#mamuscript.fic

Blessed and Stricken: Chapter 46

"Look at Me" (S02E13: Irresistible)

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The gravesite was disturbing. It stank in her nostrils and coated her tongue. It sat in her gut and twisted.

Death was often ugly, but she was immune to most of its horrors. Had embraced them, held them, settled them in her lap and run her hands across them.

This, though, was different.

Blessed and Stricken: Chapter 60

"Sweetness and Scrape" (S02E25: Anasazi, Part II—Mulder)

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Sick, in the head and in the belly. He took Aspirin, washed it down with water, was going to collapse on his couch, make himself forget about concocting a way to get Scully to come over and take care of him—but the boys arrived. A swirling tornado of activity, then: a murder in the building, a nameless fourth Gunman, botanicals in the dark.

Then the office—Scully—

He threw things, shouted, let her be splashed by his rage—regretted it, couldn’t seem to control it. 

Blessed and Stricken: Chapter 51

"Answers" (S02E17: End Game)

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—it was how calm he was. That was what gave the imposter away.

She didn’t know what the fuck was happening, but she knew one thing for sure: the real Mulder could not stand so still, could not have kept his hands to himself, would not have been so peaceful, after the messages she’d left. The Mulder who had endured the fall of ‘94 couldn’t have looked at her with such serenity and composure if he’d thought for even a moment that she might need him.

The Mulder who had been at her hospital bedside with an offering of sports and irony and her oldest, most precious possession—the Mulder who had crashed through her door and stopped Eugene Victor Tooms from carving a hole in her abdomen with his bare hand—the Mulder who had found her in Minneapolis and caught her as she fell so completely apart that she still wasn’t sure she had found all the pieces—

That Mulder could not be so placid after she’d told his answering machine I think I’m in danger and then gone radio silent.

That Mulder—her Mulder—would have been flailing, fighting to get to her. He would be beside himself—he would be out of his mind. He would not stand in the doorway, casual and relaxed, hands in the pockets of his trenchcoat and patiently waiting like he was picking up a lunch order.

The voice on the phone—Scully, are you there? Scully? What’s going on?—had more panic in it than was contained in all the lines of this stolen body.

She tried to send an unspoken message down the line through just the pattern of her breath, and then she let him go.

She said it was a wrong number; she positioned herself for quick access. She went for her gun; he went for her throat. And Dana had seen a parade of horrors in the past two years—a frozen alien fetus in a swirling cloud of liquid nitrogen; a glowing green horde of ancient insects spilling in through plastic air vents; a man-faced monster in the shape of a fluke—yet somehow, it all faded to B-movie camp and bit with blunt teeth in comparison to this: 

Mulder’s fist flying at her; Mulder’s face above her, looking down with cold disdain. Mulder’s hand hauling her against the wall. (He only needed one hand; why had she never realized before how much stronger he was?) Mulder’s lovely eyes, flat and remorseless and indifferent; Mulder tossing her aside like a sack of flour.

Mulder’s beautiful face painted in shades of murder.

She would rather have died back in November than have lived to see the day when that gaze was turned on her so lovelessly.

She was reeling from his right hook, staggered by the monstrosity of his beloved face above a pair of raised fists. It was worse, even, than when they had pointed their weapons at each other in Icy Cape—then, his eyes had been wild but hot, suspicious but beseeching.

This wasn’t him—but it looked like him, sounded like him—and she knew without thinking about it too hard that the nightmares of white walls and drills would be displaced.

Then, impossibly, the face changed—broadened and flattened, stretched itself into harsh Slavic lines, his eyes growing rounder, his hair lightening. She felt naked fear at this impossible, unknown power—but more than anything, there was a horrifying, disfiguring kind of relief when the hands that reached down and picked her up, when the voice that told her they were going to go find him, were those of a stranger.

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The rest is here, on ao3.

Blessed and Stricken: Chapter 42

"Fighting Weight" (S02E09: Firewalker)

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Healthy, fair-skinned, clear-eyed. Soft-haired, lipsticked, steel-spined. Back to normal. His Scully—the Scully from before. Before Deep Throat, before Duane Barry, before the three months of sickening, maddening, unbearable absence. Before the wires and tubes that were now, miraculously, gone. Not a cannula or electrode to be seen—only her, only Scully.

She was in a suit; she was in the office. She leaned against the wall and watched the video; she met his eyes when he said, “I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to go,” asking her to step back, his own fear pushing the words out like a newborn chick before they were ready. That flash in her eyes (the old one, the one that had started his heart in Oregon), that stone in her voice when she said, resilient and steadfast, “I’m ready. I want to work.”

