Chapter X
I wake up in the middle of the night. The clock on the nightstand tells me it's 4:40 a.m. Being still half asleep, I'm not sure whether what happened earlier in this bed has only been a sweet dream, but then I feel the warmth radiating from her body. My hand finds her curled under the duvet only a few inches away from me and I remember everything. Every word, every touch, every kiss, as well as the grand finale.
When we were out on the porch, relishing our afterglow, a strong certainty manifested itself that we're going to be just fine. With Scully snuggled into my side, the starry sky above us, a peaceful satisfaction was settling itself upon me because I have all I need to be happy. After we'd talked about the stars, about how they are born and how they die, about how vast the universe is and how small we are in comparison, she fell asleep in my arms and I was allowed to carry her over the threshold and upstairs into the bedroom after all.
I roll onto my side and slide behind her, spooning her from head to toe. I put my arms around her waist and nestle her head under my chin. I inhale deeply through my nose and can't help noticing the smell of sex on her.
We did it. We mastered yet another crisis.
How many storms have we sailed together? Our bounceback abilities are unmatched. I know we're not through yet, that Scully is still struggling with her memory loss, and might go on struggling for quite some time, but we found ourselves again. As long as we're together, we're unbreakable.
I close my eyes, join in her breathing rhythm, and before I know it, I'm drifting off to sleep again.
Next time I wake up, I do so fairly aware of our nightly lovemaking, only shortly uncertain when I find the spot beside me empty and cold, but her scent is still there. It tells me that it has not been a dream. And then I hear her coming up the stairs, each wooden step creaking even under her light weight.
She walks through the doorframe with a tray in her hands.
"Good morning," she says, obviously well rested and in high spirits. "I thought you might like some coffee."
I prop myself up and lean my back against the headboard before I take the mug she's offering me. "Thanks. Since when are you an early riser?" I ask her.
"Since I've forgotten that I'm actually a long sleeper, I guess."
She chuckles into her coffee mug.
"Come back to bed," I say, folding back the duvet, hoping she'll take her robe off and slip under it again.
"I already took a shower," she objects to my chagrin.
She ties her robe a little tighter, obviously not willing to join me in bed again. She places herself next to me on the covers though, placing herself under my arm, using my chest as her backrest. I would've preferred her naked under the sheets with me, but that's not too bad either.
We sip our coffees in silence for a moment, then she disengages herself out of my embrace, sits upright, and looks at me.
"I've been thinking," she says.
"About what?"
I'm not sure what to expect, that's why my insides start tying a knot.
She hesitates as if she knew I won't like what I'm going to hear.
"I want to read the files to our cases."
I feel like I've been slapped in the face.
"No way!" I stress my rejection vehemently shaking my head.
"Please, Mulder!"
"There must be hundreds. There are far too many for you to read," I try.
I have to talk her out of it. If there was one positive thing related to her amnesia, then it would be the chance to spare her some of the horrible details of her past.
"I don't have to read all of them. You pick the most important ones and decide in which order and when I read them."
"No!" I simply say, hoping it sounds like a resolute final answer.
"I know you're only trying to protect me, but I need to know about our work," she stubbornly insists.
"Why? There were so many ugly cases. The X-Files didn't have so much to do with usual police work, Scully. We were confronted with the weirdest circumstances of a crime. I don't see any good reason why you should be reading them. Anyway, the doctors are saying said your memory mustn't be triggered, that it has to come back on its own."
"But it's not coming back!" She's yelling now. "Don't you see that I'm completely lost? The bits of information you've been giving me don't make a whole picture. What you told me about our child, about us working together, about this house, and our relationship...I can't put the pieces together. I feel like I'm doing one of those brain-teaser puzzles where there's only one way to build a perfect cube, and I'm trying and trying and trying, but no matter how I assemble the pieces, I'm not able to solve the puzzle. And it drives me crazy."
"How would reading the X-Files help you?" I ask, my resistance already crumbling after this outburst of emotions.
"I have the feeling that I'll find the answers to most of my questions in them."
"What questions?"
"You told me that there was no other option for me than giving our son up for adoption, and I believe you. But I need to know what led me to that point in my life that I had to give my baby away." Her voice is tear-stricken but firm. "I have this metal object in my neck and-"
I'm shocked and choke on my coffee. "Where did you get that from?"
"They made a CT scan of my head at the hospital to find out where the amnesia came from. It was clearly visible in the picture." Her hand goes to her neck. "And I can feel it under my skin."
"What else?" I ask through gritted teeth. I'm not sure I want to hear it, though.
"I dipped into my medical records, Mulder, and I found out I had nasopharyngeal cancer, an inoperable tumor between my cerebrum and sinus."
I stare at her. I feel like a bucket of ice-water has been emptied over my head.
"I'm a medical doctor, Mulder. I know that the chances to survive that sort of cancer were zero. How come I'm sitting here next to you, alive and well? I'm in remission for more than ten years now, I'd call that a medical sensation!"
"Scullyyy," I groan. I'm running out of arguments already and she's still not done listing the question preying on her mind.
"We used to be city people, Mulder, living within commuting distance from the Hoover building. I know from old letters I found in the little drawer of the bureau in the living room. And now we live here in this unremarkable house, so remote and far away from everybody else, with a locking gate and barbed wire at the property boundary that I'm asking myself whether we're hiding from someone."
After catching a short breath she opens her mouth again, but this time I stop her. "Enough!"
She throws me a somewhat unfazed look, eyebrows raised, lips pursed.
"I got it," I continue, "I got it. It's just that I hate to see you hurting, and these files will make you, believe me. You have no idea what you've been through, what you and I have been through."
"I don't want to do this alone. I want you to guide me through this. You decide which files I read and when I read them. I need you with me in this. You're the only one who can explain things to me. You're the only one I trust."
