a/n: So it turns out that breaking a couple of toes during an already miserable and overly long winter leaves me grumpy, achy, and not feeling very creative. (just been posting already written stuff for my other two wips, ftr) But my toes are on the mend and my muse has come out of hiding. Sorry for the long delay.
Mulder murmured into her ear, "There were days I despaired that I would ever get to do this again."
She looked up at him, eyes not shocked as he feared but filled with understanding. "I tried not to give up hope," Scully admitted.
He nodded minutely, but he knew that trying could be a nearly insurmountable task. Or at least it had been for him, and he hoped desperately that she had felt less to shaken her faith than he had when her mother had decided to pull the plug after her own abduction. But considering how much longer he'd been gone, it seemed unlikely. "We didn't let them win."
To his disappointment, she pulled away. "Can you… Is it okay if I ask you what happened?"
Trying not to sigh, he pointed at the couch. She sat down first, and he sat beside her, not quite touching now. "Where do I begin?"
This question seemed to throw her, and she said nothing at first. "I know that Skinner was with you, when… I just don't know why."
To another person this might have seemed like a very strange thing to say, because she could've simply asked Skinner why he had been there, but he knew that wasn't what she was asking him. Mulder looked at his hands. "It was a compulsion."
"I don't think I understand," she confessed.
Mulder shrugged, glad that doing it no longer made his bones feel like they were dry sticks rubbed together. "I always pictured a tractor beam sucking people up like a hoover vacuum at an ant hill. But I didn't think about how they'd make you want to make it easier on them."
"Make you?" Scully repeated. She was hanging on his every word.
"It's some sort of mind-control, I guess," he tried to explain. "But subtle, like it was our idea to gather there so they could pick us up."
"They made you feel like you wanted to be taken away?"
"I just thought I really, really wanted to take a walk," Mulder said with a sigh. "It felt like a good idea at that very moment, and I bet it did to everyone else they took that night too. Most people couldn't resist. I know I couldn't."
"Most people?" Even if she hadn't asked, he would have seen the question written all over her face.
He looked away. "Not everyone they called came to them. Maybe they were just stronger than the rest of us. They were able to keep themselves from obeying the compulsion." For no clear reason he imagined a boat full of sailors allowing themselves and their craft to be dashed on a stony shore after being lured closer by a siren's song.
"How do you know some people got away?" Scully asked.
The question confused him; he didn't remember how he knew. It was just something he knew. "I don't know. I just do."
"Oh." And just like that he felt some of her pleasure at seeing him again flake away.
He tried not to let it upset him, but he was getting the sense that she'd allowed herself to believe a few weeks in the hospital had cured him. As nice as it would have been to completely shipshape in his head, it wasn't reflective of reality. The hospital had been careful to make him understand that he was enough better to be functional to some degree, but he still needed time and continuing treatment if he was going to get back to where he'd been when he'd been torn from his life. "There's a lot I don't remember clearly," he added, trying to predict her reaction.
At least she didn't get up and make an excuse to leave. "Maybe it's a blessing," she
suggested tentatively, betraying a desire to say the right thing.
Maybe it was a coincidence, or perhaps it was psychosomatic, but his scar began to itch, and he had to fight the urge to scratch it. "Or maybe not," he replied, more to distract himself than anything else.
"Right." she looked at her hands. This left him feeling guilty and he wanted to hug her again but he didn't. "But you do remember some of it?"
''A lot," Mulder corrected, not having intended for his admission to shut down communication. "You can ask me questions. I'll answer those I can."
''Are you sure?"
"I'm sure. Fire away."
She glanced up at his shoulder and away again so quickly that he almost thought he'd imagined it. The time she'd shot him was so long ago that he rarely thought about it. Scully clearly thought about it still, though. It was somewhat startling to grasp the fact that she dwelled on something she'd done to harm him, and not just the other way around; too many of his regrets centered on what she'd lost or endured just because she was connected to him. Giving her a crooked smile he said "come on, don't be shy."
