#fitp

The yearning is back. 

Which is absolutely ridiculous. Scully knows she is allowed to touch Mulder now, to run her nails lightly down his arms and play with his hair and press her lips to his. But instead, here she sits, in the self-imposed solitude of her green chair while the man she wants so dearly lays stretched out across the couch, broad chest calling for her to lay her head on. 

She wants, wants, wants. Something is reaching out towards him through a hole punched in her chest, but something else, something stronger is pulling it back. 

Because Scully can’t let herself taint him. Can't let him lose someone else he holds dear. To cling onto him right now would be cruel. 

What holds her to her chair is guilt. It's fear. It's love. 

Scully turns back to JAMA and tries to tune out both Mulder’s documentary and the familiar scream for affection looping through her mind. 

***

When Mulder sneaks a peek at Scully, she’s staring out the skylight that leads up to the courtyard. It's started raining, not hard enough to flood the winding road they have to take home, but enough to produce a calming pitter patter as the drops hit the glass above them. He just watched her for a second, smiling up at the storm as if the ability to watch it is a gift. To her, he supposes, it probably is. 

Her eyes glide over to him, catching how he gazed at her, and she stands up. “Come with me, Mulder.”

She’s said those words a lot, recently, but not in this context. She’s asked him to orgasm beside her, but not to trail her through a door on an adventure. 

He follows her, as he always does, out the office door and through the pale walls of a labyrinth they’ve both memorized to exit into the courtyard. Scully bursts out ahead of him, stepping into the storm to let the sky weep onto her skin. 

Mulder removes his jacket and lays it on a covered bench before following her, anticipating that she’ll be shivering by the time they make it back inside. When he steps out into the rain, it all feels so familiar. It feels like four years ago. He longs to see the same bright smile that bloomed across her face that first night in Oregon, but he sometimes fears she left it in a motel room or a doctor’s office months ago.

Instead of dwelling on it, Mulder takes her into his arms like he yearned to the last time they were in the rain like this, and has every day since. Her face is tucked into his chest, and his body swallows hers whole. 

When he pulls away, by some miracle, there is that smile. the bright, open one he hasn’t seen in months.

They sway to a melody made by the sound of rain on concrete. They never got a first dance, not a formal one.

This could be your last .

That voice has been cruel, the past couple months. It slithers its way into his mind to distract him from every fleeting moment of positivity to tell him it could be her last meal, her last time climbing into the passenger seat beside him, the last time she slips the chain that carries her wedding ring while he watches her in the mirror. 

Mulder shakes it off, pressing her closer by the small of her back. He won’t let that fear steal this moment from him. 

***

Mulder has no earthly idea why imaging would require Scully to stay at the hospital overnight, but it has. He lays alone in their bed, her empty pillow screaming at him as he stares at the rippling sheer curtains, dancing as the vent below them blasts warm air. 

He changed the thermostat, he realizes. It had been cooler than she prefers when he had gotten home, and he turned it up on reflex to accommodate her preference. But she’s not here, so he could have kept it at the cooler temperature he finds comfortable. When he runs the evening back in his head, he’d put his coat on his own hook, leaving hers open. He had pulled her usual chair out for her on reflex and hadn’t noticed. Scully’s presence is woven into his routine. She’s a part of him.

This is a practice run, he realizes. In days or weeks or months, he will be living in their home completely alone. 

Tomorrow morning, he will roll out of a cold bed, make breakfast for one, and not be reminded to make sure his socks match. He will walk into Skinner’s office without the click clack of heels following him, and he will sit next to a chair occupied by emptiness. 

For now, tonight is just a lonely, sleepless night. That, at least, is familiar. 

***

Dana has a will. She has for years; it’s a requirement for field agents. She would have set one even if it wasn’t; her job is dangerous, and she has heard enough horror stories about people's wishes being betrayed after their passing. She wouldn’t have that. 

He's been listed as her healthcare proxy since before they were even married. She had changed it not long after she returned from her disappearance. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust her mother with such a weighty task, but the change felt right. Mulder knew more about their work, and she knew that if a case were to affect her health, he would be able to take that information into account when deciding what was best. Mulder had seen every side of her, but Dana had kept Agent Scully hidden away from her mother. 

When she had Mulder sign as a witness when updating her living will, she hadn’t told him that she had altered her last will and testament as well. She had gotten the feeling that he hadn’t wanted to discuss the possibility of her death any further than signing her DNR. She respected that. So she hadn’t told him that, in the event of her death, some of her money would go to Doctors Without Borders, some set aside for her after-death care, and the rest would be left to him. Even six feet under, Scully would be caring for him as much as possible. 

***

The thing about getting diagnosed with cancer shortly after confessing your undying love to the man you’ve been married to for a year is that a lot of things change very quickly. And Scully can’t tell what has changed because Mulder can love her openly now, at least at home, and what has changed because he only gets to do so for a short time.

She tries not to autopsy a relationship that is still alive, but her medical instincts call the two changes comorbidities. They mingle together to create change to the point where it is difficult to tell what is causing which symptoms. 

