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Damn him.
Damn him to hell and back.
He'd done it again. One look, one stupid plea and off she went. Dana Scully the Fucking Idiot (God, he even had her thinking in capitalizations) marched merrily off to do the autopsy that she'd told him she wouldn't do, followed him to Illinois and back--twice, dealt with an exceptionally cranky Skinner, and still rushed in to save the Fucking Day.
Well, this was it. The last time. It was time to call a halt to this little charade.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
"Folie a deux."
She'd meant it, of course. There was no longer any question whatsoever that one of them belonged in a mental institution. The only problem was that they'd let Mulder out, and she was relatively certain that she still sounded too lucid to convince them that she actually needed to be strapped to a bed and pumped full of thorazine for 6 or 7 months.
You know you're in trouble when a long stay in a mental institution begins to sound like a much needed and much deserved break.
Jesus. What had she seen in that room?
There had been, she had no doubt, an intruder in Mulder's room. The broken glass, the odd indentations on the lawn were not simply figments of her and Mulder's shared fantasies...but what exactly did they prove? Despite the fact that she knew she'd shot and hit the person, thing, whatever it was...there had been a distressing lack of trace evidence such as blood trails. So she was left with what? Her own perception, which she could no longer completely trust, and the ravings of someone who'd been sedated not that much earlier.
Mulder's hospital room had been dark; she hadn't lied to Skinner about that. And there was that curtain, and the movement of the shadows from the trees outside Mulder's window...but she was left with the knowledge and memory that, for a moment, she'd seen a monster. Something out of the darkness and terror of childhood and fantasy. She could almost dismiss that moment. Almost.
But then there was what she'd seen at the nurses' station--something that could only be described as a zombie. But did she really? Or did the moment when she looked at the nurse, and saw something else entirely, something that propelled her down that hall just in time to save Mulder, simply mark the moment she finally fell over the edge into the twilight zone of Mulder's mind?
Was it really such a long way to fall?
She'd known for a long time that her perceptions of the world had radically altered. Had altered in ways that were past documenting, or analyzing, or even noting. She knew that the eyes through which she saw the world saw things in a different way now. A different light.
It had been a gradual change. Like a person developing glaucoma, or walking through increasingly dense fog. When she first met Mulder, she'd seen things so clearly. She'd understood the world in clear, rational terms. There were explanations for phenomena, sometimes as yet not fully-understood, but there were explanations that could be formulated in the precise language of science in which she was so fluent.
If you look through the lenses of a microscope long enough, and fine tune the focus, the field will swim into view, and you will see clearly the image of thing that you are studying. You will recognize it, compare it against the known catalog of science, identify it.
The lenses of her perception, though, began to crack almost from the beginning. Began to cloud, lose the ability to focus. Even in moments when she saw clearly, it was troubling--her identification felt like it lost its precision, her catalog had to be thrown away and rewritten. She thought that she was getting lost in a haze of cigarette smoke and imprecise refractions.
There were moments, though, when what really worried her was that she now thought she saw more clearly than before she'd ever met Mulder, before the X-files. That it was almost as though the smoke had cleared.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
"You keep saying 'I.' I heard 'we'."
They had come so far, but they had gone nowhere at all. Mulder still obviously believed that it was him against the world, and evidently the last five years of their partnership had meant nothing at all. He claimed to be trying to spare her an unnecessary trip for a worthless case, but there was so much more to his unilateral decision than that. Something else that was driving him away from her, outward on a journey that he didn't have to make on his own, that he hadn't had to make on his own for five years.
If only she know what it was--what compulsion to solitude drove him. What she still had left to do to prove to him that they were so much better as a "we" than as individual "I's." Even Skinner knew it.
Jesus. Skinner.
This little series of escapades of Mulder's had probably just cost her whatever remaining credibility she'd ever had with their boss. Very little in an agent's life looks worse than having absolutely no idea where your partner is, nor what he's doing. Ever since the Roche case, Skinner had made it crystal clear, in that subtle, glare-at-you-until-you-get-the-wordless-message way of his, that he expected her to keep tabs on Mulder--if not actually keep him in line.