Scully didn't quite smile back, but she stopped looking guilty. "What was the ship like?"
"Like a prison. At least the parts of it I saw much of." He frowned without being aware of it. "Think solitary confinement, for all of us. They took so many people at the same time as they did me but for all I ever saw them, I might have been alone."
Scully nodded as he spoke. "I take it you don't know what happened to the others."
"No. Do you?" he asked impulsively.
She sighed. "Only a few of them." This surprised him, but he made a go-on gesture. "Other people, a few of them, reappeared before you did. Of course there's no way of knowing if they'd been on the same ship-"
"How long before?" he interrupted.
From watching her face he could tell that she was thinking of something specific, and the memory wasn't pleasant. "Please tell me," he asked softly. All along he'd wanted to insist that he was stronger than she thought, but he wasn't sure of that. What if what she had to say knocked him off kilter again?
Scully took a deep shuddery breath and looked away. "They didn't all come back at once. The first three that came back…it was eleven months after you were all taken. A family camping in the mountains found them. Two men, and a woman. I heard about it, and I drove all night to get there, hoping desperately that one of the two men was you.
"But before I even got to see them I'd already begun praying that neither one was you," she concluded abruptly.
"Why-" he began to ask but the look on her face made him stop. The faint horror there as she revisited the moment spoke volumes." They were dead," he stated.
"Yes." A slight nod. "And it was simply awful."
Canting his head, he considered this. A woman who had done dozens of autopsies, not only seeing death up close but touching it too, was not squeamish about the dead. She'd given bodies that had him wanting a barf bag an unflinching clinical stare. So it couldn't merely be that they were dead that bothered her.
Queasiness struck him when his brain seized upon a possible reason for her dismay. "Was it anyone we knew?" he asked hoarsely. The words caught painfully in his throat on the way out. There were so many people he hadn't spoken to yet...
Scully gave him a puzzled look. "No."
Some of the tension seeped out of him then. With some effort he was able to banish the image of Miles and Teresa stacked like cordwood with a third person who looked vaguely like one of the gunmen. "Oh." But still, he was afraid to ask if Scully knew what had happened to the man and woman who had been part of both the first and last cases he'd worked with her.
"Why did you ask that?" Now she was the one who sounded curious.
"Your expression just then. It seemed like remembering hurt. I wondered if that was why."
"No..." She stood then, crossing the room to look out the window as he stared after her.
Stalling for time, she idly watched the cars on the road pass the building. Most of the drivers were alone, and all were oblivious; none were having a painful conversation.
Eventually she turned back to him, facing his quiet, watching eyes. "That night is when I finally realized that you might never come back. Or, not alive anyway."
Mulder seemed to mouth the words 'but I did' but no sound escaped him.
Unaware that her eyes were even sadder than before, she returned to sit again. "I blame Cassandra, really."
"I don't know what you mean."
"Until I saw the bodies of those three people, their savagely broken bones and skin nearly flayed off, I'd thought it was a waiting game," she admitted. "We'd met so many people like Cassandra Spender, returnees. They'd all come back, and so would you."
Mulder had winced at her description of the bodies, which made her glad that she'd toned it down. Now he leaned forward, unconsciously reducing the distance between them; instinctively, she knew he wasn't going to kiss her. "And suddenly I might not."
''It did feel sudden to me. That's hard to explain, but... I took one look at them and found myself imagining you being found by hapless campers someday, beyond help," she admitted.
"You lost hope," he said quietly.
"No," she denied, shaking her head adamantly. "I still hoped...but I began to wonder if I was expecting too much from you. If it was fair to you."
"To me?"
