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—
Mulder grabs the edge of his desk and shakes it with fervid frustration. The violent jerks he gives it sends pencils and files tumbling to the floor. Oh God, it hurts. Nothing but pain and sorrow surge through his veins as the finality of his mother’s death sets in.
She was sick? No, she was suffering. Just like during his childhood, he realizes with a start, she had suffered in silence then too. So she ended it all on her terms. He couldn’t begrudge her that, he supposes. He’d considered a bullet to the brain once or twice himself. But Scully insists she's really gone and done it, she had killed herself. She had died alone.
Scully’s gentle touch pulls him back and brings him to his knees. “Mulder…”
“She was trying to tell me something. She was…” His voice wavers, tears leak from his lash line.
“She was trying to tell you to stop.” Scully squats down to him, rubbing his back, pulling him into her arms. “To stop looking for your sister. She was just trying to take away your pain.”
But the pain is what keeps him going, keeps him searching for the truth. Mulder turns toward her then, holding her tightly around her waist. When he feels her soft lips kissing his neck, he breaks.
“I’m not crazy, Scully,” he insists as she rocks him in her lap, his face pillowed against her belly. “She wanted to talk this time. Finally, she had a reason to open up about Samantha. It’s like she knew I could understand now.” His breath hitches, his throat clogs. “I’m not crazy. I’m not.”
“Oh Mulder, I know you’re not crazy.” Scully rubs gentle circles across his shoulders and cups the back of his bowed head. “You’re not. You never have been.”
He hears a click of the machine again. This time it’s Scully who replays his mother’s last words: Fox, it’s your mother. I’d hoped you would call upon your return but I haven’t heard from you. I’m sure you’re busy. There are… so many emotions in me I wouldn’t know where to start. So much that I’ve left unsaid, for reasons I hope one day you’ll understand…”
Mulder gasps. His head pops up, his puffy eyes locking onto Scully’s wide ones.
“Mulder, what is it?”
“I’ve heard that before.” He chews his bottom lip raw, trying to think. Trying to pinpoint one singular childhood moment that sparked his memory. “My father… he’d said that same thing when I was a kid.”
Lost in thought, his eyes go sandpaper dry as he stares at the death grip his hand has on Scully’s hip. She rocks back on her heels to stand, her hands grasping his as she leads him over to the couch like a lost little boy.
“Tell me?” she asks, so he does.
—
2790 VINE STREET
CHILMARK
MARTHA’S VINEYARD, MA.
“He’s home, Mom.”
She stiffens. “Go.”
So he runs, hard and fast. His heart bangs against his ribs like a hammer as he hops over his backpack laying in the entryway of his bedroom.
He pulls the door closed behind him and rattles the mini basketball hoop attached to it. His chin drops to his heaving chest, waiting. One hand twists at his back, five fingers gripping the door knob as hard as they can. His night light illuminates the shag carpet beneath his feet - his long toes dig deep into its golden fibers. If he closes his eyes, he can pretend he’s on the beach with Sam again, burying his bare feet into the sand, just like he used to do.
Just like every time the lights go out.
The front door slams shut, shaking the entire Vineyard house to its frame. And instantly he knows, there will be no pretending tonight.
Muffled voices laced with hatred fill the vast chasm his missing sister has left behind. Until one voice, slurred and thick, wears down and dominates the other. Until nothing but the sound of blood rushing through the boy’s ears fills the stony silence.
His eyes widen and dart around the space-themed room only a teen obsessed with the unknown can appreciate. His bed is rumpled, Star Trek comics flung across the blanket. He turns his head, pressing his ear to the cold wood.
Thump. Thump. Bang!
He flinches, reluctantly flicking off his moon-shaped night light. It might get broken again. And he can’t sleep when the lights go out.
“Fox!”
That one word yelled that one specific way sends him flying. Pushing off the door, he stumbles over his gym shoes while dropping flat to the floor, fumbling to fit his gangly limbs under his bed.
