Work Text:
I.
It’s been a routine for so long that she doesn’t stop, even after they’ve buried him.
Her hands shake all the way home from Raleigh. Two hundred and seventy-five miles disappear into the night. Over the past nine years she’s often thought that her life would be better counted in miles than hours and she’s spent thousands of them on I-95, but she can’t remember the last time she did it alone. She told her mother she was riding with Skinner; she told Skinner she was riding with the Gunmen.
She didn’t lie to the Gunmen.
Scully’s always had a lead foot, but this time she drives precisely the speed limit. She was always running before, either towards or away, but she cannot outrun this. And no one is waiting for her.
Before she goes home she stops at his apartment. The fish are still alive, the fish still need to be fed.
She calls in sick the day after the funeral. She does not apply for bereavement leave; she cannot bear the thought of filling out the form. She’s filled it out before, for her father, for Missy; there is a blank space that says relationship to deceased and there is nothing, nothing she could write in that space.
So she calls in sick and she drives to his apartment to feed the fish, and then she takes off her shoes and curls herself into a ball on his couch. After some indeterminate amount of time - ten minutes, half a day - she gets up and goes home. And the next day, and the next.
It’s a routine and a relief. The drive to Alexandria is the only prayer that doesn’t taste like ash in her mouth.
On the fourth day she goes back to work, silence following her down the halls. She wears it like a shroud. Doggett is quiet, too, passing her paperwork that needs her signature, asking her to look over some suspicious reports from a coroner's office in Delaware.
No one autopsied Mulder's body, she thinks. Whatever truth he carried is buried now. Without meaning to she imagines it, the scalpel, the Y-incision. Taking him apart and giving the pieces weight. Heart, three hundred and five grams.
Scully feels blank. Maybe she's been preparing herself for this the entire time. She cut his mother open; she knows all his body’s stories, from beginning to end.
The entire day, Doggett only brings it up once. “When we met,” he says, hesitant. “I said some things. About you. And him.”
She remembers. Something about how Mulder would confide in other women, something so patently absurd that she'd dismissed it in an instant, even as it made her cheeks flush with anger. Even if Mulder hadn't trusted her early on, the idea of his trusting someone else at the FBI was more implausible than any ghost story he'd ever told her.
“I know you saw through that. But you know - you’ve gotta know what the rumors were.” It’s not a question.
She knows what the rumors were. She knows what people say about her and she - she must have cared once, she remembers caring. She waits for Doggett to ask for confirmation - he’s never asked her who the father is - but he doesn’t. He just stands there looking uncomfortable for a long, long time, and then says, "I'm sorry this happened." She remembers that he has also known impossible loss.
On the sixth day one of the fish is dead. She thinks, distantly, that this should be the thing that breaks her. It isn’t.
She finds a zip-loc bag and puts the fish inside. Out behind the building there’s a ratty patch of grass and she digs a grave with a serving spoon. The ground is cold.
Afterward she stays up listening to the recording on his answering machine, over and over. She’s always been meticulous about deleting voicemails and answering machine messages, some mix of paranoia and compulsive neatness, but she regrets it now. She just wants to hear him say her name, one more time.
The next afternoon she’s back, determined to keep the rest of the fish alive. A few days later she is called out of town on a case and she asks Skinner to feed the fish for her; he looks at her like she’s crazy, but he still says yes.
When she gets back from New Hampshire Mulder’s keys are in an envelope on her desk. There’s a note that says, I made a copy of the keys - thought that would be easier for next time.
After that, she sometimes sees evidence that someone else has been in the apartment. It must be Skinner, though they don’t talk about it. He, too, comes to repent. She doesn’t have the heart to tell him that there is no forgiveness here.
He’ll learn on his own, just like she has.