She was more than aware that she managed to do this successfully only part of the time. She should have resented the hell out of Skinner for implying that Mulder needed a keeper, and that she was just crazy enough to qualify for the job. Instead, she'd felt somehow that Skinner had simply acknowledged a truth that others were too stupid to see. She and Mulder belonged together on a visceral level that couldn't be explained, but that needed recognition.
Still, she didn't ever want to have to live through another session with Skinner like that last go around.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
"You're my one in five billion."
That bastard. The whole fucking world revolved around him, didn't it? But give him his due...the line had certainly worked. She'd gone off and checked for the bites or whatever they were on the back of the victim's neck. He'd been correct. But that really, really wasn't the point at all. The point was that one more time he'd played her exactly right. Played her for the fucking, mindless fool she periodically became around him. The man behind the curtain--that was Mulder.
When had she become so easy to manipulate?
She had to give him credit, though. She could hardly feel him pulling the strings at all. There were moments when it still felt like she had free will.
She did. And she was about to exercise it.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
It had been several weeks since the Marty Glenn case. Several weeks since she'd given in to some odd compulsion and picked him up at Union Station and taken him home.
The confrontation in his apartment had surprised her. Both by the fact that she'd very nearly betrayed herself, and by his unexpected insistence on forcing her to answer his question about how he saw her.
Only Mulder. Only Mulder would ask her to evaluate how he saw her.
And she'd answered him.
Forced into a corner by his questioning, she'd told him that she didn't hate the way he saw her. But that had been partly a lie, hadn't it? She did hate the way he saw her some days--narrow-minded, tense, unyielding, difficult. She had no illusions that there weren't days when Mulder really wanted to strangle her. Hell, the feeling was mutual. Absolutely no one could move her to stone cold fury the way Mulder could.
Sometimes she felt that Mulder forced her into the role of the skeptic simply because he only recognized himself in the obverse. That he needed her opposition to validate his own position as the Outsider and Misunderstood One. That he sometimes only saw in them the eternal yin and yang, existing only to balance and oppose the other.
But the flip side of all that was that Mulder also saw in her possibilities that no one else did. Mulder believed in her, and sometimes even remembered that he believed in them, too. Believed that together they were a force to be reckoned with--that they together were a truth of their own.
Them.
She wasn't sure, after this evening, if there really would still be a them.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Standing outside his apartment door, she knew with a cold certainty that she'd made a mistake, but she'd already knocked, and heard him moving to answer.
"Scully."
She'd only marginally surprised him, she realized, as he stood aside, silently inviting her in. He seemed to have almost been expecting her.
His apartment was dark -- lit only by the reflected lights of passing cars and the streetlamp outside his window. He hadn't been sleeping, she thought, and wondered only briefly what he'd been doing.
Still mired in the realization that she shouldn't be here at all, and at the same time knowing that they'd been heading for this confrontation ever since that last night she'd been here -- the night she'd brought him home after the Marty Glenn case -- she drew a deep breath and plunged into the icy water.
"It's over, Mulder."
His gasp, as he too was pulled beneath the frigid waters of the sea, was the only movement in the closed room.
He surfaced first, though. His voice was completely uninflected, as though he were speaking across a long distance and wanted to make sure that none of the syllables were lost. "What do you mean?"
"I mean that I can't do this anymore. I can't continue to play in this game whose rules you won't tell me, and which, apparently I can never win."
He was adrift, she could see, trying desperately to get his bearings, to find the lights on the shore that would guide him back to safe harbor. She had no words to tell him that there would be no one waiting on the shore this time.
"Scully? What are you talking about? I'm sorry...." he broke off, seeming to know that he owed her an apology, but not sure for what. He kept trying though, she noted with a certain grim amusement. His voice was so soft. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have pulled that thing with the autopsy, and I should have told you I was going back to Illinois."
