Chapter Text
The first time Scully slept over was after Modell.
She wouldn’t let him be alone—not after he was caught in a suffocating straightjacket of panic in traffic, idling at a green light, oblivious to the blaring horns behind them. Blood rushed so powerfully through Mulder that he couldn’t hear anything else. He was numb. Cold on the outside, sweating on the inside.
There was no road, no dependable sedans or green street signs: there was only the indelible, ruthless image of Scully’s face, her wet eyes widening in fear, the pressure of the trigger beneath his index finger, the rough panel of the pistol’s grip against his palm. The sure knowledge that she was about to die, that he was about to make her, that he could only follow her down into death if Modell let him.
“Mulder.” She sounded worried, then frightened: “Mulder, are you okay?” She laid her hand on his arm, and he jolted; his hands on the steering wheel were white-knuckled and damp-slick.
“Yeah. Yeah, I’m okay,” he said, even though he wasn’t, never would be again. He lifted his foot from the brake and pressed it to the gas and drove forward just as the light turned yellow, and he hardly saw any of it.
When they reached Hegal Place, she didn’t bother asking again. She got out of the car, followed him in, stood with him in the elevator. Watched him from across the intimate space, leaning against the opposite wall. He focused on the lapels of her suit jacket and tried to decide if it was green or beige or brown. In the hallway, she was at his back, her small warmth the only thing he could feel that wasn’t terror or deep, sucking guilt. It was a juxtaposition, a role reversal—he always let her enter doorways first, guided her in with a palm at her lower back. But he was doing everything backwards today, getting it all wrong in every possible way.
They hung their coats by the door; he slung his jacket over a chairback. She didn’t tsk at his mess of a kitchen, only rinsed out a pair of glasses while he went and sat on the couch to grip his head, dig the heels of his hands into his eyes. Allow himself to find distraction and relief in the vivid pain and the fireworks that bloomed behind his eyelids.
The freezer door opened; there was a tinkle of ice cubes, a quiet splash, and then another. A beat, and then he raised his head when she came into the room, watched her cross it—her quick, even steps; her correct, confident posture. She’d unbuttoned her suit jacket; the fitted shirt beneath was the color of milk chocolate. The kevlar was long gone; her abdomen was whole. She was whole. Despite him.
“I don’t want any,” he said, staring dumbly at the glass she extended to him, unsure what it was.
She didn’t accept that, only gestured with the glass and said, “Doctor’s orders.” He took it—it was whiskey—but didn’t drink.
She sat beside him on the couch. Not close enough to bump knees, but close enough to take his hand if she felt she needed to. Like she had done in Modell’s hospital room, wrapping her fingers in his.
He wanted her to; he wanted it with a raw need that he was afraid was spilling out of him, bright and wet as fresh paint. He wanted to bury his head in her lap, let her card her fingers through his hair like he knew she would, stain the leg of her reasonable, pleated pants with his hot, unworthy tears. He wanted to inter himself in her abdomen, close her up around him, live in the soft-scented walls of her ribs until the only thing he could hear anymore was the rush of blood and her steady, thudding, living heart.
Most of all, he wanted her to go, because he knew now what a danger he could pose to her.
—her face sickly white and fever-flush at the same time; his gun arcing like a baseball across the room, trained on her; his finger too heavy on the trigger; her eyes shiny and round and horrified; a look of ‘of course’ spreading repulsively across her beautiful, ghostly face—
“Stop it,” she snapped.
He looked sideways at her, guiltily. “Stop what.”
“Stop thinking about it, Mulder.” She took a sip from her own glass and looked pointedly at his. He raised it and let the liquid seep into his mouth, burn his tongue, light a path down his throat, spread through his belly with the wrong kind of heat.
“I can’t.” A whisper. “I pointed my gun at you.”
“I know.”
“I had my finger on the trigger; I started to—”
“I know.” She did take his hand, then, and held it on the couch between them. She wasn’t looking at him; she watched her own thumb roll across his knuckles.
“Scully,” he said, his voice broken, his chest tight, his temples heavy and drumming with a blooming headache and unshed tears. “I would have shot you, you would—”
“No,” she said, quietly. “You wouldn’t.”
He shook his head helplessly. She didn’t know; she didn’t understand: how close he had come, how incapable he had been of stopping himself. How the muscles in his arms, his neck, his hands had cramped with the tension of resistance but, in the end, how powerless he had been to do anything else.
The trigger had moved beneath his finger.
“I didn’t have any control,” he said. His voice broke.
The tears slipped out, trailed salty down his cheek. Just like Samantha, just like with Duane Barry, just like Dad. Just like every time he’d been the reason someone he loved was hurt. Weak. Incapable. Useless.
“You did, though,” she said softly, and scooted closer until her hip bumped his. She wrapped her arm around his lower back, her little hand landing on his waist. How could someone so small have so much strength to spare? “I saw it, Mulder. You must have felt it.”
He’d felt the cold metal against his palm. He’d felt Modell squirming around in the furrows he’d carved into his brain. Had felt Modell’s presence in his thoughts like a tidal wave: blocking all light, all reason, all sense of himself, and refusing to retreat back into the sea.
“Felt what?” He swiped tears from his cheek with the back of his hand.
She was looking at him now, her midwinter eyes hanging on his jaw. “You resisted him. He told you to do it—to shoot me—and you didn’t. You told me to run; you told him you were going to kill him—he didn’t tell you to say that. You didn’t pull the trigger, because you chose not to. Because you were stronger than him.”
He shook his head again. She didn’t understand, couldn’t understand—her faith in him was unfounded, and he was unworthy of it, but nonetheless it was resilient and steadfast, solid and heavy, and it moved in, tucking itself between his ribs.
