She knows he's gone before reaches the door.
It's a familiar feeling, a lump in her throat and a pull of loneliness. Her feet feel heavy and her steps automatic, as if she's bracketed to a conveyer belt inching its way toward the threshold. She takes a deep breath, filling her lungs to capacity for what she imagines will be the last time in a while. She knows how this goes, for the most part.
He's left before. She's left before. They live as a pair of spinning magnets, glancing apart only to fly back against each other and hold strong until the next rotation comes and they shoot away again.
She lives in fear of those moments of attachment, sometimes. When she moves far enough away from his axis that she finds space to breathe again she will find relief behind the sadness, a moment of stillness in the swirl of her life with him and without him. Some tiny, guilty part of her will hope that a force intervenes to knock them apart from each other for good, even as she knows the impossibility of that hope. There is nothing, not even death, that has kept them apart thus far.
—
The last time they were apart, it was Scully who left. Her brother had been sick, and she'd flown to San Diego to be near him. Mulder was living under an alias, while Scully lived openly under her own name. He believed himself to be hunted even though he no longer posed a threat to the world as some men wanted it to be, but he believed Scully to be safe as herself. They lived in a small town, aided by friends Mulder had picked up along the way and though it was hardly an uncomplicated life, Scully had thought it was a happy one.
In retrospect they both knew she went to San Diego precisely because it was not a happy life, and because she needed an escape. Her brother had his wife, and their children, and Scully's mother came when she could. Mulder told Scully her brother needed her, that she was a doctor and could help in the ways none of the rest of them could, but the truth was that he saw in her eyes a longing for the banalities of family. He told her to go, but he knew she couldn't live their life together anymore, not the way he thought they needed to live.
She was gone three weeks before she was offered a job in the clinic that treated Bill. It was another four before a colleague at the clinic asked her on a date and she realized she had left Mulder without really intending to.
She was gone three months altogether before a hospital called to tell her there had been a break-in at the house, that Mulder had defended himself, and that he was hurt. She left San Diego that night, much to her brother's disapproval, and was at Mulder's bedside the following morning.
She remembered his eyes, one swollen shut, and the bandages on his arms. It was not an unfamiliar sight, Mulder injured, but each time she saw it she felt as if she were drowning. She sat by his bedside and took his battered hand in hers. He swallowed with difficulty, turned his face to hers, and tried to smile.
"I'm sorry you had to come back," he whispered, hoarse.
"I wanted to," she murmured, resting her face on his battered knuckle.
She hoped it was true.
—
She reaches the threshold and opens the door. The rooms are empty. Everything is still inside, of course - he only takes what he can easily carry - but the one thing that fills the room is gone. Mulder is gone.
Scully crosses the room carefully, dulling the echo of her own footsteps. The couch is worn and tired, like she is. She sought a life of passion and adventure in the FBI, and she found it. Found it in the work first, and then in him. She loved him before was in love with him, falling from one to the other as much because of the unusual circumstances of their life together as because of the way she felt about him alone. She might never have loved Mulder if not for the strangeness of their life; it's a fact they both quietly acknowledge and never speak. It's a devastating truth, that she is unsure if she would have chosen him of her own volition even as he knows he would have chosen her, given the chance. It is uneven, their life together. She makes him whole, while he and the universe of torment that surrounds him shatters her again and again. it's why he leaves. It's why she's relieved when he does.
He tries to love her enough to let her go, to release her from the chaos he carries with him. She tells him she chooses to be there with him, but they both suspect that isn't really true. She has become entangled in his world over time and has committed herself to living it, but Mulder still believes that if he disappeared long enough she might be able to live the life she was supposed to live. it is the height of hubris that Mulder thinks he has any control over this, when he hasn't been able to stop her from being a part of this life any time before.
The phone rings; she ignores it. It's not Mulder, not yet. In a week or a month or six months he'll reappear and they'll crash into each other again, first as two people around which an entire world revolves, then as friends, then as soul mates, then as more. It will be slow, and inevitable. She hates it. She waits for it. She loves it. She loves him.
