This Is How The World Ends

by Solia

In 2012 the invasion started, but no one saw it. This oversight cost them - his reputation, her purpose, each other... An unsanctioned case with a familiar threat puts everything at risk, and as they race to save what matters most, standing alone may not be an option. MSR. Angst. Novel-length. Alternative events diverging post-IWTB, ignoring/replacing S10&11.

14. XIII - Scully

Title: This Is How The World Ends

Fandom: X-Files

Rating: M

Disclaimer: I do not own The X-Files, any of its characters or the definition of angst. I fully credit ownership of all that to FOX and Chris Carter and co.

Author's Notes: Happy Valentine's Day, shippers! It's also Friends' Day in Finland, a good friend tells me, so Ystävänpäivä to all of you, in the spirit of the warmest and most perfect friendship we know: Mulder and Scully.

All that said, this chapter is more angsty than friendsy or romancey, but since I didn't exactly theme it around the date (did that for the early chapters, made it Christmas, which then ended up too far in the past and now I'm struggling to keep up) I figure it's still very friendsy and sweet of me to be providing a chapter on Valentine's Day, which makes up for the angst. Hope everyone gets plenty of happiness and affection from their loves, friends and families today to counteract the tone of this chapter.

Thanks for your review and your kind words about my more traditional stance on the conspiracy storyline, minx80! This flashback chapter is told by Scully but gives some more insight into Mulder's frustrating way of interacting with her when he's consumed by a goal, and also into her reluctance to be pulled back into the unexplained. This was my vision of how they might have driven each other away without compromising either character.

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21st December, 2012

It wasn't snowing, but there was a biting chill on the wind, and the stars they watched seemed to twinkle a little more sharply than they would on a warmer night. Every time Scully exhaled there was a white cloud of condensation and despite thick gloves, she couldn't really feel her fingers; the last she'd felt her toes properly was at least an hour ago. She had been sitting on this frigid rooftop in Billings, Montana, for three hours and her patience had worn thin. Beside her, the reason for her being out here was carefully adjusting the lens on his telescope. Dark hair that he kept forgetting to get cut hung in his eyes but his concentration was such that it didn't affect him. He noticed nothing except all he wanted to see, which at the moment was activity in the sky, and nothing commonplace like hair, the cold or even Scully could distract him.

This was how Mulder had been as long as Scully had known him, and by now she knew better than to expect him to ever change. She knew him like the back of her hand – his obsessive nature, his keen sense of observation and his knack for making connections that more linear people like herself would fail to notice. Likewise, he knew her just as well. He knew she would do anything for him, even sit all night on a rooftop in the middle of winter watching uneventful skies and being mostly ignored by the love of her life as he stargazed, especially if it meant proving his life's work was justified.

That's why he hadn't even asked.

For a time it had been their life's work, but these past couple of years had been hard. The work had always been hard, no question, but the familiar frustration of running repeatedly into brick walls of bureaucracy, red tape and retracted witness statements, without the resources of the FBI and with fewer and fewer leads coming to light than ever before… It was wearing on them both. The federal pardon for Mulder had made things worse, not better. It had thrown off the shackles of being in hiding: free to roam, roam he had, and free of the urgency of trying to keep him safe, Scully felt less free than ever. Mulder was burying himself in his work even more deeply than ever, disappearing on her for days at time and returning with a sprained wrist, a vague explanation and a scrap of paper with half a name written on it, and chasing this 'lead' with all that he was until he hit the next wall. Scully had accepted the FBI's invitation to return to her former position as a Counterterrorism agent, which had initially been a means of getting around some of the barriers they kept hitting, but mostly it occupied her time and served as a reminder of how little she was achieving.

Mulder wasn't happy about it. He didn't say so, but he didn't ask about her day or anything when she came home from the office, either. For her part, she didn't particularly feel like telling him about it anyway. She kind of liked that it was separate. She didn't bring it home with her, and she didn't take her home life in with her. At her reinstatement interview she hadn't even batted an eyelid when she'd told the whole panel that she'd broken up with Fox Mulder more than a year before, barely saw him anymore.

Lying was less exhausting than working around the prejudice that came with the truth.

Wondering whether they were wasting their time was the most wearisome part of it all. Scully had let too much in life pass her by for it to be okay for this to simply not work out. She'd prioritised Mulder's crusade over everything, over any chance they'd ever had of enjoying a normal relationship, over their chance to raise their son together… Between them, they'd already given too much, and now, tonight, their faith, time and sacrifices needed to be vindicated.