II.
it was late on january first, the first day of a new year, and she was new all over.
the only light in his apartment was the dim blue glow of the fish tank, her body all shadows as she moved through the room and poured herself a glass of water. it was colder out here than in the bedroom and she thought of mulder’s warm body, sprawled out across the mattress. for someone who slept on a couch most nights, he took up an unbelievable amount of space.
it was still saturday, at least for another hour. still one more day before work, before the real world. she didn’t know what this would look like under the fluorescent lights.
his kitchen smelled like the chinese food they'd ordered a few hours ago when they finally remembered to eat; her skin smelled like his cologne. on her tongue, the sharp tang of the champagne that had made her wonder if he'd been planning this all along, because fox mulder was not the kind of man who just had champagne in his apartment.
she sensed his approach a moment before his arm came around her.
he hummed happily, pulling her tight against him with his good arm, the other sandwiched between their bodies. "this is mine," he mumbled, his face buried in her neck, and she wasn't sure if he was talking about the t-shirt she'd borrowed or her.
his hand trailed along her side, teasing up beneath the hem of the t-shirt. as his fingers brushed her waist she tried to stop herself from giggling. just that light touch, just below her ribs. she’d forgotten about being ticklish. it had been a long time.
he must have noticed the shudder that ran through her. “sorry,” he said, sounding not at all sorry, “but there is no way I’m gonna be able to stop touching you.” his voice was muffled against her skin, his mouth hot over the pulse point in her neck.
there was no universe in which she wanted him to stop touching her. his hands made promises that she knew he couldn’t keep, but she’d let him make them a thousand times.
this wasn’t what she had intended. she’d driven him home from the hospital, walked him up to the apartment - he might be light-headed from the blood loss, she’d told herself - and he’d asked for her help getting his t-shirt off.
and there was, she thought, no universe in which this didn’t happen. no universe where she ran her hands up the smooth planes of his abdomen without wanting to trace those muscles with her tongue. no universe where he stood there with those bruises and that sling and his fucking perfect mouth and she ignored the pull in her belly for one more day.
he grabbed her hand and tugged her back toward the bedroom. “come on, scully,” he said. “let’s go back to bed.”
it was a new year, and she was new all over.
III.
Mulder’s apartment was never this clean when he actually lived here. She sweeps a couple times a week, and when a fine layer of dust settles on his desk she dusts, carefully leaving all of his stacks of paper intact. Just in case. Now that he’s dead she’s meticulous, but she doesn’t wash the sheets even once they start to smell like her.
Just like before, Scully checks the mail and throws away the catalogs - why is she not surprised that Mulder got the Victoria’s Secret catalog - and saves everything else. She pays the bills when they come. At some point she knows the bank will stop his automatic rent payments, and then she will have to make a decision.
Three weeks after the funeral she receives a letter in the mail. It's from a law firm in Alexandria and she lets it sit for a few days before she opens it. She already knows what it is.
The first page is a cover letter from the law firm. There are words on it, and a phone number she supposes she’ll eventually have to call. It’s signed in pen by James McKillen, Attorney at Law. There are words and some of them say I’m sorry for your loss but - how can he know, how can he know, how can he.
What she’s lost.
I, Fox William Mulder, of Alexandria, Virginia, being of sound mind and memory, declare this to be my Last Will and Testament, hereby revoking all prior Wills and Codicils made by me.
Her hands shake, her vision blurs. It's recent, dated to just two weeks before he disappeared - but of course it is. He was dying the whole time.
Her own name, at the bottom of the page:
I give all of the personal property that I may own at the time of my death, which is not otherwise specifically bequeathed under this Will, to Dana Katherine Scully, if she survives me.
Whatever it is she doesn’t want it. She doesn’t want his father’s money or the house where his mother died. She doesn’t want his books except that they hold the memory of his hands; she doesn’t want his clothes except that some of them, fewer and fewer now, still smell like him.
She’d almost had her heart ripped out once before, but it didn't prepare her for the real thing.
He was dying the entire time. All of those months, every time he kissed her, every time he fell asleep next to her, he was dying. And he fucking knew, and he never told her.
Maybe it’s a comfort, that he would have died anyway. Scully has looked at his charts. He’d had a few more months, maybe a year, if he was incredibly lucky. And he has never been lucky.
So little time, really.
What she would give for a few more months. Anything.
And now all she can ask herself is why. She’d been dying once, too, and she’d told him before she told her own mother. Once, he had done everything he could to keep her alive, to find a cure, and didn’t he know she’d have done the same thing for him?
She’d asked Skinner that, on one of the bad nights. Called him up in the middle of the night to ask.
There was a long silence, and then Skinner just said, “Maybe he didn’t want to be saved.” He said it like he had been thinking about it for a long time. Like he’d been practicing how to tell her.
