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“Scully, please,” his hands on her right wrist burned shockingly, not because of any external pressure he was placing around her (she was always the rougher of the two), but rather through the sheer weight of his desperation.
She had heard the muffled screams from all the way up in her bedroom, the all too familiar tone jolting her out of a fragile sleep and catapulting her into action. The tattered bathrobe was swooped up from where it was hanging faithfully on the bathroom door and the hall light cast shadows down the long staircase as Scully padded down to what had once been their living room.
She tiptoed quietly but quickly towards the figure she could see curled fitfully up on the sagging couch, long spine curved almost completely off the too-small cushions. Her journey was brought to a halt at the French doors that marked the boundary of the small room at the very heart of the house. He’s locked them again. That’s twice this week, she thought despairingly, as she took a detour to the hall bathroom to pick up one of the spare bobby pins she had littered around the house. Circling back, Scully paused and placed her hand on the translucent pane that framed his tight, lined face, trying to cover his suffering with her palm, pulse pounding in time with his tosses and turns.
After a few silent moments, Mulder groaned again, and Scully slid the pin in the small lock until she heard a tiny click. 30 seconds this time, a 10 second improvement over the last time. Scully had enough humor left in her to laugh at the thought that Mulder took it for granted that no aliens would possibly have access to tiny hairpins (lacking hair, and all). The old door swung open wide, while she entered, trying to avoid the many teetering piles of files, books, articles, and yellowing paper detritus of all sorts that surrounded Mulder’s slumbering form like alert sentries. Once, in the not too distant past, Scully had laughed at the sight of Mulder hitting file-print on emails after increasing the font size, but now every sheet of crisp paper seemed to leap out and cut her deep.
Her feet picked their way gingerly along the practiced route, dodging the physical remnants of the obsession that still lay heavy on both their chests; the television on her left grabbing her attention as it always did. Once most likely to cast a soft glow over the two of them while they drank on the couch situated across, curled up and mouthing along to an old horror movie, now the screen was a glorified bulletin board, a mere extension of the walls that was enclosed completely in garish sensationalist headlines and - worst of all - a mockery of the poster that had once hung proudly and defiantly in their shared office. No comforting noise had emanated from that set in months. The photos of celestial bodies and satellite images that took it’s place were scary now instead of beautiful, and that is what she regretted almost most of all. The skies that Mulder had illuminated for her no longer provoked wonder or awe in either of them.
She finally reached the shaking and sweating man cowering restless on the couch that had once again become his bed. It seemed to her that the years they had shared a bed were merely a small interlude of peace and that this was where he was destined to spend his nights; his lanky limbs looked disturbingly familiar and appropriate pulled to his chest on the narrow cushion. Mulder’s mind had finally let him rest (for the first time in nearly three days, by her rough estimation) only to plague him with terrors in sleep, to go along with his haunted days. Slowly snaking her hand out toward his wide brow, her fingertips itched to brush an errant lock of hair out of his eyes. Halfway there, her hand stopped and something kept her elbow arm locked at the elbow, hovering. If it wouldn’t have woken him, she would have ripped at her curling hair and screamed. Why did simple gestures like this, motions she had completed a thousand times over a million moments before, now seem to cost more energy than she had to give? Why did the air that still crackled between them now sadden instead of invigorate?
As she stared into his familiar face, the moment passed and she gingerly unstuck the hair from his sweaty forehead and brushed it away. He leaned his cheek unconsciously into the warmth of her touch, his mind recognizing her even as he wrestled with whatever was fighting him tonight. God knows there was a lot to choose from. She sat on the edge of the couch and continued to stoke his hair, hoping that something in her presence could still calm him and keep him safe. The minutes agonizingly ticked by as gradually his tossing slowed and the deep wrinkles that advertised his torment for all to see released just slightly, enough for Scully to see a whisper of the man who had swiveled rakishly around in a shitty government issue office chair, ready to charm.
“Mulder,” The word was not intended to wake him, merely a knee jerk response to the power of the memory. Unexpectedly, she heard a soft responding “Scully,”. She kept her eyes - which had drifted shut in the dark room - closed a few moments more, keeping the young Mulder hovering in front of her. Her just spoken name thus coming from his mouth in the basement office, instead of this den of pain more than twenty years into their future. She felt her Mulder’s hand on her terrycloth thigh, and looked over, finally meeting his eyes, deep and full even in this darkness. Although she wished for his sake that he was still asleep, she selfishly craved any bit of physical contact. Those small moments were once so plentiful that she took them for granted but now were few enough to be counted as treasures.
She smiled as softly and warmly as she could muster, and cupped his cheek. “Good morning, Sleeping Beauty”. She watched his eyes flick to the clock on the DVD player: 2:37 am; technically she was right. He let out a breathy shuddering sigh that she supposed could reasonably pass as a laugh if she didn’t know what his laugh really sounded like.
