Work Text:
He isn’t sure how long they stay there, at the base of the stairs. He doesn’t know how many tears have soaked from her eyes into his coat, only that it is a number exponentially higher than she deserves. He loses count of how many times he whispers “it’s okay” into her ear. He knows it’ll never be enough to make up for everything he’s put her through, but still he holds her like she’s the most precious thing in the universe. He kisses her hair only once and then restrains himself, knowing who she’s just escaped from and what that level of physical affection might do to her, even though he would kiss her again in a heartbeat.
He loses track of how long he keeps his arms around her, but he would hold her forever if it would make her feel safe.
Maybe it does provide some small sliver of comfort against the river of suffering that the world seems to be pouring on her, because Scully doesn’t let go of him the whole way to the airport. Even if it’s only a small touch, her arm draped over his as he drives, she keeps herself attached to him, almost as if she’s making sure he’s really there. She says nothing, and though there are a hundred things he wants to ask her, a hundred different ways to ask if she’s alright even though he knows she can’t possibly be, he keeps his questions in the back of his mind for tonight. The Truth can wait. For now, Scully just needs to get home.
She keeps her arm linked in his as they walk through the airport, and her shoulder nestled between his collarbone and his neck as they sit at the gate. It’s more physically intimate than she’s ever been with him, and he doesn’t allow himself any thoughts of what this means for them or their partnership. If his body is her sanctuary, he’ll gladly give it to her a thousand times over.
On their flight, he lets her slide into the window seat, despite his recurring motion sickness that can only be helped by staring at the blue expanse outside. He places his body in the middle, allowing himself to become a barrier between Scully and the rest of the world. She falls asleep on his shoulder almost immediately after takeoff. It’s the most peaceful he’s seen her look since…
Since before Duane Barry , he realizes.
He should have picked up on all of this sooner. Sure, Scully had been back. On the surface, she had seemed like herself. She was certainly just as capable as she’d ever been, and she’d saved his ass countless times since her return. But Mulder hadn’t been blind to the small shivers that went through her body when she thought no one was watching, or how her eyes leapt to the dark corners of every room she entered, just for a split second, to make sure no one was lurking there, waiting to take her. He certainly hadn’t been blind to the way this case had shaken her up, but he had chalked it up to the horrific nature of what they were dealing with. Now he sees that her pain runs so much deeper than that. I should have done more, he thinks. I should have noticed more. I should have never left her side.
Scully would chastise him for these thoughts, he knows. I’m a federal agent, Mulder , he can hear her saying. I can take care of myself. And while he knows that this is true, it doesn’t stop part of him from wanting to wrap her up and shelter her away from the world, to take her somewhere where no one can ever hurt her again.
He is the one who always chases the Truth, running off into the night time and time again. For reasons he can’t understand, Scully continues to follow him, and she’s brought him back from the brink of self-destruction on more than one occasion. But even though he is always the one running into darkness, the darkness always seems to find her instead. And the unfairness of it all makes him want to scream at the sky until his vocal cords cease to function.
“I’m so sorry, Scully,” he whispers into her sleeping ear, knowing she can’t hear him. “This is all my fault.”
The teenager sitting across the aisle gives him a withering glare, the kind of glare only a sixteen-year-old girl wearing a tube top and low-rise jeans can produce. He ignores her.
He’s jolted out of his musings when Scully begins to stir next to him. The tranquility that’s been painted across her face since she fell asleep has vanished, replaced with furrowed brows and a small frown. He knows her well enough to decipher that her expression signifies worry. In a flash, she begins whimpering and thrashing against her seat belt. Quickly, Mulder reaches across her and unbuckles the belt, but turbulence strikes and he falls into her lap.
She wakes with a start and begins slashing her arms around in an attempt to shield herself from whatever had been plaguing her dreams. Quickly, he wraps his hands around her wrists and gently pulls her arms down so she can see his face.
“Scully, it’s okay. It’s me.”
She raises an eyebrow as she floats slowly back to reality. “What are you doing in my lap?”
“Uh…” he blushes as he sits back up. He debates trying to come up with some witty quip, but decides that this isn’t the time for it. “I was trying to unbuckle your seatbelt for you, but the plane sort of decided to hit some rough air at the worst possible time.”
