old solve rate but then they reach the parking lot and their two separate cars and they both stop. It feels like old times and new times and all the toppled over bits in between and she wishes she could pick up the pieces and set them upright.
"Well, I guess this is good night then, Scully." He gives her an easy grin, but she can read his reluctance as easily as ever.
"I guess so." She holds her ground, waiting to see what he'll do. It's such a silly and pointless dance, like any variety of elaborately plumed birds might do, and she wonders why they still feel compelled to do it.
So she changes it. Her choice. Just like the last time, she thinks. She chooses him, she keeps on choosing him, and the snake smugly devours its tail anew.
"Unless you want to go somewhere for dinner? Or drive me home?" It makes no sense — then he'd have to pick her up in the morning, too — but when has making sense ever mattered to them?
"Or both?" he offers, and she can see the hope in his eyes.
She smiles and feels the now familiar tightness in her chest loosen. "Why not?"
The next time she wakes from a nightmare, the knowledge that Mulder is only a closed door away is too much for what little resistance she has left.
"Will you hold me?" She's afraid he will say no, that she's already irreparably broken them, but he opens his arms to her without hesitation.
Of course he does.
There is no halfway with him — he gives her everything. She doesn't deserve this absolution that she so desperately wants and he offers it up likes it's nothing at all.
He pulls her in beside him, embraces her, surrounding her body with his own, and it's warm and familiar and she could almost weep with the rightness of it. He came back for her through his own darkness and she'll be damned if she's going to leave him waiting. She will not waste the time they've been given.
Turning in his arms, she meets his gaze, telling him, asking him. The answers are all there waiting for her.
She brings her mouth to his and, for the first time in years, she feels whole again.
Her place is a disaster. Broken glass. Smoke damage. The fireplace is completely blown out and the furniture destroyed.
She finds that she doesn't care. Not even a little.
Stepping carefully through the wreckage, she walks into the bedroom and retrieves only two things from the closet: a cardboard box and a folded t-shirt. The rest of it is all replaceable.
Mulder is waiting for her in the car, so she doesn't linger.
As they drive away, she imagines this place vanishing behind her, drifting away into smoke, into nothingness, into faded memories where her thoughts will never dwell.
Instead, she sends herself forward in time to when Mulder will carry her giggling across the threshold, welcoming her and the new life she carries back where they all belong.
They'll make love in their bed, the moon shining through the window as she undulates above him in the sweet dance they know so well.
Tomorrow morning, they will curl up on the porch swing together with steaming mugs of freshly brewed coffee and watch the sun rise over the meadows.
She reaches across the console to take his hand, bringing it up to her lips. She's made her choice and she's coming home.
As always, all the love and thanks to my beta, Josie Lange, for her infinite wisdom and support.
