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"Hey, Scully."
"Yes?"
"I love you."
"Oh, brother."
She'd rolled her eyes at him; it was her automatic response to Mulder whenever he said something crazy. And given that two minutes previously he'd been talking about meeting her on the Queen Anne in 1939, she'd assumed, in the split-second before she replied to his statement, that it was just more of the same.
But later that night, as she was falling asleep, her mind drifted back to that moment in the hospital room. She remembered the intensity with which he'd looked at her, the long pause (as if he were trying to get up the nerve to speak?), and finally, the words. Spoken plainly, a bit hesitantly, but with the utmost conviction.
And in that dream-state between sleep and waking, she allowed herself to wonder what if... What if it hadn't been the drugs after all? What if he hadn't been delirious or confused, but had been making a serious confession?
Did he actually love her?
Her mind flinched away from answering that question, but it was quickly followed by an even more frightening one: Did she want him to?
The instant that question presented itself to her mind, her eyes flew open and she sat up in bed, her half-waking state shattered. She stared into the darkness, her heart pounding, her entire body tingling with a single, monumental realization.
I am in love with Mulder.
She had never allowed herself to think those words, or even come close to thinking them, before this moment. But now they were staring her in the face, and she knew, beyond any doubt, that they were true.
And she felt as though she had hurled herself off the edge of some precipice and was plummeting through the air, with no idea whether there would be something at the bottom to break her fall. She could not face the implications of that revelation. She simply could not.
So she pushed it away into a dark recess of her mind, the place where she stored things that she couldn't bear to face. Then she lay down and tried to go back to sleep.
But she lay awake staring at the darkness for a long time before her eyes closed.