Her mouth curls into a small smile. It’s the first smile he’s seen from her all night. “Those damned planes,” she deadpans. He laughs. It’s forced and they both know it, but neither bothers to acknowledge it.
She sighs as she slumps against the window, still looking like she’s been hit by a truck. Close enough , Mulder realizes.
“I was having a nightmare, wasn’t I?” she murmurs, almost in a whisper. Mulder debates lying to her to try and give her some peace, but he eventually nods.
“Was it about him?”
She curls up against the window instead of answering, scrunching up her knees between the two of them. It’s the furthest she’s been from him since they got on the plane. There’s a hint of a blush on her face. “It doesn’t matter. I’m sorry you had to wake me like that.” She faces away from him, and Mulder doesn’t have time to say that she has nothing to apologize for, will never have anything to apologize for, before she falls asleep again.
She doesn’t say anything else. Not when they land, not while they walk back through the airport, and not when she falls asleep again in the passenger seat of his car. As they traipse from gate to baggage claim to exit, each step feeling endless, he laces his fingers through hers in an attempt to convey that nothing she could do would ever be too much or not enough. She doesn’t respond, and he doesn’t know if she’s grasped his meaning, but her hand stays there nonetheless.
He has to struggle to keep his eyes on the road as he drives her home. He keeps glancing over at her to check if she’s really there, if he’s really found her in time.
I’ve already been too late once.
He’d never let her out of his sight again if he had his way, but he knows she would resent the idea if she could hear his thoughts. Scully resents being treated as fragile, just as he resents not being told the Truth.
He parks his car in front of her apartment building, unsure of what to do next. Given how shaken she’s been, he doesn’t want to deprive her of the serenity she finds while asleep. It seems as though it’s the only peace she can hold onto. But it doesn’t seem right to keep her in his car, or to keep her anywhere other than her own home. I’d want to be home , he thinks, if I had been in her shoes.
He’s never been in her shoes. Danger only comes for him when he seeks it out himself, and it only manages to defeat him in fleeting moments. He’s never been taken, ripped from the comfort of normality and dragged into the ominous unknown. But it’s happened to her twice . The fact makes him want to rip the world apart.
He can’t keep her in the darkness with him. But he can’t rip her from normality either.
So he carries her into her apartment.
She’s light, even lighter than he expected, and it’s only as he brings her up the stairs that he realizes she’s been eating much less since she showed up back at the hospital in November.
How had he not noticed before?
He lays her down on her bed, more delicately than he would if she were worth a million dollars and made of the thinnest glass on Earth, grateful that her slumber has remained so deep. He hated the shame on her face when he was forced to wake her on the plane, and even though all he wants to do is wake her right this instant and tell her over and over again that she never has to be ashamed of anything, not with him, until she finally understands, he knows doing so prematurely would hurt her more than any nightmare could. So he lets her sleep, placing a feather-light kiss on her forehead before he leaves the room.
He can’t bring himself to close her front door behind him. Not when there seem to be so many monsters knocking on her windows, chasing her through the night. Not when the image of her at the base of the stairs, trembling in his arms, is so fresh in his mind. Even though he’s brought her down this path, right now he feels as though he is the only thing standing between her and all the horrors of the world.
He can’t leave her. Not now.
So he falls asleep on her couch.
She runs through the unfamiliar hallways for hours. Each time she turns, she knows she should find a door, a window, a way out, but each time she ends up back under the chandelier, or in the bathroom, or crashing down the stairs. His voice carries across the maze as the walls close in on her with every turn.
“There’s no way out, girly girl.”
She turns another corner and finds herself face to face with a corpse. Its hands are still covered in dried blood, its fingernails scattered across the floor like a twisted version of Mulder’s sunflower seed shells. Its hair is scattered everywhere but on its head, and as a gust of wind rips through the house, a tuft lands directly on Scully’s nose.
Slowly, she looks up and fails to suppress a scream.
Her own face, pale and blue and bloodied, stares back at her.
From behind her, hands reach out and yank her back into the darkness, her screams echoing through the house long after she’s been carried off.
Scully jolts upright, gasping for air. She can still taste cloth in her mouth and feel rough ropes on her wrists. For one horrifying second, she doesn’t realize where she is, and she throws the covers off, ready to run away from the winding hallways and the soft threats and that goddamn chandelier.
