The first time she falls asleep in their rental car, he abruptly believes it means something.
Well, he originally believes it means that he's bored her to death. That his endless droning of "meaningless language" (her words, not his) has acted more as a chloroform than anything else and it is more than affective. That she's just like the rest of the people at the FBI, listening but not really hearing, not really understanding. Which was what he had expected when they had met, but as he had gotten to know her more and more and more, had hoped was not the case. He had hoped she was different. But, when she falls asleep that first time, it just makes it all seem so much truer, so much more real.
He only looks at her once. He takes in her usually strictly upright, work-related head, lolling almost dreamily against the headrest, fiery hair falling in sheets across her forehead. Takes in the fact that she looks everything but professional, like a deflated version of the Dana Scully he knows and has unfortunately come to care very much about. He feels like he could laugh, but there's something in his throat that he suspects will come out like a sob (or something far worse) instead. So, he can't risk it.
He doesn't finish his sentence, he just sort of lets his quiet words drift off into the silence of their shared automobile, muffled by the darkness surrounding the headlights in front of him, and her deaf ears.
But, as he focuses on nothing but the darkness, and the splatter of stars drifting in slow motion outside the windows—anything but her, really—he starts to think it means more than that. The voice in the back of his mind, the one that sounds oddly like her, whispers in the back of his mind that he believes in things that aren't real too quickly, that there is always a different explanation. A more logical, scientific explanation, if he'd actually care to listen.
He sighs for a moment and opens up that possibility. That's what she would want. He ponders what her falling asleep really means, much more than just boredom. Perhaps, it means trust. It means that she finally, finally trusts him. After all their cases together so far, after all his "simply ridiculous" (her words, not his) reasonings for the simplest of things.
Trust.
She trusts him.
That's why she fell asleep.
He's quick to believe that its the case, but he's quick to believe anything really. That's what she would say if she were awake, that's what she always says when she is. Her tiny voice in the back of his head seems to smile ever so slightly as if to be saying yes, finally, you're starting to see things how they are, you're starting to see things how I see things. And he smiles, despite the late hour, despite his incredible exhaustion, and her mind-numbingly repetitive snoring, and the slight bumps in the road as he tries to get them both home safe and sound.
He smiles and he smiles and he smiles, knowing that something has changed between them, something is different. That she trusts him. That she finally trusts him.
The next time she falls asleep in their rental car, he doesn't have the heart to wake her.
They have been driving all night, following some criminal that had seemed important at the time, but later on they could both barely remember, and it has gotten to the point where he is desperately clinging to consciousness. Yet, he has found out it is as difficult as rock climbing with hands covered in bacon grease. (Not that he's ever had the chance to do such a thing, but he imagines it would be difficult.) The single, bitter coffee they shared a few hours earlier was not helping him in the slightest. He blames her wholeheartedly for the fact that she was trying to keep their budget down. He knows he could've stayed awake for longer if she hadn't smudged her lipstick against the rim of the cup and made them share. She has fallen asleep mid sentence, telling him something incomprehensible about her sister, or her father, or something that happened to her in high school. He can hardly remember. Only that it was the single, paper-thin barrier between himself and sleep.
Now there is nothing.
Now, his partner in crime is snoozing, and he is moments away from falling asleep himself. Every dizzyingly slow-motion blink that he musters seems to make his eyelids heavier and heavier by the second. He has a few options. Sure, he could try to go find them a hotel, but he thinks the redhead would object—something about the budget again, certainly. He could stop the car and fall asleep on the side of the road, which would be the safest option. Or, he could simply tap her shoulder and force her to talk to him. That way they could both get back to D.C. and back into their own beds for the night.
All he has to do is tap her shoulder, pulling her back into consciousness.
And yet… He cannot seem to remove one hand from the steering wheel to tap her awake.
It's strange.