Sighing again, she wondered if it was truly possible to articulate her feelings. Still, she owed it to him to try. "Cassandra always seemed so fragile to me, and she always came back. And you... you've always been strong. Physically, mentally... so if she could survive being with them and endure whatever they did to torment the people they took, of course you'd be able to survive it all too. When you were taken, it wasn't the same as when she had been. Cassandra had been experimented on-" Scully paused, remembering that the woman said she'd been pregnant when taken once and returned not. "And that was awful. But they had returned people alive and damaged..."
"Not dead."
"Exactly. I didn't examine the bodies-someone else did the autopsies-but I didn't have to-" she almost said 'cut them open' but it seemed unwise. "-be there during the internal review to know that they'd been killed deliberately."
To her shock this elicited a wry smile from him, and when he noticed this had floored her, he gestured with one hand and said, "I understand why you were worried. You were afraid I'd piss them off enough to kill me."
"Mulder," she complained.
Raising an eyebrow, he said, "Tell me that thought never crossed your mind."
This left her shrugging helplessly. "I could only pray that they were less irritable than the bounty hunter."
He snorted, inexplicably amused. "Say what you want about that guy," he said after catching her questioning look. "But at least he had the self-restraint not to kill me."
"You never spent three years around him," she couldn't help but blurt out. Before she could get too mortified, he nodded.
"Well, there's that. Getting myself killed would never get me back to you, so I showed restraint of my own."
It took all of her will to banish the mental image of him reduced to a pile of dull ivory bones hidden by brush on the side of a hiking trail. This was something that had crossed her mind repeatedly since the first three victims had been found. Mulder was alive, sitting just feet from her so that grim fantasy ought to have gone into retirement; it bothered her that it hadn't, that her brain clung to it still to remind her that it could have gone that way.
When she noticed that he was looking at her with obvious concern, she summoned up the ghost of a smile. Had she really been what had kept him from acting rashly? Maybe he simply hadn't been given the chance to rebel. "I'm so glad you did, Mulder."
For a moment he said nothing, and then he pierced her heart by saying "sometimes I am too."
Tears pricked at the corners of her eyes, but she didn't let them out. She didn't know who they'd be for. Him, for all the abuse he'd suffered and felt the phantom pains of still? Herself, for missing him so long and not getting the same man back? Both of them for not being able to pick up right where they left off? There could be no fairytale ending, she realized now, the hero had escaped a fire breathing dragon but their trajectory wasn't currently on the path to a 'then they all lived happily ever after' epilogue. As a child she'd wondered if that was a polite way of saying they died soon after, but now she wondered how she'd failed to hold on to a piece of that healthy skepticism. It would have been less disappointing.
Looking up at him she repeated "only sometimes?" and his shrug euthanized any half-formed notions she might have entertained about getting her mother to keep the kids so she could spend the night. Maybe they'd find their way back to what they'd had, and maybe it wouldn't take unbearably long, but it wouldn't be that night. And it was another reason to damn Them for having taken him away, stealing their comfort and familiarity too. He wasn't a stranger but he was no longer the man she'd once grown accustomed to stripping in front of unselfconsciously either. Instead there was a gulf between them, like an old lover you hadn't seen in ages and no longer remembered intimately. But she wanted to. She thought she still wanted to.
"Maybe it'll get better now," she suggested.
"Now that I'm out of the hospital?" he asked. "Maybe."
She wanted to scream "I mean now that you've come back to me!" but the words wouldn't come. How could she resent him not making it clear that he still wanted her, she wondered when she began to realize it was what bothered her about how subdued he was acting. How could she not, even if she realized it was unfair?
A montage of listening to male classmates pine over girls who wouldn't give them the time of day, and her irritation that they'd been so self-absorbed, cued up in her brain, obviously as a dry reminder about how unbecoming that attitude was.
Give the poor guy a break, she snarled at herself. He's gone through the sort of trauma that would make a lot of people cut their wrists and you're put out that he hasn't declared that talking to you for less than an hour makes everything all better while yanking your clothes off. Did you really think that the night would go that way?
