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“Go get some sleep.”
“All right.”
They don’t even bother with the pretense of separate rooms. If Skinner has a problem with it, she will tell him in no uncertain terms where he can stick his reprimand.
She doesn’t expect he will have a problem with it, though.
Mulder’s caught up with her by the time she reaches the motel room door. She steps to the side so he can unlock it, then walks into the room when he pushes the door open and ushers her through.
It’s still all so unbelievable -- the diary, the house. The first solid evidence of Samantha’s existence after 1973. The fact that she was alive, living across the country all that time… and with Jeffrey Spender, no less. That part may be the most unbelievable of all. How in the hell did they never make the connection? Surely Spender must have seen Samantha’s file, or her photo on Mulder’s desk… something. It would take a special kind of cruelty to put the pieces together and still not say anything, and whatever she may have thought of Spender, she never took him to be cruel.
In any event, now they have a lead, however tenuous. Samantha’s diary stopped in 1979, after she wrote about wanting to run away. There’s got to be something to go on, there.
She shrugs out of her jacket and hangs it on the chair next to his. Samantha’s diary is on the table, and she starts to reach for it, then stops.
“Mulder, do you mind if I take a look at this?”
He doesn’t bother turning around from where he’s rummaging in his overnight bag; he knows without looking what she’s asking about. “Go ahead.”
She picks up the diary, which feels oddly like some sort of sacred artifact, and finds herself blinking back unexpected tears. It seems so unfathomable that she could still be out there, somewhere, but at the same time, it’s hard not to feel a swell of hope, holding this concrete evidence of a Samantha beyond the 8 year-old who vanished. It’s a fleeting hope, however, quickly usurped by logic and worry; if this is just another dead end, she doesn’t know what it’s going to do to Mulder. Still, there is only one way to find out. Scully flips to the last entry and looks at the date.
October. That should give them a starting point at least. Tomorrow morning, they can check missing persons records, police reports, anything that might give them some clue as to where Samantha went after she left April Base.
She puts the diary back on the table, running a hand over the cover once more before turning away and starting to get ready for bed.
***
The TV’s tuned to some mindless sitcom, the volume turned down low. By all outward appearance, Mulder seems to be watching it, but Scully instead watches him; she can see the wheels turning in his head as he mentally chews over everything they’ve learned tonight. His gaze may be directed at the TV, but his mind is a million miles away. It’s hard to tell whether the tension in his posture is due to upset or excitement.
Scully sets aside her book -- she hasn’t read more than a few words since she opened it some twenty minutes earlier, anyway -- and reaches a hand up to gently knead at the base of his skull. Immediately he relaxes into her touch, his eyes slipping closed. Upset, then.
“Are you okay?”
He rubs his face, sighing. His words are muffled behind his hands. “I can’t stop thinking about my mom.” He drops his hands into his lap. “What if she knew? What if she knew all along where Samantha was?”
Scully frowns, her fingers stilling for a second before resuming their work. “I don’t believe that. Mulder, I can’t believe that any mother--”
“Harold Piller said she was here in this room. Afterward, there was a message on a notepad in my handwriting, a message that I didn’t consciously write. She somehow communicated with me on a spiritual level, to tell me the name of the place where we eventually found evidence that Samantha lived for years with someone my parents had known since before I was born.”
“That still doesn’t mean she knew. For one thing, you’ve got nothing to substantiate where the message came from. You’ve got Harold Piller claiming that it was your mother here, but do you know that for sure? And for another thing, even if it was her, what’s to say she didn’t learn of Samantha’s whereabouts until after she died?”
He chuckles, but there’s no mirth in it. “You don’t believe that, Scully.”
“Maybe not, but it’s no less believable than anything else I’ve seen tonight.” She stops rubbing his neck and lowers her hand. “What I still can’t get over is the fact that Agent Spender never said anything. He knew about your sister’s case. It seems impossible that he didn’t connect the dots.”
“Yeah, I thought about that, too. And not just him, but Cassandra Spender as well. In all our interactions, she never mentioned fostering a little girl for six years, a little girl who was brought to her under mysterious circumstances, with no memory of her life before then. And given the entries in Samantha’s journal, Cassandra had to have known about the continued testing, had to have made the connection to her own abduction experiences. For her to have never even mentioned it in passing… it just doesn’t make sense.”
Scully’s stomach drops, and she sucks in a breath. She’d forgotten all about Cassandra. God, how could she have forgotten about Cassandra?
“So do you… do you think the diary could be a fake? That Samantha was never really there at all?”
He shakes his head. “No. I did consider that, but… look, I know we’ve seen a lot of elaborate hoaxes. But I can’t see a motive for something like this. It’s too needlessly complicated. No, I think the answer is actually right there in the diary itself.” He shifts to look at her directly. “If whoever took her had the capability to erase Samantha’s memories of her early childhood, then it stands to reason that the most likely explanation is that both Cassandra and Jeffrey Spender’s memories of Samantha were also taken from them after she ran away.”