His final plea: “Maybe you should take some time off.”

Her final refusal: “I’ve already lost too much time.”

Just like after her father’s death, I need to work. He could have lamented it, except it was so quintessentially Scully, and further proof that it was really her, really here.

When his world was falling apart (when she was gone), Mulder descended into darkness and turned out all the lights on the way down; he stopped eating, drinking, bathing, talking, caring, wanting, living.

When hers was, she filled her hands with as much as she could carry and made a doorway where none had been.

It didn’t help—it should have, but it didn’t—that she was so achingly beautiful: her eyes unshadowed, her hair soft and voluminous and shiny (it hadn’t been cut, in all the long months of her absence; its length a constant reminder to him, and probably to her). Her makeup perfect, her lips full and quirked into her habitual annoyance with him. She looked so like herself that he was sure she had put in exacting effort—and to what end? To convince him? Herself? The Bureau? Her mother?

Maybe all of them; maybe none of them. Something that had changed: he couldn’t read her as well. Her face was sealed and locked, where before it had been open to him, at least most of the time. 

He wondered if he had done that, or if Duane Barry had. If there was even a difference.

All he wanted to do—all he really wanted to do—was carry her somewhere safe and quiet, and just hold her. But who was he kidding? Even when he had her close and under his protection—even when she was seated on her apartment floor, her knees against his, looking at him like the only thing that could save her was simply him—he ran away. He couldn’t do even that: he couldn’t even stay.

It was exactly their kind of case; just their kind of locale. The innards of a volcano, the middle of nowhere—accessible only by helicopter, or the kind of hiking neither of them had hoped to ever do again.

It was just their kind of mystery: something alive down there, in the volcano, at a sustained hundred-and-thirty degrees. Trepkos, the man-genius, missing. Colleagues dead.

Mulder couldn’t have written a better first-case-back if he’d been Stephen King.

And he wished, fervently and with no small amount of resentment, that it hadn’t come to them.

But it did, so they went. They packed and boarded and flew. When they landed at the research facility, he gave her a hand to help her down from the helicopter, and for a moment—before the scent of evergreen forest and the ominous lack of human life signs crashed in on them—it almost felt like Before.

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The rest is here, on ao3.

Blessed and Stricken: Chapter 58

"Different Tastes" (S02E24: Our Town)

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Mulder had taken his jacket off, rolled his sleeves up. He was steady and lean behind her, smelling of coffee and printer ink. 

Her face was reflected back to her in the screen, and so was his—only he didn’t know it; didn’t know that when he turned his eyes to her, tried to catch a glimpse of her reaction, she saw the way they bent, the way they hoped, the way they sought entry into her mind. What do you think?

The man in the video was raving; the man standing behind her was watching her; she felt caught in that in-between place—Mulder on one side, the unsettling and eerie world he transported her to on the other.

Blessed and Stricken: Chapter 52

"Your Turn" (S02E18: Fearful Symmetry)

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Dana hadn’t been late for a class or a day of work in so long it wouldn’t have fit on one of those It’s Been _ Days Since counters—but if she’d had one, it would have reset to zero today. Friday, February twenty-fourth.

She knew, rationally, that it wasn’t Mulder’s fault that he’d failed to acknowledge her birthday. She may not have ever even told him when it was. She was sure he’d looked at her personnel records, just as she’d sneaked his early on—but it wasn’t like they celebrated milestones together. They were colleagues, and while the fibers that were woven into her heart and skin and breath slipped under his on the other side—while she sometimes, after a strange case, dreamed about being lost with him in a wilderness of soaring pillars and deep shadow and knowing that his hand in hers was the only thing that could guide her back out into the sunlight—while she sometimes remembered having been called by his voice from the edge of something eternal and distinctly solitary, after even her blood family had given up on her—he was not, in fact, her boyfriend.

Even the word boyfriend didn’t suit him, despite the teenish flop to his hair and the way he swirled a grin at her sometimes, despite having shared more meals with him than anyone in her life except other Scullys. Despite having napped against his shoulder on airplanes and picked him up from the mechanic’s; despite how much he flirted with her, or how often she fell asleep with slick fingers and Mulderscented thoughts still coursing hot through her blood.

Despite having the shape and sounds and smells of a boyfriend, he was indeed only her partner, tied to her by nothing more than the whim of the Bureau—and thus completely unobligated to acknowledge, in any way, that she had turned thirty-one the day before.