“ Fox, dammit!”
He hates this. He loves his father, but he hates this side of him. The angry, drunken side that blames him for breathing when Samantha may no longer be. The thing is, he blames himself, too.
Heavy footsteps bound up the stairs and thud along the hardwood hallway. He shivers against the iron bed frame, knocking his biology book off the edge and onto the floor in front of him. He reaches out and pulls it close, runs his finger across his teacher’s last name written in permanent ink down its binding.
Ms. Singer is his eighth grade science teacher, and she is his favorite. She’s nice, funny, and never looks at him with an air of annoyance that he’s used to. Today, Ms. Singer had talked about how the physiological reaction to fear can affect the human body. How one moment, one split second can define future outcomes.
“Fight or Flight, Fox?” she had asked. And he hesitated, panicking. A reaction he has come to know well. Classmates had snickered and slung paper wads his way until his jaw clenched so tight it ached. Until he tossed a fist full of sharpened pencils at their heads and was sent to the principal’s office.
It is one lesson fourteen-year-old Fox Mulder will never forget.
“You better answer me, boy!”
“Bill!” his mother calls. He can hear hints of bravery in her tone echoing up the stairwell. “Leave him be!”
“Quiet, Goddammit! You can call me a bastard all you want, but you ruined this family before the boy was born! This is your fault, Teena.”
“Stop it!” Fox cries, clambering out from his hiding spot. “Just… stop.”
Boom! His father pounds his fist against the door.
Boom, boom, boom!
Then there’s silence. The ominous quiet sends his heart to his throat.
“Fox…” The deep voice of his father is deceptively calm now. Cigarette smoke curls through the cracks in the doorway, and he can practically hear the nicotine entering the older man’s blood stream. “Do not make me break this door.”
Fox freezes before falling on all fours to peer beneath the door. His eyes narrow onto the pair of dress shoes casting bat-like shadows off the shiny wood floors.
Fight or Flight?
So he grits his teeth and opens the door.
Bill Mulder grabs Fox’s backpack and flings it across the darkened bedroom. It hits the telescope in the corner, knocking it to the floor with a sickening clang.
Fox shuts his eyes. He doesn’t have to look to know the lens is broken. No longer will he search the stars for answers his parents can’t seem to give him.
“It wasn’t supposed to be this way,” his father mutters after several tense seconds pass. Pacing and puffing his Morley, he runs a hand through his graying hair. “None of it, Fox. But he wouldn’t let Them take you. Not one of his own… ”
“Who?” Fox asks, confused. His father’s words are frantic. Slurred, making no sense. Usually his father storms into his room, shoves him around, then tells him how disappointed he is in him. This doesn’t make sense to him. Though nothing makes sense anymore.
“But this choice might come back to bite that sonofabitch in the ass,” his father adds with a humorless chuckle that makes the hair on Fox’s arms rise.
“What? Dad…”
“You, my boy. You’re so much better than us all.”
Bill Mulder reaches out to pull his son into an awkward hug, but Fox cannot hide his confusion. The hands outstretched to embrace him now are the same ones that have struck him with malice before. The hesitation causes the older man to recoil and stumble into the mattress, knocking the teen’s secret stash of magazines loose from under it.
Both sets of eyes widen.
“Celebrity Skin,” his father huffs into Fox’s flushed face. The drunk man reeks of smoke and gin and doesn’t care. They are both used to that now, too. He kicks the one with a brunette woman on the cover wearing a tie and nothing else. Staring at the image but not really seeing it, his father’s anger deflates as his brown eyes flick up to meet Fox’s green ones. “Looks like we all have our secrets.”
“I’m sorry.” Embarrassment leaks through the cracks in his changing voice.
“I’m sorry, Son.” His father pats him once on the arm. “For everything.”
Fox is stunned, but he can see there's truth in his father’s eyes. “I know, Dad.”