"That's two for two, Mulder, but you left out the big one. You should have....we should have gone to Illinois together in the first place. We're partners, or at least we were." She left the implied threat hanging in the air, as she moved past him, deeper into his living room, finally coming to rest at the far end. She turned back to look at him, and then turned to look out the window. The same window that he'd used to avoid her gaze not so many nights past.
In the night black glass, she could see him still standing behind her. Caught in a mirror that reflected them back to each other like faint echoes of reality.
"I thought it was nothing....I didn't want to waste your time. Just because we're partners doesn't mean we have to be joined at the hip."
She didn't turn around. "What is that supposed to mean, Mulder? I never asked to be with you every moment of every day, just on cases where both our judgements are necessary."
She was surprised at the sudden flare of anger from him--even in reflection she could see his eyes blaze. His fury arced dangerously between them. "That's a bit much coming from you, don't you think? You've certainly proved yourself capable of taking off on your own when it suited you. What about that case with the girls and the seraphim?" Apparently they would be playing this round with no gloves and no rules.
She shut her eyes against his reflected glare. Damn him. Damn him for bringing up a point which was only too fair. Only too rawly honest. Or was it? She was losing track of her bearings as well.
She felt movement behind her, and was startled when he spoke again, his voice hot in her ear, a near whisper. Intimate, longing. "What's this really all about, Scully?" She could feel the heat of his body eddying around her, distracting her, pulling her. But he didn't touch her.
A shiver whose origins she decided to ignore coursed down her spine. She resolutely looked down at the floor, absently noting the pieces of paper scattered at her feet.
"I can't keep doing this." Her voice was lowered to a whisper to match his. There were so many things that needed discussing, so many issues that lay between them, both separating and binding them to each other. The net of shared history and disagreements and understanding that they had woven together had supported them, but also hindered them. It was time to simply cut the knots in a single stroke.
He had bound her to him by so many cords -- passion, shared sense of justice, friendship, partnership, common enemies. But now, finally, she was left standing alone on a shore. Stranded there by Mulder and his refusal to accept her fully into his life and his quest. They had come so close, the two of them. They had faced the conspiracy together--united, strong -- many times. And then, every time, Mulder would turn and do something like take off on a case on his own.
It had to stop. For her sake and his. She only wished that she could find the path that would lead her out of this tangle. The way clear.
"You don't need me."
Instantly he protested. "Of course I do. How could you even..."
She cut him off sharply, still looking at the floor, still fighting her way clear. "If you needed me, if you trusted me, if you believed in our partnership, you wouldn't keep doing these things."
She could feel him shift restlessly behind her, but his voice was level. Dangerously calm. "Scully, you don't mean that. You're just mad about my taking off on you."
She knew she was being brutally unfair, but she had to take an extreme tack. Had to get out into the open before he caught her, could change her mind. She searched for a way to convince him, and herself.
She brought her head back up to meet his gaze in the windowpane. "I lied to you." She felt him stiffen, but there was no other reaction.
"I do hate the way you see me sometimes." She could see the ghost-reflected image of Mulder begin to raise an arm, as though to touch her, to turn her around, but the hand dropped again without bridging the gap. He simply waited, his gaze beseeching. She had managed to shock him, she realized.
"Like this last case. You didn't even see in me the possibility of an ally until you needed something--that autopsy. I'm not your lackey, Mulder," she brought up her hand to ward off the protest she knew was coming, "I'm your partner..." The word hovered uncomfortably in the thick air for moment, before she continued.
"And sometimes I'm just not sure what that means to you....or to me anymore. So maybe we shouldn't keep trying. Maybe we should just stop."
Time ceased. She was quite sure that neither of them was breathing anymore. There was nothing in the world but their eyes, and their
tangled gaze.
Eons later, he brought his hand up, muscles straining with the effort of moving those inches, and touched her shoulder, finally settling with a gentle touch that threatened to tear her asunder, and turned her to face him.
Now, meeting his gaze face-to-face, without the distortion of the window's reflection, she could see the full weight of his confusion and sorrow. She wondered what he read in her eyes.