Then she recognizes the familiar feel of her own bed and takes in the features of her apartment, letting out a small sigh as she sinks back down. She’s safe. She remembers that now, though many details of the latter half of the night are still blurry in her mind.
Mulder must have brought her home.
Oh God, Mulder.
It all comes rushing back at once. Her shaking like a little girl as he lifted her up and crying…fucking sobbing into his arms. She hasn’t cried like that in years, certainly not in a professional setting. Her face flushes. She hates being vulnerable, hates not being able to protect herself or to rely on her own abilities. It’s somehow a thousand times worse knowing that Mulder has seen her in such a state. How fragile she must seem to him now. God , she’s worked so hard her whole life to avoid being perceived as breakable, and it’s been an uphill battle every step of the way, because people always assume she’s easily breakable from the moment she steps into any room. She’d thought she was finally getting somewhere with Mulder, that he saw her for what she could do and not what she couldn’t , but last night had probably ruined any chances of that. Now he probably just thought of her as another person he had to protect. God knows he was certainly drawn to anyone with whom he could play the hero. She’d seen it time and time again.
She’ll be just another pet project for him after last night. She’s sure of it.
And she has no one to blame but herself. You should have kept it together, Dana. You’re a trained FBI agent, for fuck’s sake!
Fat load of good her training had done her. She’d sat in that closet like some damsel in distress from a 1950s superhero movie, and there was a good chance she’d still be there now-only significantly less alive -if Mulder hadn’t found her. How mortifying. This was not supposed to happen to professionals. She was supposed to know how to get out of situations like this.
Some agent you are.
She sighs, dragging herself away from the fleeting comfort of familiar sheets. Exhaustion still plagues her and sunlight is only barely starting to seep through her curtains, but she doesn’t want to return to sleep. She knows he will be waiting for her when she does.
A shiver goes down her spine as she begins to leave her bedroom as she realizes she’s still in those clothes. There’s a bit of her blood staining the collar, and she can feel the dried sweat on the back of her shirt, sticking to her back. Her body creaks with each step, and she winces, pain flaring through bruises and pulled muscles as she walks. That would be the result of being run off the road and falling down the stairs. Maybe a shower will help. At least then she could get the touch of his hands off of her. Though , she thinks, I could probably shower a hundred times and still not feel clean enough.
She freezes as she walks through the door and catches sight of a sleeping figure on her couch. Every worst case scenario immediately runs through her mind. They’ve come back for me. They’ve been waiting here all along. God, I can’t lose even more time. I’m already missing so much.
She doesn’t even realize she’s stopped breathing until she gets a closer look and her lungs begin to function again. Of course , she thinks. It’s just Mulder.
Now that was about as unprofessional a response as you could summon. Nice work, Dana.
Her face flushes as she considers the implications of Mulder bringing her home and sleeping on her couch. It was…touching. It was the most someone outside of her family had done for her in a very long time. The depth of Mulder’s care isn’t lost on her. There’s a part of her heart that nearly sings at the thought of it, beneath all of the shame and mortification weighing her down.
Stop blushing, Dana. You look like a tomato.
She doesn’t want him acting like her knight in shining armor, placing himself between her and all the dangers of the world. She doesn’t need that, and never has. Though he’s convinced he’s dragged her down his path of darkness, she’s followed him willingly. She knows…always has known…the risks. They’re partners , for crying out loud. She can’t become another thing for him to take care of. She needs their partnership to remain as it has been- equal -or she won’t be able to cope with her guilt. As his partner, she’s supposed to alleviate some of Mulder’s burden, not make it worse.
Well, considering your track record lately, that ‘equal’ status isn’t holding up so well.
She’s never wanted so desperately to feel like she is living up to her title, and she doesn’t quite know why this is bothering her so much, but the thought of needing Mulder more than he needs her…
It was unfair to him, and it was a disgrace to her skills as an agent.
Dana Scully has never been anything other than skilled. She refuses to let that change.
She can’t stay here anymore. She doesn’t want to face Mulder when he wakes up, doesn’t want to see him look at her in this new light, with eyes full of pity and infantilization. She knows he still cares for her, that was never in question, but she feels undeserving of his…of anyone’s partnership if she’s to turn into this person who needs to be saved, comforted, protected all the time.
Foregoing a shower ( ugh ), she throws on a fresh suit and grabs her keys before she remembers that her car is still probably totaled on the side of a Minnesota backroad. She’ll take a bus to the office and deal with the hell from her insurance company later. As quietly as possible, she creeps out of the apartment and shuts the door behind her.
