#ltwrites

The masked male, who’s eyes were hooded over ever so slightly as he engaged in a dumb conversation with his friends, lazily dropped his hand to his thigh- laughing with a quick head toss backwards. His words, though not even audible due to the feelings you were wrapped in, were low and gravely, making your stomach twist and turn, that heat that was in your cheeks traveling down your body, passing through shoulders, arms, and stomach, even making its way down into your fingertips. There was something so toxic about the calm and cool sniper in your barrack that was dragging you deeper and deeper into his spell.

“Evergreen… he controls me….” your headphones betrayed you, the words filling your senses- though, only in one ear. Purple and yellow blurred your vision as the feeling of warm satin wrapping around your waist and abdomen engulfed you. What was this feeling? Why was the man in front of you so enticing? Why did your whole body yearn to be closer? Who knows. With a quick tug on his sleeve, the man who’s head was tipped back, peeked over to you, a quizzical look on his face.

A soft “oh” resounded through the now dim atmosphere, his hand slipping onto your waist to pull you impossibly closer. “My little maus here needs some help finding something outside, I’ll be back” he muttered, completely uninterested in whether they approved or not. The soldiers surrounding him nodded and whistled in acknowledgement, not sparing a glance as he slipped a finger through your belt loop, dragging you out of the room and into the empty corridors. Of course you tried to shake off the burning in your throat and fingers, but couldn’t. This type of closeness felt like a burning lake of fire on your skin.

Your eyes fixed on his slim fingers, the heat that pooled your stomach moving to your face again, that familiar shade of crimson blossoming across your cheeks and nose. Once you were out of view from anyone and in a secluded area, he carefully pushed the sniper hood off of his head and tossed it over his shoulder, smiling down at you with adoration.

He pushed you against the wall in an instant and made you look up, rough fingers delicately guiding your chin to meet his lips in a gentle and chaste kiss. It was short and sweet, but sent electricity through your veins, feeling like the world went quiet; the earphone long tossed over his shoulder to dangle.

“never change schatz. I love seeing your flustered state and those pleading eyes just for a moment of privacy- just for a kiss. God it’s intoxicating… look at those eyes..”

It all came out as a murmur and you felt like you might throw up from how scrambled your stomach felt. This felt unreal. His hand pressed to the warm jumper that adorned your frame.

“Please..”

And that’s how you two were left, lips locked in a needy and loving kiss, your hands gripping harshly at his soft locks, thumbs dancing over his soft skin. It was romantic. A fairy tale. Impossible love that felt inhuman. And you wouldn’t have it any other way.

∘₊✧─────────────────────✧₊∘

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.”

Margaret Scully has lost enough in her life, she thinks. Her husband, her parents, her eldest daughter. And now, here she is, losing the younger one, too.

Maggie tries to put on a happy face when she arrives with her bag, like there’s nothing wrong. Like Dana doesn’t have some wretched poison growing inside her. Like she isn’t shaking. It doesn’t work. 

“I don’t know why you didn’t tell me. I don’t know why you didn’t tell me immediately !” Maggie doesn’t mean to snap, she really doesn’t, but her body does it before her brain can hold it back.

“I wanted to get all the answers first.” Of course she did. Because Dana, of all her children, has always been the most curious, and the most attached to concrete evidence and outcomes. 

“And you found them here?”

“I have found some clarity. And maybe a way to fight back.”

“I don't wanna be kept in the dark. You need to tell me these things, Dana. God, you didn’t even tell me when you–” Maggie drops the sentence and drags her hand across her forehead. 

“When I what, Mom?”

“When you married Fox! Why on earth would you leave me out of that!”

Dana is silent for a moment, taken aback by her mother’s outburst. “Oh.”

“And I had to hear that you’re sick from him? That’s — it hurts when you don’t tell me these things, Dana.” Maggie approaches the bed and takes her child into her arms. “You have always been the strong one, but you are my only daughter now.”

“I know, Mom.”

“Oh, Dana.” 

They hold each other for a moment, but Dana breaks the silence. “How did you know about me and Mulder?”

Maggie pulls away to look her daughter in the face. “You’ve always looked at each other like you meant something special, but when you came to Thanksgiving, it was different. And Fox had a tan line on his ring finger.”

“We weren’t even together then,” Dana says, her eyes cast to her lap and a shy smile on her face. “We were married, but we didn’t… talk about it or anything until a couple weeks ago.”

It’s Maggie’s turn to be surprised. “You didn’t… talk about it? What on earth does that mean?”

“We got married as… well, for convenience’s sake. In situations like this.” She waves her hand around the hotel room. “They can’t keep him out of here because legally, he’s my spouse. And vice versa. No one knows except Assistant Director Skinner, or we would have had you there. The situation was, well, complicated to say the least, and difficult to explain. Not to mention it potentially endangers our partnership at the FBI. Skinner doesn’t know we’re romantically involved now, and if anyone other than him found out, our department would be done for.”

“Why don’t you wear a ring?”

“I do.” Dana’s face curls up into a small smile, the first genuine one Maggie has seen today, and reaches to the table by her bed to lift a long chain with a gold ring on the end, handing it to her mother. “Our rings match, and he wears his, so it’s safer and easier for me to wear mine on that chain and under my shirt.”

“Dana, do you see how ridiculous this is?”

“It might be ridiculous, but it works for us.”

Maggie runs her hand over the surface of the ring as she’s sure Dana has done many times before. “I’m happy for you and Fox, Dana; I truly am. I think he’s a wonderful man for you. I just have concerns about the secrecy of it all. You two have always had a good working relationship. Couldn't the FBI just make an exception?”

“It’s not just the FBI we’re concerned about,” Dana adds in a low voice. “There are people out there who might… if they found out, they could use it against us. Or force Skinner’s hand in breaking us apart.” Dana’s eyes are locked on the ring in her mother’s hands when she continues, “I don’t like it either. I wish we could go out on dates and kiss in public, but this is the way things have to be for both our sakes.”

Maggie reaches out and brushes her daughter’s hair away from her face. “I’m sorry, Dana. But I’m glad you have him.”

Dana lifts her eyes to meet her mother’s and offers a nod. “Me too, Mom,” she says with a watery voice to match tear-brimmed eyes. “Me, too.”

***

Scully opens her eyes to a figure in a dress uniform, bathed in a bright light. At first, just for a moment, she thinks she sees her father. That he’s here to guide her on, to the next work, to leave Mulder and her mother and everyone else behind.

It’s not. It’s Bill. She offers him a stiff hug, and he apologizes for Charlie’s absence. He tells her about his promotion. There’s a moment where he’s pleasant before he turns truly, truly rotten. 

“Mom’s getting worried there’ll be no one to carry on the Scully name.” His tone is joking, but Scully can read between the lines. How dare you, a woman, get a terminal illness instead of staying in the kitchen and popping out babies like a good girl . “I guess the pressure’s on, huh?”

“I didn’t choose this, Bill,” she reminds him.

“No. But you chose to join the FBI. Mom and Dad sent you to med school. You were gonna be the one who saved lives.”

“When Dad died… I asked Mom. She said he’d forgiven my choice.”

“Yeah, but maybe not after what happened to Melissa.”

The air in the room stiffens. Bill’s words cut right where they’re supposed to, in the guilt she’s harbored in the year since it had happened.

“I didn’t choose what happened to Melissa, either.”

