Title: Only Her
Characters: Mulder, F.
Rating: PG
Genre: Angst, Romance
Summary: Companion piece to 'No One Understands'. Mulder watches Scully as she sleeps. He turns his thoughts to the past and their journey together.
Night. The time when most people sleep. When most people's lives are interrupted by those precious few hours of nothingness. I emphasize the word 'most'. It's not like that for me. For me, sleep is only a extension of the pain I feel in my waking hours. When I sleep, my hidden thoughts come out to haunt me, no longer restrained by my conscious. When I fully realize what it is that I fear the most. It's not death, as would be the fear for many. At least, it's not my death that I fear. It's hers.
I turn to her now. She's sleeping, her head resting against the window of the car door as I drive down this desolate road. She, of course, insisted that she drive when we started out this morning, but I didn't let her. That lead her to comment that I never let her drive, which isn't entirely true. It's just that she can't fall asleep while she's driving. And watching Scully while she's asleep is one of the few things I look forward to in my life.
You see, when she's asleep, it seems to wipe years of fear, pain, and loss from her beautiful face. This gives her an innocent, almost happy look to her. A look I cherish and never wish to end. But it always does. She wakes up, and life goes on. Life, with all its pain and suffering just waiting for the both of us.
Shouldn't it end? Haven't we had more than our share of pain? Haven't we lost enough friends and loved ones? Samantha, Melissa, my father, Scully's father, my mother, and the Lone Gunmen? The deaths of Byers, Frohike, and Langly bother me the most. Just knowing that at the time they died, I was hiding in the desert. I hadn't known. Nor had I been given the chance to say goodbye to them. A wanted man cannot just walk into Arlington Cemetery and expect not to be seen. I've wanted for so long to go to their final resting places and just talk to them. Just talk to the most loyal friends I've ever had.
My eyes go back to the road and I try to steer my thoughts away from the dead. This, instead of helping, only causes me to think of the one person who can bring both of us more pain. William. Our son. The son Scully gave up to protect. It just about kills me to know that my son is out there, but that I can't have him. I hide it from Scully, determined to be strong for her.
He haunts my dreams as well. Well, more like nightmares that dreams. In my dreams, I see the end. The end of everything I've ever know or loved. I watch, helplessly, as Scully perishes, holding our William. He too perishes, still in his mother's arms. That's usually when I wake up, screaming in denial that Scully can't understand. She always asks me what I saw, but I don't tell her. I don't want to her to get a visual image of the same thing. I don't want her to have nightmares.
I shake my head slightly, trying to clear it of all thoughts. This doesn't work, so I turn to the one thing that pushes my fears away. Scully. I run my hand over her head, feeling the softness of her hair. I'd always loved her hair, in one of those silly infatuations that you can't explain. Although I'd never said anything, I'd always noticed whenever something different had been done to it. Scully used to get frustrated with me, thinking that I hadn't noticed a thing, a haircut or newish style. But I always did, I just chose to keep it to myself, lest I blurt out something that our superiors wouldn't approve of. An apparently budding relationship would just give them one more excuse to separate us. Not that they couldn't find some other reason anyway.
She'd come into my life suddenly. Sent to debunk my work and shut me down. But it didn't seem to work out the way our superiors had planned. The X-Files lived on for many years after that. We were shut down eventually, only to reopen on the orders of Skinner. I lived on as well. Or rather, I finally got to live. I actually had something to live for. I had the truth to search for, but I also had a beautiful, intelligent partner to look out for. We've saved each other's lives too many times to count, or even remember.
We'd been great friends, with a friendship built on trust. I suppose it was only a matter of time before that friendship became more than that. When those small butterflies in the stomach began to appear whenever I saw her. The urge to always be with her, to randomly select a case so we could go 'solve' it, away from the scrutiny of the FBI.
I suppose the feelings were mutual, with both of us trying hard to hide them. And then, when I was full of painkillers after being pulled from the ocean, I told her how I felt. But she took it as delirium. How could she not? I don't know that I ever showed any feelings before that. Sure, just a little harmless flirting, but everyone flirted with Scully, whether she wanted you to or not.
But I had told her the truth. I had left it up to her to see it as a truth or a fabrication of my drugged mind. I'm not quite sure how she took it at the time. She told me to tell myself that there was no place like home, typical Scully. I wasn't quite sure for a while just how she felt, though there were always these little hints and clues that were dropped.
So here we are now, homeless fugitives from a corrupt system. We've lost everything in our quest for the truth: our families, our jobs, the respect of others, our son. But we still do have one thing: each other. Well actually, we have two things left to keep us going. Ourselves, and our will to keep fighting. And we will fight, we will do everything we can from keeping the colonization from happening. How we are going to do that is unknown to me, but we'll do it. It's not the first impossible thing we've done.
One of those would have been for me to get Scully to open up and join the real world of feelings and people. Then I realize, it was she who opened me up, made me live. So now she's stuck with me, for the rest of both our lives. And I look forward to it, as does she.