The last sentence puts the final nail in the coffin. I'm going to do it. I'm going to let her get re-acquainted with the X-Files. Goddamnit! How could I have been so naïve to believe I could keep them from her forever?
"Alright then," I voice my inevitable concession.
She's relieved but not triumphant that she managed to persuade me. She's well aware that it's not going to be an easy read.
"How about I start with our last case? I was taken by a serial killer who held me hostage for almost three months before abandoning me in a parking lot." Before I can ask her, she explains, "I did some research, Mulder. The internet, newspaper archives, your office."
"My office?"
"There are newspaper clippings all over the place. It was impossible to oversee the one with the headline 'Former Female FBI Agent Reported Missing' circled in red ink."
"I see."
You're a negligent jackass, Mulder!
"Wouldn't that be a good file to start?"
"Probably, but that particular one is not an X-File. The X-Files were closed several years ago and have never been re-opened. For the better, I guess. The serial killer is just a regular VCU case."
I chuckle bitterly. 'Just a regular VCU' case, as if this alone made the whole thing less ugly and cruel.
"Why were you involved in that case anyway if it wasn't an X-File?"
"The agent in charge knew me from when I'd been a profiler with Violent Crimes before I transferred to the X-Files. They were at a dead end with the case and he asked me for help. How could I say no? Innocent women were being abducted and killed."
"Why wasn't I killed?" she asks oddly detached as if she wasn't talking about herself.
Okay, Mulder, yet another story you have to tell her where being associated with you turned her into a victim. There will be the day she realizes that tarrying with you has been the biggest mistake of her life.
Her eyebrows hit the hairline while I keep her waiting for my answer. And that look she shoots me...oh, how I know that look! 'Spit it out, Mulder,' it says. She knows that I'm hiding something from her and she won't let me off the hook until I tell her. She never has. So I give up my resistance, not without heaving a deep sigh though.
"You weren't his type."
Nice try, but you don't really believe she'll content herself with this, do you?
"Why did he take me then?"
If the earth opened up under me and swallowed me just now, I wouldn't mind.
"Mulder?"
"Yeah, well, you were..."
Instead of completing the sentence, I clear my throat, and, eventually, she's run out of patience. "You don't want to tell me that with abducting me he actually meant to affect you."
I close my eyes and groan.
Do you have any idea how this makes me feel, Scully?
"I'm right, aren't I?"
I open my eyes and bore them into her.
"Yesss, you are right!" I hiss, sharply emphasizing every single word. "That freak waited for you in our house, bore down upon you in the kitchen, dragged you through the living room, and took you. He held you captive for three months, did God only knows what to you to erase your memory, and left you at a deserted parking lot at a freezingly cold night to die. All of this, to punish me for having hunted him. And you know what, Scully?" I've talked myself into a rage that much that I just can't stop, "it wasn't the first time you were taken and harmed because somebody wanted to teach me a lesson. You were used as leverage on me so often that I really can't understand why you haven't sent me to hell ever."
My outburst isn't intimidating her one bit. She looks at me, all composed and calm. "I guess, I didn't want those sons of bitches to get through with it, and..." She presses her lips together and shrugs. Turning away from me, she purrs, "I must have been madly in love with you."
I don't realize my jaw has dropped until she stands right in front of me again, lifts her hand to my chin, and pushes it shut.
"Madly in love, huh?" I manage to mumble.
"Nothing else would explain it," she supplies in such a casual tone, looking me deadly serious in the face, that I have to chuckle.
"That was a masterstroke, wasn't it?" I supply, mentally patting myself on the shoulder.
"What was?"
"That I made you fall madly in love with me."
"Hmmm..." she purses her lips and furrows her brows in a gesture so overtly mocking me, I feel beamed back to the time when she used to comment on the wild theories I was supplying just like this.
She takes a few steps away from me, then stops in her tracks, turns around, folds her arms in front of her chest, lifts her chin, and scrutinizes me from head to toe before adding, "who says it wasn't me who checkmated you?"
Now my eyebrows are taking a hike. I'm speechless.
"I've been told that first time we landed in bed was on my initiative. What if this was the final strategic stroke of a long-term plan to make you fall in love with me?...Madly."
Jesus, how I love 'Playful Scully'!
I made acquaintance with this side of her the day after our first night of love. When I woke up, she was already gone, a note on the nightstand telling me she'd meet me at Skinner's office at 9 a.m. for our weekly meeting with him. When I approached Skinner's desk later that morning, my pulse hitting the ceiling, she was sitting in one of the chairs in front of his desk in her shortest and tightest skirt, her legs crossed for it to ride high up her thigh. She smiled innocently at me, piercing right through me with her steel-blue eyes, and asked me in the most business-like tone, 'You look a bit exhausted, Mulder. Rough night?' And then she crossed her legs the other way to let me see the lace top of her tights. My mind was racing and my throat was so dry, I wasn't able to answer any of Skinner's questions for the following ten minutes.
Later on, when I asked her why she'd tortured me like that she just countered, 'if you want last night to have a sequel, you better learn to put up a poker face in front of Skinner, because today, Agent Mulder, you gave a very poor performance.'
Of course, I wanted our first time to be followed by many sequels, so I was fast in developing a technique to keep my hormones in check at work. It involved picturing her with that green beauty mask she'd put on her face during the undercover assignment that made us act as a couple. My next meeting with Skinner must've gone better because the topic didn't come up again. It didn't keep my partner-slash-lover seated across from me at our desk from undoing a button to let me get a glimpse of a red lace bra, though, or from coating her voluptuous lips with the red lipstick I adored so much and licking them while at a debriefing with our boss.
Cruel Scully. Intoxicating Scully.
My heart aches for that Scully. I miss her so very much.