In the moment she’d blanched and hung up the phone. When she came into the office the next morning, she could tell that he hadn’t slept either.
She’s always known that Mulder contained that possibility. She remembers how easily he’d turned his gun on himself. And after his mother - after Samantha - maybe it was just easier for him to go.
(But she also knows that he was happy, those last few months. His jokes, his easy laugh; it was like a weight had been lifted. She’d assumed - selfish, selfish - that it was because of her, but maybe he’d just seen the end in sight. She can’t let herself think that. She won’t let herself think that.)
If he’d learned about her pregnancy, would he have told her? Or would he have kept his secret until he finally landed in the hospital, until there was nothing left that anyone could do?
She imagines herself in another hospital room, watching him die. Slowly. Eight months pregnant, or with a baby - with his baby. One of her prayers answered while he faded. The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away.
Is it better, she asks herself. Is this better?
His body on the ground, three days dead. Screams, maybe hers; everything hazy, her nightmares played out before her. And it was over, over, over. And there was nothing she could do.
Is it better.
IV.
“happy birthday,” he said, standing outside her apartment with a smile and a pint of ben & jerry’s. at least he’d learned to get her the good stuff.
this dimension to their relationship was new still, and fragile. for all the ease between them, neither of them knew quite how to act.
"you remembered," she said, teasing, but secretly she was pleased. he hadn’t said anything at work.
"of course,” he replied, mock-offended. “you know that february twenty-third is the original publication date of the gutenberg bible? you have an important birthday.”
she rolled her eyes and refused to take the bait. there was no way he just knew that, photographic memory or not. he must have looked it up. right?
“not the same year, obviously,” he continued, “unless there’s something you're not telling me.”
she smacked his arm, he pretended that it hurt. maybe they did know how to do this.
when she pulled him down into a kiss she buried her fingers in his short hair, keeping him at the perfect height. if this lasted, he was going to turn into the hunchback of alexandria. or she'd have to buy some higher heels, and she didn't think her podiatrist would tolerate that.
eventually they settled on her couch and worked their way through most of the pint. in honor of her birthday, mulder picked around the brownie bits, saving them for her.
"sleepless in seattle" provided background noise. normally he’d have protested, but it was her birthday and anyway, she knew he secretly liked meg ryan.
not that it stopped him from complaining. “you know this movie is terrible, right?”
“mulder, you made me watch the third ‘die hard’ movie last weekend.”
“scully,” he said, infinitely patient, “that was the second ‘die hard’ movie.”
instead of arguing she turned and straddled his thighs, licking the last of the ice cream from his lips, seeking out his more familiar flavors. beneath the sugar he tasted like rainstorms and wildness. she swallowed his moan.
he growled and grabbed her hips, flipping her onto her back. she ground her hips against him as he kissed her, his mouth on her mouth, on her neck, on her breasts, trailing impossible heat everywhere. everything else receded. she would sit through every “die hard” movie for five minutes of his mouth on her. not that she was planning to offer.
she groped at the coffee table, feeling for the remote; when her fingers finally got purchase she flipped the tv off. when he kissed her, she traced her fingernails down his back and he shuddered. there would be marks there, later.
they never said "i love you" - that, too, was too fragile a thing. but she carved it into him all the same.
V.
They buried him eight weeks ago and she's started hearing him everywhere.
It’s so vivid that she starts to worry the cancer is back. She tells her doctor she’s having auditory hallucinations and the doctor says of what and she just says, hoarsely, voices and he schedules her for an MRI.
There is nothing, and Scully doesn’t know what she expected. A white space the shape of his hand. A vacancy where some vital organ is supposed to be. She’s contained every other medical impossibility: why not this one?
On the day they buried him, it still felt impossible. But she’s learned to believe in impossible things.
The baby kicks, and she places a hand over her belly to calm him. Her body is becoming heavy now, and she would call it burdensome except that some days this baby is the only thing propelling her forward.
She starts going to Mass on Sundays, but she never takes Communion and she never makes confession. God already knows all of her sins. She needs no reminder to repent.
She remembers the taste of the Hail Mary, the swell of it on her tongue. Pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. When she was a child, she’d never understood why they prayed with their heads bowed. How could anyone expect to find God on the ground? But she's spent the last nine years with her face turned to the sky, and damned if she's found any answers there, either.