“Not yet you don’t,” the man whispers, slurred sadness dripping from every syllable. “There’s so much I’ve left unsaid. I just hope one day you’ll understand…”
—
“Oh Mulder…” Scully’s eyes are brimmed with tears when he finally looks into them. She cradles his trembling hand between her smaller ones and brings it to her lips.
“So much that I’ve left unsaid, for reasons I hope one day you’ll understand, Scully,” he repeats. His voice quavers, chest aching. Christ, he never wanted to burden her with more Mulder family mess. But the way her fingers caress his own, and her gaze pools with pure compassion, he refuses to stop now. “It’s exactly the same. Secrets and lies from them both. Maybe… maybe they were more alike than I’d ever realized.”
Scully’s warm lips graze his fingers as she speaks, “Is that- God Mulder, was it always like that for you? After Samantha?”
Guilt tugs at his conscience.
“You don’t have to hear this, Scully.” He pulls free his hand adorned with her kisses and drops it into his lap. Burdening her with cutting open his mother is more than he should have asked of her. “It doesn’t change anything.”
She frowns. “I want to be here for you, Mulder. You’re my friend, my best friend,” she pleads. He stares at her as her hand finds his again, and he sees no judgment. She truly wants to know. “If you need to talk, I want to listen.”
Overcome by her empathy, he nods, pressing his thigh flush to her own. She leans even closer.
“Sometimes it was silence from them both. Like my father wasn’t even there for weeks on end,” he starts. A long list of traumatic moments to choose from spins through his head like a rolodex. “Sometimes, I’d lie awake in the dark and listen to them fight. At first it scared me. So I’d hide in my room alone and read or crack sunflower seeds to drown out the noise. But after weeks then months of loneliness, I found their vitriol comforting. At least I wasn’t alone anymore.”
He rubs his eyes with one hand and squeezes Scully’s with the other. He can’t look at her and see her tears for him that he knows are there. He can feel the warmth of her sadness wetting his shirt. The past hurts, but he feels safe here in the embrace of someone who cares.
“I’m here,” she whispers, and it’s all he needs.
“Barbed words only lasted so long before Dad came home late one night, drunk and overflowing with resentment,” Mulder explains. “My mom lost it. She called him a coward and blamed him for her daughter never coming home. I didn’t understand a lot of what they were saying back then but Jesus, it makes a helluva lot of sense now,” he huffs out a mirthless laugh. “That was the first time he hit her… that was the beginning of the end.”
“My God,” Scully mumbles into his shoulder. She can’t seem to get close enough, touching and nuzzling his arm. It takes all the strength Mulder has left not to just say fuck it and pull her into his lap and never let go. “Your poor mother. I’m so sorry, Mulder.”
“At first, she never let me leave.” His eyes slam shut at the rising wave of memories. “She was so scared for me, Scully. So worried she’d turn around one day and I’d be gone too. But I’d sneak out and rebel against the world, I guess. Craving touch and attention, even if it was the wrong kind. But then a strange doctor came to the house one day when things got really bad, which I now know was probably when they’d called off the active search for Samantha. Men in suits that chain smoked had tagged along, my father inviting them in. Syndicate motherfuckers,” he spat. “I don’t think she even realized they had the doctor sedate her to shut her up when they visited.”
“She was heavily medicated for years,” Scully adds carefully. “I read it in her file. What they did, what they continue to do… Good God, Mulder.”
Hot tears stream steadily down his face. Scully calmly murmurs encouraging words and soothingly strokes his hair, and Mulder remains quiet for a long time after.
When he finally opens his throbbing eyelids, his living room his dark, the sun having set while he’d spun his tale of domestic terror. He must have drifted off, because Scully has him fully covered with his Navajo blanket. He glances at her and is struck by how beautiful she looks this way. She’s shed her black blazer and boots like she’s come home after a long day at the office, sipping a cup of tea, gazing sleepily. It’s a welcome idea.
