A/N: Thanks so much to Morgan for betaing and staying up late so I could bug her to beta. g> Thanks so much to you if you're reading it. And super excited. Meeting w/ the LA gang tomorrow. Oh, and if you live in NYC, Alter Boyz Da Shizzle. Anyway, please read, review, and enjoy. This has been my first XF fic in what seems like forever, so any characterization mistakes, I apologize for. This is an AU post-Fight the Future and MSR, so if those aren't what you're looking for in a fic, turn away. NOW.
For her, it had never been about proving him wrong. It had never been about reaffirming her own status in the bureau and the status of things. She looked out for him, and he her. It had never been about the conspiracy or the aliens. It had been about the man whose quest it was to search for them. And her own self-actualization.
After Melissa and Emily and her own abduction, she had realized numerous things about herself. She had been more cautious. More things had happened to her than were in her realm of possibility merely a decade ago. She felt overwhelmed. She felt like she was drenched, caught in an undertow of an ocean that she couldn't escape from. She felt suppressed by nature, by the very current of things. And the one solution her rational mind provided was that she had to get out. And vagueness wasn't a helpful trait in a solution.
Over the course of years, she had grown from professionally respecting her partner to loving him. She hadn't realized when that had officially happened, but she knew that it had occurred. And she had been caught unawares, like a dreamer in a sudden rainstorm. At first, she had been frightened. It was her and it was him, and they were complete opposites.
That had been the nature of her life. Opposites. As a child, she had been a tomboy. As a woman, religion began to interfere with her own beliefs and ideologies. The good Catholic she had been raised as stated simply that things certainly just occurred because God made it happen. Some things were beyond the scope of understanding by humans. Yet she lived in a world of rationality and investigating. Her scientific knowledge cited that nothing ever just happened simply because somebody made it happen. There were responses: chemical, physical, nuclear, that were the root of the occurrence. And now? She was in love with a man she worked with, a man whose own beliefs completely countered her own.
He believed in aliens and looked for conspiracies everywhere he went. The stereotypes perpetuated about him in the Bureau were true. Startlingly cold and cruel, but true. He was "Spooky" Mulder. But there was a level of humanity within him that they didn't embrace, and there were sides of him that they never truly experienced. He had been ostracized, persecuted, for lack of a better word, for his own beliefs, and she respected his actions, the way he never retaliated or returned any harsh remarks against them. He took their insults and continued doing what he normally did.
The threat of the tide was still there, though, and it constantly intimidated her. There was a chance that she'd be swept away, lost in a tide, suffocating and drowning. She had been unable to stand some of the contacts that he had known, that he had experienced a previous relationship with. They flaunted their connections in her face. It was subtle, but flagrant. Women were not stupid. And there was only so much of it she could take. It did not take long for mob mentality to finally seize her mind.
That was when she arrived at the conclusion to do what she did. She stared at the type message on her laptop screen, which glowed brightly in the dim room. She printed it, and decided to hand it in to Skinner the following morning. But first? She had to tell him, and his reaction was the one that mattered most to her. She hoped he'd just take it, like he did the insults, and allow her to leave. She had never been more pleased to be wrong.
He had cajoled her with a speech about how he needed her, how she was the one thing that kept him whole, kept him human. And it was one of the sides that nobody else had seen or experienced. He was merely a character to them. Spooky Mulder. Nothing more, nothing less. But he had stirred emotions within her. First was love, and then tears. The saline drops formed over her cornea, but they did not fall. That was when he embraced her. Their lips touched for the briefest of moments, and then—the conspiracy filtered through into their personal lives. Again.
Special Agent Dana Scully lay on the bed. The sun was peering through the blinds, casting abstract shapes on her skin. She smiled softly, and she looked virtuous. Her lips were kissed, worshipped by another set of lips, and she welcomed it. Welcomed it completely.
"Good morning." Shining hazel eyes stared back at her. A lazy smile began to grace his face.
"Aren't you glad you decided to listen to me? For once?" He kissed her again. She lay against him, closing her eyes.
"Yes."