She wanted to snap back at her bullying subconscious, to defend herself against such an unflattering incrimination, but deep down she really had. And maybe it wasn't wrong, but she was now aware that it was foolishly unrealistic. Absence might have made her heart grow fonder - or at least didn't let her ardor for him dim - but she hadn't been the one who'd been tormented for three long years.
Of course he hadn't just been sitting around longing for her. He'd been trying not to die.
An ambulance's siren wailed as it drove by the apartment, making them both jump. She gave him a sheepish smile. "Sorry. I guess my nerves are a bit frayed."
''I guess seeing someone back from the dead will do that to a person," he suggested.
"I never really believed you were dead," she insisted automatically. "Just... "
"Missing in action?"
"Out of reach."
Suddenly his gaze was piercing and his expression contemplative. "You know, I think you really mean it."
"What?" she demanded to know because he couldn't doubt that she'd felt him out of reach. There'd been light years between them after all.
"You really didn't think I was dead."
"Why is that so surprising?" she wondered if this was about the fact that she finally had accepted the existence of aliens after denying it for so long.
"Three years is a long time," Mulder pointed out instead.
"What can I say?" she asked drily. "I consider you a dependable guy."
"Thank you." He looked down. "You're probably the only person on earth with that kind of faith in me," he said huskily. Maybe he was thinking of his parents.
Scully wanted to protest that she wasn't the only one, but ultimately she thought it was probably untrue. He still had other friends, other people who would be overjoyed that he was back, but they didn't expect him to come back, hadn't been waiting for him to come home one way or another. (Even in her darkest imaginings where he didn't survive, he was still found.)
After the first year, and certainly into the second, she began to realize that although no one ever said that they thought otherwise, her continued insistences that Mulder would be found were greeted by something akin to pity, as if they were just humoring her when they didn't express their doubt to her. After long enough even her mother and Skinner no longer hid their own doubts. A part of herself that she didn't really like wished that she could have seen the look on Skinner's face when he found the man he'd given up on at his house.
"I'm sorry," she finally said.
"Don't be." After a moment he asked, "If you thought I was still alive is that why-"
"Why what?" she prompted after he broke off in mid-sentence.
His eyes clouded and it didn't surprise her when he shook his head and said "never mind."
As curious as she was about what he might have asked, she decided not to push him. "Okay. Another time."
"Yeah." He looked down and she wondered at what until she realized his eyes were on her open purse by her feet. A purple hoof poked out, part of the My Little Pony Grace had had a tantrum about not bringing to her physical the week before until Scully relented after deciding that someone having immunizations forced on her should be able to bring something along that would comfort her.
Mulder gestured at the plastic equine. "Your daughter's?"
"Grace's, yes."
"Skinner says she's three."
''Almost," she agreed. "And Tommy's five. He just started kindergarten." Scully almost prattled on about how big an adjustment this was for her son, but when she looked up at Mulder she was glad she hadn't.
"Do you have pictures? With you," he asked, sounding pained to make the request.
Skinner had pictures, but it was obvious Mulder hadn't seen them. Had he not wanted to until now, or had Skinner been reluctant to share them? The latter possibility had her wondering if Skinner had somehow guessed what she herself had required a test result to become cognizant of, but perhaps that was just a touch of paranoia. Maybe he simply didn't want to throw a solid reminder of what had changed while he was gone in Mulder's face.
"Sure," she told him, picking up her purse.
He looked confused when she handed him the pony after it got in her way, but he held it gamely. The photos were in her wallet, a possession that she had never bothered with before the kids because her license, credit card and insurance card had been all she needed to carry before. Flipping through the pictures, she found the one taken during the summer and slipped it out of its protective sleeve before handing it to him. In it Tommy had an arm slung around Grace's shoulder and they were smiling without having been prompted to by the photographer, that time.
Photo in hand, Mulder studied it long enough to leave her wondering what he was thinking about. Finally handing it and the toy both back, he said "They look just like you."
