Chapter Text
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CHAPTER SEVEN
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The answering scream does not break for breath.
And suddenly Mulder is there in the room with her, his silhouette against the window. Looking out between the boards.
"Mulder! What is that?!" She wants to cover her ears against it but refrains for the horror that's on her hands.
"It's Merwyn." He breathes in absolute shock.
The little boy is standing on the lawn near the well, his small face canted up at the house with his little mouth open, his toe-head hair shining in abominated light.
"Get him." Scully says, but Mulder's already headed out the door. He pounds down the stairs, launching himself entirely over the last landing and catching himself hard against the kitchen table. Nahum's body lurches at the sudden hit and his arm slides out from beneath the red checked tablecloth. His blunted fingertips gray.
Mulder bursts out of the house at full speed, he's down the steps and halfway out to the little boy before he stops himself in his tracks, realizing that a full-grown man running full-bore at anyone is enough to scare anybody. Let alone a child.
"Merwyn?"
The boy had not stopped screaming.
It's a high, shrill, terrible noise that has an undercurrent of something else entirely beneath it now that Mulder's right in front of it. It holds some sinister secondary sound that no prepubescent boy's vocal cords should be able to render. Deep and resonant. Evil in its intonation.
He drops to one knee against his better judgment and puts his gun away. Having to raise his voice to be heard. "Merwyn, I know you're scared. My name is Fox. I'm here to help you!"
The volume of the boy's scream only rises, hurting his ears.
In another part of his brain Mulder notices the crumbling of the grass. How it collapses in an unseemly way like fire-ravaged skeletons beneath his fingertips. He edges closer to the boy and the well, noting that the iridescent blight has rotted the yard from the inside out as it has rotted all the people that lived here.
Mulder winces as the pitch being blasted in his face grows even higher, his feet creeping him closer despite the actual pain now.
The boy's face is exactly the same as his father's, except in miniature form. His little visage one of death white save for his dark gray sockets.
Every lizard instinct in Mulder's brain and body tells him to get away, but he inches closer nonetheless. He has to try to save this boy.
"Merwyn. Give me your hand!" He can't help it, he ducks his head against his shoulder, anything to try and help against the onslaught of that noise.
"Merwyn!" He stretches out his fingers, slipping against the little hand that won't reach out to take his. "Give me your hand!"
And just as he gets a firm grip around those little fingers the boy stops screaming. It is a dead stop. An unnatural stop and the tiny hairs on Mulder's arms stand straight up against its emptiness.
He swears that he can see his own reflection looking back at himself in the boy's saucer-sized eyes and sees another figure come out behind him in the doorway.
It is Scully.
Mulder breathes a sigh of relief.
The figure hunches animalistic and low.
It is not Scully.
The figure rushes him. Clearing the steps. Feet rending the grass. One step. Two. Mulder does not even have a chance to turn before Nahum is upon them, snatching up the boy and taking Mulder right along with them with preternatural strength and speed.
Mulder cries out in surprise as his head smashes against the coppice, as he is drug over the edge into the well, racking his shins on the stones. The wellsweep with its dangling bucket clatters out of the way. All three of them headed straight for the liquid darkness. Headed for death.
And Mulder experiences a moment of freefall, before suddenly snagging on something hard and his right leg explodes with fire. His shoulder strains in its socket as he takes the full snap of the two other bodies being halted as well.
His head swims clamorously. He stomach giving a sickening flip.
Ten feet down inside the column of the well are two boards pinned across it at an angle, acting as a shelf. His foot is caught here, letting him dangle while the pendulum of extraneous weight tears at his arm.
He tries his damndest to not to let go. But his grip is slipping.
And then his eyes meet Nahum's.
Nahum is peering up at him, lit from beneath with his feet slopping in the kaleidoscopic water and that image chills Mulder to his very core.
The uncolored light glows up from beneath the black water from an unknown source. Irradiating them with such manifestation that Mulder can see straight through Nahum's body like an x-ray, straight through little Merwyn's skeleton like some black chain of connected bones, and can see right through his own hand where he holds onto them.
