Chapter Text
On a Saturday morning, Fox Mulder likes to sleep in as much as he can. He never gets very far, considering it a win when the sun wakes him up and not his own jackass internal clock. The rest of the day after that is spent waiting for it to be Sunday. On Sunday, he waits for it to be Monday.
But he’s got a sweet deal with this new bed of his, and he hadn’t even lited it off a curb. He’s been getting more sleep. A ton of sleep. The best sleep he’s ever had. Life is so much easier to deal with when he’s not living it.
He recognizes the signs of a slow, deep depression settling in. Shit’s been steadily descending since the fire cooled at El Rico airbase, but it goes further than that, he thinks – all the way back to the ice. There’s a timer set for the extinction of the human race, and it takes every shred of his energy just to knock it back a few seconds. How long can they keep slapping the snooze button on armageddon?
How long can he keep trying to solve problems that are too big for him?
Maladaptive daydreaming takes him there. Warm happy thoughts. No guilt. Nothing to fumble an apology for. Hit the snooze button, drag Scully under the covers. Let the end of the world happen while they finally get some fucking sleep. If the sky were falling he could maybe bring himself to hold her, and she could maybe bring herself to let him.
The phone wakes him on a Saturday morning. Scully’s been working late or working early, he can never tell, and when it’s not absolutely vital it’s been increasingly harder to reach her.
She tells him she’s coming over with autopsy results. He rubs his fist over his mouth and rolls over, grunting, to catch the time on his digital clock: eight in the morning. Not bad, not bad at all.
There’s only time to pull on some jeans and a t-shirt and to stick a toothbrush in his mouth before she arrives, showered, chipper, all suited up.
She is – she seems content. Talkative. Asking questions about his reclusive neighbor that he brushes off; the guy’s a creep, but a quiet one with no discernible odor, and there’s nothing more to say. Her good mood puts him off balance. He swallows his toothpaste, tosses the toothbrush on the coffee table and takes a swig of his coffee. Eugh. It’s disgusting, but he drinks until all the paste dissolves from his tongue.
Flipping through the results, he thinks about the inherent brutality of a cleanly sliced wound. That sort of delicacy and precision hinted at a lot of things – a medical background, thoughtful premeditation, and the killer’s unmitigated control over their actions.
But where the hell is the wound?
What is going on here?
Her dropping by his apartment, he’d realized as soon as he let her in, is as close to a truce as they are going to get. She is willfully inhabiting his space and fighting back when he chooses to drop the bullshit and say exactly how he feels; what other explanation can she possibly provide, if not psychic surgery? His conciliatory approach as of the last few months only succeeded in pissing her off even more. Everything he does succeeds in pissing her off – except, apparently, arguing against her every word.
It’s a toss-up. No one ever has just one feeling. Why the hell can’t you just accept my theory for once? I missed this so much I could weep, Scully.
He misses her at the crime scene, too. Seven in the morning, a gray, chilly traipse through the Virginia forest, a young lover who’d had his heart ripped out. He can’t explain anything to anyone, and he doesn’t have his trusty skeptic around to pacify the local P.D. as he boldly proclaims what he knows to be extreme alternative medicine. But she’s in his office when he calls. He doesn’t think about the possibility of her sitting in his chair, or spreading out her work on the side table like she used to.
There’s nothing for him to do at the crime scene, he double checks, so he follows her lead to the basement. It’s a quick drive back, and when she tells him about the charm, he deduces, just as quickly, that it’s nothing, stomping down his annoyance at her sudden urge to play profiler. A killer who doesn’t dare leave a scratch on his victim wouldn’t suddenly find it in himself to taunt the guy trying to catch his ass.
“A secret admirer,” he throws out, and he wants it to be flirty, craves that natural rapport, that playfulness, any sign at all that sanity has been restored to their partnership. But for a moment he believes himself. Someone’s hitting on Scully. This is worst possible time for that to be happening. The joke falls flat. Neither of them find it funny.
But there’s work to be done, anyway. “You’ve got a 9:00 a.m. with the D.C. medical examiner. He’s going to let you autopsy the latest victim.” He slips the envelope with the charm out of her hand. By the time he sees her face, takes note of her supreme offense, it’s too late. All of her walls are back up.
“Thank you for making my schedule, but I think I’m going to have to be late for that appointment.”
