Close Encounters, a x-files fanfic

Aliens, Scully! Close encounters from outer space! Little green men! No, grey. They abducted you once, don't you remember? Why don't you remember, Scully? What are you hiding from yourself? Wake yourself up to the possibility that there is something else, someone else, swimming in the stars with us. Why won't you let yourself believe?

You've gotta believe me, Scully.

I want to believe.

Scully is running. Along Grove Avenue, turns the corner onto Belvedere, a left on Cary. The trees are blooming, the spring cherry blossoms brought here by the Japanese. Running. Small white sneakers with a blue dash on the side. She never liked running, before. Not before she began work on the X-Files. At Quantico she had despised it, never being able to keep up with the others, an Achilles tendon strung tight as an archer's bow when she massaged it afterward. Now it seems all she does is run. Run toward Mulder's ever elusive truth, run away from it. Run from the nefarious dealings of a corrupt government, run in an effort to expose them. Run run run, faster than a speeding bullet.

What happened to you? Can you remember anything?

As soon as she had regained her strength after her abduction, Scully had taken up running. It was easier not trying to keep up with longer limbs. She still doesn't like it, but it's better than sitting still, and it allows her to forget. Run run run, I want a blurred mind, run run run.

Her mother asks her about her memories, as if she's a sponge she can squeeze answers out of.

"I'm sorry, Mom," she insists over rotiserrie chicken and green beans, her voice low. "I can't remember. I can't remember anything."

Her mother puts a hand on her shoulder blade, smoothes the fingers over it. "I just don't want you to keep everything inside like you always do, honey."

1974 -fourth grade. "Don't ride your bikes past the Stockmans' street. Melissa, you watch her." Melissa nods, the dutiful big sister, and taps Dana's helmet.

"Come on. We won't go too fast."

Twenty minutes later and two streets over, ten year old Scully gets spooked by a curb and flies off her bike. She breaks her wrist.

"Oh, my God. Are you okay?" Melissa throws her bike to the side where it falls in a twisted angle, half on cement half on pavement. "Please tell me that's not broken." She crouches by her little sister, who's cradling her little wrist like an injured bird, wide-eyed and frightened.

Dana nods. "I'm fine. It doesn't hurt that bad."

"Let's go home. It doesn't look scraped or anything." Melissa turns Dana's wrist over and Dana yelps in pain. She knows it is broken, but says nothing. "Mom's gonna kill me if she finds out." Melissa leaves their bikes by the side of the residential street to come and get later and they walk home in the twilight. Dana goes to sleep after nearly crying all through dinner, exhausted, and wakes up with a wrist swollen twice its natural size.

"Why didn't you say anything?" Her mother holds her against her side while Bill Jr. drives them to the hospital. She kisses Dana's hot forehead and her daughter wipes at her runny nose. Dana makes a little choked sobbing sound and Maggie kisses the top of her head again. "It's okay, it's okay."

"You look different," Suzy Parker, a cousin by marriage, tells Scully at Thanksgiving. She'd had to jog from the Hoover to her car and speed to her mother's house, arriving just before dinner, which her family had pushed to the evening specifically for her. Work on a holiday? Really, Dana? Her brother had wrinkled his nose.

"Really?"

Suzy nods and smiles. "The last time I saw you you were still wearing ponytails and sweatshirts!"

Scully tilts her head. "That was four years ago."

"Now you look like a real grown up woman."

Scully laughs, and then her niece buries her face in Scully's leg and the moment is forgotten.

Later, she turns the concept over in her mind. A real grown up woman. She knows it means she looks older, but she hopes it doesn't mean she looks weathered. Two abductions, now. Enough brushes with death for one lifetime.

She'd worked hard to lose the weight she'd gained during her abduction, learned how to do her hair, and graduated to two inch heels. A real grown up woman. She wonders if Mulder thinks of her that way.

Sometimes she's afraid that she's replaced his little sister. Good job, Scully. A pat on the shoulder. You okay, Scully? A kiss on the cheek. A comforting hug. Slowly, he has become a larger presence in her life. She thinks about him when she wakes up, before she goes to sleep. What case is Mulder going to try and convince me is worthwhile today? Hopefully he hasn't gotten himself into trouble again. Is this what a grown up woman means? Worrying about something other than the size of your thighs or an A on a paper. Thinking about someone other than yourself? Still, she doesn't know what they are to each other, and this troubles her.

You take a picture to preserve a memory, a single instant in time, a story. A photograph captures a moment, a solid moment. But what if the moment hasn't happened yet? What if it's only a moment in theory?

