Closer
Scully spent her days climbing over rubble, looking for everything that calmed her and smothered her at the same time. Without Mulder, she couldn't breathe for want of a reason. With Mulder, she couldn't breathe because they were so damaged, because he took his guilt and her wounds and absorbed them, and she absorbed everything about him, and it became just one huge gaping hole that grew bigger every time he touched her.
The day after Skinner had told her Mulder was dead, Scully had climbed down to the old town fast, alone, and desperate. Skinner had followed her, but he was slow, and she had no qualms about gashed hands and bloody injury. She arrived at the bottom of the mountain angry and alive, bleeding from cuts accumulated and scars reanimated.
When Skinner arrived, he narrowly missed his "hello" greeting: a clenched fist hurled towards his face with lightning fury. He grabbed her by the arms and shook her; he was on her side, she couldn't forget that. "Don't forget that Scully," and she laughed, a cold deranged laugh, because she'd been to the building, and thus urged Skinner forward with a motion of her hand. She said nothing.
There was blood on the floor. There was also a bullet. Far away from the scene, an un-bloodied bullet existed. But there was little blood, from a gash in the side perhaps, not too deep.
"He's not dead."
"I'm sorry."
"Then help me find him."
Mulder had been abducted, by who Scully did not know. By aliens, he had either been experimented on—being him it would have been just for fun of course—or enslaved, dead already. By someone else…she had no idea where to start. But abduction by the invaders had never dropped Mulder someplace she couldn't find. It had never been in another country, a place she wouldn't find him. Perhaps then, Scully surmised, he had been left somewhere near her.
They found a map in an old general store near the outskirts of town. It was personalized, with the names of everyone living there labeled on the houses and stores. The Harpers a few miles out into the desert, everyone else in the town with their shops and mobile homes.
Skinner went around the shop, looking for supplies, maybe there was fuel, maybe even a Twinkie. He found a smear of blood by the pantry, as if someone had been laid down momentarily and then dragged again to an undisclosed location.
There was no gasoline or alternative fuel left in the shop. There was no one left in the town. This was not the most complicated case Scully had ever been assigned to.
After spending so much time with Mulder and his "I'm never wrong" instincts, Scully had picked up hunches of her own. Now, she pondered the situation, and decided that he had been abducted by someone human, someone living near here. There was no one in the town, they knew that much.
But she decided, against Skinner's best judgment, they should stay there overnight. She knew, once the sun went down, they would see a blazing house on the horizon, and that they would find Mulder there.
A/N: Sorry for short chapters. Not much time to write. I have other chapters already in progress, so don't worry. But I'd really like reviews. PLEASE. I didn't mean for this story to have one specific plot to it, but I realized after I'd written the first part I basically set it up for one direction. What do you think? How's my driving?