“You okay?” she questions, her eyes soft and imploring. He scans his now clean living room and notices his freshly fed fish swimming happily within their tank’s green glow. “You should eat something. It’s been over twelve hours.”
She squats down at his feet, patiently waiting. The one saved message on his machine blinking over and over catches his gaze. And it all comes rushing back at once.
He opens his mouth to say something. To talk about anything other than his empty stomach or his mother. She’s been victimized and labeled an unwilling accomplice in the Mulder family tragedy enough, but an unbidden memory of her screaming in his face one night after he’d made a horrible mistake takes his breath away.
“Mulder?” Scully’s instantly cupping his face between her hands. “Hey, what’s wrong? Gonna be sick?”
That rising memory wave he’s tried so hard to hold back rolls over his head and sends his heart hammering against his ribs. Suddenly, he’s fifteen again and he’s drowning. “Shit,” he gasps.
“Mulder, it’s okay. I’m here.” Her voice, his life preserver, pulls him to the surface. “Breathe.”
“Okay. I’m okay,” he sighs. He means it, and he can’t resist turning into her touch and pressing a reassuring kiss to the center of her palm. “Another shitty memory, that’s all. It’s nothing.”
“That’s not all, and it sure as hell is not nothing to me.” The way she’s rubbing his shoulders and leaning her forehead against his is all it takes for him to crumble. A strangled sob escapes his throat. “Mulder, talk to me. Please.”
“You’re the only one, Scully,” he whimpers. The delicate gold cross is cool against his fingers nestled between the wings of her collarbones. Her pulse flutters like a butterfly against his skin. “The only one.”
“The only one,” she agrees.
He holds Scully’s cross, using her faith as something tangible to tug onto. Despite attempts to forget, he feels himself wafting through time and space, remembering a piece of his past that still stirs bouts of betrayal and invites a plethora of insecurities.
—
2790 VINE STREET
CHILMARK
MARTHA’S VINEYARD, MA.
“Oh no!” Fox gasps as he stares down at the red Kool-Aid stain blooming like a blood orchid on Samatha’s blanket. “No, no, no…”
He isn’t supposed to have it. It isn’t his, he knows his mother keeps it neatly folded at the foot of Samantha’s vacant bed for a reason. “Leave it be to keep it safe and smelling like her, Fox,” she’d scolded when she caught him cuddling with it weeks after her disappearance. His mother hasn’t washed it since that horrible night in November three years ago.
Now it’s ruined.
“Please God, no,” he mutters as he leaps from his bed. The glass of cherry Kool-Aid falls to the floor, sending red sugar water everywhere. He could care less about staining the ugly shag carpet in his bedroom that his parents barely even notice exists anymore. It’s only his baby sister’s blanket that matters now.
Panicking, Fox races down the stairs and into the kitchen. If he cleans it before anyone gets home, before the stain sets, he can carefully fold it back up and pretend he’d never snuck it from his sister’s room. He only wanted to wrap it around him and imagine it was her sitting by his side, annoying him again, simply because he misses her.
But his mother will know. And his father…
Beads of sweat prickle along his hairline.
Cupboards slam. Drawers are flung open. Bins of kitchen supplies belonging to the maid are upended. But there is nothing for stains, dear God there’s nothing!
“Shit,” he says, holding the blanket under the kitchen’s fluorescent lights. His gut twists. He knows what he has to do now.
Tears sting his eyes as he shuffles slowly down the hallway and into the laundry room. He brings the flower embroidered blanket to his face and inhales Samantha’s scent one final time.
Hours later, when the sky is black and the clock reads 2:23 a.m., loud voices and slamming doors jolt him awake.
“Fox!” His mother’s shrill scream makes his ears ring. Even through his bedroom wall, he can hear her heart breaking the moment her voice does. “Fox William Mulder, come down here now!”
He’s sweating with fear by the time he makes it to the laundry room to find his mother cradling the blanket to her chest as tears spill from her big brown eyes. “Her scent, it’s gone.”