She’s not sure that qualifies as “the most likely explanation,” but it’s an explanation, at least. Still, it could all have been an elaborate setup. Harold Piller, coached to lead Mulder to a house with planted evidence. CGB Spender, breaking into her house to tell her to stop looking, knowing that would only fuel Mulder’s curiosity further. All calculated to prey on a grieving man and maybe push him to a breaking point.
“I know you don’t want me to get my hopes up, Scully. Believe me, I’m trying to keep my eyes open and see the bigger picture here. But I can’t ignore the possibility that she’s still out there. I can’t.”
“I know, Mulder. And I wouldn’t dream of asking you to.” She sighs. “I just don’t want to see you get hurt.”
He kisses her instead of answering. As avoidance techniques go, he could certainly do worse.
His hand comes up to cup her jaw, his thumb slowly tracing back and forth across her cheekbone. There is a tenderness to the touch, even as the heat builds between them. The kiss rapidly deepens, his lips and tongue becoming more demanding as the emotional roller coaster of the past week coalesces into desire. He needs to lose himself in her, and he telegraphs this need without words, but with perfect clarity nonetheless.
She may not be able to fully block out the rest of the world for him, but she can certainly try. Scully pushes the blankets aside and swings one leg over both of his, settling herself on his lap without breaking the kiss. Her hands come to his shoulders, while his slide under her shirt to trace searing paths across her back. His mouth pops off hers with a gasped intake of breath, and he pushes her shirt up and off. The cool air in the room hits the places where his hands had just warmed her moments earlier, and the sharp contrast makes her shiver.
Something seems to snap inside him, and suddenly he’s everywhere at once, his hands and mouth in constant motion across her skin. Every touch conveys a want so powerful that it’s impossible to not be swept up by it. His racing heart thuds under her palms, and her own breath starts to come faster in response. When he sucks particularly hard at a spot just under her collarbone, her head falls back as she arches against the pressure, her eyes slipping closed and a soft moan escaping her.
She thought she wouldn’t be able to block out the world for him, yet here she is, completely at a loss to focus on anything beyond the nerve endings firing in answer to his touch.
His arm wraps tightly around her waist, and he flips them in one fluid motion, sitting back on his heels only long enough to tug his shirt off by the collar and fling it to the side before coming back to hover over her. There’s a sensation of being enveloped by him, of being completely surrounded by the smell and feel of him, by the heat radiating off his bare chest. The intensity of his gaze, meanwhile, warms her from the inside out, and she finds herself holding her breath until he blinks and captures her mouth with his once more. Like an automatic feedback loop, the emotion he pours into the kiss only amplifies her own, which she broadcasts right back to him, as they spin each other higher and higher. By the time they are indelicately shoving down pajama pants and kicking them away under the covers, his breathing is ragged, and she is barely holding herself back from the edge.
This is not a time for finesse. There is a neediness to the coupling, something almost primal as they build toward a release that is as much emotional as it is physical. When they find it, in tandem, her heart feels barely contained within her chest. He collapses sweat-slick beside her, and it is a long time before her pulse slows back to a normal rate.
***
Some time later, Mulder draws her back securely against his chest and rests his chin on her shoulder with a sigh.
“Thanks for that,” he murmurs. “Sorry if I got a little carried away.”
She smirks into the dark. “Did I somehow give you the impression I wasn't enjoying myself?”
“Well, no, but…” He runs his fingers absently over the ridge of her clavicle. “I mean, I'm not sixteen. I should be capable of enough restraint to keep from, you know… giving you a hickey.”
Ah, that. She chuckles. “As long as I'm not at risk of showing them off at work, I don't actually mind.” She reaches back and squeezes his hip. “Not that I’m advocating constant bruising, but there's nothing wrong with getting a little carried away sometimes.”
He responds by tightening his arm around her and pressing a kiss to her shoulder. He’s quiet for so long that she thinks he’s fallen asleep, but he eventually breaks the silence with a whispered, “I really love you a lot, you know.”
“Mm, I’d suspected as much, yes.” She smiles, not needing to see his face to know exactly the mock-affronted expression that’s on it right now, then turns her head to kiss him in reassurance. “I really love you a lot, too.”
***
She slips out of bed before dawn has even broken, her circadian rhythm still running on Eastern Standard Time. Not wanting to wake Mulder so early, she foregoes a shower and dresses as quietly as possible. The dark bruise on her chest is not the only mark he left on her last night, and she sends up a silent prayer of thanks that the shirt she packed will conceal them. After brushing her teeth and hair, she leaves a note for him, folding the paper and propping it beside the telephone.
Gone to see what I can find in the historical records. Call me when you’re up.
- D
A quick breakfast of coffee and toast at the hotel diner fortifies her against the early morning chill. The sun is just coming up as she pulls her rental car out of the parking lot and heads for the local sheriff's office.