Merwyn's hand slips loose some more as Nahum begins to climb.
Clawing his way up his son.
Eyes hellbent on Mulder.
The undead man is speaking in that same Eldritch tongue he had spat with his teeth in Ammi's face. The bloody stretch of his lips pulled back again, revealing empty places. He speaks in a language not known to this world. In a tongue that's been borne out of darkness. And it only grows more diabolic as he rises.
Mulder's consciousness is waning. His vision pulses darkly with pain while his instincts flashback brightly like a flintlock against it. Demanding him to stay awake. To defend himself against the oncoming threat.
Nahum is at the top now. Closing in. Reaching up.
With a terrified gasp, the little boy's hand is pulled away and with a foul cry both father and boy go toppling into the cold, wet lighted darkness beneath.
He has no time to reconcile.
"Mulder!"
Scully is above him now, looking down the well.
"Scully!" He groans, trying to look past his toes at her. The merciless gravity of his blood is making his head feel tight.
"Nahum's body is missing Mulder. Where's Merwyn?" She can't see past his obstruction, doesn't know where to look.
"He's gone. They're both gone." He whimpers.
In a rallying effort he clenches his abdomen and tries to rise, grunting to bend himself up towards his feet, but he's unable to get very far and when he falls back down it wrenches a cry from his throat as he swings into the stony side. His entire body burns. "My leg's caught Scully. I can't get up."
With the addition of the two spoiled bodies to feed it, the light that had at first been merely glowing out of the well now pours out of the well. Flowing upwards like a stream. Strong enough to lift Scully's hair like a heatwave. Make it dance around her head like licking flames.
He doesn't like it at all. And can feel that it's going to get worse.
"Scully. Get me out of here!"
She prioritizes her options. "Grab the bucket!" And makes sure he has a hold before she races to the other end of the wellsweep, throwing knitted hands over the end of the beam as she tries with all her might to make the pendulum lift him, letting out a cry to boost her energy, trying in vain to climb on top of it.
But he's too heavy.
She doesn't have enough mass or strength to move him.
She leaps back to the rim when there's nothing else she can do, pressing her face into the flow of uncolored light to peer down at his upside-down body, her eyes watering against the stream which is still growing in its potency, blowing her hair back towards the sky now. Pressing against her cheeks like a strong wind.
Mulder's clothes are flapping up against him, volplaning up his body as he looks at her one last time. Endcapping all the memories he has of her face.
He already misses her terribly.
She can tell he's losing consciousness as his body begins to go lax. As his arms hang free.
No longer able to fight the fight.
"Mulder. Try to stay awake. I'm coming down there. I'm coming to get yo--" She begins to say, throwing one leg over the edge with the intent to jump down where she sees his foot pinned until all of a sudden she's thrown backwards by a great large WHUMPH as the heavy rush of the uncolor lets out a pulsating throb and makes towards the sky.
Scully lands sprawled on her back, staring up at boiling clouds that are eating the uncolor like gluttons. Like something foul sucking at the world, plumbing the depths of whatever thing it was that skulked at the bottom of the well and trying to coax it back into the heavens.
The wind it creates is so monstrous now that it pulls the bends out of the branches around her, until every shivering tree stands straight up. Candleabra limbs convulsing towards the sky.
Inconceivably, the blasted uncolor intensifies, burning her eyes like chemical fumes and he throws her arms up to protect them, only to realize that she can see straight through her skin to the sky beyond. Past the insides of herself where the opaque black bones of her elbows hitch together and she can't help but marvel at what she is witnessing.
A furious howl screams out from the depths before there is another loud discharge and the glut of light finds its tail as it rockets back towards the sky, lifting Mulder with it. It whips him helplessly about in the unnatural swirl, carrying him like an abductee in violent ascension until fifteen feet up, whatever astral pull has a hold on him tosses him free.
The earth regains him indifferently as he crashes boneless to the ground.