“Well, in a way you did.”

“I found the person who killed her,” she defends.

“I didn’t come here just to lay all this on you, it– it’s just– they say that you should try to come to terms, so…”

That, honestly, hurts more than the dig at her job, more than blaming her for Melissa’s death. She sees, now. He’s only here for his own peace. So that her inevitable demise will hurt him less. He has no regard for her wellbeing in the meantime, feels no need to comfort or support her. She is only here to be the recipient of what he needs to get off his chest. 

“Have we, Bill? Come to terms?”

“I don’t know. It’s just… I guess I want to ask you – joining the FBI, was it all worth it?”

“Yes.” There’s no hesitation in her response. She knows that the FBI was the right choice for her, leading her to the X-files, to Mulder, to their search for the truth. If– when – this disease kills her, she will regret some things she hasn’t accomplished, but not any of the past actions that have led her here. “Can you forgive me that?”

“I don’t think it’s up to me to forgive you, Dana.” And her big brother looks down his nose at her like she’s scum on his shoe instead of a sick woman in a hospital bed who dared to have an unorthodox and dangerous career. Like she disgusts him.

They’re interrupted, thankfully, by her mother entering the room. Bill leaves. Scully tries not to cry. 

***

Mulder sits on the arm of Skinner’s office couch for what feels like hours before the man himself shows up. He drove all night from Pennsylvania down to DC, and he’s starting to feel the lack of rest. He usually doesn’t, but without Scully to feed off of for fear of zapping the lifeforce from her body, it is weighing on him. 

He knows he wouldn’t have been able to sleep if he tried. He can only ever sleep well with Scully lying next to him. He’s been better rested the past 10 months they’ve been living together than he has been since he was a child – since before Samantha’s abduction. 

The world feels like a construct around him, some movie set that’s been built up for him to deliver lines in. That’s the only thing that makes sense – this can’t be real. He can’t really be on the verge of doing this, sinking to the one depth he hadn’t thought himself capable of. 

The Smoking Man. He was at the start of all this, and he’ll be at the end of it. Mulder needs to make a deal with the devil.

He would do anything for Scully. Anything . That urge is one that’s existed in him for years, since before they were together, before they were married, before he was even in love with her. She is the only reason he would ever do something like this, would ever indebt himself to the man who creates and guards the truths that Mulder has spent his life seeking. 

Mulder’s eyes don’t so much as shift to Skinner when he walks in. He can’t look at the man’s face while he makes this request. He doesn’t think the words would make it past his lips. 

He takes the drive from the fertility clinic out of his jacket pocket and holds it between two fingers, a bit of attitude in his grasp.

“I’m pretty sure — pretty damn sure my wife has never undergone treatment for infertility.”

Mulder doesn’t get to say those words out loud very often. My wife . Sure, he bounces the phrase around in his head every time he lays eyes on Scully, and he said it to Malcolm in the hospital right after she had been diagnosed, but he can’t remember the last time he said it other than that. Probably somewhere in another hospital, the only place it seems safe to lay claim to her. 

The phrase doesn’t seem to strike Skinner as hard as Mulder expects him to. He blinks. He refuses anyway.

***

There’s a moment, a horrible moment where the skin of Mulder’s chest is being slowly peeled away because Scully is not in her hospital room, and he fears the worst. There’s a moment where he sees Scully’s journal and thinks she's dead. There’s a moment where he lives in a reality where her cancer has crept up on her suddenly, that it’s consumed her. She’s gone; grief is flooding his chest and swallowing him whole like a second shroud of death has befallen them. 

And if the darkness should have swallowed me as you read this, you must never think there was the possibility of some secret intervention, something you might have done. And though we've traveled far together, this last distance must necessarily be traveled alone.

Unorganized images flash across his mind. An article on assisted suicide he had read years ago. The way Scully has pulled away when he’s tried to touch her. How well she knows him, to tell him in her last words that this is science, this is not something he ever could have controlled.

But there’s more on the page. The last line cuts off. And Scully would never leave her goodbye unfinished. 

Mulder shoots into the hallway in search of her, desperate to lay eyes on what has to, has to be her breathing body, her open eyes. 

Mulder hasn’t felt the same kind of relief that flows through him when he sees Scully at Penny’s bedside since she had woken up from her coma a few years back. 

He gives them space, leaving Scully to sit silently at Penny’s bedside. She holds Penny’s hand, limp and cold, until she takes one last ragged breath. Scully is there with her to provide comfort and a warm hand until she inevitably fades and passes. 

This chair will be Mulder’s in a few months’ time. She doesn’t want him to go through that, to sit silently and watch her fade away, weakened and withering.

Her death is, as it always has been, inevitable. It’s going to be a lot sooner than she’d like, perhaps, but she won’t let that knowledge stop her from finding out why she was made a victim of this disease, and by whom. She has no average cancerous mass, and she will not act like she does. 

Mulder is on her as soon as she steps through the door, pulling her into his arms and breathing her in. He lays a lingering kiss to her forehead and then, softly, presses another into her lips.

He tastes like grief. It crushes her.

Scully can’t bring herself to look him in the eye as he withdraws. She can’t let him see the raw look on her face, the grief for the life she’s only just started building that might now never become the full structure she wishes it could be. 

She sticks her head into his chest for a moment, and just as his arms are about to wrap around her to hold her there, she slips away and back down the hall to gather her things.

***

Scully’s fingers dance across her necklace, twirling the chain between her fingers and slipping the ring loosely onto her pinkie finger. Her eyes are cast out the passenger window of the car, not following the rows of trees as they blur past.

She’s replaying Bill’s visit in her mind, over and over and over. She had already known he was disappointed in her decision to join the FBI, and that he had blamed her for Melissa’s death, but she hadn’t expected the judgment to go as deep as it had. She hadn’t expected the undercurrent of you’ll go to hell for this that bubbled under the end of their conversation.

“What’s got you so deep in thought?” Mulder asks from the driver’s seat, casting her a glance. 

Scully swallows. “Bill visited me in the hospital,” she confesses. “Our conversation was… enlightening, as to what he thinks of me, of being in this line of work.”

“You already knew he didn’t like that you joined the FBI.”

“Yes, but I didn’t know how deeply that dislike ran. Or…” Scully cuts herself off, and her eyes fall to her lap. 

“Or what?”

“He said he wanted to… well, I think come to terms was the wording he used.”

“With… what? The fact that you’re sick? Because I’ll be honest, Scully, I don’t think disparaging your career decisions is the best way to do that.”

“He wanted to say what he needed to before I die.”

A heavy silence falls over the car. This is, to Scully’s memory, the first time she’s addressed her imminent death as a certainty, an absolute.

“He what?” Mulder’s voice is thick with indignance. 

Scully keeps her eyes squared on the road, unwilling to see the… well, she’s not really sure what lies in Mulder’s eyes right now, but she doesn’t think she could bear to see it. “He had some things to get off his chest.”

“And when you’re laying in a hospital bed is his idea of the best time to do that?”

“Apparently.”

“What did he say?”

“That I was to blame for Melissa’s death.” She raises her chin as if her confidence could hide the hurt. “And that forgiveness would be up to the Lord.”

“That’s… God, Scully, I’m — I’m so sorry. That’s horrible for him to say.”