Mulder stiffened slightly, alert to some change in the patch of sky he was observing, and Scully, alert to any change in her partner's demeanour, looked up at the stars hopefully. 'Hopefully' should have been the wrong word. Tonight was the night, the fateful date on which the mysterious Mayan Calendar ended and, so Mulder had once learned from their very government, on which a long-dreaded alien invasion was set to begin. The logical side of Scully (usually the dominant aspect of her personality) hoped she would look up and see nothing out of the usual. No descending flying saucers, no evidence of extra-terrestrial life, no laser beams. She had seen enough of what some of these not-of-this-Earth races were capable of to know she didn't want them here and wanted the Calendar to be wrong.

In spite of all this, a little shameful part of her, looking hard at those twinkling distant suns, wanted desperately for Mulder to be right. That little part wanted to see the ships fall from the black and wake the world up with their flashing lights and the soft rumble of their futuristic engines, so she could point and scream, "You see? He isn't crazy, he was right all along, and I was right to follow him!"

So everybody would know. So she would know, once and for all.

A tiny glint was moving against the night, but their gasps died in their throats.

"Another plane," Mulder said gloomily. Scully could already make out the faint red flash of the wing light that gave it away. Her partner sighed and pulled away from the telescope to look upwards with his unassisted eyes. "Any change?"

"Nothing," Scully answered dully before she even raised the binoculars to her eyes. Jensen Dale, their client, was visible through the top floor bedroom window of the apartment building across the block. He was fast asleep, warm beneath his thick blankets, curtains drawn back to give them their view but window tightly shut against the cold outside.

He had the right idea.

"I know it's coming, Scully," Mulder insisted. He didn't need to look at her; she felt the intensity of his assertion.

"I know you do," she assured him, lowering the binoculars to check her watch and blow on her hands. She didn't know for sure that an alien invasion was coming, but she did know for sure that Mulder knew there was, and if there was a skill she was constantly revising in her relationship with Mulder, it was agreeing to disagree and accepting that there was a difference between facts and the truth.

Mulder's truth was that aliens were coming. Tonight. At midnight, and all through tomorrow. The fact was that they had found no viable evidence to support his truth. Those who shared in his belief were wholly unreliable characters with concerning backgrounds of mental health issues and fraud, and Scully was having trouble understanding the dots Mulder was trying to connect here.

She didn't want to tell him he was overreaching. She'd told him enough in the past and it had never done them any good. It had even been incorrect at times.

Jensen Dale was the least dodgy of the people who had responded to Mulder's classified ad. He was a journalist, currently working as a researcher and editor for a popular morning news show – educated, critical, reasonable. Someone Scully could take seriously, even though he was one of dozens of people reporting escalating symptoms of headaches, vivid recurring nightmares and specific paranoia. The symptoms, at least, seemed consistent from case to case, though Scully had sent Jensen and two other abductees for a brain scan and blood tests in order to rule out more earthly causes and found nothing helpful. No implants. No tumours. No irregular blood chemistry.

Nothing to indicate abduction. Nothing to indicate otherwise. Nothing to encourage anyone else (other than Mulder's usual crazies, out of the woodwork) to join them in their investigation or to offer any more resources in their search. The costs were adding up and the options were running low.

Which was what had driven the investigative pair to the desperate measures they now found themselves in. On the roof, in the cold, days out from Christmas, watching a man sleep and watching the skies for signs while people all over the city partied in light-hearted anticipation of the end of the world.

"We should be seeing something by now," Mulder muttered, checking his watch and quickly repositioning his eye. Scully dutifully brought her binoculars back to her eyes and sought out Jensen Dale. There he was, sound asleep, warm and content… "There are only three minutes left until midnight." Mulder paused for a long time. "Something should have happened already. We're a time zone over from where the calendar was created. It's already tomorrow, by that logic."

Scully didn't say anything. She'd already asked the questions – is the Calendar so exact you'd trust it to the very day? Let alone the second? The ancients counted in number systems of base-18 and measured time in 52-year-cycles, too big to be this precise, so how can you believe any vague notion that a cataclysm would be predicted so surely? Could your intel be wrong? Might the invasion be from today's date rather than on it? If you're so sure, wouldn't you rather be at Chichén Itzá or something? It'd be warmer… And she'd already copped the sharp responses, so she wasn't game to test Mulder's strained sense of charity of information tonight.

"We are in the right place, right?" Mulder checked, and Scully swallowed down the nervousness that arose in her at his query. Mulder questioning himself made her feel uncomfortable. She believed because he believed enough for the two of them. That his faith was starting to shake was unsettling. "These are the coordinates?"