Work feels comforting, somehow. At least there’s somewhere she can still be of use.
He’s off the couch mere moments after waking up, all but sprinting to her bedroom to make sure she’s still safe. Jesus, Mulder, calm down. Nothing’s going to happen to her in one night in her apartment. He wishes he could make himself believe it. It’s so easy for him to believe almost everything else.
She isn’t there, and he thinks his chest might explode right at that very moment.
Keep it together. You don’t know anything’s wrong yet.
He checks her answering machine, praying he won’t hear anything ominous or unnerving. Fortunately, there are no messages. That was good. He hopes.
On a whim, he dials Assistant Director Skinner’s number, thankful for his eidetic memory. He’s more prone to barging into Skinner’s office than using the phone, and he doubts he’d remember the number otherwise.
“Agent Scully?”
Well, so much for his memory. In his haste, Mulder had almost forgotten that he was using her landline.
“Actually, sir, it’s me.”
“Agent Mulder? What are you doing in Agent Scully’s apartment?” Mulder can hear the suspicious undertones in the assistant director’s voice, but he ignores them. Let him assume what he assumed, so long as he didn’t split the two of them up again. Still, he has to come up with a believable reason for being in Scully’s apartment. He really hadn’t thought that far ahead when he picked up the phone.
“I…uh…was looking for her.” Sort of true. “Do you know where she is?”
The sound of papers shuffling carries through the phone. “As a matter of fact, I do,” replies Skinner. “Looks like she checked into work at 5:45 this morning.” What could she have been doing so early? “Actually, I’m surprised you aren’t with her, Agent Mulder.”
It’s only then that Mulder checks his watch. 8am. Wow. He was never this late to work, but he supposes he wanted to let Scully sleep. He’d assumed she’d wake him.
Mumbling a halfhearted apology, he makes his way out of the apartment and to his car, which is still parked out front. He wonders what could have caused Scully to leave the apartment so early, especially without saying goodbye. She would know how worried I’d be , he thinks…hopes, especially after what just happened.
He’s usually the one doing the ditching in their partnership. Now he understands what it’s like to be on the other side of it. No wonder she hates it when I do that.
His mind can’t tear itself from her as he drives the DC roads. He probably runs at least 5 different stop signs over the course of the commute. He doesn’t care.
I thought she understood that she doesn’t have to run away from me when she’s hurting. I thought I got through to her last night. Doesn’t she know I’ll never look down on her or judge her, no matter how much she’s been hurt? She could make so many mistakes, walk into trap after trap because of her own lack of foresight, and I’d still think she’s the most brilliant person I’ve ever met.
But maybe she doesn't know any of this. It’s not as though Mulder is always the most straightforward. Most of his deepest confessions to Scully come in moments when he knows she can’t hear him. The closer she gets to him, the more danger he always seems to put her in, and it is for this reason alone that he tries to keep some metric of distance between them. But any distance that causes her pain is more distance than Mulder can bear.
He can tell she’s hurting, and he wants to fix it, but Scully has always been the healer between the two of them. Getting her out of that house had been easy, if harrowing. Now he’s not quite sure what to do.
He thinks he knocks several coffees out of people’s hands as he hurries down to the basement office. He doesn’t care. They can get more coffee, but there’s only one Scully. She’s there, sitting at the desk and shuffling through files like it’s just a normal workday. It’s only because he knows her so well that he can spot the increased effort she puts into her movements, the way she flinches almost imperceptibly at the slightest sound, and how she’s biting hard on her lower lip-a giveaway whenever she’s anxious.
She glances up at him, without even a slight smile. Her gaze isn’t cruel either-it’s entirely neutral. It reminds him of the way she looks at fellow doctors when she’s doing her autopsies. To him, her neutral gaze is foreign. “Good morning, Mulder. You certainly slept in.”
Had she really not noticed that he’d been sleeping on her couch?
“Well,” he clears his throat as he slides into his chair. He wants to pull his chair up right next to hers, but restrains himself. “I was waiting for you.”
“Oh,” she says, and he doesn’t miss the faint blush that crosses her face for a fleeting moment, “that was unnecessary.”
He wants to respond with something clever, but he can’t find the words. “I just…I wanted to make sure you were alright,” he finishes awkwardly.