It’s an understatement. Mulder is floored by Bill’s lack of care, bordering on active malice towards his own sister. The rage bubbles up inside of him, but he doesn’t let it overflow. Scully doesn’t need his rage right now; she needs his love. That is something he will joyfully provide. 

He slides a hand onto her thigh, just above her knee. It’s not a suggestive touch, but out of the corner he can see her blushing at the contact anyway. 

“I love you,” he says, a relief to leave his lips.

When Mulder wakes to the sound of coughing, he tenses immediately. He turns around to see Scully's upper lip and hand covered in blood.

“Shit, Scully.” He springs into action, leaning over her to grab a tissue from her bedside. When he lifts it to her face to blot at the flowing blood, she plucks the tissue from his hand.

“Don’t.” She lifts the tissue to her nose and blots at the blood herself as she slides out of the bed. The bathroom door is closed behind her before Mulder can wake up enough to follow her. He gets up anyway and raps on the door.

“I'm fine.” The far-too-familiar words bite through the wood. Mulder tries the handle, but it’s locked.

Mulder sighs, resigned, and rests his forehead on the door. “You’re not,” he whispers into the paint, and returns to the bedroom.

***

During her increasingly common migraines, Scully sits alone in the basement. It's the darkest part of the house, and though it is generally Mulder’s domain, he leaves her alone when she retreats with a hand over aching eyes. Oftentimes, she’ll hear as he steps on the creak outside the basement door, the clock of the nob and immediate soft shut of the door, and a quiet knock. When she approaches, she finds a roll of saltines, a water bottle, and a mug of tea honeyed to perfection. It surprises her the first time. she comes to expect it by the third.

During one such instance, Scully ponders how their relationship has taken shape amid her ill health. Mulder is hitting his stride. He's learning the ebb and flow of their relationship, smudged as it might be by her sickness. He has cared for her for years, but Scully is now truly starting to understand what that caring means.

Scully wishes she could let herself lean into it. She wishes she could let their relationship grow and blossom around them, instead of watching statuesque as Mulder grows into a romantic partner in front of her. She wishes, she wishes, she wishes.

***

When she sleeps, he can hold her. Or, at least, he can try.

They’ve been sharing a bed for months, and spent almost every night pressed up against each other. On the warmer nights, they at least share a hand rested on an arm or some other small form of contact. That’s the only way Mulder can sleep well, with some physical sensation reminding him that she’s there. Who knew that after years of insomnia, all he needed was Scully?

But now, when he tries to wrap an arm around her she turns away. Even in her sleep, she often flinches away from his touch. He just wants to hold his wife, to feel her breathe against him while he still can, she will not allow him that luxury.

Mulder rolls away from her, and lets her have her space.

***

Mulder honestly forgets about the man he had met at the hospital in Allentown until his dry cleaner hands back a business card he had left in a suit pocket.

Malcolm Henries, and a Philadelphia-area phone number. He runs his fingers over the ink in the basement one evening, Scully upstairs taking a midday nap on the couch.

When he calls, he learns that Malcom’s wife had passed a few weeks prior.

“Jade – Jade is gone.” His voice is crackling through the long-distance connection, but Mulder can make out the wobble in his voice. “God, I’m – I can barely say it without tearing up.”

He can’t bring himself to ask for Malcom’s advice on bringing Scully back to him.

***

They’ve lived in the house for a year now. They have watched the flowers bloom, the leaves color, then fall, then grow back again. They have watched the family across the street move out, and the house go on and off the market twice. They have watched dogs be walked morning, noon, and night from their living room window.

The neighborhood has changed, as has Scully, as has her relationship with Mulder. Some things are better, other things are worse, and the house on the corner has been painted a rather unfortunate shade of yellow.

She doesn’t realize that the year mark has passed until a couple days after the fact. Her feet are propped up on Mulder’s lap while she reads a book on the funerary industry. Mulder has his own book in his hands, something on aliens that he had picked up for an absurd price at an antique store a couple weeks ago. He had come home waving it and bemoaning the state of his wallet, and Scully had just smiled at him. This is the man she has chosen to love. To spend her last days with, the skin of his wrists barely grazing her ankles as they read together silently.

She stares at his side profile now, the same look in her eyes. His glasses are perched low on his nose, and his expression is unbothered. She doesn’t get to see that very often, these days. That is what gets her reflecting and realizing and then…

“It’s April.”

Mulder’s eyes shift to her, gazing over the top of his glasses. “It has been for a couple weeks, Scully.”

“We bought the house in April.”

“Oh.” Mulder chuckles lightly, “Wow. A year in and we still haven’t successfully fixed the draft in the bedroom.”

Scully laughs. “Give it another year, Mulder. Maybe we’ll get it by then.”

Neither will say it out loud, but each silently acknowledges the likelihood that in a year, there won’t be a we anymore.

***

Scully settles back on the couch and softens her grip on Mulder’s hair. This is her third orgasm she’s coming down from, her fifth total for the day, all from Mulder’s mouth on her.

The man himself is kneeling between her legs with a pillow under his bunched knees. He’s still wearing his boxers, clearly tented with a growing wet spot on the front. He hasn’t come yet today, not this morning, not now.

She hasn’t let him.

Mulder releases her clit from his mouth and rests a cheek against Scully’s leg.

“Scully,” his rough voice begs, “Please.”

“Not yet. Two more, sweetheart, you can make it.”

“You underestimate how much eating you out turns me on, I think.”

“I know exactly how much eating me out turns you on, which is why you have to make me come twice more before you get to.” She buries her fingers back in his hair. “I’m ready now.”

Mulder whines as she pulls his face back into her cunt, but follows her guidance. His lips capture her clit first and Scully’s hips jump, overstimulated. She guides him back down to lap at her opening.

This is something unexpected about the way Mulder has sex: he always does as he is told. Scully feels she could make any request of him, any demand, and he would comply. She loves it; she loves him.

Scully thinks back to Mulder coming to her the night before, wide eyes almost shy. She had raised an eyebrow at him as he approached her side of the bed. He broached the topic with a simple, “So, that whole you holding me down thing. What are your thoughts?”

It was a long, necessary conversation. Mulder told her about how he liked when she used him, liked being able to please her, even if it left him… unsatisfied. She knew they would be compatible — there was no way they wouldn't be, given how well they meshed in the field – but the depth at which the align is no small pleasure.

He had asked for this. Far be it for Scully to say no to something he had asked for so sweetly, especially when it intrigued her so. Plus, Mulder is so pretty when he begs.

And then, of course, there’s the high. Sex, an orgasm, is the only thing that makes her feel both like she’s above the clouds and she’s actually inhabiting her body for the first time in days, instead of just watching as her body and the world moves around her. Her hands perform the autopsies, drive her car, and fill out her paperwork, but she’s barely telling them what to do. When they’re having sex, she’s there. She’s alive.

So, in compliance with Mulder’s request and her own need for control, she had woken him up by plastering his hand to her cunt and humping it, pressing his fingers right where she needed. Consequently, the motion also meant her ass grinding against his hard cock. Once he was awake enough, she was riding his face, holding herself up with two hands to his chest. Two orgasms for her before they even got to work and none for him, because it was fun for Scully to watch him squirm both during the day and now, on his knees for her at home. His half-joking suggestion of a quickie in a supply closet was useless; Scully had a plan, and she wasn’t about to abandon it.

Mulder’s tongue dances up her folds before dipping inside her, bringing her back to the present. He whines and presses his face closer, closer, closer until his tongue is fucking her and his nose is hitting her clit and Scully’s not even sure if how he’s breathing with his face buried so deep inside of her.