“Mom,” he chokes. “I didn’t mean to, I’m sor-”
“How could you?” she roars, reaching up to grip his chin, her long nails digging into his skin. “I told you, Fox. I told you not to touch it and you washed it? That's all I have left of her. I have nothing else. Nothing, Goddammit!”
“I know. But-” Teena Mulder winds back and slaps her son across the face, sending him stumbling backward. His head bounces off the crown molding of the doorframe, his eyes instantly watering. “Mom…”
Her hand flies over her mouth.
“Oh Fox, I… Just go to bed, please. It’s late,” she stutters, dazed as she walks past him with Samantha’s blanket pressed to her nose.
“I’m so sorry. You love me, right?” he pleads. And he knows it's useless. He’s only fifteen but his IQ isn’t. Deep down he knows she is too far gone now to be the mother he needs. But he can’t help it, he wants her to love him again. “Mom, please.”
“Sometimes Fox,” she starts as she turns to look down at her son curled in on himself on the laundry room floor. “Sometimes you’re just hard to love.”
Fox Mulder bows his head and cries.
—
You’re hard to love.
The weight of his words slam into Scully so hard she wobbles against the couch cushion. She shouldn’t be shocked young Mulder was slapped around by his parents when she’d witnessed it firsthand in his mother’s home three years ago, but she is. Her heart throbs heavily in her chest, each forceful beat penetrating her ribcage as her hand reaches out behind her, blindly searching for the coffee table. She feels like Alice, free falling down an endless hole of sadness.
Hard to love.
She can’t help it, she gasps for air again and again. After all she’s heard tonight, these are the words that leave her breathless. Her chest fills with a heft of concrete, She just doesn’t understand, cannot comprehend how anyone could not love Fox Mulder.
“Scully,” Mulder calls. She can tell by his panic face that it’s not the first time, either. “You okay? You’re the doc here, don’t leave me hanging.”
He helps her up from the floor where she’s been literally kneeling at his feet, wrapping a supportive arm around her. “I’m fine. Just… what your mom said to you, God Mulder, that’s just not true.”
He sniffs. “It was a long time ago, Scully.”
Long time or not, she knows it still bothers him. No one knows her Mulder like she does.
“Look at me.” She leans in and grasps a fistful of his gray t-shirt, tugging him as close as she possibly can get without kissing him. “Of all the lies your parents told, that is the biggest one. It is so easy to love you, Mulder. Maybe too easy,” she adds on a whisper.
“The Mulder family was never too keen on emotion,” he says so solemnly she isn’t sure he’s heard her at all.
Anger at his childhood trauma curls like a viper ready to strike in the pit of her stomach.
This is the root of it all, she thinks. This unrelenting guilt he carries - the poisonous thought that it’s his fault for not protecting her, his sister, his mother. For not being the one chosen by twisted men to be tested on and led to slaughter. Well fuck them, because this man is more than his preceived failures. He is everything good and worth fighting for in a world riddled with deception and lies.
More than that, she’s in love with him because of it. And she will not allow anyone to hurt him again.
“ I am your family.” She may be sitting half into his lap, wound around him like DNA, but it is she who holds him. He hugs her in return and instantly she knows it is her benefiting just as much as it is Mulder.
They sway in silence for a long time, just rocking and squeezing and murmuring each other’s names.
“Thank you, Scully. For everything.”
“I mean it, Mulder. You’re my family too.” There’s a fierce protectiveness in every word she says to him. Newly orphaned, old wounds rubbed raw, and she only loves him more. She really is his only family now. “I’m not going anywhere.”
He falls apart once again, his shoulders shaking beneath her reassuring hands. It is her that will hold him together in this aftermath. His partner, and no one else.
“Sorry, Scully,” he rasps into her neck, urgently clutching at her clothes as if it is her who might disappear this time. “So sorry…”
She isn’t sure what he’s sorry for, but suspects he isn’t either. And that doesn’t matter now, anyway. Nothing in the world but comforting her best friend does.