He’d always been undeserving, not just of her loyalty, but of everything she was, everything she gave him. Only, she didn’t know it.
She tugged at his waist, guided him into her.
He leaned into the space between her throat and her shoulder, and stopped fighting the tears. He hung on her like she was a life raft—which, of course, she was—and somehow, her petite frame was sufficient to hold him up, to let him cling. She turned toward him and held him; she shouldn’t have been strong enough for this, but she was. She sat, solid and real, whole and alive, and let him weep.
Her hand rubbed his back with long, gentle strokes, like she was petting a dog, and he didn’t even have enough dignity left to feel embarrassed. Not about that; there was no room for such pedestrian shame.
I almost killed her. She almost died at my hands. And she’s the one comforting me.
The remorse poured out of him with the tears; his sobs were strangling, hot in his throat and his eyes, on his face, on her neck. She absorbed them like lotion, like guilt, and her warm hands on his back rubbed something like redemption into his muscles. He shook and clenched his hands and cried, and she sat with unwavering fortitude, with bottomless empathy, and murmured words he couldn’t hear.
When the trembling subsided, he let his head fall against the back of the couch, still facing her. He drew his knees up; she curled herself into a mirrored posture, her toes brushing his, two layers of thin socks between. When had he taken off his shoes? His eyes closed; abruptly, he was so exhausted he wasn’t sure he could have stood up.
“Hey.” Her voice was low. “Come here.” He felt her shift, and opened his eyes. She had dropped her feet to the floor and was patting her lap—like she was urging a frightened animal to come closer, to seek comfort.
He shouldn’t. But he did: tilted, settled, and laid his cheek on her thigh.
Her fingers tilled his hair like a field: long, straight rows. Her nails scratched him lightly, above his ear and then around to the back of his skull. A shiver licked down his spine. He sighed heavily. “Scully,” he couldn’t help saying, “that feels really good.”
She paused infinitesimally, then resumed her ministrations. “Good,” she said.
Mulder brought one hand to rest on her knee, rubbing a thumb along the inside of it. Her tender strokes generated a need in him to return them in some way—to give, for once, instead of always taking.
Her fingertips caught his bangs between them and tugged lightly, pulling the hair back across his scalp, and he was shocked to feel arousal nudging him. He shifted a little, to hide his lap from her, but said nothing.
“How are you feeling?” she asked after a while.
I want you. “Better.”
She made a low sound of approval.
“Scully,” he began, “I’m s—”
“Shhh.” She drifted her hand from the side of his head to cover his mouth with her cool palm. He kissed it, and sighed.
Instead of returning to stroking his hair, she slipped her thumb across his cheek, cupped the side of his jaw in her hand. He realized most of the tension had dissolved, that he was feeling relaxed. Empty, chafed raw on the inside, but calm.
He turned his body so he was laying on his back, his neck on her leg, looking up at her. Watched her tongue dart out to moisten her lips. Watched her swallow.
God, she was beautiful. The long, winter-white column of her throat, the swooping curve of her jaw, those full, late-summer lips. The limitless intelligence in her spring solstice eyes—freshly flowering, perennially filled with hope for new, better things. And that autumnal hair.
“What?” she asked. He realized he was staring, making her self-conscious.
“Just looking at you.” He took up the hand that still lay against his cheek and brought it to his mouth, kissed her knuckles. She remained still except for her eyes, which tightened with an emotion she chose not to voice.
Slowly, she leaned forward, hiding him in the curtain of her hair, and pressed a kiss to his forehead.
He smiled. (He could smile.) Lifted a hand. Caught her cheek.
She stared into his eyes for a moment, and then he watched it happen: she gathered herself back into herself, slid slowly out from under him, and stood.
Without her warmth, her scent, he felt suddenly lonely, but she didn’t go far. She turned and lifted his head with one hand like he was a child or a hospice patient, and slipped a throw pillow underneath.
He sighed when her soft, cool fingers returned to brush his hair from his forehead. “Go to sleep, Mulder. You’ll feel better in the morning.”
Don’t, he thought, don’t take care of me. But he didn’t stop her. He watched her.
It took her a minute of searching before she unearthed a blanket, one that smelled like sweat and dust and had lurid stains on it that she politely ignored. She covered him, and he treaded water in the sea of exhaustion long enough to grab her wrist. “Scully,” he murmured.
“I’m right here,” she said. “I’m not going anywhere, Mulder.”
No, he wanted to say, get as far away as you can. But his heart was no longer in the idea, and her hands were back, stroking hair out of his face; she sat next to him on the couch, in the space beside his hip, her weight anchoring him, settling his heart. He felt himself drift.
When he woke hours later, sweating under the blanket, eyes scratchy and swollen and hot, he felt a moment of bone-deep panic, certain that she’d left. That he was alone.
Then he saw her—she was on the floor between the couch and the coffee table, curled into a nautilus, centering her heat in the middle of herself.
A fresh wave of shame. She was sweet and holy, heroic and divine, and she was sleeping on his dirty floor without a blanket.
Mulder got up slowly, stepped around her. Bent, curled his arms around her sleeping body and lifted her. Set her in the divot he had left on the couch and covered her with the blanket.
She didn’t wake; she only burrowed into his leftover warmth and sighed.
He sat on the floor beside the couch, took up her hand, and watched her. It could have been minutes or hours; he lost himself in the sight of her the way he could lose himself at the theater, or the symphony. Time slowing, then stopping, then waiting. Her eyes were unlined in sleep, soft and easy. Her breaths were deep and even. It was comforting—that evidence of life. Her body, so much smaller than his, undamaged and at rest.
He watched her until his eyes closed, saw her unburdened face in his mind as he leaned his head onto his outstretched arm. He fell back asleep that way, leaning against the leather cushions, his hand in hers.
⧫⧫