“Do you believe there is a life after this one?” the priest had asked her, after Emily, and she’d said yes as a reflex, with no certainty at all. But God, she believes it now; needs that belief like she needs oxygen.
She needs to believe that when she finds herself again in that boat, lightly tethered to the shore, he will be standing on the other side.
When she closes her eyes she sees him there, waiting.
The fish are still alive. Just the one casualty, still, even though their owner has been absent for months and months. She wants him to come back so she can tell him. She doesn’t know what it proves.
James McKillen, attorney at law, has started leaving her messages. Something about coming into his office. Something about bank accounts. Her life is a sea of paperwork: the letters she ignores from Mulder’s attorneys, the endless forms at work. Just forms and autopsies now, no more field work; she leaves the office at five o'clock most days. She is too visibly pregnant. Too visibly a target.
This is everything she has ever wanted. This is her miracle, this child, and God knows she’s paid for it a hundred times over. She has only spoken to her mother three times since Mulder’s funeral. There are too many questions: about prenatal vitamins and birthing plans and daycare waiting lists. And all of the other questions, unspoken but understood.
She hasn’t received even a grudging condolence card from Bill. When she’d asked her mother about it Maggie just said, “It's hard for him,” and Scully bit off, “it's hard for me too.” Bill doesn't understand what he was to you, Maggie had said. And what was he? Scully still falls asleep in Mulder’s bed at least once a week, and every time it feels like a failure. Something about coping, something about the stages of grief. She should know them by now. She’s had plenty of practice.
Now that he is gone it's like the end of a strange dream. After a decade of horror and wonder, in their parallel world of monsters and shapeshifters and ghosts, she has to return, alone and unwilling, to reality. And she has culture shock.
Out of the blue on a Saturday she gets a phone call from Chelsea English, an old friend of hers from college. Back when Scully was learning to slice up cadavers, Chelsea was getting married; Scully had gone up to Gaithersburg for her bridal shower, Ocean City for the wedding. Back when she was normal, a person with friends and a social life.
“I just thought I’d call and catch up!” Chelsea says brightly. Scully suspects her mother’s hand is at work here, but she’s always liked Chelsea, so she plays along.
But it's hard. She doesn't actually know how to be in the real world anymore, she makes people uncomfortable. She's grown accustomed to long silences and unanswerable questions. Chelsea regales her with stories from her work as a pharma rep, strange doctors and corrupt executives and questionable accounting practices, and Scully wants to say you have no idea. Everything she knows is caustic, unspeakable.
After ten minutes Chelsea hangs up with a half-hearted “we should grab a drink sometime,” and Scully is grateful for the quiet. They will not get a drink. Scully isn’t cruel enough to tell Chelsea about her own work, about the things that hide in the shadows, and she isn’t strong enough to listen to Chelsea talk about her sweet husband and their sweet children.
When she’d asked Mulder to be her donor, she’d done it with the expectation that she would be a single mother; she hadn’t felt like she could ask for anything more. So this will not be different from what she expected. It will just be different than what she had hoped. On weekend mornings he would make her coffee and scrambled eggs, and she had almost believed that he could be domesticated.
Every time she’d let him come inside her, in every motel room in every state in the goddamn country, she’d thought maybe, maybe.
This is what you wanted, her brain hums. This is everything you wished for.
She should have learned that wishes always come out wrong.
VI.
by the time “caddyshack" was over she’d sunk halfway into the couch cushions, her head on his shoulder and her right leg thrown casually across his knees. after a little bit of prodding he finally fessed up. scully imagined the djinn relieved of her burden, maybe on a beach somewhere. that's what she'd do, anyway. mulder could come, too. she’d love to see him on vacation.
grinning at him, she said, “that’s a generous wish. straight out of a fairy tale.”
he shrugged modestly. “yeah, well, the first one didn’t go so well. i figured you were probably right.”
“world peace was a little ambitious.” she raised her eyebrows at him. “but i’m sure you could have thought of something.”
she waited.
his beer was long empty, tipped over on the coffee table, so he grabbed her half-full bottle and took a swig.
