disclaimer: not mine, don't sue
okay, so this takes place during FTF when scully gets reassigned to utah. what if she had been excited? what if she needed to leave?
Back to You
"Scully," he calls out as she walks out his door. He can't let her leave him. She's the only thing keeping him sane… the only thing that HAS been keeping him sane. In the five years that he has known her, she has made a bigger impact on him than all the other people in his life combined. He can't let her leave. He hasn't told her how he feels. Hasn't told her how much she means to him. She turns around.
"Please don't beg me to stay, Mulder. I need to get out of here," she snapped. She didn't want to be angry at him. She had come over to say goodbye. She was sure that she was going to leave, and she didn't want to leave him on a bad note.
"What am I supposed to do? Don't you know what your leaving is going to do to me?" he asked her, and even he noticed how self-centered that sounded.
"What about what it's doing to me?" a tear runs down her cheek, "Don't you know what staying is going to do to me?"
"I'm sorry, Scully, I'll make it up to you. We can take more time off, work more in DC, you can have your own desk!" he was grasping at straws now, ready to throw himself at her feet.
"This isn't something that we can fix by just going out and buying me a desk, Mulder," she regretted telling him.
"What's it going to take? I'll do anything…" he cried. He was crying. She hated to see him cry. It happened almost as often as she cried. And now tears were streaming down her face too.
"I'm leaving, Mulder. I have to get away. From the darkness. From everything that's happened to me. I can't… I can't take it anymore," she confessed to him. It was one of the hardest things she had ever had to do. Then, his eyes met her's, and she changed her mind about that thought.
"You're just leaving?" he asked, almost in disbelief. Really, though, he was trying to wrap his mind around it. No more Scully. No more partner. No more I've got your back and you've got mine. No more coffee in the mornings. No more red hair. No more skepticism. No. More. Dana. Katherine. Scully.
"I'm sorry," she said in a whisper, looking down at the floor.
"You're not," he said coldly. The ice from his statement burned her heart. She didn't want to leave things like this.
"This isn't about you, Mulder!" she shouted, though she didn't know where it came from. Somewhere deep inside of her, from the person she had buried when she left medical school and joined the FBI.
"What is it about, then, Scully? Would you be doing this if you were still working a respectable job in the bureau? Would you be leaving everything behind if you hadn't had me as a partner?" he shouted back. He shouldn't have been arguing with her. He should have been holding her, kissing her gorgeous face and telling her how much he loved her. But that was them. They always argued.
"Can't you just accept that this is my own choice? That I decided that it was time for a change. Maybe I'm tired of the questions. I'm tired of getting myself so involved in my work that I start to suffer the consequences. I don't believe like you do, Mulder. I don't have that holding me. I don't want to believe! I don't want to believe in your goddamn conspiracies and your paranoia! It's time to grow up, Mulder! I don't want this to be about you, but maybe it is. Maybe we're too close."
"I've never been closer with anyone in my entire life."
"And that's what scares me," she whispered.
"So you're just going to run away? You're afraid to lose me, so you'll leave me?"
"It's not like that--"
"I will never have with anybody else what I have with you. You are my partner, you're my best friend, and if you leave…" he trailed, unable to finish that sentence. She finished it for him, though.
"If I leave," she started, "you will go on. You'll get a new partner. Things will go back to normal. You don't need me, Mulder."
"I need you. I need you here, with me."
"I need to go, though. I need to leave all this," she tried to be gentle with her words. They had closed the distance between them, and now they were in the middle of his front hallway, her hand on his chin. The X-files had been shut down. She had been reassigned. She saw it as an opportunity to grow.
"Why do you always have to distance yourself? It's not going to hurt you if somebody gets close, you know," he reasoned with her. She was intent, though.
"I'm not running away from you. I'll still be with you. But please let me go and see what I can do on my own. Please don't guilt me into staying. Please don't make me feel bad. Because I really want to go."
She wanted to leave. Not to be away from him. But she needed to leave, and he would not, so she would in turn, leave him. That was not something she wanted to do. The first time she knew for sure that she trusted him, right after her sister had died, she had realized that she never wanted to leave. That if she stayed right where she was, she would be perfectly fine for the rest of her life.
But she had been wrong. Things had happened. Cancer had happened. Emily had happened. Gibson and everything that came along with him happened. And she could no longer take it. She didn't want to leave Mulder, but she wanted to leave DC and headquarters there and everything that reminded her of her old life.