He imagines if she was driving and he fell asleep. He tries not to laugh for a moment, thinking about how close her tiny body would have to be to the steering wheel, and how angry she would look at everything car-related that would come out of his mouth. But, surely she wouldn't hesitate to punch him (lightly) in the shoulder to wake him up. His partner wasn't one to willingly suffer in a silent car alone. To let him sleep when she wasn't.
Why could he not do the same?
He takes more time to look at her than he had the first time. Her coat collar is turned up against her cheek, something that seems like an accident, and her lips are slightly parted—she has fallen asleep mid sentence, after all—and her nose juts out between the curtain of what should be red hair, but isn't because of the lack of light from outside their windows. It seems to glow less in the darkness, as if her unconsciousness has snuffed out the fire that she has in her eyes while she's awake.
He notices that she looks effortlessly beautiful, but that isn't something new.
He noticed that a long time ago.
It just seems slightly more prominent now, as she snoozes. He thinks that it has nothing to do with her slight snort that goes along with every intake of air she pulls into her lungs. But, then he pauses. Even with those snorts, those weird little snores, he finds her effortlessly beautiful. He's always found her effortlessly beautiful. Even when she's drenched in water, or shouting at him for doing something reckless, or lecturing him in a bored manner. Beautiful.
For an FBI agent, he's sure that he can come up with another word, something else to call her. But, at that moment, exhausted from their case, their adventure (his word, not hers), he cannot seem to come up with anything but beautiful.
He starts to drift off just staring at her sleeping face, but jolts himself back into reality. As pretty as his partner was, he knows he would rather see her annoyed yet, rested face than her amnesia induced, unconscious one (courtesy of him crashing the car they were sitting in). He pulls into the nearest truck stop and falls asleep, turned towards her, staring at the arc of her nose, highlighted in the flickering, yellow lamps that line the truck stop parking lot.
The next time she falls asleep in their rental car, he's surprised that she does.
Their case has been a tough one. And its affect hits her harder than he's ever seen any case hit her before. As he sits in the car, he can picture her in his mind's eye, standing at the scene of the crime, back slightly hunched forwards, whispering briefly about the bathroom before vanishing behind the closed door. He can imagine himself as he follows her, because as her partner, it seems like the right thing to do. But, he hears too much, her quiet, almost gut wrenching sobs are barely audible above the noise of the policemen around him doing their jobs, but to him, it is the only thing that he can hear.
She doesn't want him to see her cry.
To be fair, she doesn't want anybody to see her cry. Long gone are the days when she is willing to press her face against his shoulder because, perhaps, she realizes that it doesn't solve anything. No matter how many kind nothings he whispers into her hair, it doesn't help her sleep at night, it doesn't help her sleep at all. They aren't together, he isn't going to be around to protect and care for her forever. She decides that she has to take care of herself by herself. Perhaps, he muses, that is nowhere near what she has been thinking about, but he can never be certain. What lies within the depths of a woman's mind is her business—and obviously she does not want him to have anything to do with it.
After she cleans herself up, and they sort out the rest of the case with the police, he still hasn't taken the time to ask her if she is alright. They step back into the safety of their shared vehicle, cutting off the world with two slams of their car doors, and she doesn't speak a word, content to stare out the window in silence. He hasn't commented on how puffy her eyes are, how red her nose is. He can see how her heart seems to hang low in her chest, her eyes downcast, her shoulders pulling her frame lower, making her even smaller than usual. He starts the car.
Even after hours of driving in silence, she does not want him to have anything to do with her pain, otherwise she would've spoke up in the car, and not fallen asleep instead.
Yet, here snoozes his redheaded partner, the lines of stress and concentration gone from her slightly plump face. He notices that she looks younger when she's sleeping. Maybe, it's because he can see her face clearly, a lot more clearly than the last times she's fallen asleep in their rented car. She has a few chunks of silken hair pulled back behind both ears, looking considerably more "housewife" and considerably less "dangerous FBI agent" (his words, not hers). He wonders if he should ask her if that was what she was going for. He decides against it. She would probably roll her eyes and not answer the question anyway.