She shows up at the bay at 10:05. He feels, ridiculously, depressingly stood up. And dead wrong, to boot, because the more he thinks about it, the more likely it is that the charm has everything to do with the murders. He screwed up. Was there ever a second chance he didn’t obliterate?
And when she arrives, so solemn, so disappointed with herself and the turn of events, bowling him over with everything she’s learned about his fucking stalker, hermit neighbor, his blood pressure rises, and he clenches his fists at his sides.
She’s disturbed, visibly shaken, and… he swallows the huge lump forming in his throat. He doesn’t reach out to comfort her. His gut is a cauldron of bad feelings. He’s afraid for her, and of her, for a reason he can’t pinpoint. There’s something off about her reaction to all of this. Maybe it’s how quickly she dismissed her own theory.
Ever since he’d told her he loved her – for real, this time, with all of the intent and the hope and the despair he knew would come with that declaration – every second he’s spent with her is paired with the anxiety of accidental indecent exposure. Trapped with his dick out and his heart on his sleeve under her scrutinizing, unforgiving gaze, making every wrong move possible. The fucking audacity of this guy to believe he knows the first thing about Dana Scully.
He’s trying it out her way now, and by that he means the scientific method, when all he wants to do is shake her until she gives in. Keeping Scully with him is becoming a hard, unforgiving science, one that involves a lot of experimenting, a careful tweaking of methodology. He never knows what she is feeling now, except that it some sort of bad. Oh, that is humbling. That could do his knees in. Anyone might say what they want about the carelessness with which he treats most people, but he has never wanted to hurt anyone. Well, hurt anyone who hadn’t deserved it. Well, he has never, ever wanted to hurt Scully.
It had not come to him in a single epiphany, that he loves her; it had been a slew of them, like getting the crapped kicked out him at least once a year. A right-on-schedule, beg-for-his-life ass beating that temporarily shoves him to his knees, and he’s been humbled repeatedly by the volatility of his feelings and the ineludible nature of them.
They are not soley reserved for his visits to her hospital bed. He’s almost died a thousand times, and his final thoughts are not always of her. That’s not his fault. Sometimes you crave a Big Mac when you’re lipping the barrel of someone else’s gun and there is nothing you can do about that. He’s loved her nearly dead and he’s loved her undeniably alive, and he’s loved her in that listless space in between – where they have both suffered, where they have both been damaged irreparably. And he’s failed her, irreparably, or so he’s finally beginning to believe.
He knows what it looks like. He’s not an idiot.
It’s not that he needs to lose her to love her.
It’s just that it never seemed worth bringing up until recently.
His neighbor is the killer. The rest of his night will consist of mail fraud and a little careful surveillance. If by some inconceivable circumstance he is wrong – and he is not – he can at least gather enough information on the guy to make him back the hell off.
Having a plan doesn’t make him feel any better. The air is swollen and sick with tension, and eventually something’s going to snap.
He is losing Scully.
It’s a recent development, this occasional belief he might be worthy of some companionship. That someone might want to be his goddamned friend. He’s not sure when it started –
I wouldn’t put my career on the line for anyone but you, Mulder –
I wouldn’t change a day –
– but somewhere along the line he grew some expectations. Some hopes. More than friendship. More than love. Need. A painful, soul-consuming need.
Christ.
He is losing Scully.
—————
She often does her best work on autopilot, her scalpel sinking into bloated flesh like one might sink into a daydream. Her findings are unambiguous; the method of killing an exact match for the method of their killer. She dictates it all into her recorder and works all of the details out of body until there’s nothing else to find, all the while she is thinking of events of the day. Dismissal, derision, delusion. Ridding herself of her scrubs and latex gloves, her eyes catch on her jacket hanging from the coat stand. Her fingers slip into her pocket and pull out the milagro.
Holding it, she’s filled with the uncontrollable urge to watch her back, and unease floods her to her core. She’s flattered, and decently ashamed of that. She remembers her admirer’s unceasing stare, how his gaze had felt like a physical touch. But she is sickened, too. She had asked to be heard, she had asked for attention to be laid upon her, to be understood and to be valued, but not by some stranger, and certainly not by someone who never even bothered to say hello before he got to know her.
Images unbidden float into her mind, her nerves ablaze with phantom sensation. The writer’s hand gliding over her body, caressing and squeezing her, the bristle and scratch of his facial hair against her sensitive skin.
They make her want to throw up.
But it is nice to not think about Mulder for awhile. A miracle, really.