Scully’s hips match Mulder’s rhythm, and his eyes snap to hers. She lifts her leg to rest a foot on the coffee table, to gain some leverage as she begins to fuck his face in earnest, controlling how his nose hits her clit, then tugging his face up slightly to encourage him to take it in his mouth. He does, of course, compliant as he is.

“God, Mulder, yes, good, good.” Mulder whines at this, which Scully lifts an eyebrow at and tucks away for another time. When his lips wrap around her clit, he sucks hard, and Scully’s orgasm ripples through her. Her back arches and she shoves her cunt further into Mulder’s face as she pants towards the ceiling.

“Keep going,” she demands. “Tongue. Clit.”

Mulder releases and starts with small licks, slowly letting them get wider. He pulls back the hood for more direct contact, and Scully screams.

“Mulder, Mulder,” she pants, “not done. Keep go — keep going — ahh —” Her hips stutter into him and she wraps her legs around his face. Her whole body wraps around his head, forcing his mouth away from her clit and back to her opening. He takes it greedily, taking the task of eating her out literally and scooping her wetness out of her like it’s his lifeblood.

When he looks back up at her, his eyes are glazed over. His chin is wet, and he looks fucked out, he looks like he’s —

“Did you come?” she asks. He shakes his head, and she pats his cheek in response. “Good boy, come up here.” She pats her leg. As he stands, she grabs his waist to guide him, but stops when she gets a good look at his crotch. More specifically, the large dark patch that has formed on his boxers, just where the tip of his dick lies beneath the fabric. She drags a manicured nail along the spot and down his cock, eliciting a moan from the man.

“Scully,” he whines needily.

“Are you wet for me, Mulder?” She lifts her eyes to his to watch him nod, and she runs over the possibilities while dragging one finger up and down his length, teasing him. She could take his cock out right here and suck it, but she wants to appreciate that glorious wet spot a little more. Another option is to bend him over the arm of the couch and have him hump it in his boxers until he comes, or maybe let her hand slip lower and caress his balls until he’s begging her to touch the tip of his cock…

The list is extensive, but Mulder ends up making the choice for her when his hips stutter and he lets out a choked moan. “Please, Scully, I’m going to — I need to —”

And God, he sounds ruined. “You’re going to come from just one of my fingers on you?” Her nail traces the head of his cock. “Do you get that turned on by eating me out?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

“Scully, please–”

“Come for me.”

And like a switch has been flicked, he does. His hips jump into her hand, and his cock twitches wildly in his underwear as the dark patch grows. As he comes down from his orgasm, she leans forward and presses her tongue to his underwear, tasting his come through the fabric. Mulder gasps at the oversensitivity, and crashes into the couch next to her.

“Jesus,” he says. When he reaches an arm out to pull Scully into his body, to hold her and kiss her with softness and love… she can’t stand to let him.

She pulls away. She reaches for the dress shirt she had stripped off him and pulls it on. “I’m going to go get cleaned up.”

The bathroom door is closed behind her before Mulder can even get a word in. She takes a seat on the side of the bathtub and puts her head in her hands.

Dana Scully feels unbelievably lucky to be able to watch her partner sleep. For his breath to come in small rhythmic huffs across her neck, tickling the skin atop her collarbones. To be allowed to run her hand through his hair, brushing through cropped strands and twisting them slightly around her fingers. 

Lying with him under the cloak of night is intimate, but not new. There is nothing about this that she hasn't had before, but now everything is recontextualized. It’s not just her best friend clinging to her like a vice, but her lover. 

Well, not yet her lover. The time for sex hadn’t yet presented itself. That hasn’t necessarily been a problem, Scully is perfectly secure in her positionality and loves just knowing that he’s hers, and she is his. Sex isn’t strictly necessary for that. But to say that it is wanted would be… an understatement.

She wants Mulder. She wants him on top of her, and under her, and inside her, all over each other. She has long since tried to avoid fantasizing about Mulder, so she now has a long mental list of things she wants to do with him.

But the problem, now, is fear. Not of anything to do with Mulder, or any sex they might have, but of the briefness of the future. 

If he were to see the fears running laps around her mind, if he knew just how likely it is that those fears are true, if Betts had seen something in her, Mulder would touch her differently. Like she’s made of glass, like she’s a fragment of something already half gone. Maybe she is, but she doesn’t want that experience to be the only one they have.

She wants to fuck him, properly. There will be time for tender love-making later, but right now, she needs it to be raunchy and absolutely disgusting. She needs them both to be wrecked after.

Now that she’s thinking about it, need is thrumming under her skin like a second heartbeat, filling her to the brim. And, well, Mulder is right here laying on top of her, so…

Fuck it. Or, rather, fuck him. 

Scully moves her hand to his cheek and strokes her thumbs across the soft protrusion of his zygomatic. 

“Mulder,” she whispers. “Mulder.”

His eyes open slowly, and even when barely awake, he looks at her like he loves her. Like she’s some glorious goddess, hanging the stars for him to dream of. She pulls his face to hers, and kisses him resolutely.

He makes a muffled sound, surprised and sleepy, but returns her enthusiasm, pressing closer. Her hand shifts to his back and she clings to him, allowing the desperation to leak through. 

When Scully opens her mouth atop Mulder’s, he sucks in an uncontrolled breath, stealing the oxygen between them. She shifts, rolling on top of him to straddle his hips, and grinds down. Hard. 

And that’s not the only thing that’s hard. Mulder’s cock is stiffening under her, lined right up with her clit and eliciting a squeaky moan from her throat. It’s not the first time she’s felt him hard against her; it had happened during numerous accidental make out sessions in the past weeks since they had officially gotten together. Even before that, they had been sharing a bed closely for months, and the situation was simply unavoidable. The shape and feel of Mulder’s cock wasn’t new; the ability to do something about it was. 

She shifts her hips back up along his length, and runs her hips down again, setting an unrelenting pace. Mulder tilts his torso up a bit, so she’s sat straight up and still kissing him but has a fuller range of motion. She takes advantage of Mulder’s available back and slides her hands up under his shirt to grope at the planes of muscle. Mulder groans, breaking the kiss, and his jaw slackens as if the mere act of Scully touching his back is pure pleasure. This reaction, the lack of coordination borne from Scully’s fingertips across his spine, is new. She takes advantage of it, just about tearing his shirt over his head to expose more skin, more for her to touch and map and claim. 

Scully feels like she’s flying. She’s a little removed from herself, from her fears. The only places she’s truly connected to her body are where Mulder’s skin is brushing hers, lighting her nerves up so bright you could see them from space. She’s needed this, needed him.

Mulder moves his head to the junction of her neck and shoulder, dragging his teeth gently along sensitive skin. It’s not quite hard enough to leave a mark, but hard enough that a part of Scully wishes that he would. She tilts her head to give him better access, and changes the angle of her fingers dancing across his back. Where she had been teasing him with the light brush of her fingertips before, she is now letting her fresh manicure catch on the flesh as she rakes them down, down, down, undoubtedly leaving red marks across his skin. Mulder’s lips detach from her skin as he whines, panting into her collarbone with a soft, “Scully.”

“Yes, Mulder?”

