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“Scully I-” he begins after the interviews and the half assed reports, a three way game of chicken with the grim reaper carefully unmentioned, but she stops him, says,
“Let me drive.”
His chin tucked into his chest he drops the keys into her hand, carefully keeping their fingers from brushing. She needs him to know what she cannot say, that the tear lonely on her cheek was not for herself. But the words aren’t there and maybe they never will be.
So she drives them back to his apartment in the loud type of silence that follows on the heels of gunshots, begging him to look at her, to use the profile he’s made of her and find the words when she cannot. He sees her, sees into her and most days knows her motivations better than she does. She flicks the indicator, turns into his parking space, she will give him time to look.
She pulls the handbrake and turns the ignition in the same moment, gets out before he can say a word, lets them into his building. She knows he’ll still have the beers in the fridge and hopes the leftover Thai is still there too so she might heat a portion and push it around a plate for a while.
She lets them both into his flat, forgoes the lights and wonders, hopes that he’s figured it out, doesn’t dare look at him in case he hasn’t. She finds the beers in the fridge, there’s no leftovers.
“Scully,” he says when she settles beside him on the couch and she cringes away from him. He’s not figuring it out, he’s not even looking. Maybe, probably because he doesn’t want to. Maybe she has to make it so that he can’t ignore it, that he has to look, she won’t let him use her as a flail.
“It’s okay,” she says and it’s exactly as inadequate a reassurance as she knew it would be, hates him more for making her try do this than for the game of roulette that started it.
“How can it be okay?” He’s mocking himself, his fingers white around the beer bottle he hasn’t drunk from, his short nails picking at the label. He’s mocking himself but it stings anyways.
“Don’t,” she says, rubs her forehead with beer cold fingers, “Mulder look at me,” she turns so she’s facing him and after a beat he does as he’s told, head resting on the back of the couch and false mirth in his eyes.
Scully thinks, hopes it looks like she’s thinking and choosing words with care even though there are none to choose from. For him she has only one word and it’s a word she’s had since Oregon and graveyard rain, an old and unshaken word.
“What are you doing here?” He asks because he knows that she’s trying and on any other night he’d afford her all the time she could ask for to juggle words she doesn’t have, he’d give her so much time that she’d say nothing at all. But tonight he’s trying to cut himself and she’s little more than a casualty, a forgotten after thought.
“Shut up,” she says not unkindly and then she says, because in the absence of the patience he’d normally hand out in spades all she has for him, for them, is, “you make me feel safe.”
A fundamental truth of her universe exposed and she shifts under his gaze, jaw clenched tight. In her ears she hears the dead barrel clicking of a revolver bled dry and her cheeks burn. She wants to stay, wants them both to forget he’d ever made her say anything so she can heat leftovers in his microwave and put her socked feet on his coffee table and watch movies while their beer bottles collect condensation.
“Goodnight Mulder,” she says, presses her lips together because there’s something unnamed and overwhelming clawing up her throat. But when she stands his hand shoots out and catches her wrist. His touch is warm like it had been in the shadow-less hospital, in the low lit van.
“Scully,” he starts and she grinds her teeth, shoulders around her ears, “what do you want to eat? I already ate those leftovers,” he says to her back.
She breathes out, her shoulders drop, his thumb sweeps across the inside of her wrist just once, like an apology, before he lets go.
The stack of menus is where she left it two nights ago, it’s too late for anything other than a twenty four hour diner so she picks out the first one she sees. They eat, she finishes her beer, tucks her legs beneath her and leans back against the couch. Neither of them are really watching whatever movie it is but the changing shadows and low sound is a familiar comfort.
When her eyes grow heavy she shifts toward him, pretends she’s closer to sleep than she is, pretends that her head against his shoulder is an unconscious accident. He has to see then, that nothing has changed. He moves under her cheek to settle a blanket around her shoulders and she pretends not to notice that either.
When she wakes it must be near sunrise by the low hanging of the moon, the fading midnight blue. Mulder isn’t next to her so she tugs the blanket around her shoulders and pads through to the kitchen, stifling a yawn. The bathroom door is ajar and the moonlight catches movement. She scrubs the sleep from her eyes, smearing her eyeliner.
He’s on the floor, clothes in a pile next to him, drawing long and harsh breaths as if it’s hurting him. The tile is cool through her socks but she doubts he feels it. She settles next to him, sitting on his discarded pile of clothes, he must’ve been getting in the shower, and draws the blanket around his cold shoulders. One hand cups the base of his neck, drawing him into her orbit and the other she splays across his chest. Reminds herself that he too, is breathing.
“It’s okay,” she whispers because it’s the truth. After a minute or an hour the rise and fall of his chest beneath her palm finds a steadier rhythm and he shifts back into his bones. He moves slowly, like his limbs are heavy, until he’s curled around her, a strong arm around her back and his face buried in her neck. And she says, “it’s okay,” because it is.
She cards her fingers through his hair, a tender rake of her nails against his scalp. And maybe this is who they are, two people who draw blankets around each other's shoulders, like it might protect them from the morning when it cannot even keep away the cold.