And he's able to hold onto his senses just long enough to watch the protracted light stab its way up through the clouds before it disappears forever. Before Scully eclipses his world.
Just like she does already.
"MULDER!"
There is the sudden galvanic feeling of an impending lightning strike in the air and Scully has just enough time to cage herself over the top of his head and wrap her arms around her own before the explosion occurs.
Absolutely awesome in its savagery.
The house behind them gives one single shriek as it is flattened to the dust. Shattering, buckling boards go flying sideways. Thick beams slamming to the ground.
Their ribcages are compressed together, the closest they have ever been is when the light leaves Earth behind.
Scully takes a wash of woodwork across her back and rear and thighs, her pained cry lost in the onslaught against the heavy groans of the surrounding trees as they too are pushed towards the ground but resist. Some of the smaller ones, not having grown strong enough, let out nightmarish screams as their trunks are flayed open under the pressure. Green wood split wide. Exposing their inner flesh like cadavers.
And just like that it is over.
The ensuing silence pierced only by the high-pitched whine of tinnitus.
Scully's pretty sure she has burst an eardrum as she tips an eye towards the sky and catches the slow-motion flutter of the red-checked tablecloth flicker down and land undamaged at her side.
Then her attention is only for Mulder.
He's gasping with his mouth wide open and his head tipped back, trying like hell to take in more than the shallow breaths that refuse to make it in past his teeth. His throat is moving spastically while he kicks one leg feebly against the ground. Starving for air.
The thick gray dust beneath his heel does not deign to stir.
"Mulder! Mulder." She takes his head between her hands, trying to find his eyes, impulsively shoving away any of the splintered boards that had dared to fall too close to his precious head. "Look at me."
Finally, his goggling eyes find hers and hold. His flailing hands knocking into her chest and belly until he can take up fistfuls of her shirt and lock his fingers in. Mouth still gaping.
Tears cut tracks through the grime.
"Breathe in Mulder. You have a diaphragmatic spasm, but it's only temporary. I need you to take a deep breath in." The fall knocked the air out of him, she knows, and the medical terminology of the damn thing helps her to focus. Once she gets him breathing again it'll be better. "Don't fight it. I know it hurts but you have to do it for me. Breathe. In."
She wipes at his dirty face with her dirty thumbs, only managing to smear more of the thick gray dust across his sweaty features. Painting his cheekbones and forehead in black. "You can do it."
And soon he does, every breath a hair deeper than the last, catching on hiccups, until he's finally able to take in a whole lungful.
And he uses it to yell.
"Ack! God! Scully!" He attempts to go into the fetal position, wanting to curl up on his side, but Scully flattens her whole body down on him, not allowing him to move.
"No Mulder! Don't!" With the height that he had fallen from, he could have sustained any number of injuries. "I need to check you over. Try not to move."
Mulder whimpers when she disappears, his view replaced by a blank white sky that arcs traitorously above him, now devoid of even the clouds and the stark emptiness makes his eyes water.
Or maybe it's the pain.
"Scully?" He doesn't like that he can't see her.
"It's okay Mulder. I'm right here." She says, even though her voice sounds very far away. She's down around his belly, palpating his torso. He still hasn't let go of her shirt. "I need you to tell me what hurts."
"Everything hURTS!" His groan ratchets up into a snarl when she presses firmly on his chest, finding a broken rib or two beneath her necessary fingers. "Son of a bitch..." he pants through the pain. Thumping his head on the ground.
"What else? Be specific."
It honestly feels like someone has dipped his entire skeleton in acid or lit it like long sticks of kindling, pretty sure that as they speak it's wicking itself away inside of him, burning up and turning to dust, but he tries his best to pinpoint the worst of it. For Scully, he is capable of anything.
"My leg...god Scully it hurts." He grits out and the throbbing worsens when he names it.
Scully doesn't respond.
And continues not to respond.
For so long, in fact, that Mulder begins to worry. Apparently she knows why. "What? What is it?"