A small smile dances across Scully’s lips for a split second before it’s replaced with the same neutral stare. “Look, Mulder. I wanted to apologize for the way I acted last night. It was unprofessional.”
Mulder laughs to cover up the way his heart hurts at the idea that she thinks he’d care about something as shallow as professionalism. “Scully, if we’re not past the idea of unprofessional now, then…”
“I behaved in a manner unbecoming of a field agent,” she cuts him off, “and of a reliable partner. I am apologizing to you, and promising that it won’t happen again. Now will you please accept my apology so we can move on?”
He doesn’t want to accept an apology he doesn’t deserve…not when he was the reason she’d been thrown into danger so many times in the first place. But he’ll say anything if it can give her some peace.
“Of course.”
It’s almost too easy to avoid him for the rest of the day. Mulder is so afraid of hurting her again, of pushing her too hard, that he doesn’t intrude when she asks for space, doesn’t say anything as she stacks the files high enough on her desk as to block him from her sight, as she adds autopsy after autopsy to the day’s schedule. It’s much more than she should be doing given how exhausted she is, but it’s easier to lose herself in the familiar rhythms of the computer keyboard, in the repetitive motions and clean cuts of a standard autopsy, than to let herself sit alone with her thoughts. In her thoughts, there is nothing waiting for her but guilt and shame, and in her memories, nothing remains but him .
Mulder tries to find her several times, not even to converse, just to share space, to exist safely together for a few hours, but she dodges him. It’s easy enough to slip from lab to lab, keeping herself confined to cold clinical hallways, hidden between stacks of trite paperwork where she knows he won’t follow her. She doesn’t think she could take his pitying, concern-filled puppy-eyed gazes right now.
She stays at the office far later than she has in days, and it’s after midnight when she finally runs out of tasks to give herself. Though her car was returned to her sometime during the day, she debates staying at the office. She doesn’t want to return to her apartment, bear witness to the rooms where Mulder has seen her at her most vulnerable, fragile, unprepared. She doesn’t want to return to sleep no matter where she is, for she knows he will find her in any dream, and all roads will lead back to that house and those hallways and the hair on the floor and the whispers in the walls.
She realizes she’s stopped breathing again.
Focusing solely on her breath (or rather, unable to let any other thoughts into her mind), she takes her car keys and begins to drive. She has no destination in mind, but she wants to run away. Away from Mulder’s pity and his protective arms and his knowledge of who she is at her worst. Away from the monotony of work that can only keep the whispers and the nightmares at bay for so long. Away from that house and away from him .
She drives on rural Virginia roads, somewhere between DC and Quantico. They’re the roads she knows best, but it’s easy to get lost in the night, and she finds herself driving blind into the darkness, her speed changing erratically as her eyes drift open and shut.
Don’t fall asleep, Dana. You’re safe as long as you can stay awake.
Logically, she knows she should pull over. How many Driver’s Ed courses mentioned drowsy driving as a severe risk, after all? Staying awake for 18 hours is equivalent to a blood alcohol level of 0.05% , her brain informs her. She’s been awake for far longer now.
But the memory of his car ramming into hers, of flying off the road, of drifting slowly into oblivion only to wake up with her wrists tied, mouth full of cloth, trapped in the deepest corners of that miserable house, is fresh in her mind. I can’t leave the road. If I stay on the road, I’ll be safe. He can’t get me as long as I stay on the road. The false reassurances loop endlessly in her thoughts. They’re almost enough to keep her demons at bay.
She closes her eyes for a split second and nearly crashes into a tree before starting and swerving drastically, nearly running into a fence on the opposite side of the road before she straightens the car out again. It was a good thing these roads were so empty late at night. No one to follow her, to see her in such a state. Her eyes begin to drift shut again.
No one to hear her scream.
She’s lying on the side of the road, paralyzed and barely conscious. From somewhere far away, she feels hands wrapping around her, lifting her up. Something in her knows how wrong this is, but her body is too dazed to react. She opens her mouth to let out a shriek, but something is stuffed inside before she can. It tastes old and bitter, tinted with the metallic flavor of blood (not her own, she realizes with a chill).
“Don’t bother screaming, girly girl,” comes a voice from far above. “No one can hear you out here.”
Scully’s eyes burst open just in time to see a tree speeding towards her. Glass shatters and she goes flying.