Scully waits in a rickety dentist's chair, ankles and hands bound, and regurgitates German to a lunatic. She's never liked anyone's hands near her teeth, much less near her eyes, much less near her brain. What is she waiting for? Mulder has saved her before. Will he save her again? They disagree on so many things it's a wonder they still put up with each other. In this fraction of a second, Scully thinks of how they joke in the car.

"Come on, Scully. Where did you put them?"

"It's your fault if you lost them!"

Mulder laughs. "You're a lousy liar, Scully. Where are they?"

Scully raises her eyebrows, both of them. "I have no idea what you're talking about."

"Okay, not in the glove compartment, not in this pocket thing behind my seat, not in the overnight bag. I know I brought them." Mulder gapes at her. "You didn't throw them away."

Scully shrugs.

An hour later, Mulder finds the bag of sunflower seeds underneath his seat and waves them triumphantly at her while she drives in the rain. "You're running out of hiding places, Agent Scully."

Scully bites the inside of her cheek and flicks on the turn signal. "Be quiet, you know I don't like driving in the rain."

"Ich habe keine Unruhe!" Scully reiterates. But does she? I have no unrest. I have no unrest. "Ich brauche nicht gerettet zu weden."

I don't need to be saved.

Run run run, run from the truth. Run from the lies. Run run run, Agent Mulder, before your partner's brain is drawn out from her eye.

In this moment, Scully wants nothing more than for him to save her. Ich möchte, um gerettet zu weden.

I want to be saved.

Schnauz is saying something, telling her that she does need to be saved. Yes! Save me, Mulder! The words are loud inside her head as she rubs her thin ankles together and her wrists chafe. It is hot wherever he has brought her, and Scully feels a terrified sweat break out at the back of her neck. A third abduction, she realizes.

When Mulder finally arrives, Scully doesn't know what to do. She'd spent hours wanting him to come to her, but this time she does not cry and push her tear streaked face into his white shirt and cheap tie. If anything, she pushes him away. She will not allow herself to need him except in a rare moment of weakness. He looks at her and wonders at the workings of her mind, he watches as she puts a hand up against the light and wonders if her heart is beating as fast as his in this moment.

"I have cancer." Scully watches his knees buckle and his eyes go wide and wet. She wants to run away.

Everything changes. Mulder looks at her despairingly each time she has a nosebleed, and his hand is feather light on her back. Scully says nothing, but wants to slap him, to hug him, to cry. She will not do any of those things.

One night they spring for a real hotel and Scully is pleased to find that it has a pool. She buys a swimsuit, dark blue with a white dash on the side. It reminds her of the springs and summers her hair was tinted green by chlorine when she had joined the swim team at her middle school. It is ten in the evening, their case has come to a standstill and their flight is tomorrow. Scully dives into water as warm as tears. She floats on her back and tries to read patterns in the tiled ceiling, then closes her eyes and breathes deeply in and out. She does not want to run tonight. She inhales deeply and turns over, sinking like a penny to the bottom of the pool and resting there a moment.

Vaguely, and distorted by the water, Scully hears a voice calling her name once, twice. She blows a string of bubbles and kicks off from the bottom and looks up in time to see the sky shatter as a dark shape dives in.

Their eyes meet, blue to green, reddened by the chlorine. Mulder pulls her up, tugs her by the elbows up to the surface where she emerges, gasping and choking from struggling against him. A single shoe falls to the floor of the pool.

"What the hell are you doing?" Scully cries, swimming to the edge and wiping at her nose and eyes.

"Are you okay?"

"Of course I'm okay! What about you? What the hell is going on, Mulder?" she is breathing heavily. Her eyes are large and accusatory.

Mulder sputters, hoisting himself up and out of the pool. He offers her a hand but Scully brushes him away and climbs out by herself. "I'm sorry, I thought something had happened."

Scully squeezes water out of her hair and wraps herself in the complimentary robe. "Well, it didn't. I went swimming, that's all." She looks at him. He looks like a half drowned puppy. "Calm down."

Mulder shakes his head. "You disappeared. I didn't know where you were."

"I went swimming." Scully gestures at the still fractured water. "You disappear on me all the time."

"Yeah, but you don't."

Their voices echo, bouncing and ricocheting off the walls. They look at each other for a full minute and say nothing.

Mulder realizes that he is in love with her when he is draped over her hospital bed, her cold little hand in both of his, her face grey and slack with sleep. It hits him like a harsh winter gust, and he looks at her -transfixed, like she's a falling star he doesn't want to lose sight of.