She does not answer.
"Scully? Wha-" He goes to pick his head up, to see what she can see, but his neck feels very stiff and it won't bend right and the glance he manages to catch of her face tells him that she sees something terrible. He moans in fear. "How bad is it? Did it fall off?" He squeezes his eyes shut.
Just about.
Must've happened in the well.
Scully breathes out around the shock of seeing it; the unnatural lay of his right foot.
It's bad.
She rallies herself for Mulder. "You need to keep taking deep breaths for me Mulder, as deep as you can. Ten count in and let it go." She tucks her hair back out of her face, massaging his wrists with her thumbs to try and get him to let go. She wants to give him something to focus on, but she also needs to be able to move. "Good. Do it again." Watching his chest.
Once unfettered, she's down by his foot and whipping his laces clear out of his boot, peeling the tongue back as wide as she can before finally hesitating, trapped at the point where she needs to jimmy his foot free.
"Scully...?"
She has to make sure nothing important is pinched inside the wreckage of his broken leg.
"Mulder. I need you to listen to me. I need to take your boot off okay? It's going to hurt for a minute. But I need to get to your foot."
Mulder is beginning to feel nauseous as his mind unhelpfully relays all the different sorts of reasons Scully might be keeping the specifics of his injury to herself and why she's so worried about his foot when it's his leg that's hurting while his foot just feels angrily numb. But maybe it's a good thing. It might be worse if he knew.
"You're going to have to bear with me. Okay Mulder? Get ready...I'm going to count to three. Take a deep breath in and hold it."
It's in testament to her iron-clad focus, that it's not until the boot is off and his scream has subsided that her hands begin to shake.
"You did great Mulder." She soothes while checking the pulse in his foot, relieved to find it fast and strong through his sock. With her other hand she's gathering boards, sorting through whatever is near that's long enough and flat on the ends. "Stay with me. You're doing good." She's shredding the tablecloth into strips.
The one they had draped across Nahum all those long years ago.
"Help's coming." But when would it get here?
She ties the strips around the boards and splints up his leg with a medical precision that hurts as much as it helps and Mulder puts an arm over his face in an effort to distance himself from the pain while agony thunders through him. Panting like a werewolf.
Scully takes pity on him, stroking his hair, and tries to figure out what to do next. How to get help. She has no way of moving him.
Then she hears it.
The faint seeping underwater sound of sirens as they grow louder and louder, wombling in through the ringing in her ears and an incomprehensible weight lifts off her shoulders as she sees the paramedics and the Arkham Police pour forth from their luminous vehicles.
Alta has accomplished her task.
They are no longer alone.
"OVER HERE! I have an officer down!" She waves her arms above her head despite the hot pain coursing through her back. Determined to make herself seen.
Soon the paramedics are upon them, replete with a silver litter with which to bundle Mulder away.
A clutch of officers, momentarily shocked at the sight of the trees, goes about surveying the ruins that was once Nahum's house. Picking carefully through the devastation. Where nothing but the well and a chimney now stand against a dark soft landscape of sticks.
"He's sustained a moderate long fall. Tib fib fracture. Difficulty breathing and broken ribs. He's an FBI Agent. " She relays what she knows, giving them his height and weight, his heart rate and blood type as they flick a penlight over Mulder's eyes and she has to reassure them about his strange uneven eye dilation.
Scully stays crouched beside him, keeping out of the way. Two fingers pressed dutifully against his radial pulse as the paramedics check over her splint with approval. Another of them laying out the long straps of lashing, getting ready to take him away.
"Don't worry sir, we're going to get you out of here." Someone says, but Mulder's not paying them any attention. He has something else on his mind, knowing his time here is limited.
"Scully?"
He tries to find her in the crowd of looming faces, but it's hard to stay buoyed through the flotsam of pain, made all the harder when they cant his head back and lock his throat into a neck brace.
"Scully." He tries again.
"I'm right here Mulder." She's suddenly there, leaning over him and her hair is no longer molten gold. The uncolor has left and taken everything. His world is back to a wash of yellow.