Her eyes fidget beneath her eyelids, following an unseen source, dancing meaninglessly to images and wisps of imagination, her brows furrowing softly above them. He notices that there's a thin line between her eyebrows when she's anxious, as she is now, one that ages her by minutes, days, years even, despite the calm look from before. It makes him feel strange in his chest, uneasy. Almost sad.
But then, the unspeakable happens. His partner's face scrunches up and she lets out a horrible sound. One that crawls its way out of her throat, against her wishes, against everything that she has done to hide it earlier in the evening. One that he has hoped he would never get the chance to hear, after hearing it so few times perviously.
Agent Dana Margaret Scully—his Scully, his redhead, his best friend—the brave, endlessly tenacious, kind-hearted young woman who he feels he has spent more time with than his own mother: Dana Scully begins to cry.
And, it breaks his heart.
He decides then that he will not ever tell her. He will not tell her how much her pain has come through her paper thin exterior, even as she sleeps. She has not wanted him to know, and he has found out, but he was not about to hold that over their heads. He decides that if she wants to keep a secret, she should be allowed to. He is not the boss of her secrets, after all. She can do what she wishes with her secrets.
He also decides, he cannot stop driving. He cannot pull over onto the weed-covered, dusty wasteland to pull her into his arms and promise her that everything will be alright in the end. That he is there for her, that he will always be there for her. Why? Because that would break the first rule, his first rule.
So, carefully, keeping his eyes glued to the road, he moves his right hand from the steering wheel, letting it hang weightlessly in the air between them. He pauses, as if uncertain that what he is about to do is a smart choice. He thinks, almost briefly, about what she would say if she were in the situation that he is in. Perhaps she would park the car on the side of the road and gently run her fingers against his back, her nose balanced against his shoulder as he leaned down towards her and let his emotions drain out of him. Perhaps she would wake him up and then they would talk about what has gone wrong, what she could do to help him.
He blinks, sighing softly, glancing over at her only briefly, before shortening the distance between their hands, and clasping his with hers. He takes the time to intertwine their fingers, which seem to stupidly fit perfectly together. He lets his thumb dance in calming, repetitive, circular motions against the squishiest part of her hand, between her index and thumb, as if trying to calm her.
He squeezes her hand slightly and after a few minutes she miraculously calms down enough to continue sleeping in silence. He doesn't know what to think, so he tries his best not to think anything. To let his mind go numb, his eyes focusing on the barely lit road ahead of them, and his thumb circling over and over and over against her hand.
He's still holding her hand when she wakes up.
She doesn't say anything.
The last time she falls asleep in their shared car, they've almost made it back to her apartment.
Somewhere within his own heart, he believes that she's gone and done it on purpose. The drive has not been that long, and she has just made some clever commentary mere minutes before he looks over to find her sound asleep. Their case has turned out to be nothing, an X File that was nowhere near what an X File should be. She has—for the first time in what feels like forever—the right to laugh at his ridiculous assumptions: she has the facts to back up her conclusions, finally. He is not looking forward to the paperwork in the slightest. (He lives to prove the impossible, after all. Possible things are not of any inkling of interest to him.) He makes a couple mean, vaguely witty jokes to try and rouse her from her slumber, no avail. It isn't until he stops the car in front of her apartment and pokes her in the shoulder, that he realizes that she's actually gone. Her mind far away in la la land, or wherever special agent doctors go when they dream.
He instantly feels bad for what he has said, but then he pushes that aside. It isn't like she can hear him, anyway.
He tries to wake her, shaking her shoulder gently, tickling her nose, but nothing seems to work. His redhead, in her beautiful (he has yet to locate a thesaurus to find a better word), snoring glory is dead to the world. He sighs, coming to a realization of what he must do. What must be done.
He gets out of the car, meandering to the trunk to pull out her suitcase. It's a lot lighter than he's expecting. He wonders if it just contains her scrubs and a pair of pajamas—that's all she usually wears anyway. He wouldn't be surprised.