"You're sure?" he breathes when Scully tells him the cancer is gone. She gives him a slow smile and a nod.

"I'm sure." He sits down heavily at the end of her bed and doesn't know what to say.

Scully looks at him with tired, heavy eyes. "Mulder, I'm okay."

He pats her foot awkwardly. "Mulder, did you sleep here last night?" Scully has a drugged, foggy memory of his head against her side, of an arm across her, holding on.

He nods. "I fell asleep here, yeah. But you were still out when I left this morning."

Scully blinks at him sleepily. "Okay."

She is asleep again before he reaches the door. He flips off the light.

Mulder sees Scully with Emily, and wants to run. Scully's little engineered daughter doesn't look how he would have expected her to. And then he discovers that he's never thought of her as anyone other than Scully. Dana is a mystery to him. He doesn't know her at all. When, at motels, he happens to see her in her pajamas, Mulder purposefully pushes that part of her aside. Would he recognize her with her hair up, out of business casual, without the added two inches of her little black heels? Yes, Mulder thinks. Of course. He would know her anywhere.

But now she asks him to see her as a mother, and he can't. Instead, he thinks of her frozen children, orange sludge in test tubes. But this one is real and solid and alive. And came from Scully.

He wants to run. He wants to grab her hand and run away with her, away from this inevitable pain. She's had enough of it. Enough pain for a lifetime.

Mulder looks at her, and all he can see in Scully is an earnest desire to mother this child. To hold her. To tell Emily she loves her, even after three days.

This is that moment, Scully thinks, where the world stops. It is not a missed heartbeat as you glance across the room and look into the eyes of the one you love. It is not cold fear, terror that petrifies you. No, those would be easier. This, now, is a paused world. She is paralyzed -immobile in an uncomfortable hospital bed while life must be continuing on around them. Now Scully has returned to the cradle of death, not having left it herself so very long ago. The space between her eyes no longer pains her. Now she feels it press against her chest, feels it in every inhale and exhale as her heart beats and her daughter's heart flutters and slows, an uneven melody she can read on a monitor. The world is still, Scully thinks, and it will move again when her daughter's tiny life flows out of it. For now all is frozen, and Scully can only lay beside Emily and wait until the inevitable.

It comforts her to know that Mulder is somewhere outside of this morbid bubble. He is waiting for her to come out, to tell him that it's over. It comforts her to know that he is maybe in a chair just outside the room, his head in his hands. She had sent him away, but he has stayed. She knows this, and suddenly wishes he would disregard her request and come back into the room, break apart the cobwebs and join her in this miserable stagnant pond.

Emily makes a small noise in her drug induced slumber, a little whimper. The little girl's heart skips a beat. Scully puts her hand over Emily's chest and sweeps across it in a comforting motion. The physician in her wishes that Emily would go soon, peacefully. But the mother in her, the one yearning to love and cherish what is left of this small life, is hoping against all hope that she will awaken to find the little girl well again. She can't help it.

It is odd that she can fall asleep here like this. Her daughter is dying in her arms, and yet Scully falls asleep, the baby's clammy forehead against hers. Her chubby hand in her own cool one.

When, at four in the morning, the heart monitor slows and goes silent, Scully kisses Emily's cold forehead. And, as if he knew, somehow, Mulder knocks softly and comes inside the room in time to see Scully stand up from the hospital bed. Emily looks tiny in the big bed, and Scully looks at her. Her eyes are dry and red, and she doesn't react when Mulder puts a hand on her back, drawing a smooth circle across her.

"Do you want to stay a little longer?"

Scully shakes her head. Instead, she pushes the call button and waits in an ugly chair until the nurse and doctor come to pronounce her small daughter dead. Then she tilts her head up to Mulder and nods, gathering herself to stand up straight and leading the way out of the hospital and into their musty car. The sun is rising, a bleak disk in the east.

The air feels thick, a sweaty Tuesday morning that tastes like the beach and has left dew tracks across the windshield.

"I'll drive," Mulder announces.

"No, I want to."

He watches as she pulls the driver's seat forward and turns the key in the ignition, silent like this four in the morning sunrise, her lips bare and pursed into a thin line. Scully drives, careful as ever, back to the motel and steps out of the car, avoiding his glance as she fairly jogs back to her room. His is one away from hers, but he hears the shower beat down for far longer than it usually does, and hears her sniff through the thin motel walls.

A/N: Thanks for reading, and please review!