"They haven't changed," Scully said, reaching back without looking for the backpack she knew was against the vent. She reached in through the unzipped opening and felt the vague tactile feedback of paper against the thick glove on her frozen fingers. She pulled out the crumpled, dog-eared map they'd carted around with them for the last two years, plotting locations of interest to this case. Despite the well-worn appearance gained from being opened and closed and read and shoved into pockets, there was very little marked on it. Seventeen crosses, marking unsubstantiated claims of alien activity across the nation across the past twenty-eight months. Ten blue triangles, marking the current residences of the respondents to Mulder's ad, claiming shared nightmares foreshadowing an impending alien invasion. And four red circles, the first marks to go on the map, marking the coordinates smuggled to Mulder in a Moscow bar just over two years ago, supposedly by a terrified former Soviet agent from an unidentified department, with a fake name and a false service history, because there was no matching record that Scully could bring up on her databanks at work when they'd tried to verify the man's existence later.

It sounded eye-rollingly preposterous, typical Mulder.

But they were on this roof because, against all Scully's reckoning, one cross, one triangle and one circle had intersected in the exact same place.

Billings, Montana.

"This has to be the place," Mulder agreed, reaching as far as he could to take the map. He didn't need to check it to know what they'd already known a week ago, a day ago, this morning, three hours ago when they'd set up here. "Jensen has to be the fish they're coming to fry." He flicked the map roughly to make it fall open, and glanced between it and the view through his telescope lens. "Even if he's not," he conceded, "and there's someone else on this side of the city marked for abduction, we're up high enough that we should still be able to see it."

Mulder was utterly convinced that they were here to witness an abduction. Scully had more varied worries. Annihilation. Apocalypse. Judgement day. And… nothing.

She thought that for nothing to happen at all would be the worst, because for all of the other eventualities, at least in the act of being blown up she wouldn't be around to suffer them.

Mulder looked for a while at the map, trying desperately to see a pattern emerge that hadn't already. With a frustrated sigh that was almost a growl, Mulder shoved it off of his lap and moved away from his telescope to check again the knobs of the radio transmitter beside him, fine-tuning to the frequency he'd been told would pick up indicators of approaching space craft.

He found nothing. Scully kept watching their client. He seemed to be sleeping deeply, body relaxed in a side-sleeper position facing the window. There was no indication from his posture that he was suffering from the nightmares he apparently shared with the other abductees of being locked in a large cage in the centre of a sort of white colosseum while a crowd of frightful aliens heartlessly examined each one, grabbing and holding up for better inspection before throwing back into the frightened group of humans. This morning when they'd seen him, Jensen had been restless and uncomfortable, reluctantly sharing that his latest dream had involved the alien beings picking through the lot for the abductee they each preferred.

"It was like an auction," Jensen had recalled, looking haunted. Dark rings had started to develop below his eyes and he'd taken a week off from work as stress leave.

An auction for what, both Scully and Mulder were curious to know, but the auctioneer and his audience were tonight nowhere to be seen. The stars stayed put. The radio stayed silent. The seconds ticked by, and Scully could detect no change in Jensen's circumstances. The heat and motion sensors they had set up in the bedroom would provide clearer data later, but increasingly Scully was thinking that this data would be as useless as this exercise of staring through the binoculars.

"This is the channel," Mulder said, hitting the side of the radio to prompt it to locate a frequency that was not transmitting. "This is what they said. I'm dead-on," he added urgently, telling no one in particular except the radio itself as he leaned close to check the needle indicator. "This is the same channel Harris detected that blip pattern on."

Harris. Scully was unable to bring a face forward from her overcrowded memory bank of unreliable witnesses in this case. Several of them had claimed to have detected a radio signal in the vicinity of the alleged alien activity (a.k.a. the crosses on the map) on the corresponding dates. None had recordings or any substantial evidence. What had made Mulder believe this Harris over the others? She couldn't remember. She was tired, on so many levels.

Tonight felt like a culmination of twenty years of work, and it was looking set to be a complete and utter letdown.

"Scully, check this for me," Mulder urged, and his partner obediently dragged herself to her feet, suppressing a sigh and trying to ignore the stiffness in her joints from the cold. She shuffled over in the narrow space they'd set up in, between two vents, and crouched back down beside him. She would have liked for him to slide a warm arm around her and pull her closer, but despite possessing a compassionate and caring personality, Mulder was not prone to examples of affection when he was on a case like this. That he even noticed she was present was more a sign of how big he considered this event, rather than a sign of his feeling for her. He was definitely the loner type, but had latched onto Scully early in their working relationship, appreciating the edge he gained in his war with an ally at his side. She always knew when something was big – it was when he disappeared for a week and then called her, claiming to 'need' her on this. And she always went, whatever she thought of it, however annoyed she was about his thoughtless abandonment. She knew it was not personal. Nothing was more personal to Mulder when he was like this than his work, which was why she shrugged off her disappointment at the lack of attention and looked closely at the needle on the old radio. It was exactly on the second notch after 106, not a hairsbreadth off.