"So everyone tells me." She didn't mention how many people couldn't resist opining that this was better luck for Grace than Tommy, as if a boy having red hair was somehow a minor tragedy. Her sisters-in-law hadn't gotten the memo that red-haired men were unattractive, nor had any of her brothers' girlfriends before then, so she didn't worry too much about her son's potential at attracting a mate as an adult.
"That's good," he said, leaving her wondering what he meant by it.
"Right." She held her breath, wondering if he was going to ask her if they were his. Wondering what she'd say when he did.
Instead he looked sad. "I imagined coming home to something like this," he said, which confused her until he gestured towards the photo she was putting away. "It helped me... hold on."
"Mulder... "
Shaking his head, he said, "It was a lot to hope for, children of our own when we hadn't had any luck with the IVF before. But still, impossible things happen, and it was nice to picture something after, it helped to imagine there could be an after for us... Maybe I only imagined children because I knew how much you wanted them. Neither of my fathers was an ideal role model, but... I'm glad you found them. After what was taken from you, you deserved to have something good come of it."
What about you? she wanted to demand to know. Don't you deserve something good to come from your experiences too? One look at his face said it wasn't the time to ask that, though. He probably didn't know and the question would only wound him with its implicit expectation that he'd worked everything out already.
So instead she said, "Thank you. Once and for a long time, if someone had asked me if I'd ever be willing to go through it all again, I would have quickly said no. But that all changed two years ago when someone called me to ask if I'd ever given children up for adoption. On some level I'd always wondered if there were more children of mine in the world, but I'd never given much thought to tracking them down because I thought that they'd all of been like Emily, and my quest would end at graves. I'm so glad I was wrong."
"Me too."
"Do you want to meet them?" she asked impulsively. His imagining that he'd come back and they'd have a baby together wasn't something that could happen, but it wasn't as though he couldn't be a part of the lives of these children. If he wanted to be.
"Um..." he bit his lower lip and gave her a scared look.
Reaching for him, she put her hand on his arm, glad that he didn't pull away. "It can wait. When you're ready, if you'd like to meet them, I'd like you to."
"You're not afraid that it'll harm them to know someone as screwed up as me?" he blurted out.
"I don't think you're screwed up," she said gently. "I think it's perfectly normal not to have been able to get through your experience unscathed."
"But I was supposed to!" he insisted.
"Oh, Mulder," she sighed, wrapping her arms around him when he began to cry.
Maybe his tears should have scared her, and made her worried about how damaged he was, but they didn't strike her that way. Tears were very human, and it was a lot healthier than holding everything inside. Of course, he'd probably be more embarrassed by crying.
For a long time she held him but eventually his grip around her slacked. Pulling away slightly, she saw that he had drifted off into a troubled sleep that left his eyes screwed tightly shut. Of course he'd exhausted himself, so she shouldn't be too surprised by that.
Wondering what to do, she noticed that there was a throw blanket on the back of the couch and tried not to wince when she thought about why he got cold so easily. She stood and picked it up, but let it dangle from her hand. If she just covered him up and left, what would he think when he woke up, even if she left a note?
So she pushed against his shoulder until his eyelids fluttered. Then she bent and kissed him, softly, not expecting much back. Or getting it. "I think it's about time for you to go to bed, huh?" she suggested.
Mulder nodded. But he asked, "Can we do this again soon?"
"Absolutely," she replied, still half wishing he'd kiss her back. Patience, she reminded herself. "Maybe we can catch a movie and go to dinner over the weekend, huh?"
"That sounds... unreal," he replied with a small smile.
"Talk to you soon, Mulder."
"Yeah."
As she let herself out of his apartment and walked down to her car, she reflected that their reunion hadn't been everything she'd hoped for. But it hadn't been at the side of a grave either, so there was room for things to get better. At times even that had been more than she'd allowed herself to hope for.