“Fuck.” he flips them, settling her on her back with her legs spread wide to accommodate him. His mouth dips back to her collarbone, exploring as his fingers dance at the hem of her tank top. When she raises her arms to encourage him to take it off, he complies, and he attaches to the swell of her breast immediately.

His mouth kisses over to her nipple, giving it a light, affectionate bite accompanied by a gasp from Scully before mirroring the action on the other one. His lips shift to the valley between her breasts, kissing down her stomach until his bottom lip brushes the edge of her underwear. 

“Please.” Mulder’s voice is unexpected and rough. “Please, Scully. You have no idea how long I’ve wanted to do this, Scully, please.”

Scully’s tongue darts out to wet her dry lips, and she cards her hand through his sleep-mussed hair. “Please what, sweetheart?”

“Please let me eat you out.” It comes out in one heavy breath, like it’s a confession offered on reflex. Maybe it is. 

She shifts her hand to his cheek and strokes it affectionately. “God, yes.”

The smile this wins from Mulder is lopsided and genuine. He looks like he’s won the damn lottery, like getting his mouth on Scully is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. It’s certainly not. She plans on this happening regularly for the rest of their time on this earth.

Mulder tucks his shoulders into the curve where her ass meets her thigh and settles in like he’s planning on being there for a while. Scully just about screams when his lips brush her clit through her underwear, her hands weaving their way back into his hair. An “Oh, God,” tumbles from her lips and her head falls back to the pillow, lulling to the side. Mulder’s tongue darts from his mouth, and when he tastes the wetness that has begun to soak through her underwear, he moans. Scully sees his eyebrows knit together, like he is overwhelmed by the pleasure of her taste. 

He breaks away for a moment, pressing his cheek to her thigh and panting. When his eyes open again, he stares up at her. A mischievous smile — one she’s used to seeing on cases when he’s about to do something stupid — crosses his face, and he uses two fingers to pull her underwear aside, just brushing the soaked lips of her labia. 

She clenches on a disappointing nothing. He doesn’t slip his fingers inside, where she wants him so badly. He just moves the fabric out of the way, and lowers his lips to hover above her skin, taking a moment to just breathe her in.

She tugs his face closer by her grip on his hair, impatient. When Mulder’s lips land on her, it’s uncoordinated, but the contact is so, so necessary. His tongue flits across her vaginal opening, barely venturing inside, and up across her clit. Scully jolts, grinding into his face with a stuttering moan.

His tongue works her clit gently for a moment, before he takes the gland into his mouth, between gentle teeth and tongue, and gives it a soft, experimental suck. 

Scully’s reaction is… well, positive is an understatement. Her back arches, and she drapes a leg across his back to hold him impossibly closer. 

She’s panting, grinding, and muttering nonsense expletives and praise. She thinks Mulder might be pressing into the bed for some relief as well. He hooks his fingers in the side of her underwear and goes to pull them down, only for them to get caught on the spread legs he lies between.

Scully laughs, not unkindly, but lifts her legs to help shimmy them off. “I can’t get those off if you’re between my legs, sweetheart.”

“Uh huh,” Mulder agrees absently, and dives back into her, finally able to get the direct contact he craves. He looks like he’s fucking floating while he eats her out, holding her to his face by her hips, and oh. Oh.

Mulder needs this as badly as she does, that much is clear. But whereas she needs to consume him, to take him in as a part of her – Mulder needs to please her. He has something to prove.

With this realization, Scully tucks a foot under Mulder’s body and flips them, his feet dangling off the end of the bed and her pussy hovering a couple inches above his face. Mulder looks up at her with wonder and groans. She cocks an eyebrow, questioning if this new position is alright. His hands land at the top of her thigh in response, pressing her down onto his lips.

Scully fucks herself on Mulder’s tongue, controlling when it spears inside of her and when it circles her slit with a shift of her hips. She loves it, she wants to explore this deeply, but another time. Right now, she needs to be full, she needs Mulder inside her. His cock, yes, but also the rest of his being. She wants to absorb him into herself, make her body as full as her heart feels when love rises inside her. 

Scully leans backwards, supporting herself with her hands on Mulder’s sculpted torso. Two fingers tug the band of Mulder’s boxers away from his skin, and let them snap back down, stinging his skin. Mulder grunts, a sound of pleasure, and Scully tucks that reaction away for another time as well. “Take them off,” she demands, breathless. Mulder complies in short order, and Scully shifts backward until she can rub her cunt along Mulder’s bare dick, laid against his stomach, hard and aching for her. 

He reaches for the nightstand, presumably groping for condoms. “Don’t,” she says. “I’m on the pill, and I know for a fact that neither of us have any sexually transmitted infections.” Scully leans forward so her face is inches from his, still teasing the both of them with a slow glide of his dick along her folds. “I want you to come inside me.”

Mulder leans up in a desperate attempt to kiss her, but Scully sits up straight again. “Okay?”

He nods frantically in response. 

She lets out a stuttering breath before leveling him with her gaze, eyelids low and demanding. She drags her body up his, angles her hips and nudges cock to just the right angle so it presses against her opening, and lowers again to let it slide in. To take Mulder inside her. 

Their eyes stay locked while she lowers herself on his cock. The contact doesn’t break until Mulder’s eyes shift slowly down her body, shining in the moonlight filtering through the sheer curtains, and settle on the spot where their bodies meet.

Scully wiggles slightly, teasing him with a figure-eight motion of her hips. Mulder groans, his head falling back to hit the pillow and his fingertips digging into Scully’s hips. The contact isn’t controlling, it’s not even guiding; Mulder just needs something to hold onto desperately, and his palms fit too perfectly on her hip bones for them to have ever meant to be anywhere else. 

Scully savors the moment. She drinks in the electricity of Mulder’s touch under her skin, the fullness where she stretches around his cock, the cool sting of Mulder’s wedding ring on her waist that reminds her that he’s hers. Because he is; he’s her husband, her partner, her lover, her friend. Her heart pounds with the heat of possession.

And her heart, oh her heart. It’s pumping, beating hard against her ribcage as if threatening to escape and jump out to lay across Mulder’s chest in a desperate attempt to get closer to him. She runs her hands down her inner thighs, brushing across her hammering femoral pulse.

Thadump, thadump, thadump. She’s alive.

“Scully.” Mulder’s choked voice brings her back to the present. “Please.”

“Well, since you asked so nicely,” She presses up and begins to set her rhythm, matching her rises and falls to the feeling of her blood pumping through her body, which she can feel in every corner of herself. Alive, alive, alive.

“Scully, oh god,” Mulder pants her name, his pleas, and Scully leans forward to lay her lips on his while she fucks him.

When Mulder comes inside her, Scully isn’t surprised. His moans increase as he reaches his climax, and she can feel his cock twitching and leaking inside her. She changes nothing, just continues her brutal pace as he softens inside of her and keeps her lips atop his where they are spread open around a silent scream. 

She takes and takes and takes, her clit rubbing against the stretch of skin above his dick. She’s past controlling her actions, her body just propelling itself where it needs until her abs are clenching and her orgasm rolls over her.

She doesn’t know when they stop just breathing into each other’s mouths and start actually kissing again, but when Scully’s aftershocks ease, Mulder’s tongue is brushing her lips skillfully. She lets his now-soft cock slip out of her, but quickly replaces it with her fingers. She’s not touching herself for more gratification, just to keep his come inside her for as long as possible. 

“I love you,” Mulder breathes into her mouth.