"You're dead-on," she confirmed, and let her frustrated partner take the binoculars from her and hurry to where she'd just been to check on Jensen. She watched him, feeling the disappointment trickle back. Not because he was ignoring her. Not because he was obsessed and everyone thought he was insane. Disappointed because he'd ignored her and obsessed over work that everyone else thought was a joke for the last two decades and tonight it was all meant to be proven worthwhile and every second that passed made it look less and less likely that it would happen.

He wasn't going to give up as easily as she was prepared to.

"He hasn't moved," Mulder commented irritably once he'd looked for five or six seconds at Jensen, and he side-stepped back between the vents to his telescope, squeezing close against Scully without any awareness of her, of their bodies sliding hard against each other. He shoved the binoculars at her. "Watch him. Eighty seconds to go. Something's going to happen."

Scully did as she was told but the heaviness was still building in her chest, and she quietly asked, "What if it doesn't?"

Not an option. "It will."

Since Mulder's capture at Mount Weather, where it had been revealed to him that the alien race the Syndicate had been working for had already set an invasion date, this date, he and Scully had found almost nothing to substantiate or elaborate upon that information. No further documentation had come to light; no eccentric anthropologist had released any laughable underground study linking the Mayan Calendar with extra-terrestrial activity, or even with unusual mythologies. Nameless weirdos appearing to Mulder in random dark places with wild claims of classified knowledge of incredible government conspiracies had once been plentiful but even this supply had dried up since the guy in Moscow. In the last ten years, they had achieved less than they had in any single year they had worked the X-Files, and if a flying saucer were to materialise in the sky right now over Jensen Dale's apartment building and blow it up with a laser, aside from being absolutely awful it would at least be immensely satisfying, because it would make it all worthwhile.

It would be proof.

Mulder disagreed, or at least pretended to. Whenever she got hopeless he went on a passionate rant about how the lack of information clearly demonstrated the government's tight security measures, the stranglehold they had on the Truth, the importance of their cause. He would close his argument with a reminder of the lengths their own government had gone to in order to silence him in the past, imprisoning him for murders he hadn't committed, subjecting him to torture and attempts at brainwashing, forcing him to defend himself in a rigged military court and chasing him into exile for six years. He was right, of course he was right. It just got so difficult to believe sometimes, but knowing that this date was looming, bringing the Truth with it, that made it possible to keep going.

Whatever was about to happen, Scully needed it to happen. More than Mulder did.

"Fifty-three seconds," Mulder said tensely. "Anything?" As if he didn't think Scully would shout in alarm if something like what he expected to see had happened inside the apartment. She only shook her head, knowing he only wanted an answer if it was the answer he wanted to hear. He said, adamantly, "It's going to happen, Scully."

She nodded and swallowed, ashamed to feel her throat was tight. She was afraid. And not of seeing aliens or watching the world end. All day she'd wondered whether this was her last day on Earth, tried to stay as close to Mulder as she reasonably could without getting in his way, tried to be grateful that if it really was her final minute or hour or day that at least she'd spent it with him, but now she was more afraid to wonder the opposite. What if it wasn't? What if Mulder was wrong? What if this was one huge cosmic joke being played on them? On him, on her?

How was she meant to walk into tomorrow with her whole purpose of the last twenty years stripped from her?

"Forty seconds," Mulder murmured. He turned back to his radio and turned up the volume. He checked the screen of the laptop he had connected it to and squinted closely at the flat line of the channel. Sent off a quick PM to the other fanatics in the chatroom he was logged into. No action yet. "It's going to happen. Any second now…"

He abandoned the useless instruments and stood, staring straight up into the sky. Scully spared him a glance. He wasn't as pretty or as tidy as he'd looked when she met him in 1992 but his eyes – which she would have fallen for eventually, set into any face – still burned with the same feverous, half-crazy sparkle as always, and his voice, low and intense and then upbeat and teasing, still tumbled out of the same playful smile.

Scully quickly went back to her task, feeling her heartrate pick up as Mulder murmured, "Thirty seconds…" She sought their client out in the dark and stared at him hard, without blinking. This was it, tonight was it, something was about to happen, it had to… "Twenty-five seconds. Where are they?" The television journalist slept soundly. "Twenty… Nineteen..."