“How did you get in here?” The question was not at all accusatory; she knew he was merely asking because he was worried about security, imagining her as an intruder (the grey skinned kind or the kind that came clad in fbi regulation suits) but it hurt nonetheless. She shrugged off the pang deep in her heart and took the bobby pin out of her robe pocket. “Same as last time, honey,” His face flashed with some sort of conflicted emotion as she used the pet name, but she pretended not to see how the jolt of familiarity made him uncomfortable and powered on, “Even faster than last time. I could be an international spy.”
He didn’t respond, and looked occupied. Scully knew Mulder was probably constructing a new failsafe solution that involved iron and would keep her out forever, so she strove to distract him. “What was it this time?” She didn't really want to ask if it would hurt him, but she couldn’t bear to watch him think of ways to isolate himself even further. Pain was better than absence, at least with him.
She thought he might say Samantha, for that was the net his mind had spun for him earlier in the week. She had found him in the days proceeding amidst the personal belongings he usually kept locked up in the giant trunk the TV rested on. She had looked through the doors of their living room, hovering on the rug outside, and watched him fiddling with things. Flipping through yearbooks, smelling a small cerulean blanket, and – was that a small fabric heart? He had paused and looked up blankly at her, so she shuffled away, unsettled. When she passed by again later everything had been set back as before, the cinderblocks lifting the television-become-paranormal-collage above the collection of untouched VHS tapes and the DVD player that was now merely a clock.
Tonight though, was different. He did not croak out the name of his sister, but something even more impossible. “He’s back Scully”. Uncharacteristically, he did not pause for Scully to ask for clarification, but continued without meeting her eyes, “Cancer Man. I don’t know how, but he’s returned”. Scully involuntarily snatched her hand from his face and laced them together in her lap, in a self soothing gesture she picked up in the months during his abduction.
Not wanting to set him off or seem unsupportive, she couldn't help the familiar skeptical edge that crept into her reply. “Mulder. That’s impossible. He’s dead. I may not be sure of much but I know Spender can’t hurt us anymore”. She silently begged him not to argue with her, and hoped against hope his head would nod and he would lay back down and drift into a dreamless restful sleep. But she was Scully, and he was Mulder, and no matter what else had changed, he would never give up that easily.
He sounded more reasonable and calm than he had in months when he replied, “I know how impossible that sounds Scully, really, I do. But I’ve seen him. Every time I close my eyes, he’s there laughing and taunting me. He knows we were wrong, that we got absolutely everything unimaginably incorrect. He sees me suffer, and he laughs with that same satisfied grin, always always surrounded by a cloud of that damned smoke. I swear I’ve smelled it”. His voice was steadily rising in timber and volume and he was now sitting completely straight, all traces of sleep and the healing it offered gone. “Scully, please,” he whispered, grasping at her wrist now, begging her to understand, his need to not be alone in this nearly shattering him.
Scully’s heart sped up, although this shouldn’t have been surprising to her. In the months and years after 2012, Mulder’s dreams had gotten increasingly disrupted. First, she would come home late from a lecture or a forensic consultation only to see him asleep in his armchair with all the lights on and the heat turned way up. She would have to beg and plead with him to follow her upstairs, but eventually he would, and everything would be fine in the morning. He still made breakfast, then. Next came the sleep paralysis and the visions. He stopped sleeping in their bed because he said the creatures knew to come in through their second story window; he would gasp out tales of grey faces leering over him, sucking out his knowledge through his nose, of elongated cold fingers prying and picking and keeping him frozen. She saw the way his skin was becoming thinner in the light, as if it had to work harder to keep him together, and she watched the warmth recede farther into the depths his eyes, unreachable. So she agreed, and watched him build a veritable nest inside the living room in the center of their home. She helped him tack up the large map, and even assisted with the accurate pinning of UFO sighting locations. She did these things because she was his partner, and she loved him enough to indulge him once more while she waited for him to come back upstairs.
But here they were, and he had only burrowed in deeper as time went on. The obsession that had brought and bound them together now only served to keep them apart. These days, he locked the doors more often than not, afraid of intruders both extraterrestrial and terrestrial. He denied her offers of tea and food, until she had no idea how he sustained himself (she supposed he must eat while she was at work but the food in their pantry never decreased so she had to guess). Scully had even taken to locking her firearm in a safe buried deep in her closet, combination shared with no one. She wasn’t exactly sure what she was afraid of – or she did, but she was too afraid of the answer to look any deeper. They had essentially been living separate lives, coexisting in tandem but not together, the house silent with tension and avoided conversations.
She missed him even as he was one room away, and suffered as she watched him suffer. The aftereffects of what they had thought would be the time of Colonization had worn them both, but instead of rebounding together as a team, us-against-the-world like always, Mulder had allowed the confusion, guilt, and rage to turn inward and blocked her out, taking on both their burdens. The effects were physical as well as mental, and the once vibrant Fox Mulder was now slightly withered, locked day after day in a hell of his own creation as some sort of self inflicted punishment, seemingly unaware he was hurting Scully as much as himself (how did he still not know what bruised one bruised to other?). The continuing nightmares were often the only times she entered his room - the living room - and she found herself looking forward to the nights when she was able to lend him some of her strength.