And yet.

Her lunch break unaccompanied, her phone unrung, her door unknocked, her dining room table untroubled by the weight of any gift. It wasn’t logical, rational, reasonable, or even plausible, but she found that she was hurt by it.

Hurt enough, apparently, that she’d had two glasses of wine, managed to hide the melancholy in her voice when Mom called, and gone to bed seeking total oblivion and giving no thought to the future.

I.e., without setting her alarm.

Mulder was, of course, already there when she flung open the door to the basement office and stalked in. She couldn’t have explained (at least not to him) why she was irritated with him, nor (even to herself) why she was surly when he didn’t ask why she was late.

“Good morning, Scully.” He was tipped back in his chair, his feet on the corner of the desk and a magazine in his hands—a mundane one, this time, the residents of its pages fully clothed and workplace-appropriate—and he grinned softly at her as if everything were right in his world.

“Morning.” Devoid of her usual warmth, not that he noticed. She hung her coat beside his and straightened her suit jacket before turning around.

Sometimes the sight of his long, lean body stretched out across his space like a cat on the back of a couch was stirring. And sometimes it seemed he was taking up as much room as possible to make sure there was none left for her. Given the way her morning was going, it was no surprise when she landed on the latter impression and dug in with teeth and claws.

“Would you take your feet off the desk, please?” She felt spare and spiny as she crossed to sit in her usual chair.

His eyebrows rose, but he did as she asked. Set the magazine aside and leaned forward to plant his elbows on the blotter. “Sorry.”

“It’s fine.” She caught the bridge of her nose between thumb and forefinger and willed this nagging resentment to dissipate.

“Everything okay, Scully?” There was nothing unusual in the question, nor even in his lightly concerned tone, and yet she found herself biting the inside of her cheek to keep from scowling.

“Yes, Mulder. Everything is fine.” A clipped tone. “What are you working on?”

“Oh, nothing. I was just reading about the Bridgewater Triangle. Did you know there have been more Bigfoot sightings there than anywhere else in the country besides the Pacific Northwest?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“And not just Bigfoot, either—it’s a hot spot for all kinds of cryptid reports, UFO sightings, poltergeist encounters, and cult activity. The Algonquins refer to the wetlands there as the ‘place where spirits dwell;’ they have a legend about the area being cursed. And in 1979, there were a series of homicides in Fall River, Massachusetts; one of the bodies was never found, but all the murders are attributed to a satanic cult.”

“That hardly seems likely.” When he tipped his head, inviting her to go on, she said, “C’mon, Mulder—we both know that evidence of ritual abuse by satanic cults is essentially nonexistent.”

“Well, sure—but whether the perpetrators were acting under the orders of Satan or were only at the mercy of their own mental illness and depravity, the murders did take place.”

“Murders take place everywhere.” She crossed her legs and sat back, folded her hands in her lap. “If serial murders were some sort of proof of the paranormal, there would be a lot more than two people in our department. We’d probably even be on a floor with windows.”

That smile—the one that made her want to pull his hair (nicely) or stomp on his foot (not so nicely), depending on the day—crawled onto his mouth. “Fair enough.”

She nodded sharply and turned her eyes away.

“Uh, hey, uh, Scully…?”

His voice was so uncharacteristically timid that she snapped her gaze back immediately, felt her own brow furrowing. He was playing his fingers between themselves, not meeting her eyes. “Yes?”

“You seem a little on edge. I just… I hope it doesn’t make you uncomfortable. That I’m…”

She waited; stared. Prompted: “That you’re what?”

“That I’m going to be there.”

She cast her mind back across the past few days, trying to come up with some memory to indicate what he could possibly be talking about. Was he taking a trip? “Be where?”

“Tomorrow. I didn’t think it would be polite to refuse, all things considered. And I thought…”

They didn’t have plans tomorrow. Tomorrow was Saturday. Tomorrow she was going to sleep in (sanctioned, this time), take a long bath, and go over to her mom’s in the afternoon for a belated birthday dinner.

“Mulder, what are you talking about?”

Now he was frowning, and he did look at her. “For your—your thing. Your birthday thing.”

Horror was a slow seep, first through her fingers, then up her arms. When it reached her heart, it pumped out through the rest of her limbs, a poisonous passenger riding in her blood. “My birthday thing.”

“Yeah. At your mom’s.”

“My birthday thing at my mom’s.” It wasn’t that she hadn’t heard him (she had, unfortunately, heard him perfectly clearly), only that the idea was as incapable of taking form in this reality as a methane-based lifeform.

