Chapter Text
When Mulder heard the static filled voice over the phone ask him to meet her in the oncology ward at 8am on a Saturday morning he felt the last domino in his head fall.
They’ve barely spoken to each other since the Ed Jerse incident, she seemed perpetually recluded in her own thoughts, not even focused enough to bother purposely give him the cold shoulder while they worked. It became a thorn at his side, at first because he wanted to find the cause for her out of place behavior, but soon after for the words that had almost slipped his mouth at that moment.
“But it’s…” become mine.
As she steeped in her own thoughts so did he, trying to decipher exactly at what point had their lives become so entangled and inseparable that he hadn’t even noticed. Perhaps that’s not what bothered him, no, he would have not been shocked by that statement in a long time, not since her abduction. More likely it was the fact of the set of events that led to that realization. He could grumble to himself all day long that he had just gotten upset and yelled at her for getting herself in danger, but he didn’t need his phycology degree to tell him the reason was Ed Jerse. Mulder felt himself sink into himself at the thought of how selfish he could be sometimes, especially towards her.
It wasn’t anything new for him to, well, be an asshole. As he descended into the madness that led him to the X-files he learned it was just easier to scare people away than deal with them, Diana being the cherry on top to remind him it was just not worth letting people in. But Scully tested him from the moment she walked into his office, and for the first time in a very long while he found that he actually had to try and scare somebody off. Four years and counting and she still seemed unfazed by it, until now that is.
At first he tried to scare her off by being an asshole to avoid having a spy in his office, after that he just was intrigued and wanted to push her buttons, unknowingly forging their trust little by little. Yet lately it had changed into a pathetic mechanism to keep her at arms length, to keep her safe from this mess I am, he told himself. But his little outburst at a man that hadn’t even spent a full day in Scully’s life made his brain propose a road of thinking that he quickly decided to veto, thinking no good could come of it. Not when he had too many secrets he wasn’t ready to share, not even with her.
After the executive decision to not think of it further, he decided to fixate on why she was acting out, after all, Scully was dutiful in not letting her complaints about him pile up, usually administrating eyerolls and chastisements like she would expense reports; down to the last decimal and not a day late. He found it hard to believe she just suddenly had it with him over a desk, that that would be the straw on the camel's back. So he started to patch together a timeline in his head, anything that felt out of place in retrospect. She had been more tired than usual the last few cases, but he didn’t think much of it, especially after Leonard Betts almost invited her to his all human buffet. Maybe she just needs a vacation , he wondered, thinking maybe the physical toll was it.
It wasn’t until a few days into their silent work days that she walked into the office that he noticed a trace of a certain smell. His nose was no stranger to people’s unique scents, it was both a curse and a blessing. Usually he could smell her presence before the elevator dinged far off into the hall of the basement, but it wasn’t until she silently dropped some files at his desk that he got a sense of deja vu at the vague sweet smell that met his nose for the first time from her. Just as fast as it came it was gone as she walked to the alcove to find something.
A month passed, and he thought not much about it, the smell coming and going at times, not strong or persistent enough to pay it much mind. Scully kept her distance, both physically and in their friendship. While she didn’t look upset at him anymore and seemed more than okay to work with him, the silence still kept strong, work chugging along despite. One night, after Scully had taken the morning off to run an errand, they found each other working late in the basement, fighting over if a photo was doctored or not.
It almost felt like they were back to their baseline out of the blue, as she hunched over his shoulder at his desk, angrily pointing at the obvious distortion in the polaroid in Mulder’s hand. He was holding back a chuckle as he turned his head around to quip something back at her, his nose almost bumping into hers in the process when it hit him, that sourly sweet smell again. It made him give a small gasp, locking eyes with her for a second, in what felt for the first time in an eternity. She pulled back, correcting their distance and quickly wiping under her nose, pulling back the eyes that he just noticed where red-tired, purple bags hidden under makeup now fading in the late night. He could see her swallowing hard, almost shakily trying to pull up the sticky polaroids from his desk and clumsily throwing them in a manila file.
“It’s getting late, let’s pick this back up tomorrow?”she said, the first smile in weeks appearing on the corners of her mouth for just a split second before it disappeared, but it was enough to pull Mulder from his head.
“Um, sure Scully, see you tomorrow.”he managed to get out as he stood up, but she was already halfway out the door, gone before he had a chance to even say anything else. He slid back into his chair trying to understand the sense of deja vu that he had just once again felt. This time around he got a long enough second with it that he could not stop thinking about it, trying to pinpoint where he had smelled this scent before.
It wasn’t until she called his apartment later that night and asked him to meet her at the hospital the next morning that he remembered the sickly sweet smell of living death that radiated from Leonard Betts so many weeks ago.