Back to how it should be.
"Don't worry. I'm going to come with you in the ambulance."
"No." He thinks he can feel her hand on his shoulder. Squeezing.
Blood seeps from a cut on her cheekbone and she moons down at him with a look of surprise.
"No? Why not?"
"You have to stay-"
"What?" He's probably mumbling.
"The well."
There's too much going on above him and everybody moving around and barking information is making him dizzy. He feels like hell.
Three. Two. One.
Those diligent, faceless hands keep his head and shoulders straight as they roll him onto his side just far enough to slide the backboard underneath him. Someone is supporting his leg and it's just enough to keep him from passing out as he's lowered into the metal basket. Though it does nothing against the new spring of sweat.
"Make them drain it Scully. We need to know-!" He grits out.
"Mulder?"
He catches her hand in a last-ditch effort before they can get to it, clamping onto her wrist and squeezing as hard as he can. Which isn't much. "Scully. Please." He's begging her.
He grimaces, grinding his teeth.
"Mr. Mulder sir." The paramedic is interrupting them, gently but firmly coaxing him to release his grip. "Sir. You need to put your arm down. We'd like to give you something for the pain."
Helping them out, Scully pries Mulder's fingers free and presses them back down beside him so they can strap him down like a monster but he wants to make sure she's heard him. But then he's being pierced with a needle on a bag and the subsequent burn of the painkillers that flood his system takes off the top of his skull and soon there's nothing there anymore to keep his brain from floating away.
His vision becomes narrow and blurry. His body going slack.
"What hospital are you taking him to?" She asks as soon as she sees him settle.
"St. Mary's." Comes the reply.
"Mulder. I'll meet you there, okay?" She says. Putting a hand on his heart.
"Sc'lllay...?" He slurs out from under the oxygen mask. Eyes slipping closed.
"It's going to be okay."
She had heard his request. She won't let him down.
"It's okay. I'll stay."
She touches his dirty face one last time before he is taken away.
--
Alta finds her sometime later, slipping in through all the mess, having been brought on the back of Hero with Ammi to the outskirts of ground zero.
Scully's standing at the edge of the well with a paramedic's blanket around her shoulders and a local numbing her stitches. She stands in a bit of a daze, watching bucket after bucket being lifted from murky depths and splashed upon the ground.
Police officers mill around them, some of them stopping to watch.
"Oh my stars and garters! Ms. Scully!" Alta swoops down upon her, wrapping her up in a claustrophobic hug that's infinitely worth the pain it causes in her shoulders and back. All the wounds she can't see.
"Every time I lay eyes on you young lady," she sputters into Scully's ear, "you look like you been pulled through a knothole backwards."
"I'm alright." Scully smiles, comforted. "It's just a few scrapes."
"And Mr. Mulder? Where is he?" Alta's hands are fluttering around helplessly until they finally come together in front of her face, clearly wanting to touch Scully but not willing to touch the butterfly bandages and all the glittering knicks and cuts. She clearly has the desperate motherly urge to soothe them away.
"He's on his way to the hospital, but he'll be alright." She says firmly and believes it now that this is over.
Another splash from the bucket hits the ground and the fetid smell is beginning to ripen the air.
Ammi approaches with a face like a withered peach, nodding wordlessly at Scully as he puts a hand around Alta's shoulder, clearly overwhelmed by the state of Nahum's house.
Very different from when he had last seen it.
Emptying the well takes surprisingly little time as the water is phenomenally low. Its contents growing thicker and more fetid the deeper they draw until those gathered around can do nothing but hold their noses against the stench.
Then a bucket rises filled with thick dark sludge and the white bulge of a human skull.
A shout about the discovery goes around and suddenly the crowd grows bigger and presses in closer as more bones and more scum are brought up.
There is a scattering of smaller animal bones, as well as five larger skeletons. There's a small deer and a large dog, and when Scully manages to piece together the three humans that have been dredged up from the depths, she's relatively sure that they are Nahum, Thaddeus, and Merwyn.