Mulder can’t sleep. Every time he tries to drift into peaceful oblivion, he sees her, battered and shaking in Pfaster’s house or lying motionless in a hospital bed. He wants to leap out of bed, run to her apartment, pull her close and make sure no one can ever make her cry like that ever again. Not now, Mulder , he chastises himself. She asked for space. You’re not even working a case right now. She can survive without you for one night.
She can survive without him for longer, he knows. Hell, she’d probably have a better shot at surviving if she left him and the x-files behind altogether. He still struggles to understand why she stays, but she does, and every time she ends up on death’s door because of it, it breaks his heart a little more.
Unable to restrain himself any longer, he leaps out of bed, races to the phone, and dials her number. He remembers every phone number he’s ever read, but hers is the only one that his hand is able to type in automatically, phone ringing before he’s even fully aware of what he’s doing.
It doesn’t matter, anyway. She doesn’t answer, and he has to actively stop the worry racing through his veins from consuming him altogether. It’s 2:30am. She’s probably just asleep.
But she isn’t asleep when he goes to her apartment, and she isn’t hiding out in the office, burying herself in work as she so often does.
His heart is fully racing now, and he tries to think like Scully and rationalize the situation before he jumps to the worst conclusions. She could be staying with family. She could be at the library. She could be getting coffee.
Think, Mulder. Where would you go if you were Scully?
He drives aimlessly around town as he tries to get inside his logical partner’s head. It’s surprisingly difficult given how long they’ve been working closely. Scully has always kept her cards close to her chest, and while he trusts her with his life and more out in the field, he’s not sure how she reacts when pushed to her limits like this.
He realizes that the only times…to his knowledge…where she’s been in crisis have been times when he’s been taken somewhere. The air base in Idaho. The Erlenmeyer Flask. Both of those times, he’d not only not been there to witness what Scully was like in an emergency, he hadn’t even been conscious .
Some partner you are.
Maybe she’s going to request another partner , he thinks dimly. He can’t blame her. Who would want to stick with him after everything Scully had been through? But no. No one requested a new partner at 3am.
Could she have gone to do another autopsy? She’d run through every corpse waiting at the labs in headquarters that day (he’d checked the records and was sure of it), but there was essentially an endless supply for educational purposes waiting at Quantico. It was a long shot, but he knows that Scully finds comfort in the reliable, repetitive nature of autopsies. He, not being the biggest fan of blood and corpses and human organs, had never understood it, but if he knew anything about his partner, it was that she would most likely turn to science when she was at her most vulnerable. Science… unlike him …has yet to fail her.
He gets in the car and begins driving the rural roads of Virginia.
She thinks she’s probably in shock, because she knows her body is bruised and bleeding yet again, and she should feel pain but all she feels is numbness as she unbuckles her seatbelt and drags herself out of the car. She has enough presence of mind to take a few steps and wiggle her arms, to confirm that she still has the use of all of her limbs. No broken bones. No paralysis. She rattles off her name and birthday to herself, forces her eyes to follow a shooting star far above. No concussion. Good.
She glances back at her car. The bumper has caved in and the front window is shattered. She’s lucky her injuries weren’t worse.
She isn’t aware of her body sinking, but she finds herself on the ground, curled up in a ball in some desperate bid for self-protection. She doesn’t feel lucky. She feels breakable. Scared. Childish. She hates it, but the fear is endless, tormenting her, plaguing her. She wants to close her eyes, drift into sleep, do anything to escape from this nightmare and feel safe again, but he waits for her every time her eyelids so much as flutter shut.
No one can hear you out here.
Don’t be afraid.
Is your hair normal or dry?
I know this house, girly girl. There’s nowhere to hide.
She can’t close her eyes, so she puts her hands over her ears in a vain attempt to block out his voice. She stares up at the sky, because at least the sky will stay still. And she cries.
He drives for over an hour, racing far over the speed limit, when he spots the familiar car wreckage off to the side of the road. He would say his heart stopped right at that moment, and it is only because he’s able to keep driving that he knows it’s still beating . It’s her car, all right. Her insurance would have a field day with this. He would laugh at his silly thoughts if he wasn’t filled to the brim with worry.