For example, she and Mulder lay out on the floor of a bowling lane with their shoulders brushing as they often do in the field, as they have since before they were even married. This time, instead of savoring the contact of their coats, Mulder pulls her into his body under the guise of helping her see the message carved into the varnish. To be fair, it does help her see the evidence, but the contact wasn’t strictly necessary. 

It’s not that she doesn’t want Mulder’s touch. Deep down, she does. But there are layers over that desire attempting to shield him from any kind of pain, even if that pain is her. 

She doesn’t like this case, the haunting feeling that this will be the last one they work together, the sense of teetering on the edge of change that permeates the air between them. And she is certainly leaving plenty of air between them.

She tries to pin down the finality of it all. Plenty of their cases bring her close to Death, she dances with Her from a distance on every case and puts her hands inside Her with every autopsy, but never has she felt Death has been in the room with her. 

It hits her when she starts seeing things. Her nose is bleeding and she is as close to Death as she’s ever been when she sees the words “SHE IS ME” splashed across the mirror in blood she's sure must have come from her own veins. It’s not until she sees the woman — just a girl, really — around the corner with her throat freshly cut that she considers the blood might not be her own. 

But Mulder follows her, like he always has and always will. His voice snaps her out of it, pulls her back to reality so she can see that the mirror is clear and the bathroom is empty. It’s all just a reminder of her own mortality, of the worsening state of her cancer causing new, scarier symptoms. 

And for the moment between when Mulder knocks and when he speaks, that’s all she thinks it is. A hallucination brought on by her worsening condition, exacerbated by the details of the case. But when he describes the victim as the figure she just saw across the bathroom, a flash of maybe crosses her mind. Maybe it is something… Mulder-y. Something he would believe, that she should staunchly deny. But it’s still a phenomenon she can neither comprehend nor explain.

By the time she’s staring Lauren Heller’s corpse in the face, she’s decided again that it is simply a new symptom of her cancer. She had probably walked past Lauren around town at some point, and her mind had latched onto her face and used it to create a visual nightmare for her. It had just been a coincidence that the woman's body had been found around the same time Scully hallucinated her in the bathroom. A mere coincidence. 

Or maybe , a twisted version of Mulder says in her mind, you are now closer to the dead than you’ve ever been. Maybe they’re welcoming you. 

She wonders if Mulder will see her ghost when she is gone. She doesn’t believe she would actually haunt this plane, of course, but Mulder might think she would. He might feel the draft in the bedroom that they still haven’t fixed and call it her presence; he might brush something off the bathroom counter without realizing and convince himself that it’s Scully calling out to him. 

When Scully tells Mulder she’s going to see a doctor about her nosebleed, she doesn’t tell him why. She doesn’t tell him she fears that the cancer has pushed into her brain and is now causing hallucinations of real dead women. She can’t worry him, and she certainly can’t deal with being an X-file right now. 

She misses him, in the hospital. She always does, when he isn’t there to hold her hand and help slip her jacket back over her shoulders. 

Mulder comes home with a one-track mind. She's grateful for it, for the distraction and the quick, almost irrelevant way she confirms that the doctor told her nothing had gotten worse. 

Yes, Death is in the room with her. Even if the doctor will not tell her so definitively, Scully can feel it in her blood. Death is holding Scully’s hand, ready to guide her into the great beyond. 

***

“I’m going home,” she insists, and leaves Mulder standing in the hallway, alone with his fears. 

When he arrives home half an hour after her, she’s curled around a cup of tea in the living room. She’s sat in the middle of the couch, not the solitude chair, where she’s spent most of her evenings as of late. 

Her eyes don’t leave the cup of tea when she speaks. “Harold Spuller is dead.”

“I know.” His click of his work shoes on the hardwood brings him closer. “I saw the ambulance when I was walking to my car. How did you find out?”

“I saw him.” She spits the confession out of her chest like it won’t come out without force. “I saw him in my rearview mirror not two seconds before I saw the lights.”

Mulder can read her confession for what it is: an olive branch. A willingness to work with him, to lean on him, to let him see her again. 

“Thank you for telling me,” he replies simply, taking a seat next to her and sliding his arm along the back of the couch. Scully leans into his shoulder, letting his arm fall across her shoulders instead. He pulls her into his body and soaks in the casual contact that has grown rare the past few months.

Scully takes in a ragged breath. “I’m sorry,” she whispers.

“I know,” he says through a kiss pressed into her hair.

“I've been so afraid of death and dying that any connection seemed like a bad thing… something that wouldn’t last. I’m dying, Mulder, and I don't want to hurt you when that happens.”

“Scully, you can’t… you don’t get to choose that for me. I love you. I’m not just going to stop because it will hurt later. I would much rather be able to be with you, to love you like you deserve, while I can. Okay?” He lifts his head to look into her tearful eyes. He knows his own face is begging for her to come back to him, to let them be them. 

“Okay.”