"That you are my partner means everything, Scully. You are my one in five billion." Somehow the tone was both the same and different. This time she heard the underlying self-mockery and fear, and surprise. Surprise that there was, after all, anyone who saw him clearly enough to believe. To stand by him. This time the words didn't sting so much.
"I know it's hard to believe sometimes. I know I'm hard to believe sometimes. But I count on you to see me, Scully. I count on you to be there, even when you're not there. I have to hope and believe that you also count on me. Rely on the knowledge that I'm always there for you."
It was growing impossible to ignore his physical proximity. His scent and heat wrapped around her, soothing her, grounding her, until an unlooked-for white-hot awareness shot through her concentration, distracting her with dark promises. She drew a quick breath and stepped back--not so far that he would think she was retreating, but far enough to regain her precious distance.
Mulder blinked, aware that something had shifted, but still lost in his own need to reach her.
"How can you hate the way I see you, Scully?" And in his voice she heard so many other questions; questions she couldn't begin to deal with in her fatigue, and sorrow and anger.
"Because sometimes I think you don't see me at all. Sometimes I think you only see me as an imperfect reflection of you, your balance, your opposition. I am more than just the skeptic who exists to prove your own viewpoints....." she trailed off because the most difficult thing was left to say. He seemed to sense that she wasn't done yet, because he was uncharacteristically patient in waiting for her to go on.
"And it makes it so much harder, then, when you do see me clearly." She stopped, aware that her breathing had grown ragged, and that she was straying into waters that she had long ago recognized would drown her.
He was so still that when he finally moved it seemed as if he was wrenching his shape out of the very air that surrounded him. He approached, but stopped just short of their former closeness. He was a cipher. Blank. Unreadable.
"I always see you clearly." Something in his eyes shifted--deeper than she'd ever seen before. "Sometimes I think you are the only thing in the world that I can see." There was a danger in his voice, but she was no longer sure if the danger was from him or in her reaction to him.
"What do you see when you look at me, Scully? What do you see when you look at us?" Now she knew where the danger lay, but it was too late, she was already caught in the undertow, being dragged out to sea. And so she waited until she had caught her breath; searched her flailing mind for the right words. She needed to find the words that would reveal the shape of her truth, but not betray herself.
"I see in you a promise, Mulder.... A promise of an end to the madness we seem to be caught in, a promise of answers to what seem unanswerable questions, a promise of... hope."
His voice was a lifeline, or the rope that would tangle her and drown her forever. "What other promises do you see?" Oh Mulder, don't ask that. I have no answers. I have no strength to fight this anymore.
She surrendered to the tides. Her mistake had been in longing for the surety of land.
"I see the promise of a future." It wasn't over. She could never have left him, left this promise.
His eyes flared again, and the warmth and hope in them nearly shattered her.
"I do, too, you know. I always have."
Still he didn't touch her.
And so at last she was the one who moved forward again, and once more she brushed her hand across his eyes, which shut in obedience to her touch. This time she lingered and touched the side of his face, before dropping her hand to her side again.
She was moving toward the door when his voice stopped her. "Where does this leave us, Scully?"
She didn't turn around. "Everywhere and nowhere, I suppose." She was so tired.
And then he was behind her, turning her around to meet eyes that asked for everything and nothing.
"Stay." He was asking something else entirely, but it was the only way he had to ask it.
"No." But he heard and understood the underlying 'yes.' Yes, I am still your partner. Yes, there will be more, but not now, not now.
He watched her for another moment and then smiled--his eyes so clear they actually hurt her. She merely looked at him and nodded, surprised to feel the tiniest of smiles tugging at her lips.
And now he brushed his hand over her eyes, and then unable, it seemed, to stop himself, he gathered her against his body for long embrace that made no threats, but promised something she'd forgotten she even wanted.
She knew he could feel her trembling, but he said nothing, simply held her.
Finally she pulled away, and headed for the door again. His voice followed her into the hall. "Tomorrow?"
Yes. She thought to herself. Yes.