“I love you, too,” Scully echoes.

They kiss slow and deep, Mulder’s hands dancing across every inch of her skin. One trails its way down her arm to meet where her fingers are plugging his come inside her. He takes her wrist between his fingers and lifts it to his lips, moaning around the way they taste, all mixed together.

“Fuck, Mulder.” She kisses him; she can’t not kiss him. An unwilling squeak rises from the back of her throat as their tongues meet and she tastes the junction of them, too. She hopes the flavor will soon be familiar.

They kiss, and kiss, and kiss until Scully is falling asleep with her lips on Mulder’s. She has shifted  so that their sweaty legs are wound together, flesh stuck to flesh. Every inch of her is pressed against her partner’s body, as it was always meant to be. 

She’s drifting off with her lips gently brushing Mulder’s when he moves, leaning away from her. Scully tightens an arm around his waist, silently requesting that he stay close and never, ever get far enough away to stop touching her. 

“I’m just going to clean up and get some water, Scully. I’m not even getting out of bed.”

“Fine,” she mumbles into the now-Mulderless pillow. Mulder rustles in the nightstand, and Scully blinks open to admire his strong, naked back. Normally, the only marks are a couple freckles, but now it is graced with a series of red lines down his back. She reaches out to drag her fingertips down the marks, much lighter than she had when she had put them there. Mulder shivers at the contact on his raw skin.

“I marked you up,” Scully notes matter-of-factly. 

Mulder hums. “Whatever will the guys in the locker room think, Scully?”

She sits up and scoots toward him, tilting his chin towards her and over his shoulder. “Just tell them your wife gave them to you.”

They’re both smiling like fools when she leans in to kiss him. He turns his body towards her, leaning her to lay back on the bed again. He presses her knees open, surprising her slightly.

“Again?” she asks quietly. 

“I’m just cleaning you up. You’ve got, uh…”

“I’ve got what, Mulder?” she asks innocently. 

Mulder meets her eyes, raw, and he’s breathless when he speaks. “You’ve got my come leaking out of you.”

Scully hums happily. “Guess you’ll have to lick it out next time.”

Mulder makes a punched-out groaning sound. Scully’s glad to know he likes the idea and tucks it away for later use. 

For now, she lets him clean her up, and curls into his body as soon as he’s thrown the wipe away, seeking his comfort, his warmth. 

Mulder holds her body tight to his and buries his nose in her hair. He inhaled deeply, and Scully’s brows furrowed in confusion. 

“Mulder are you… sniffing me?”

“…no?” It’s a lie, an obvious one. “I just…” he continues, “I don’t want to forget anything about this. I mean, it took us so long.”

Scully just laughs and burrows into him further, her nose pressed to his neck. 

“But we got here.” She presses the words into his skin with a peck.

“We got here,” he echoes. 

Remission. Noun. Diminution of the seriousness or intensity of disease or pain; a temporary recovery. A forgiveness of sins. 

It’s never been such a powerful word as it is today. Medical school texts don’t tell students how the word washes over your skin, how it rebaptizes you as it passes a doctor’s tongue and the meaning lights up your sinuses. 

She’s fiddling with her wedding ring when Mulder comes in. Part of her is surprised it hasn’t tarnished with how often she runs her fingers over the etchings, but the ring is secondhand. It lived a whole life before it made it onto her finger. It’s strong enough to last the course, no matter what hell might be thrown at her, or at it. 

Her eyes lift as the door opens, and she can feel the joy radiating off her face in a way it hasn’t in months. Mulder’s lips lift in response, face instantly brightening at her mood. 

“Hey, Scully,” he greets softly. “You look good.”

“I feel good.” She beams at him and reaches for his hand. “Mulder, I’m —”

“I love you.”

Scully hasn’t been able to stand it. Every time he says that, it sounds like he fears it might be the last. 

It won’t be. She has forever with it. He can keep saying that for days and months and years, and she’ll keep saying it right back. 

She reaches out towards him and runs her fingertips along his cheeks, then drags her nails around his ear and settles her palm on his jaw, cradling his stubble against the delicate skin.

“I’m in remission.”

Scully watches as Mulder’s face shifts into something glowing. Eyes flood with hope, a surprised breath is sucked in, pallor is wiped away by a more familiar color. “Remission?” he breathes.

“The chip worked. My cancer is gone, Mulder. I’m–” she chokes on the final word, one she hasn’t been able to use in far too many months, “I’m healthy.”

“Just like that?”

She nods. “Just like that.”

His smile blooms across his face. It’s an expression she only ever sees directed at her, layered on top of his Christmas-tree smile. Maybe it’s the way hope has lit the room through her eyes, but Scully doesn’t think she’s ever seen something so beautiful. 

She stands and falls into his arms, letting him hold her like he hasn’t been able to for the few days she’s been bedbound. 

“You’re gonna be okay,” he murmurs into her hair. She nods into his chest and squeezes harder. 

Mulder pulls back to look her in the eye. This time, when he says I love you, it’s not borne of desperation. It’s full of hope and promise; it’s full of the future. The words know how often they’ll pass his lips in the years to come. 

***

The last time she saw this door, Scully was playing the role of a grieving widow who had just seen her husband dead in their basement after blowing his own face off. This time, as she closes the door behind her, the stained glass doesn’t rattle. It stands solidly in its frame. She has no idea how it got fixed, but she’s grateful for it. 

“Home, sweet home.” Mulder lets out an awkward chuckle and guides her over to the couch.

“I’m okay, Mulder, really. I’m feeling good. You don’t need to treat me like I’m —”

“Like you’re dying?” he interrupts. “Three days ago, you were. And that’s what you said then too.”

“I mean it now. I have a clean bill of health. There’s nothing to worry about.”

He gives her a sad look, all too reminiscent of the ones she’s grown accustomed to seeing on his face the past few months. “You can’t blame me for worrying about you, Scully. You can’t.”

“I’m not blaming you, Mulder. Just telling you that it isn’t necessary to treat me as though I’m made of glass. I know I haven’t…” she takes a deep, steadying breath, “I haven’t made it easy for you, and for that I’m sorry.”

Mulder is silent for a moment, and when he finally does speak, his voice is tender and quiet. “There’s no way for it to be easy, no matter what you do. You don’t have to apologize for that —”

“I do,” she interrupts. “I spent so long pushing you away in hopes it would make it… easier for you.”

“It wouldn't have.”

“I know. But I didn’t have anything else I could do to ease your suffering. I couldn’t cure myself, but if I could prepare you for when I died, at least that was something.”

Mulder takes her into his arms, and she follows willingly, eagerly even. “You’re here, Scully. We talked about it, we don’t need to keep rehashing it.”

Scully looks up at him, allowing the outpouring of love in his eyes to soak into her skin. When she kisses him, it is gentle, sweet. It’s a far cry from the affection they have shared over the past few weeks, afraid that each chance would be their last. This is the kiss of two people who know they have time.  

***

A few nights after she gets home, Scully wakes past midnight and stares at the ceiling for close to an hour. She strokes Mulder’s hair, cherishes how he nestles closer to her in his sleep, and prays her gratitude into the plaster until she becomes too restless to stay in bed. Eventually, she finds herself in the kitchen, sat on the counter with a cup of tea and watching as rain rages against the window. 

It can’t reach her; not anymore. She’s weathered the storm. 