He sees her sitting outside the wreckage and can’t stop himself from exhaling a massive sigh of relief. It feels as though he’s been holding his breath ever since he called her and she didn’t pick up. Really, he’s been holding his breath since those moments on the top of Skyland Mountain months ago.
He knows in that moment that there’s nothing in the universe that scares him more than the idea of losing her again.
He makes his way over, trying to walk as quietly as possible to avoid startling her. Leaves crunch under his feet and she stirs. Stealth has never been his strong suit, after all.
“Scully, it’s me.”
She doesn’t respond. He’s not sure if it’s a good thing or a bad thing. At least she hasn’t tried to run away again. Up close, he can see that she’s shaking. It’s not warm out here, and she doesn’t have a coat. Suddenly thankful for all the times he’s slept in his car over the years, he grabs a blanket out of the trunk and drapes it over her shoulders, sliding down to meet her on the Earth.
She’s been crying. Her face is nothing but a mess of tear tracks, her eyes wide and glassy, staring up at the stars. She says nothing, but when he gently pulls her head onto his shoulder, she doesn’t resist. Instead, she closes her eyes and stares at the ground, refusing to meet his eyes. He only knows she’s still crying because he spots her tears landing on the leafy ground beneath them.
“You don’t have to run away, Scully,” he whispers. “There’s nothing you have to hide from me. Don’t you know that?”
For the first time that night, she looks up to meet his eyes.
She hates this. Hates that Mulder has found her in this state yet again. Hates that she’s let herself get like this. Hates that he has the power to transform her into this glass doll shell of herself, broken and sobbing on the ground. Most of all, she hates that, despite her shame, despite how much she wants to apologize to Mulder for her lack of professionalism, she finds herself leaning into his shoulder all the same. Right now, it’s the only place that feels safe. Her only sanctuary.
She’s too exhausted to keep running away from him, not when it seems that the only place she can truly rest is in his arms.
She leans into his shoulder a little more.
“I’m sorry, Mulder. For all of this. I know how much you hate seeing me like this, and I shouldn’t have let myself get so worked up. It wasn’t proper behavior, and I know that, but I promise I’m working on controlling…”
Softly, gently, he places his finger over her lips to cut her off. “Scully, I could never hate seeing you, no matter what state you’re in.”
She bites her lip. The tears are coming back and she knows it, but she tries to hold them in. “Maybe I hate that you’re seeing me like this.”
He nods, running his fingers through her hair. It’s soft and comforting, and she’s taken aback by how much she relishes the feeling. “Scully, there’s nothing you could do that would make me think less of you. You know that, right?”
Her self-hatred bubbles over. “Maybe I think less of me, Mulder. Maybe I think I shouldn’t have let him get the better of me. Maybe I think I should have been a better agent. Maybe I’m scared of turning into some sort of victim, of not being able to rely on myself the way I used to.”
“You can rely on me.”
“But that’s the problem!” She’s crying now. “Mulder, I don’t want to be just another someone for you to protect! We’re partners. And if I allow myself to turn into… this , well…I don’t want to fail you. You deserve better than that.”
His hand slides down her arm and he laces his fingers into hers. “You could never fail me, Scully. Not in a million years.”
She turns to meet his eyes. He’s crying too, she realizes. “What if I’m failing myself?” she whispers. “I used to be able to trust myself. I’m not sure if I can anymore, and…” she breathes in, hard, “it scares me, Mulder.”
“He ran you off the road, Scully,” he replies. “There was nothing you could have done. It doesn’t say anything about you.”
She laughs bitterly. “Easy for you to say. I feel like you’re always running after me these days. Saving me. Some partnership this is.”
“But you save me every day.”
She blinks, unable to produce a response.
“When you were…gone, after Duane Barry, Scully…I didn’t recognize myself. I can’t remember the last time I’ve been so reckless, so lonely, so…Scully, the number of times I thought about ending everything…”
“Mulder.”
“Scully, you keep me grounded. You keep me sane. You keep me going. I need you.”
She sighs, fully allowing herself to sink into his arms. She’s not supposed to need anyone . That idea scares her the most.
But Mulder isn’t just anyone. And if what he says is true…maybe she could let herself need him too, even if only for a night.
She looks up at him. “Can we stay out here? Just for tonight?” She doesn’t want reality to chase her again just yet. As long as it’s just the two of them, maybe the rest of the world will fall away.
He smiles. “For you, I’d stay anywhere.”