Alta lets out a wail at Scully's predictions and becomes enfolded in her husband's embrace, tucking herself like a frightened bird beneath his trembling beard.
Scully is momentarily absorbed by the state of the skeletons, especially with how little Merwyn's body, only having been down in the well for a short period of time, had already been completely skeletonized.
"I want a sample of this sent back to Quantico for analysis." She informs the officer who is maneuvering a dollop of sludge into a baggie marked 'EVIDENCE'. "And get a sample of this dust as well." They nod and take them away.
Another officer is sent down into the well to stand on the pump boards. He's given a long pole and the help of every available flashlight, only to come up with strange news. "It's like there's no bottom!" He calls up to the circle of faces. "It's the damndest thing." He keeps sinking the wooden shaft in as deeply as it will go and never meets any solid obstruction.
Scully circles to meet him as he's being pulled up again, giving him enough room but needing answers. "Was there anything else unusual about it?" She asks. "Did anything down there appear different to you?"
"Different how?" The officer answers, slightly confused as he hands off the pole. Ultimately, he shakes his head. "No. It was just dark. Looked like what any well bottom looks like I suppose."
"There was nothing unusual about the colors down there?"
"Colors?" The officer's face is now thoroughly confused. "Was I supposed to see something?"
"No." Scully recedes, understanding with guilt. "No. Thank you."
In essence, there was nothing left. The uncolor was completely gone.
Once again, there would be no message for Mulder from the stars.
--
The Pierces come visit on the day they plan to discharge Mulder into Scully's care, bringing with them a vase of home-picked flowers and Alta's great-great-grandmother's apple cheddar galette wrapped up ready-to-bake with instructions for them to take home.
"It'll remind you of us. Of better times."
Mulder manages to stay awake for the longest stint he has so far as they say their final farewells.
"We're gonna be forever in yer debt." Ammi says with a shaky voice, hat in his hands, clutched to his chest. And Scully finds it quite moving that a man who has clearly not cried since the day of his birth is now willing to have tears in his eyes.
With one final tight squeeze from them both, the Pierces are gone.
---
EPILOGUE
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"I don't believe this!"
Scully's in her bathroom shaking out the next dose of Mulder's pain pills when she hears his upheaval.
"They're flooding it Scully!" He explains when she walks in.
She'd made a quick trip to his apartment earlier that day while he had been taking a nap, staying just long enough to get him his daily paper, a set of clean clothes, change the water in his fish tank, and collect his mail. Noticing immediately that he'd received a letter from Ammi.
"They're going to turn Nahum's property into a reservoir! They're burying the evidence. After we were so close! Damnit!" He covers his face with one hand in his impotency, papers facedown against his chest. His left arm remains essentially useless, needing to be used to keep the extra pillow tucked against his broken ribs.
In any other circumstance, the image of him reclining there would have him looking like a spoiled courtesan, if it weren't for the fact that in the middle of every pillow she owned that was currently propping him up and holding him together, he lay essentially broken.
Sighing, but not surprised, she extends the glass of water from the bedside table and gently taps his shoulder. Knowing something like this would be inevitable.
They had only just gotten back home.
"Here. It's already been four hours." She wheedles.
They'd spent the last week and a half trapped in Massachusetts, with Mulder having to have had surgery to pin his leg back together and then having to remain until the hospital felt confident enough that he could be released into her care, let alone to go over state lines.
During his recovery, after learning that he would be in a hard cast and crutches for the next month or so, they had reached an agreement that he would stay at her place when they first got back to D.C., seeing as how she had the larger and more negotiable floor plan.
She had only half dreaded the car ride it was going to take to get them there, but the idea of being home again was enough to eclipse her worry and with him drugged up and sleeping for most of the way they had made surprisingly good time.
Scully involuntarily hisses as she sits down beside him and her noise momentarily snaps him out of his wallowing. His hand coming down.