“hey!” she protested.
he looked at her, his gaze electric. always, with him. “i had some ideas,” he said, “but then i realized—“
“hmm?”
she took the beer back from him and finished it. he watched her throat work as she swallowed the last of the shiner bock, the hunger in him obvious. once the bottle was empty she set it upright on the coffee table and, just for good measure, picked his up too. she was always cleaning up after him. sometimes it bothered her, but not tonight.
“you’re sitting on my couch,” he said, “and you sat through all of ‘caddyshack', and i get to do this.”
he leaned over and she closed her eyes, but he didn’t kiss her. she waited, and when her eyelids fluttered he whispered, “don’t open your eyes,” and she felt his shuddering voice everywhere.
she kept her eyes closed while his lips traced her eyebrows, her temple, her jaw. he undressed her, his hands slow and careful. they’d spent a lot of nights like this lately, but her body still responded like it was the first time, arcing into his touch.
"what would you have wished for, scully," he said. his breath was hot on her skin, and the muscles in her abdomen tensed, anticipating. what would she have wished for?
missy, she thought. absolution. fat-free ice cream that tasted like the real thing. selective memory. my father's approval. a raise. world fucking peace. a baby, a baby.
his fingers tracing circles on her concave belly, his tongue along the edge of her hip bone. all her sharp and hollow places. what did she wish for. her skin thrummed with it:
you. you. you.
later she curved her body against his. her eyelids were heavy, his skin smooth and warm. “i’m not just fairly happy,” she said, yawning against his chest, and he said, “i know.”
VII.
Scully doesn’t get phone calls in the middle of the night anymore, so when her landline rings at four-thirty a.m., she doesn’t answer.
The sound is insistent, though, and just before the machine picks it up she reaches out toward her nightstand. “Hello?”
There’s breathing on the other end of the line, and then an unfamiliar voice: “He’s alive.”
It’s impossible and she should know better, but she’s learned to believe in impossible things.
In fifteen seconds she’s out of bed, pulling on a pair of pants with one hand and dialing Skinner’s number with the other. It goes to voicemail. “Damn it,” she mutters, and dials again. And again.
On the fifth try he picks up and just says, “How—“
And she says “Where is he,” and five minutes later she’s on her way to Annapolis, rubbing sleep out of her eyes.
Part of her remembers that she’s seen men rise from the dead before. Gray-skinned or caked in dust, she remembers, all screaming and violence, and that part of her whispers don’t get your hopes up.
The larger part of her is aching with hope, can only hope. She is greedy for miracles. What’s one more, with everything she’s seen? All of the horror, all of the wonder.
She brushes past Doggett.
Time contracts to the space between each calibrated heartbeat. Doctors and agents move in and out of the hospital room, saying words that she can’t quite make out. Everything is sped up and slowed down. She doesn’t know how long she’s been here, but his hands are warm. She can’t process anything else.
It’s a high-risk pregnancy already and she is not supposed to do things like this: not supposed to stay up all night, not supposed to court stress, not supposed to spend days in hospital wards full of patients with mysterious infections. Not supposed to not supposed to not supposed to.
After Billy wakes up she is a blur in the hospital corridors. This is what she knows: making connections, interviewing patients, analyzing results. For the first time in three months she feels sharp. Connected. When Skinner pulls the plug she doesn’t feel it: just watches the numbers go up, go down. She’s making connections.
A blur. Time expands and she preps for surgery. He’s stable. His heart is beating and his blood - his blood is still red. When Doggett finds her she’s not angry at him. Can’t remember why she was. Mulder is alive; she hears the other doctors murmur miracle, and this is hers. It is five o’clock in the morning and he is stable, and he is hers.
Once he’s back in his room she doesn’t let herself think about the what-ifs, or how impossible this really is. Everything terrible could happen and probably will, or already has, but right now he is breathing on his own. His heart is beating on its own, and what else is there, what else is real in the universe.
Scully touches his face, the scars there.
What would you have wished for, he’d asked, and if he could still read minds he would just hear her saying, over and over: come back, come back, come back. Somewhere in the city of whispers and bargains the conspiracy is whispering, bargaining. This is not the last battle they’ll fight, but Scully has to believe they’ll fight the rest of them together. Somewhere outside the walls of the hospital, the sun is rising.
And then his fingers close around hers, and time stops. She stares at him.
His eyes open.