As he closes the trunk and makes his way to the passenger door, he can see that her head is still leaning against it. Still sound asleep. He pauses, watching her through the glass. It all seems so unreal, almost. To be out, in the middle of the night, the city awake, but just barely. Stars, hidden by the flickering light pollution of their home. ("Light pollution is really harming our environment, Mulder," she has said on more than one occasion, tucking a strand of her hair back behind her ear, "if people don't put at least a little effort in preserving our world, you won't be able to see UFOs from your bedroom window.") The street lamps seem to illuminate her, like a spotlight, in the car. It could only be cheesier if it were raining.
He puts down her luggage and slowly opens the passenger door, making sure she doesn't tumble out onto the concrete. Once he gets the door open, he leans over and unbuckles her seatbelt, letting her upper body slump against his chest. She reminds him of a rag doll, which he refrains from laughing about. He decides it's best not to wake her now, unless he wishes to face the consequences.
Carefully, he pushes her back into her seat, before kneeling slightly with his back turned towards her. The chances of his plan working are very slim, but he at least has to give it a shot. Gently, moves her arms so they're hanging over his shoulders, before he stumbles to his feet. It's not a classy move and he manages to bump her head—which is leaning against his shoulder—as well as his own, against the car.
It's a miracle, he thinks, that she hasn't woken up yet.
He leans forwards slightly, as he gets to his feet, so she's not choking him or dangling too much while he carries her. It's not an elegant sight. He closes their shared car's door with his hip, and fumbles for his keys, locking it with a quiet beep. He stashes the keys back in his pocket, before balancing his partner against his back like a sack of potatoes, and grabs her suitcase from the ground. If his partner had a concierge in the lobby of her apartment, they would've probably given him a weird look, but he's in luck when it comes to Scully having no concierge. She's heavy enough as it is, and he's having difficulty making sure that she's not choking him, and that he's not falling over, and that she's not falling off his back. He became a special agent because he wanted to find the truth, not so he could practice for his partner-balancing circus act.
He sighs, thankful for the elevator in her building, placing her suitcase down on the ground, and bumping her floor button with his elbow. He sighs, kneeling down slightly to let her rest against one of the walls for a moment. He takes a few deep breaths, before he leans down and pulls her over his shoulder, her feet hanging by his hip, and her hands dangling by his lower back. Now, he chuckles softly, she has truly become a sack of potatoes: every special agent's dream.
Eventually, the elevator doors open and he makes his way to her apartment door. He wonders, briefly, what he would say if he ran into any of her neighbors. He cannot come up with anything satisfactory, anything that his partner would agree to being a good idea so, he tries to be as soundless as possible. It's the best option, there are less people likely to be suspicious of their favorite neighborly special agent that way.
He fishes for the key to her apartment in his pocket. It is a recent addition to their towering pile of trust, one that he is a little more than proud about. He gave her a key to his apartment long ago, but she has only given him one in return after he promised to never break in to her apartment unless it was absolutely necessary. She had stressed that particular point over and over and over, and he had kept telling her he would respect her boundaries until he felt like his head was going to fall right off. But, it had been worth it. He unlocks her door, letting it swing open.
He scuttles inside, shutting the door soundlessly behind him, before stumbling into every article of furniture in her apartment in an attempt to find her bedroom without turning on the lights. No matter how much time he enjoyed spending in her apartment, sometimes he felt that she moved her furniture inches to the right and left in order to mess with him.
(He had bruises on his calf from walking into her coffee table five times in one visit.)
Now, he muses, comes the hard part.
The last time he remembers having the opportunity to carry anybody smaller than him to bed was when his sister was still present in his life. She had seemed like a doll in his hands, fragile, breakable. He had taken care with her head, placing it gently against her pillow, tucking her in nice and snug before whispering a quick goodnight and shutting the door behind him. His partner is not like his sister. The redhead is strong and resilient and she is not one to give up without a fight.