—
For weeks after she returned home from San Diego, she and Mulder sidestepped the truth about why she'd been gone. They so rarely talked about these periods of separation, except when Mulder was angry and wanted to push her away or test the likelihood that she would leave again. For Scully, once she made the decision to be with Mulder she was done and no longer wanted to second-guess it. Mulder sometimes needed a little more time.
One afternoon the phone rang and Mulder answered, only to hand Scully the phone with eyebrows raised.
It was the man from the clinic; he'd gotten her number from Bill. Scully suspected Bill had prodded him to call, hoping it might remind Scully of the life she was giving up to hide in off-the-map towns with a man Bill was justifiably certain would lead Scully to an early death. She made eye contact with Mulder, who leaned against his desk with arms folded and watched as she turned away and returned the man's greeting.
He asked after Scully, told her the clinic missed her, updated some of the gossip Scully tangentially knew from her time there, and expressed his disappointment that she'd left before they'd really gotten to know each other. She responded in kind, cognizant of Mulder's shifting weight behind her. When it was clear she was uninterested in knowing him further, they said their goodbyes and she hung up the phone. She hesitated for a moment before turning.
"Mulder -"
He was gone. She sighed and headed for the bedroom.
"Mulder, I should have told you -"
He was rifling through a drawer, and as she paused in the doorway to gauge his thoughts he turned toward her with a small box in his hand. She stood straighter, confused.
"I got you something," he said. "While you were gone. I wasn't sure when I should give it to you."
He waved the box toward her. It was light, but her hand trembled as she took it.
"Mulder, that man -"
He shook his head. "It doesn't matter."
They locked eyes. "It matters to me."
He nodded. She told him in quiet, unsparing detail of the man in San Diego, of his attraction to her, of her refusal to return the sentiments but of her desire to. When she was finished, the silence fell thick between them. She looked back at the box in her hands; he studied her face.
"Are you going to open it?" he asked.
She lifted the lid from the box and broke into a wide, relieved smile. A tiny lapel pin rested on cotton in the box; it was an alien, its four-fingered hand raised in a peace sign.
"Scully, I know being out here like this isn't the way you want to live," he said, shuffling closer to her. "I … I don't want to make you stay here."
"I choose to be here, Mulder," she said, but the look on his face told her he was not convinced.
He pressed his lips to her forehead, and she stepped into his arms. They held each other for a long while.
—
The phone pauses, silent for just a moment, before it rings again. It's more insistent this time, somehow. She raises her head from the couch and stares at it as the familiar lump forms in the back of her throat. It isn't Mulder, but it's what's going to bring him back to her again. Already. She isn't ready.
They never say "I love you," not out loud. She caught him reading an article once, in a magazine she brought home in a fit of normalcy, about the importance of saying the words every day. The terror in the eye contact they made let both of them know it wasn't how they worked, and it didn't need to happen. It's the wrong phrase for them, anyway. Scully loved their son. She loved Emily. She loved her sister and her father and her mother and her brother and friends and other people she'd long abandoned to chase shadows in the dark with this man they couldn't understand. Love was not the word for Mulder.
Scully answers the phone. It's a man, speaking words her mind has to scramble to understand. It's what she suspected. She thanks him, hangs up the phone, studies the room once again.
—
The nosebleed came in the middle of the night, the haunting reenactment of a moment Scully had relegated to her nightmares. She awoke with a cough and a familiar wetness on her upper lip. She tried not to wake him but something about her fumbling in the bathroom startled him from sleep anyway. When she came back into the room the lights were on and he was getting dressed. He'd seen the blood on her pillowcase, jumped to the correct conclusion as he so often did, and insisted they go to an emergency room. She tried to calm him, calling an emergency room visit over one nosebleed irrational, but Mulder could not be deterred. He'd been anticipating this moment for years.
Her x-rays were concerning, and her blood tests offered no solace. She was to see an oncologist as soon as possible.
