Caught in the Undertow by chibiness87
Rating: T
Spoilers/season: 4x10 Paper Hearts
Disclaimer: not mine
Summary: You have a co-dependent relationship with your partner, her therapist tells her. She wants to laugh. What they have is so much more than that.
Partner. [Pahrt-ner]. Noun. A person who shares or is associated with another in some action or endeavour; sharer; associate. A player on the same side or team as another.
Sometimes, when they are lost in a forest, or looking for Nessie's long lost cousin, or, once, body deep in an elephant carcass, she forgets the real reason Mulder does what he does. His enthusiasm gets the better of him when they're chasing down myths and legends and, once, a flukeman mutant thing, through sewer systems or ventilation shafts or old abandoned buildings, so much so that she momentarily loses sight of what he really wants to know.
The truth about his sister's disappearance.
So when a serial murderer of small girls claims to be the reason behind Samantha's disappearance twenty three years ago, and she is faced not with the man that she knows, the man she has come to rely on, the one who runs through the forest after ghosts and goblins and aliens, but instead with the face of a scared little boy, looking for answers, it throws her. They have a system down; he believes, she debunks, and together, more often than not, they find a truth somewhere in a not quite so happy median.
She can count on the fingers of one hand the times she has seen him like this, and every time she does it cuts her a little deeper.
Hits her a little harder.
She became an FBI agent almost straight from med school; not in rebellion, but because she thought, at the time, it was the right thing to do. All these years later, she still believes that. Has to believe that; she has seen too much, lost too much for her beliefs to waver now.
But sometimes, especially in times like these, she wonders if she would have even been able to make it as a doctor. To look family members in the eye and tell them their loved one was never coming home. Sometimes she wonders how she does it as an FBI agent.
A broken father tells them having a child who is missing is better than having a child who is dead, because when they're missing hope can be eternal, but she knows better. Hope can kill just as much as despair; sometimes more so.
Because when there is hope, there is a chance of disappointment. And that chance only increases day on day, year on year.
They are taught, in the academy, of the golden hour. The time just after a crime has been committed, where the evidence is still fresh, and people's memories are still clear. The time most kidnap victims are found safe, compared to those who are not.
Samantha has been missing for 23 years.
She knows what that means.
But Mulder still has his hope, still has his belief, and what sort of partner, what sort of friend would she be if she didn't stick with him? His most recent trip down memory lane under hypnosis makes him think of past lives, time they have spent together, side by side, and she honestly can't think of a reason that, if by some miracle she does know him in any of these former lives he claims to have, she wouldn't willingly follow him into hell.
She has lost count of the number of times she has lied for him, covered for him, sometimes at the expense of her own bed for the night, or even being held in contempt. Those times always make her laugh, because she knows the truth then. She told him once they kept him in the basement because they were afraid of him; they haven't quite worked out they should be scared of her too.
Her therapist told her, after the kidnapping by Pfaster and the subsequent rescue by Mulder, that she was becoming too co-dependent on her partner. She had scoffed, asked her isn't that what you're supposed to do? Know they will watch your back, just as much as you watch theirs?
Her therapist had stuttered then, the first time she had been left flummoxing for an answer, and Scully had declared then and there she was done.
Co-dependency is only a problem if the quo stops being pro quid.
I scratch your back, you scratch mine.
I rescue you from an unknown biological agent, you save me from a psychotic maniac.
Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
And the biggest irony of all? It's all down to those that want to tear them down that they provide such a united front.
She had never asked to be assigned to the X-Files. The idea of going out into the field, with orders to first spy and second debunk a fellow agents work seemed petty and immoral, especially one with such a high profiling record as Agent Fox 'Spooky' Mulder. Her first meeting with her new partner is nothing like she expected; not least because he knows who she is. Has even read her senior thesis, read and understood it, even, and she doesn't know whether to be wary by that, or flattered.
The first night out of town, and not just out of town but across the country out of state, and she is suddenly standing in the middle of the road in pouring rain, unable to account for 9 minutes of her life. She is a scientist, she knows how time works, but there is no rational explanation for this, no warp of time space continuum that would account for missing time, and she forgets her mission.
Forgets about spying and reporting, and instead experiences.
Lives.
She has no problem going to him with her fears over bumps she can feel on her back, and her reward is better than she could ever hope to imagine. That night, curled up on his bed while he sits on the floor, baring his soul and his mission to her, she believes.
Not that his sister was abducted by aliens, but that, at the core, his heart is true.
His methods may be unorthodox, but then so are most of the things they are sent to investigate, so really, what can they expect?
So when the call comes in to say Mulder has taken Roche on a road trip, she knows exactly where they are heading, and her heart breaks a little more. The emotional cut scars a little deeper. She wishes, more than anything, for him to be right, to get his answers this time, but knows, deep down, he is being set up for a fall.
Again.
He has given so much of himself to this cause, this search, that now, four years in, she has forgotten what it takes for someone who trusts government employees about as far as he can throw them to open up to her.
She has started taking him for granted, and that, that might be her biggest downfall.
But if she is taking him for granted, he does the same of her. His words to her when they had shut the X files down, punished him with hours upon hours of wiretapping, deep in the basement haunt her to this day. I still have you.
He still has her. More now than ever. And she will be there when this whole case is over, and the world has let him down again.
Because where else would she be?
It's not co-dependence, she thinks. Not quid pro quo. It is more than that.
They are more than that.
They're partners.
End
Thoughts?