"Your mother killed herself." The words taste metallic on her tongue, bitter, sharp, tangy and ugly all at once, and Scully cannot bring herself to look at him once they filter out into the humid DC air between them.
When she finally muster sup the strength to look up she wishes she hadn't. He looks like she took a knife to his chest, gutted him wide open and held his beating heart against the light just to show him how engorged and mangled he is inside. His face crumples from within, and she feels sick watching it fade. It's like she can physically see the energy drain from his body as the words seep in, and all these weeks and months and years of running catch up with him at all once, all bleeding together at the speed of light, just fast enough for him to push it all away.
"No."
But even the denial is broken, and before she knows it he is breaking, shattering into a thousand pieces in her arms in a way she never thought he would. All these years, all these cases, and a selfish part of her has always hoped it would never come to this. That she would never live to see the cracks in his armor. Because usually he's so solid, so complete looking, that she can almost convince herself this easy, laughing, happy Mulder is real, is her Mulder and that underneath it all, he has remained untarnished to the very core. Because at her own core, she knows she is all but splinters, fragments of the women she once dreamed of becoming, and that despite her thick skin, she is completely hollow inside. She knows what thats like, and it is a fate she would never wish on her greatest enemy. She knows how that emptiness gnaws away, infecting like a virus that can be kept at bay only by day, but that at night, it never ceases to bite and tear at her very bones, leaving the sheets damp with salt and the bathroom tiles running red with blood, like some medieval attempt at exorcism, anything to keep the demons at bay. But it doesn't work. Nothing does. She has learned to live with it, to disguise it under layers of cynicism and well-placed humor, but she never thought it had quite found the same refuge in Mulder as it did in her. She liked to think he was still uninfected.
But now, as he trembles and shakes under her arms, she knows he is very much infected with the same burden as she is, and it makes her entire body burn, makes her heart want to shriek out in sheer agony, wants to throw herself in front of him and take the bullet, anything to save him. Anything to save the broken little boy in her arms. Because that's all he is really. The little boy who got left behind, ignored in childhood and now orphaned at 37, all alone in the world but for his one friend; her. This is it. This is all they have left. This right here, this mess in her arms, this is it.
They sit like that for quite some time, and she makes no move to get up, even when her calves begin to burn and her knees none too quietly protest from the extended pressure on the hard floor. They sit like that for what seems like hours, the room silent but for the quiet tears that pour, endlessly, down his cheeks. Slowly, ever so slowly, the tears begin to fade, drifting away into shallow breaths and damp sniffles, until finally he slides down onto the floor beside her, head flopping onto her shoulder.
And that's when she kisses him.
Her nose gets wet from where his tears brush her face, and her neck crinkles painfully from the awkward angle, but it's still a kiss. And its their first.
It's beautiful and gentle and then its over.
She looks at him, soaks him in and lets her fingers trail through his hair in a long, lazy path before she finally speaks.
"It's going to be alright, Mulder."
"I know."
And when he looks back, those green eyes full of hopeless desire for something neither can ask for, they both know.
This is it.
The street is dark as they lie in bed, but neither of them seem to mind. She could spends eons memorizing him, drinking him in with her eyes and hands and teeth and mouth, but she knows at heart that she won't ever get that chance. They've had hours tonight, hundreds of seconds of exploration, and yet she knows she has hardly scratched the surface of him. There are some things that can never be fully explained- X-Files that cannot be solved, mysteries that will always have a hint of the unknown, something dark that lingers just below the surface, and there is a sort of thrill in that unknown. Something satiating in the unsatisfactory-ness of all of it, because no matter how much you search, you will always come back for more.