He slides her off his shoulder and she slumps against his side, her legs practically unusable. He wonders if he still has some of that boyish, brotherly stealth in him in order to tuck the redhead in without waking her. Well, he's about to find out.
Cautiously, he gets up on her bed and kneels on the fabric, pulling her down with him. Her face slams down against his chest in his stumble, as he pulls her onto the bed. He tumbles onto her sheets and lets out a gasp of air as the wind is knocked clean out of him courtesy of her body weight. Sure, the girl could run in heels and probably give him a good run for his money when it came to a fight, but he hasn't expected her to be as heavy as she was.
He could hear that little voice in the back of his head that sounded oddly like his partner say, "well, maybe you're just weak". (Which was probably the case, he groans.)
He rolls her off of him gently, and sits up, looking down at her.
She's dead to the world, looking more peaceful than ever, with her hair sprawled in a halo about her head. There are thin lines of light dusted across her form from the blinds of her window, cutting her cheekbones into neat, identical portions. He can see the curve of her lower lip here, a hint of her eyelashes there. He pauses, just for a moment to stare at her, knowing that she would probably not allow this at any other time. He stops, when he can't seem to take any more of her perfect features, and slides off her bed.
She's perfectly wonderful, more than he could've ever imagined. To bad he cannot seem to express any of that when she's awake. It's a pity, really. He makes another mental note to find himself a thesaurus, or perhaps just contact a working poet on what other words could possibly describe his partner. Perhaps that would help in telling her how he…
He stops himself in his tracks.
It's too late in the evening, too early in the morning to think about that.
He pulls her heels off, one by one, leaving them at the foot of her bed before turning back to look at her. He seats himself at the edge of her bed, before pulling her covers up and tucking her in securely. (Perhaps he still does have that weird stealth touch that he thought he had lost with Samantha all those years ago.)
Without putting too much thought into it, he places his hand on her cheek, to push some strands of hair out of her face. And yet, he's met with what appears to be a slimy substance on her cheek. He wrinkles his nose and pulls his hand away, squinting at it in the darkness for a moment before realizing what it is.
Talk about beauty.
She drools in her sleep.
He barely holds in his laughter, wiping his hand against his slacks before stumbling out of her bedroom, not even pausing to say goodnight out of fear that his laughter will wake her whole apartment building. Of all the "strictly professional" and "almost robotic" (his words, not hers) things that his partner has ever done, this takes the cake. He closes her bedroom door behind himself and lets out a gasping little snort.
Scully. His Scully. Drooling. Oh, she would never be able to live this down. He takes a handful of deep breaths to calm himself before letting out a yawn. Would she mind if he spent the night on her couch? Probably not. He staggers over to the couch—hitting his calf against the coffee table in the process—before collapsing in a heap on the material of the couch. He notes, sleepily, that it smells like his partner's laundry detergent.
The last thing that crosses his mind before he falls asleep is perhaps they were not as different as he had first thought. They had trust, they had an overwhelming amount of trust between them. Perhaps the only thing left to do is confront her about the weird feeling he gets in his stomach when she smiles at one of his sarcastic jokes. The weird feeling he gets in his chest when she answers his phone call in the middle of the night. The weird feeling he gets when…
He falls asleep thinking of more reasons why he thinks he's falling in love with her.
"Hey, Scully," he says, still half asleep, from his position on the couch the next morning.
"What is it, Mulder?" she replies, with a yawn, seemingly unsurprised to see him lying there.
"You drool in your sleep."
"Oh, shut up."
I hope you've enjoyed that little story! I've never written a strictly present tense story before so, hopefully it all makes sense. Special thanks to afbaggins for forcing me to change all my "but,"'s to ", but"'s. Anyway, I'm super upset that The X Files got taken off Netflix before I got a chance to truly finish it, so I wrote this in retaliation. Sculder and Mully deserve to be happy! Please let me know what you think in the form of a review, follow, or favourite! I would really appreciate it! :)