Maybe that meant Mulder couldn't be a part of her life, either. She couldn't have her cake and eat it too.
"You want to go?" he asked through his sobs.
"I need to go," she said, rather heartlessly. It was just her way of distancing herself. He was right about her in so many ways.
"Fine," he said after a deep inhale and wiping of his eyes. He stood up straight, backed away from her, and they looked at each other intently.
"Don't do this, Mulder," she told him, referring to his behavior.
"Do what? Run away? Distance myself? Make everything clinical so nothing hurts? I can't stop doing that, Scully. I learned from the best."
"We are different--"
"We're exactly the same."
And she knew he was right.
"I'm leaving. I'm packed. I'm ready to go. I have a ticket to Salt Lake City."
"So nothing I would have said would have made a difference?"
"Something would have. But it's too late for that and I wouldn't believe you anyway."
"Believe what? Do you want me to tell you I love you?"
The question tore through her like a knife. She had waited for so long for him to tell her he loved her. She was sure he did. She knew him, sometimes better than she knew herself. And she knew she loved him. So how could he not love her? After all, they were
Exactly
The
Same.
"No. I don't want you to tell me that. Not now."
"At one point?"
"At one point. That point has come and gone, and we are just two people now. Two people who had something. Two people who lost it--"
"Two people who are losing each other."
Precisely.
"I just wanted to say goodbye."
"We never say goodbye to each other."
Never. Not on the phone. Not in person. Never.
"It's time that we did, then."
Never say never. Never say goodbye.
"Alright, then, you can say it."
"Mulder, won't you please stop being difficult for just this once? Please! I just wanted to come say goodbye to my best friend. You mean so much to me--"
"Then why are you leaving?"
"Ugh. Fine, Mulder, if you don't want to say goodbye, don't. I can't make you. But I'm going to say goodbye. Goodbye, Fox Mulder."
He stood there, looking at the ground. And because she couldn't take it anymore, she turned on her heel and left. Maybe in Utah she wouldn't get paired with somebody like him. Somebody that scared her so much. Somebody that was afraid to say goodbye. Somebody so stubborn.
Somebody she loved so much.
Two hours later, at the airport, she watched as her flight showed up on the screen. There was no going back now, not that there had been earlier. Actually, she liked to think that there had been. That there had been some hope of her staying. Despite the fact that she emptied her apartment and packed away all her things, she liked to think that there wasn't any guarantee she would go until she talked to Mulder.
And she had talked to him. And in the end, he hadn't said anything back.
So she grabbed her luggage, the things that weren't already being moved across the country. She tried to forget everything that had ever happened to her in DC as she moved toward the terminal. She knew she couldn't forget, but she liked to think that she could.
Every now and then, she found herself looking back. Looking for him. Looking for his lanky figure running through the airport, trying to find her. She would run up to him. He would take her in his arms, telling her how sorry he was and that he didn't want to say goodbye. He would tell her that he loved her and that he couldn't live without her. Not just as a partner, but as a significant other. Then they would kiss and everyone would clap.
Just like they did in the movies.
But she didn't see Mulder running through the crowd looking for her. As she boarded the plane, she scolded herself for thinking such a thing could be possible. Not with Fox Mulder. Not in real life.
Because
Real
Life
Is
Not
Like
The
Movies.
Five minutes later his tall lanky figure can be seen running through the crowd. Not by her, though. Her plane just left. She is on her way to Utah. He waited too long.
He broke down right there in the middle of the airport. There are so many things he didn't say to her, even if she said they wouldn't have made a difference. He still needed to say them. He could have at least said goodbye. His stubbornness wouldn't even allow him a goodbye, though. It hadn't even allowed him to bid farewell to the one person in his life who had the power to take him down with just a look.
His one in five billion.
This isn't about you, Mulder, her voice rang in his head. He wanted to be happy for her. She was getting out of the darkness. Gaining some of her life back, some of the life that he himself had taken away. For a moment, he had considered getting himself a ticket and going after her. It wasn't about him, though. He couldn't just go chasing after her like some guy in the movies. He couldn't do that.
Because
Real
Life
Is
Not
Like
The
Movies.
So he picked himself up, brushed himself off, and prepared himself for the long journey without his partner by his side.