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She turned over, an epiphany shooting through her body, forcing her to act immediately, even if he would be irritated in the moment. Mulder laid face down on the bed, hugging the pillow and turned away from her. Scully poked his bare shoulder quickly, using just enough pressure to get his attention. Unless he didn’t wake up, and then she’d have to pinch him. Fortunately for him, he turned his head.
His bleary eyes gazed up at her, blinking the fog away. “What is it?” he rasped.
She wanted to grab his hand and press it against her forehead, like a knight to their King. Bow before him and show her undying loyalty. Let him know how dear he was to her. Words were something she never had a way with, in her opinion, but she knew they would have to do. Or else he would never know, and keep guessing, a man like Mulder deserved an answer. The truth, if she would.
“This isn't a passing thing Mulder,” she told him. “There’s no coming back from this.” He’s been stuck with her for a long time, but now in a completely different way. They had entered territory no one had crossed into before.
“I didn’t think it was,” Mulder replied, his interest becoming more evident.
Liar, she didn’t say. Mulder was a book she knew from cover to cover, there was always doubt in his heart, no one needed reassurance more than him. Long ago, Scully learned to live without it. Reassurance was for Charlie, who struggled with school, or Bill, who was on the football team, or Melissa, who their mother always gave special attention to.
“What’s going on?” He added, trying to coax her into speaking.
“No one saw me before you.” Scully looked down to the gray sheets, where Mulder’s shadow extended from his body. She traced the line of his shadow, moving his forefinger back and forth along the edge. Mulder furrowed his brow, and Scully continued. “My mother saw me as the child who needed the least amount of guidance, because my other siblings needed so much more. And besides, I didn’t seem to want it anyway.” All those times when she slammed the door to her and her sister’s room and hoped a parent would follow her to try to talk it out were in vain.
Mulder reached out to her and grabbed her hand, he rolled onto his side, making space for Scully to fill. She shuffled over to him, pressing her face into his chest as he wrapped his arm around her.
“Daniel wanted me to be someone I wasn’t. His protege and new wife to have on his arm in front of all his friends and colleagues, a young woman to give him new children to raise and put her career on hold.” At the time, having kids wasn’t something she wanted, but now, all she wanted was a product of her and Mulder toddling around their apartment, with his eyes and her hair. Still, they had been a family of two for years, since 1993. That family was enough, it would always be enough.
“I can’t imagine anyone thinking that of you,” Mulder mused. “You’re not exactly one with tradition.” He trailed his fingers along her rib cage, causing a laugh to bubble up from her throat, Scully forced the giggle back down but her body shook for a moment, letting Mulder know he succeeded. A light kiss pressed onto her hairline. She could feel him smile into her skin.
“Everyone thought they knew me because they knew my family, or that my dad was in the Navy, that I would be all the All-American girl they wanted. That’s probably why they sent me to you, they thought I’d never question why I was sent to watch over you.” They thought Scully would never fly through the entrance of the birdcage Mulder opened for her, everyone always underestimated the third child. That her faith in God meant she had faith in the system she was placed in.
“Thank you for seeing me, Mulder,” she whispered. A tear fell from her eye, just one.
“I always will,” he replied. “Thank you for seeing me too.” He held her even tighter than before, fingers individually pressing into her skin. “When I was a kid, my father always treated me differently from Samantha. I thought it was because she was so much younger, or maybe he thought girls needed more support. He probably always knew I wasn’t his, and that’s why he was distant, because he saw me, but he didn’t like what he saw.” His voice shook for a moment, and Scully moved her hands and gently rubbed his back, trying to take his pain away. She almost protested, but that wasn’t what he wanted, Mulder wanted to be heard. “I— I’m not ready to talk about my mother,” he admitted. “I just can’t.”
“I don’t expect anything from you Mulder,” she whispered. “We can go back to sleep now, I just wanted to talk to you.”
“No,” he interjected. “I need you to understand something, it’s important to me that you know that I feel the same way.”
Scully's heart swelled, and she closed her eyes tightly, trying to stop any more tears.
“I thought Diana saw me, that’s why we were together for so long. She always boasted about how I was so talented and the brightest star in the Bureau. But once I strayed from that, she didn’t like who I was becoming. She pretended to be right there with me, investigating some of the first X-Files at my side, but as I dug deeper and deeper into the strange, she checked out.” Scully couldn’t stand that woman, how she treated Mulder, anything about her really. “Now I know she was reporting on me the whole time,” he ended with a sigh. A resolved sigh that made her whole body ache. “I don’t think she would’ve been able to handle Spooky Mulder anyway,” he joked, trying to lighten the mood.
“Spooky Mulder was alluring,” Scully admitted, letting go of a secret she had been keeping locked away in her heart since the day she met him. Spooky Mulder was hot, and from the time he was kind to her in that motel room, she’d been falling in love with him, whether or not it was recognizable. The more she got to know him, the further she fell, until their lives were a Gordian knot that no one could untangle, not even them. Even if they wanted to. “But I always knew you were trying to scare me off.” Her strange and sexy partner was very good at pretending he thought he was above it all, and that everyone else around him was just too stupid to believe in him. Instead of the man who desperately wanted to protect the people of the world from the people who took everything from him. Someone like him was hard to understand, except for someone like Scully. Someone willing to look deeper, beyond projections, like she always wanted someone to do for her.
“You always saw right through me.”
“I still do,” she said with a smile, shifting again, settling into his body, ready to sleep, knowing that he knew she loved him.