Fifty yards away, Jensen jerked awake in his bed.

"Mulder!" Scully already had the second pair of binoculars in her extended hand and his hand was already on them. "Something's happening."

Neither breathed and for a moment all was still as they watched raptly through their lenses. Far away, Jensen was sitting up in bed, breathing hard and resting a hand on his chest like he'd received a terrible fright. Scully felt Mulder's tiny motion beside her and knew he was checking the rest of the room for a cause. Jensen wasn't looking around; if there was anything extraordinary present, he did not acknowledge it. There was no bright beam of light on him and no apparent presence in the room at all, because with a final calming breath, Jensen lay back down and pulled his covers back up to his chin.

Just a nightmare.

Nothing more.

Mulder was silent for a moment. "What? No!" He lowered the lenses quickly and stared in their client's direction, disbelieving. "No, no. It's not a mistake. It's not. Scully?" He turned desperately to his partner and she felt her heart fall away. He waited, eyes wide, silently appealing to her to either explain or keep faith long enough that he could regain it.

But she couldn't do either. She looked down at her watch.

"Four seconds."

Four seconds. They both looked up helplessly at the sky. In four seconds, now three, the world's oldest calendar ended. Time ran out. No one knew what came after. Two seconds. Scully drew a deliberate breath, ready for it to be the last, and tried to brace herself for whatever unexpected shock was waiting for her in the next moment.

One second.

Mulder took her hand. It was more of a shock than if he'd grown antennae. She threaded her fingers with his and held on tight.

They both startled slightly when Mulder's watch beeped softly to mark the hour, and tightened their grip on each other in preparation for the explosions, the screams, the searing heat of savage war, the roar of otherworldly engines.

It didn't come. Not that second. Not the next. Not in any second that came after.

Scully slowly released her last breath. She waited more seconds before daring to draw a new one. Her first breath outside of time. She let it out. Drew another. Kept breathing.

The world had survived the end of time. So had she.

The next breath came out ragged, uncontrolled, almost a sob.

She couldn't remember the last time she'd felt so crushed, and, looking up at her partner, she recognised the confused expression she read there. It was his lost expression. His does-not-compute face. The face he wore when she told him she had cancer.

He looked at her blankly.

"Nothing happened," he noted, disbelievingly.

"No," she agreed softly. Her chest felt tight and achy. Her breaths still came out rough and jagged as she battled against dissolution into tears. Twenty years… Two careers practically left to rot on the wayside, if not utterly torched. Loved ones lost in the name of fighting for the Truth. Relationships allowed to wither. A child, long desired and miraculously conceived, given away for his own safety, leaving a gaping wound in his mother's heart. And a love that could have been loved for two decades but instead was spent chasing lies, secrets, horrors and all the other things love doesn't need.

All for this. For nothing.

"But… we were in the right place," Mulder insisted. He looked about. "This is the right place! We checked the time zones; all the coordinates matched up. Right place, right time, right target…" His voice was escalating. The dazed and lost phase had already passed and he was moving into the angry denial phase of his usual insanity loop. "Scully, we did everything right."

"Mulder," she sighed, knowing where this led, and pressing her lips together to hold in the irritable reality check that threatened to burst from her when he exclaimed, "No, Scully, this doesn't add up! We've missed something," and pulled his hand from her grip to stride across the roof to his discarded map. "We've missed something. It's here, I know it! I'm not wrong about this, Scully. It's got to be here, staring me in the face…"

Wasn't she always?

Scully had been dreading this night for many years but in the end it far exceeded her worst expectations. She watched helplessly as Mulder spiralled into the dark place he carried around inside himself. He made urgent phone calls and sent short, unpunctuated emails to other crackpot stargazers who were scoping out other UFO hotspots and got even more disappointing news. He fiddled with his radio and got nothing. He searched the internet for new reports of unexplained phenomena and kept hitting refresh with more aggression than was necessary when nothing came up. He looked through his telescope and his binoculars and maintained, vehemently, that there was some tiny clue he was missing that would explain everything, make it all make sense, pull it all together and set them on a new path.

Scully felt like crying but she didn't. She just sat down and watched the stars. Maybe they'd been off by a few minutes, or maybe a few hours? Perhaps, in only a second, in only a minute, in only a day, the skies would light up like Mulder had been fearing since she met him.

But the invasion they were waiting for didn't come. Not that second. Not the next. Not in any second that came after.

And Scully had to accept what she'd been fearing since she met him.

Mulder was wrong.

The Truth was not out there.

And all she'd lost and forgone had been for nothing.