She found herself at a loss. The Cigarette Smoking Man was long gone, an ancient damned relic of the past. Now though, looking at the man who was fixing her with a piecing but terrified stare, she knew the fact of their enemy’s death did not matter in the least. He was real to Mulder, and that was the truth. God damn him to hell she thought bitterly, although she supposed the man was already there - hopefully. The decrepit creature was causing them pain even from beyond the grave. Typical.
Scully met Mulder’s eyes and kept her gaze steady and strong, scooting closer and managing to get her arms almost all the way around his wide frame. He sagged into her gratefully like staying upright for those few moments had been all he could manage, and rested his chin on her shoulder. She rubbed circles into what bits of his back she could reach, then pulled back ever so slightly, keeping his face close to hers.
“You know Mulder, Monica says that when we dream it’s the closest we get to those who have left us without dying ourselves. Something about the unconscious mind being most open to voices while in sleep or something….” She trailed off, smiling fondly. Mulder made a discontented noise deep in his throat and she focused again on his face, which had bridled at the mention of Reyes.
Oh shit. It was not that Mulder had a problem with Monica exactly; the agent was mentioned in their home pretty frequently. Scully had been very open about everything that had occurred between she and Reyes, and Mulder certainly didn’t begrudge her the other woman’s company or comfort during a time when Scully believed Mulder was dead (that would be asking a little too much, even for him). From the beginning, he assured Scully that what passed between her and Monica in the months he was gone was fine by him (not that Scully was seeking permission, exactly, but she had decided honest was the bedrock of their relationship going forward) and he and Monica had sensed a sort of kinship in one another and were sincere (if a bit begrudging) friends.
Monica and Scully had ended it on good terms, but had stayed close, and things had been peaceful. However, Mulder’s clenched jaw when she sometimes talked about Monica did not go unnoticed by Scully, and a few months after they had gone on the run Scully confronted him about it, needing to start with a clean slate and minimal lingering phantoms. After a prolonged painful conversation she discovered his problem with Monica Reyes, which actually had little to do with Monica herself and was so bound up in the traumatic journey of all their lives she didn’t even know how to help him. She could hear Mulder’s confession now as if it was happening in front of her: “Scully, she got to hold my son more than I did. And God help me, but I haven’t forgiven either of you for that yet”. Many years had passed since that moment, and most of their wounds had healed, if they were always at the surface, occasionally reopened and prodded at. The outlines of both of her lost children were before Scully’s eyes at all times, and on sunny Sundays when Mulder’s eyes unfocused she knew he was thinking of his son. A small woven dream catcher Monica gave Scully for her birthday hung above the bed, and reminder of the protection that woman always provided for both of the sleeping people.
She supposed she couldn’t blame his negative reaction to her sudden mention of Monica, after all, things were fragile and it wasn’t as if they had been talking a lot lately. She chided herself but kept on. “Maybe it’s possible he’s trying to taunt you or haunt you or punish you in some way, I’ll give you that. If anyone can come back from the dead to try and hurt us again, it’s Spender.” Mulder did not look at all comforted by her words, but he was listening without interruption. “But Mulder, don’t let him. Don't give that bastard the undead satisfaction of manipulating you any more. The next time he appears to you, knock the rotten teeth out of his smile. If you need help, imagine me standing next to you, and there I’ll be. I’ll high kick the smirk right off of his face and he’ll never bother you again, I promise.”
Mulder looked shocked for a moment, clearly not expecting her to play along, much less evoke such colorful images. But Scully smiled clearly and brightly right into his face, which has so close next to hers their noses were touching, and gave him a light eskimo kiss. She was determined to keep things light; if he was determined to be sucked down into this whirlpool of despair she was just as determined to haul him back out again, even if it drowned them both.
Mulder let out a huge grating breath of air as if he had been holding it for hours, and let out the first true peal of laughter she had heard from him in almost a year - even if it was a bit weaker than she remembered it. “Would you mind if I imagined you in some sort of leather outfit? I’ve always wanted to see that”.
“Oh brother” she scoffed, but pulled him close again anyways and rested her forehead against his. This, the easiest gesture between the two of them, one that said “I’m here and I’m with you, and I’m not going away so just let them try” so she wouldn’t have to.
Mulder finally brought his own arms up and circled them around her waist, so they were awkwardly embracing while teetering on the edge of the couch. When she moved to lift her forehead from his he tried to hug her tight again, but she ended up falling off, landing right on top of one of the towering mounds of paper, both topping straight to the floor with a thundering crash. She looked up, disgruntled, and was relieved to see a twinkle in his eye, illuminated by the light of the moon, which filtered in through the one window he hadn’t boarded up yet. Mulder scooted farther into the back of the couch, then leaned over and offered her a hand. She figured he would have hoisted her up and into the space next to him if he thought he could get away with it. The thought made her giggle.
She grabbed the proffered hand and got up, sliding into the narrow space left open for her. Objectively this was not comfortable, as the couch was barely big enough for Mulder to lie down on his own much less with her too. But she hadn’t felt the beat of his heart sync up with hers in what felt like eons, and the steady pounding that emanated from his chest into her own was enough that she thought she could withstand anything, even the weight of his terror.