She can feel the difference, not just in her lack of headaches and nosebleeds and fatigue, but in the way the colors have changed. The kitchen is green again, sunlight is bright and golden, and Mulder’s eyes are the warmest and most comforting brown she’s ever seen. Things don’t blend together in drab shades of grey. 

The days since Scully has gotten home have been quiet and slow, where moments they aren’t touching each other are scarce. They’ve woken up with limbs twisted into each other, they drank out of the same mug of coffee while gathering their things for the day, they bickered over who will drive them to work that day. It’s been routine. Comfortable. These days are the ones that she loves him so much it hurts. 

Scully, historically, had always pictured herself being loved loudly. She imagined a giant ring, a big house, and a jovial laugh beside her at dinner parties. A bright spot to shine on her every day, to make her small corner of the world seem a little bigger. Since joining the X-files, this desire has changed. The world has gotten so large, so overwhelming, and much, much scarier. Now, she wants a love she can see all sides of. One she can cradle in her hands. It doesn't need to be loud and boisterous. It needs to be familiar; it needs to be safe. Really, it just needs to be hers. 

Which is why Mulder’s breed of affection is so perfect that she tries to swallow it whole. He rests a subtle hand on her lower back in a crowd, not to brand her as his own, but to make sure they don’t get separated as she leads them, serpentine, to their destination. He encourages her to take the space and the breaks that she doesn't usually permit herself. He replaces her lotion before she can squeeze the last of it out. He loves her deeply, so deeply, but quietly. It’s exactly what she needs when facing an ever-expanding world cloaked in conspiracy, mystery, and the unknown.

He’s perfect for her, and she for him. And they get to keep having each other. 

Scully hugs her mug closer to her chest and lets it warm her from the inside out. The kitchen, though empty except for herself and the gently flickering light above the stove, has an undercurrent of love woven into every nook and cranny. It thrums with life. 

It’s not until they’re leaving the hospital after an initial meeting with Scully’s new oncologist that Mulder realizes he hasn’t really seen her weak before. 

He’d thought he had. When she was in a coma after being returned to him, then when she couldn’t stand up on her own for a couple days after waking up. She had shown him glimpses of vulnerability, of her tears, but he had never seen her lean on him as heavily as when he tucks her into his arm and guides her out of the hospital and out to his car. 

She had wanted to go alone. Mulder would have tailed her car if he had to, but she eventually relented to allow him to drive her, to hold her hand as long as he could. 

***

There’s a woman who lost her partner too soon. A couple whose time was cut short, between whom the veil of death fell before they got their chance to ever truly be . A man brought back from the dead, through the power of his wife’s love for him. 

Mulder understands Ariel. He understands what it’s like to love so desperately. He will soon know what it’s like to lose that. He sees himself in her as she admires the ring on her finger as if it holds her whole world.

***

Scully stays in bed for a weekend. She’s exhausted. Being exhausted is exhausting. Mulder knows this, and just does his best to feed her and care for her and hold her when she allows it.

So it’s a surprise, to him, when she tugs at his arm and commands, “Fuck me, Mulder.”

She’s normally the leader, when they have sex. She states what she needs, and he provides it. She’s often on top. But this time, with exhaustion burrowed deep in her bones, she pulls him on top of her before guiding him in. 

Mulder still ends up with red lines down his back from an outgrown manicure. He makes a mental note to schedule her a lunch appointment with the woman she usually sees, down the street from the Hoover building. Scully will like that. Maybe it’ll draw one of those growing-rare light smiles from her lips, the ones that she doesn’t mean to let fall across her face.

***

Mulder beams at her across a table in a crowded bar, his Christmas tree smile lighting up his face. A piece of plastic is caught between his lips, and she can’t help but think momentarily of the other things he’d wrapped them around this morning. Her earlobe, her bottom lip, her nipple, her clit. She shoves the thoughts aside for later and focuses back on the present. 

Mulder turns away from her to face where out-of-key notes of the beginning of “Happy Birthday” filter out from across the bar, and God, she should have known he would do something ridiculous.

This isn’t the first time her love for him has hurt, but now it has a different flavor. It tastes like I’m sorry for what I’m about to do to you ; it tastes like Why do you still spend your energy on me knowing I have no choice but to leave you ; it tastes like bitter guilt building up in the back of her throat. 

***

Mulder breaks his lips from Scully’s and pushes up slightly to look down at her face. This, in itself, is not odd; Scully knows that Mulder likes to see her when they’re intimate, to take in just how desperate he makes her and watch her come undone. What is unusual is the blood smeared across Mulder’s top lip. 

Scully gasps and moves her hand from Mulder’s back to touch her own nose, and the fingers come away red. She removes herself from under Mulder and rushes off to the bathroom without making eye contact, not wanting to see how she’s stained him.

Sex is supposed to be safe . Scully craves it near constantly. How could she not, when the touch of his fingers is the only thing that keeps her pulse beating rhythmically beneath her skin?

But she’s got death in her bloodstream now, pumping through her body next to her pulse and her love. 

She doesn’t let him see the fear, the ache that comes with low white blood cells and a ticking clock. Instead, she walks around their home with the same mask of professionalism she wears when performing an autopsy, the analytical fold of her lips guarding her true emotions. This time, though, the body in the morgue is her own.

***

Mulder is starting to feel as though the texture of Scully’s palm is engraved into the ridges of his own flesh. He holds it in every doctor’s office. Some days, that’s the only time she’ll allow him to touch her. 

Her skin is addicting. He loves the way the ridges of his fingerprint catch along the crest of the joint of her thumb, or the outline of her nail bed, the life line of her palm that he hasn’t let himself inspect for fear of what he might learn. 

***

Scully can’t explain why, exactly, she kept her ring on her necklace when she got home. She’s accustomed to putting it on her hand as soon as she locks the door behind her, whether Mulder is right beside her or not. But today, after placing her keys, cuffs, and badge on the table in the entryway, she doesn't immediately leave the chain in the jewelry dish where it belongs. She keeps it on. She leaves it hidden.

Maybe it’s just petty possessiveness. Mulder had forgotten his own ring on the bathroom counter before they had left for West Virginia, and had been without it the whole time they were there. But maybe something inside her, something subconscious, knows something is awry. Her soul knows Mulder’s intrinsically, and can tell that the man walking around wearing his face is not her husband.

Then, Mulder brings a bottle of wine home. This is, for so many reasons, out of character. 

For one, Mulder rarely drinks. He also knocked . On the door to his own house. Their house. As if he hasn’t lived there with her for a year.

There’s something off about him, about the discomfort in his posture. She’s never seen him this stiff in their house. Actually, thinking back, she’s never seen him this stiff at all, like he doesn’t know how to position his gangly limbs.

“We never really uh… talk, much, do we?” he says from the couch across from her. 

This is a ridiculous claim. If this guy were Mulder, he would know that all they do is talk. Maybe not about the things they should discuss, considering that it took them over a year of being married and ten months of cohabitating to agree that they were in a relationship, but they do talk. They barely spend a moment apart, considering that they both live and work together. They can’t get away from each other, not that either of them seem to want to. 

“What do you mean, like, really talk? No. No, we don’t, Mulder,” she lies. Sure, they have a habit of not talking about important stuff, like how they had been in love with each other for years before properly settling into a relationship, but they do talk. 

“Well, what’s stopping us?” 