“Nothing to be sorry for, Mulder.” She peels his white-knuckled fist from her blouse and laces her fingers through his. His anchor in a ruthless sea, his touchstone.
His only one.
After what feels like hours, Scully backs away from his supine sprawl on the couch, barely composing herself. As soon as she makes it into the kitchen, she’s sobbing into the palm of her hand plastered across her mouth.
Several minutes and two Tylenol later, Scully pads her way back to a dozing Mulder’s side. She would suggest moving to his bed, but with their mutual vulnerability at an all time high, that might be treading on dangerous ground.
Instead, she easily curls around him and pulls the Navajo blanket over their laced limbs, pressing her nose into the cleft of his chest and breathing in the heady musk of him. Mulder finally falls asleep with his hand warm at the small of her back and their bodies tied like twine. Only the cadence of her heart could lull him into submission tonight, and she is happy to give it.
Scully would give Mulder anything.
She will stay awake as the man she loves finds comfort in her arms. Unblinking, she stares willingly into the dark for him. Because when the lights go out, she knows deep down her heart will never allow him to look into it alone again.
—
For the first time in the longest time, a nightmare isn’t what wakes him. Instead it’s the familiar scent of Scully that rouses Mulder from slumber. Small hands smelling of sweet lavender twitch and flex against his sternum. His fingers grasp hers with utmost care. They’ve worked tirelessly holding him together all these years, after all. He tucks his chin to his chest to kiss each one in thanks, taking in the image of her hair fanning out like flames over his forearm, her warm legs wrapped protectively around his own.
Mulder swallows hard.
He’s acutely aware of the tranquility that their shared body heat brings. It’s a level of comfort and intimacy he’s never had from anyone before. It doesn’t matter that they’ve never made love; their bond is stronger than the physicality of sex. The unwavering presence of his touchstone is the only comfort that matters anymore. And the very real worry of waking without her, of finding himself back in his childhood bedroom alone, is a constant reminder of what he’s lost in life - of what he has left to lose.
Scully is all he has to live for.
He turns and looks at her, his one and five billion. Her rust-colored lashes flutter under the morning’s light as she stirs at his side - so vulnerable beneath that FBI armor, so easily crushed by his need if he’s not careful. Still, he clings tighter. If he had to diagnose himself, he could confidently say he’s fallen prey to his betrayal and abandonment trauma.
Fox Mulder may never be able to provide proof of what happened to his sister or to little Amber Lynn LaPierre, but the unfettered presence of Dana Scully in his life provides evidence of a different kind.
It’s time to stop clinging.
“Hey,” he whispers as her eyes pop open.
She blinks wearily, “Hi.”
“You‘re still here.”
“I am,” she says simply. She’s still as she gazes up at him through those long lashes, carefully assessing his mood while he assesses hers in turn. He can see past her mussed hair and wrinkled clothes that she is absolutely willing to lay here, smooshed against him on this old leather couch until the sun sets again. “I’m here for as long as you need me.”
Maybe even longer, he doesn’t dare hope.
A lump balls in his throat and his eyes burn as if staring into an untamed bonfire.
He can’t look at her when she says things like that. Not when she’d spent the night stroking his hair as his tears soaked her skin and expected nothing in return for her kindness. If he stares into those sea blue eyes, the last tether he has tying down his love for her will snap free.
He will always need her. And worst of all, she fucking knows it.
The soft pad of her thumb sweeps across his stubbled cheek. “Mulder-”
A knock on his door startles them apart. Whatever she was about to say is now lost alongside his mother’s secrets.
It’s for the best, Mulder thinks, as Scully sighs and swings her socked feet to the floor to slip on her shoes. He can’t completely love her on the outside the way she deserves without being fully free on the inside.
When he hears Skinner tell Scully there’s a break in the case for at least one missing little girl, Mulder holds out hope that freedom is closer than it has ever been.
—