"What's wrong?"
"Nothing Mulder. I'm fine." She says, watching him swallow his pills.
He hands the empty glass back. "Can I see?"
He's been periodically asking and she's becoming more convinced over time that the hangdog expression he's been assuming when he asks has been carefully crafted into a weapon, which she really only pretends to mind.
After all, it's giving him something to do.
Moving slowly, she turns around and lets Mulder lift the bottom of her shirt, feeling the weight of his heavy gaze at the same time she watches it in the bureau mirror.
He's wincing at the aftermath like he does every time and it feels oddly soothing when his large, warm starfish hand takes its place just beneath her bra strap, filling up her entire back with his fingers splayed. Emanating heat like a balm. Like he can heal her with his touch.
It had been a miracle that she'd only needed fourteen stitches for one cut that had sliced deep across her shoulder blade. The rest of her purple tiger stripes were left to mend under cold-compresses, extra-strength Tylenol, and time. Which by now were beginning to turn green.
"How's it look?" She asks, pleased when his hand stays right where it is, even when her shirt slips back down. She finds his eyes in the mirror. Pinning them like butterflies.
"Like it hurts." He replies with remorse.
She glances at his cast propped up on a stack of pillows. 'HERE LIE THE BROKEN BONES OF MULDER' it reads in black felt tip. "You're one to talk." She says.
He had asked for her 'handcock' a couple of days ago in part jest, but it had made her think of Hitchcock, and in the end they had both decided that it fit there perfectly.
Scully stares at his long white toes jutting out of long white plaster and tries to reconcile. Feeling his thumb move.
Though she'd taken the brunt of the house exploding; it seemed insignificant compared to what he had suffered. Especially when she knew for a fact that Mulder would now have the ability to predict rainstorms for decades to come. A barometer forever forged in broken bones.
"It's not so bad." He shrugs and sighs and lays his head back on the pillows, flinching as he settles, looking up at her ceiling. "My doctor keeps me doped up pretty well. I can hardly feel it most of the time." He gives a little smirk to show he's serious.
"Do you need me to get you anything before I start dinner?" She asks, half hoping he'll ask for her to move the television in here to distract him. But she's not so lucky.
"No." He lets his hand slide off her as she rises, not really ready to stop touching her, but the disconnection changes the course of his mind. "Yes. Phone book."
She gets it and comes back, this time facing him with one leg pulled up and silently besotted at the way he attempts to move over to give her more room on the bed. As if he could. Resulting in the inevitable grunt that comes when he tries to move his torso.
"Who are you going to call?" She asks, biting her lip against flapping pages. Their turning only growing more fitful as he can't seem to decide on which letter to choose to begin his search. His lips pursing in irritation.
"Whoever I can to try and get that reservoir canceled. You wouldn't happen to have any eco-terrorists handy on your speed-dial would you Scully? Make it easy for me?" Little trips of individual pages flash by before big pulpy chunks of yellow start flopping back and forth in futility.
His vexation banking in low.
"Mulder."
There's a resignation steeped deeply in the way she says his name and her hand coming down in the middle of the book stops him short. Her hand on his hand.
He looks up at her, already knowing what she's going to say. "Well, what are we supposed to do Scully? Let it happen again? Let them bury the evidence like they always do? We get so close and then get left with nothing. No proof."
She tightens her hold. "Proof of what Mulder? There's nothing out there anymore. Whatever that thing was in the meteorite, it went back up into the sky and took everything with it. I watched it happen. Don't you remember?"
He did and didn't at the same time. Mostly he remembered staring down the eye of a long dark well into the milky blackness that wanted to take him too, then the boy's hand slipping out of his fingers, his small strange face disappearing under the water, followed by the rushing light that had lifted him into the air and finally lying flat on his back with Scully over the top of him like some terrific angel from Ezekiel. The halo of her hair whipping around her face in a raucous copper flurry.