“Right. She caught me off guard when she called me, and she was so determined, and… you know. I have a hard time saying no to her.” He raised his palms in a what-was-I-to-do? gesture, accompanied by those pursed lips that he probably thought were disarming (and which, if she was honest with herself, usually were) but which, at least in this moment, brought her teeth together to grind. “So I said yes. I know I should have asked you first, but I figured if she was inviting me, she must have run it by you, and…” Something broke over his face, and the smile slipped away, water through a sieve. “Did she not…?”

“No, Mulder. She did not.” Her thumb and index finger were back to pinching the bridge of her nose, this time tightly enough to produce a distracting jolt of pain. She sighed heavily and opened her eyes. “To be clear—you’re saying that you’ve been invited to join my family tomorrow evening at my mother’s house to celebrate my birthday—and that you’ve accepted that invitation?”

He nodded slowly, his eyes fixed on her. “Yes,” he said. “That’s what I’m saying.”

“Right.” She felt her mouth folding, her head nodding slowly. “Right.”

“So… it does make you uncomfortable?”

“I’m not sure ‘uncomfortable’ is the right word, Mulder.”

He was chewing his lip, and there was a marked restraint to the gesture—as if he were holding back a grin.

“I didn’t think you knew it was my birthday yesterday.” She hadn’t meant to say it—and certainly hadn’t meant to imbue it with the soreness that had permeated her thoughts all evening—but, much like the look of shock slowly descending over his face, it wasn’t entirely within anyone’s control.

“Your birthday was yesterday?”

“You can’t tell me you didn’t know that,” and apparently she was fully leaning into the petulance, because her eyes had left his face and landed on the file cabinet, and her shoulders were stiff.

“I guess I forgot.” He scrubbed a hand over his face, then leaned toward her. There was an entire desk between them, but somehow it seemed he had entered her space, that he was wrapping her up in something. Her gaze drifted back to him, because despite the unreasonable wound of his having forgotten, she found herself craving whatever he was about to offer. “With the thing tomorrow, and… I don’t know, they’re both odd numbers—twenty-three, twenty-five… shit, Scully. I’m sorry. Happy birthday.” He grimaced. “Belated.”

Another sigh. “Thank you, Mulder.”

“Did you do anything fun?”

“Yes,” she lied. “Now, do you have a case for us, or should I take the day off?”

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The rest is here, on ao3.

Blessed and Stricken: Chapter 57

"And You, And Me" (S02E23: Soft Light)

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Detective Ryan was sharp, and she was green, and she reminded him of Scully. Determined, authoritative, confident, smart. She asked about his theories, and the expression on her painfully youthful face wasn’t the usual. She wasn’t prodding the monkey to see how it would dance; she wasn’t smirking behind her palm or trading looks with anyone else, in on a joke they thought he was oblivious to. There wasn’t anyone else here, anyway, and she didn’t look sadistic or pernicious—she looked excited. Like she was open to whatever he might say, like he might crack the case wide open with a single obscure reference in a dead language.

What had Scully told her students about him?

I’ve heard a lot about you. Not like she’d picked up the low rumblings in the halls of Quantico about Spooky Mulder and his insane ideas and what a shame and can you believe this shit? why does he still work here?, but as if the stories in which he featured belonged on a shelf with Homer or Goethe, or performed as a radio drama that the panic-prone public wasn’t warned of ahead of time.

Blessed and Stricken: Chapter 54

"The Outcasts" (S02E20: Humbug)

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Mulder was off-kilter, off-balance, mildly uncomfortable, more than a little amused. Already eager to wrap up the case and get back to D.C., where the opportunities for embarrassing himself or offending others were limited by his self-imposed subterranean exile. 

Everything was out of sync, slightly out of place—except that he was with Scully.

They were quiet together after Norway. The wound of that was still bleeding—of drifting off, letting the darkness take him, knowing what she would have to witness before she could join him, regretting the damage done but, as always, unable to prevent it. Like an asteroid in a disaster movie, or a tsunami, or tax season.

But, of course, she had saved them. She had watched him die, had come to join him, and then they’d both woken up. Not to a new life, as should have been their reward—not to a world in which the barrier between them was made of water and wine instead of brick and bureaucracy—but to the same world they had left, where their reports were due and Skinner was pissed at him for running off without informing him, where the basement heater never worked and their expenses were picked over by increasingly tetchy accountants. Where they were partners in the professional sense, and their love for the work—for working together—took precedence over any other kind of love.