Oh. This is a seduction. Scully recognizes the look in Mulder’s – not-Mulder’s? – eyes, even with the short time they’ve been having sex, as wanting. This look, however, is draped in forced sincerity. 

Scully takes a deep breath and considers her options. She’s about 70% sure this isn’t her husband. But she needs to be positive, needs to make sure it’s not just her mind latching onto the victims in their latest case. Like with anything, Scully needs proof.

She can test him. She can test this so-called Mulder. 

She rolls over the possibilities in her head. She could ask him something factual, like their anniversary or about a shared memory. But that is too blatant, and potentially something Van Blundht could have studied up on, or gathered from their surroundings. It’s not likely; he doesn’t seem bright enough for that, but she can’t risk it. 

She doesn’t know Van Blundht, but she does know her husband. She knows his mannerisms possibly better than she knows her own, after four years of partnership, almost a year of cohabitation, and eighteen months of marriage. And one of those habits she’s picked up on is how intently Mulder listens to her– unless it’s something he already knows. She can never tell the same story twice without him reminding her that he’s already heard that one. Normally, it drives her up the wall, but tonight? Tonight it might be useful.

So, she chooses the first thing that comes to mind. The tale of her horrible prom ordeal from senior year of high school, which she recalls Charlie telling Mulder when she’d seen him at Thanksgiving. 

“Marcus was the twelfth grade love of my life,” she concludes. She giggles into her wineglass at how well this plan has worked, relishing in the rush of deceiving a man who thinks he has seduced her. “I can't believe I'm telling you this!”

“I can’t believe you haven't told me before.” Not-Mulder – because yes, she is sure of it now, this is not her husband – smiles at her.

Scully cocks her head to the side. “I have, though.”

Not-Mulder blinks at her. “What?”

“At Thanksgiving. My brother told you, don’t you remember?” He would, if he were her Mulder. His eidetic memory is useful on cases, but it can be a curse sometimes, outside of work. Now, she’s grateful for it, grateful for knowing her partner so well. 

“I must have forgotten.” He shakes his head. “Silly me. You know what else is silly, Dana?”

Mulder doesn’t call her Dana unless someone is dead or dying. She resists the urge to roll her eyes. Instead, she hums in reply.

“That we’ve never done this before,” he says, and the dipshit starts leaning in to kiss her. Scully stands stock still until she can’t hold it back anymore, and laughs. 

Haven’t done this before . Like Mulder hadn’t thoroughly fucked her on this very couch three days ago. Ridiculous.

She takes advantage of how caught off-guard he is and twists to launch him onto the couch face-first before snatching up her gun from where it sat conveniently on the coffee table and cocking it. She places her sock-clad foot squarely on Not-Mulder’s spine, pressing him into the cushions. 

This is, of course, when the door bursts open. Scully’s head snaps up to see another Mulder – this one, presumably, her own – with wide, concerned eyes.

“I’m good,” she says. “I figured it out.”

“You — oh. Good,” her husband agrees as he takes in the scene in front of him. The image of Scully holding him down… wow. “I think you just awakened something in me, Scully.”

She smirks. “Later, sweetheart. Can you grab my cuffs?”

Mulder grabs them from the entry table, but not before wiggling his eyebrows suggestively. 

***

Mulder closes the door with a click after the officers leave with Van Blundht in handcuffs. 

He pads into the kitchen, where Scully is putting the kettle on for a cup of tea. Mulder tucks himself behind her, arms around her waist and nose tucked behind her ear. She doesn’t press into the contact, but she doesn’t brush him off, either.

“Did you mean it?” Her voice is quiet, but it’s firm. Demanding.

“Mean what?”

She turns in his arms to face him, her hands still on the counter. “I think you just awakened something in me, Scully.” She says it in a low, intimate tone, and oh. That’s what she means. “Mulder, do you want me to hold you down onto the couch?”

“Among other things.”

“Other things… like restraints?”

Mulder gulps, and nods. 

Scully leans up so her lips are just shy of his. “Then go grab your handcuffs.”

Mulder doesn’t think he’s moved so fast in his life. Before he knows it, Scully is standing in the kitchen in her underwear, clicking Mulder’s FBI-issued cuffs around his wrists, and ordering him onto his knees. 

He complies easily, fully hard by the time his knees touch the tile. Scully hops up onto the counter, folding her legs over his shoulders like that’s where they belong. Mulder doesn’t need to be told what to do next. His tongue traces where her underwear meets her skin, taking in the growing-familiar scent and taste of her. She’s not quite wet enough to soak through her underwear, but he can feel the warmth of her cunt through the fabric. 

When his tongue sneaks under the garment, her breath stutters and squeaks. Her hips press in closer to his face, and he accepts the offering, using his lips to urge the fabric out of the way as a moan tumbles through them.

“Off,” Scully instructs. “Take them off. Use your teeth.”

Right, because Mulder’s hands are out of commission. Because Scully had cuffed them behind his back, so he couldn't even touch himself if he wanted to — not that his own pleasure is at the forefront of his mind. Scully’s is. 

Mulder’s teeth catch at the top band of her underwear and bite, pulling them down to the best of their ability. Scully lifts her hips to assist him and works her foot out. They’re flung somewhere near the stove, but Mulder doesn’t care to check exactly where they landed, not with Scully’s bare pussy right in front of him. 

His tongue dips into her, and she sighs, looking down at him like he’s something precious. This just encourages him, and he presses his face further into her. 

Drowning in her feels like it lasts forever; he never wants it to end. When she removes her legs from his shoulders, he looks up at her in confusion. 

“Stand up,” she demands. Once he’s complied, she undoes his belt and forcefully shoves his pants and underwear down in one go and lines his cock up with her entrance. She tangles her other hand in his hair, keeping his eyes squarely on hers, leaving no room for him to watch where their bodies are about to join.

“Fuck me.”

And Mulder does. With Scully’s hands on his head and under his shirt, refreshing the marks left on his back, he fucks her frantically, chasing his own orgasm without shame. She pulls at his hair, forcing his gaze to the ceiling, and she nips at the column of his throat. She gasps with every thrust, painting his neck with little bite marks and smudges of the lipstick she hadn’t gotten around to taking off. His breath stutters with every bite, growing closer and closer to a moan as he approaches his orgasm. 

He loves this, loves being at her mercy. Without the ability to touch her, to pull her closer and relish the feeling of her soft skin under his hands, it’s like he’s just a toy. 

“Mulder,” Scully moans into his neck, “God, there.”

She comes first, walls tightening around Mulder’s cock as her legs quiver around his hips and her breath beats unevenly against his skin.

Mulder follows her over the edge a few thrusts later, and Scully’s grip on his hair loosens. He looks down at her, lowering his face for a kiss, but she pulls back minutely and slides off the counter. She turns him around and starts fiddling with the cuffs.

A bit of him wishes she wouldn’t pull away from him so quickly after sex. It’s one thing to be used while they were being intimate, but it’s another to be left alone after they were done, with his cold skin hungry for touch and approval. He’ll take it, though, if this is as much of herself she is willing to give. Who is he to ask for more than she is willing to provide?

“Is this what you expected to see when you walked in?” Scully asks and she unlocks him. “Did you think I would have fucked him, thinking he was you?”

“No,” Mulder says breathlessly, “You — I was worried he’d hurt you. But you know me, Scully, and he’s not smart enough to trick you.”

“No,” she replies, “He’s not.”