"What do you mean there's nothing there?" He asks just this side of petulant. "There's soil samples that can still be taken. Sludge samples. Water samples. Someone can test the vegetation that's still around the perimeter...surely YOU as a scientist can-"
But Scully's shaking her head, not wanting him to get himself worked up.
"The well's been sealed Mulder, it was declared a falling hazard. And as for the samples, they faxed over the test results today while you were sleeping. The sludge is a mixture of algae, diatoms, and organic debris."
"And the dust?" He asks hopefully.
But it's met with a sort of sadness in her eyes. "Besides its unusual weight that nobody can currently explain, it was found to be inert. Whatever organism had been inhabiting the area is gone now Mulder. All it left in its wake was alkaline phosphates and carbonates. Essentially potash."
"So that's it Scully. We're just giving up?" He's full-on pouting now. Though he knows that ultimately she's right, as much as he doesn't want her to be. "It's like we didn't even do anything. Like we went there for nothing." He squeezes his temples, covering his eyes again, trying to head off the impending headache he can feel coming on.
Their hands, as ever, remain entirely empty of the Truth they so tirelessly pursue.
"We're not giving up."
He hears her say it, but he's too busy feeling lousy and he avoids looking at her as she stands with a wince and feigns that he can't see her when she leans over him. His plans of detachment are foiled, however, when she sinks a hand into his hair, which just makes him feel more wretched. A useless, pitiable fool.
"We're simply ... able to pursue other lines of inquiry now. We'll keep looking Mulder." She tries. "The truth IS out there."
"We're giving up." He mumbles moodily, clenching his jaw, raging at her ceiling fan. Looking almost like he wants to cry.
Everything they'd experienced would be gone soon. Another truth subsumed.
Another tale to their names that no one would believe.
And she understands his turmoil.
He is a man in constant battle against a universe that won't give up her secrets. His tooth and nail campaign against a reality that tips forever between what is and what if and she knows from her own limited experience that this one-man fight is exhausting.
There has to be another way.
She looks at him now, stretched out and wrecked across the neat folds of her bedding. Looking at a man whose whole existence is the better part of a catastrophe.
And she feels it.
The way the crush of love has planted itself deep within her guts. How the limbs of it are currently squeezing her heart so tightly that it makes her gather up all the vestiges she has of she-never-ever-does-this-and-this-never-ever-happens-to-her impulsivity and she kisses him straight on the mouth.
Surprising them both.
Mulder splutters underneath her with his hand spasming wide and she, like the professional she is - like the partner she's been for years now - rides out his upheaval until it passes.
In the resulting standoff, neither of them move. Even though their noses bump together. Even though their eyes are too close to actually see. The hot slip of each other's breath against each other's lips is enough to keep them melted together.
Mulder is absolutely, positively dumbstruck and Scully only freezes on a cold day, so it's only when his hand comes back to land feather-soft upon the back of her head in acceptance and his grooved lips open up beneath her own in hesitant invitation that she has the presence of mind to finally move and kiss him more deeply.
Their kisses are so gentle here in this first baby step they take together and the tender touch of alien lips that they are already so familiar with are filling them both up with understanding.
How silly they were to assume that they didn't love each other to pieces.
He can't help it when he moans a little and only dares to break away once his evaporated lungs toe the line this side of bursting and it feels so damn right to consecrate her name like that. Like he can't believe it against all her evidence. Like some clueless unbeliever.
Mulder's breath is so hot against her chin and she can taste her own name in her mouth and it's all so full of love and it's all so full of him and it's all so, so, so, so divine and right and good and just in the world that she wants as much as he is willing to give her. Which she knows is everything.
"Scully?" Mulder whispers against those lips that have been vexing him from that very first day, that he's absolutely over the moon to call his own now, "have I told you lately how much I like your scientific method?"
Scully huffs and giggles and smiles around the purl of his words. Kissing him again.
"Convince me again then skeptic." She whispers back.
And Mulder and Scully and Scully and Mulder slide headlong into the rest of their lives.
--
THE END.
...or is it?
*soft X-Files theme*