The silence on the ride home was awful, but conversation would have been worse. Scully stared out the window already working through the potential diagnoses, the treatments, and the prognoses in her mind. Mulder worked his jaw and gripped the steering wheel too hard, betraying his carefully constructed air of confidence.
She heard him on the phone when he thought she was sleeping, already emerging from his self-imposed exile to chase answers they weren't yet sure they needed. In days, Scully knew, he would be bouncing across the country again, inserting himself into a conspiracy that may not have even gone looking for them.
But first, he booked her a ticket to San Diego and an appointment at the clinic that treated Bill.
He told her it was for her health, because of the zealousness of their treatments and so she could be closer to her family, and she let him think she believed him. She knew as she boarded the plane that she was leaving so he could leave her, that he was trying to give her a chance at life before she died.
She told him she would be gone a few weeks, just long enough to get a diagnosis and a schedule of treatment, and that she would be back. The wave he gave her as she left confirmed that he wouldn't be there when - if - she returned.
—
From behind a stack of papers on the desk peeks a picture frame. She knows it well; it's home to a picture of Mulder's sister, Samantha. The picture goes where he goes, and the frame is empty now. She pushes it aside, looking for the other frame, the one that holds a picture of Scully clipped from a newspaper article years ago. He framed it to annoy her; it's a terrible picture of her looking exasperated while on the phone at a crime scene. They both know it's him on the other line, and when Mulder framed it he told her it was so he could always remember just how much of a pain in her ass he was on a daily basis. She'd responded that she would be happy to remind him of that herself.
She finds the frame, empty.
Without thinking she picks up the phone again, dials his number, and waits. It goes straight to voicemail, as she knew it would. He's on a plane, or he's drinking, or he's sitting in a hotel room staring at the television and telling himself he's done what's best for her. Whatever he's doing, he wants to do it alone.
He knows that she's come back as she promised she would; he probably knows exactly when her plane landed. He knows she sat in the living room in San Diego surrounded by family who loved her and the opportunity for a better life, and that she got on a plane anyway to come back home. He knows that the only way for her to let go is for him to disappear. He knows they'll see each other again, when her path has diverged enough from his that he can no longer derail it. He knows that he'll be by her side when she dies, that he'll hold her hand, that he will be the last thing she sees, and that she'll know he loved her enough to let her go.
But he doesn't know that Scully isn't going to die. That the man on the phone confirmed that the tumor was benign. That Scully has decades of life left to make her own.
On top of another stack of papers, there's an envelope with her name scrawled in Mulder's handwriting. It's a boarding pass back to San Diego, leaving tomorrow. She runs her fingers over it, and the catch in her throat surprises her.
She thinks back to that first moment that they met, in that basement office years ago, both of them pumped full of ego and interest and flirtation and challenges. She smiles. If she had known at the time what she knows now, she still would have walked through that door.
Scully reaches for her bag and drops the boarding pass inside. As she hefts it over her shoulder, her fingers slide against a pen affixed to the side - an alien, giving the peace sign. She closes her hand around it, gives one last look at the living room, and leaves.
—
For all his skill at running, he is a creature of habit. He sits at the bar with a glass filled halfway, pretending to listen to a game on the television above him, but paying more attention to the conversations of the patrons around him. He doesn't know where he's going to go tonight, so for the moment this bar stool is his home, the din around him the only distraction he has from the pull he feels toward the door, toward the airport, toward San Diego.
There's the scrape of a bar stool next to him, a flash of red, and a rush of ice in his veins. He keeps his mouth straight, but can't stop the smile in his eyes as he stares harder at his glass.
"Buy you a drink?" she asks.
He lifts his glass and drains it dry, placing it back on the bar with a clatter. He motions to the bartender for two more. They pretend to watch the game, but ignore everything but the feeling of the other one beside them.
The glasses arrive and Mulder holds his in her direction. Scully clinks her glass against his, looks him in the eye, and smiles.