Asteroid
After he is abducted, Scully sees Mulder everywhere. It is never a dream or a hallucination, he is simply there. In the waking hours or the starry nights, she finds him sleeping on her couch or shivering in the curtains, with deep shadowed eyes that echo more pain than she thinks she can comprehend.
The visits aren't frequent by any means; he comes once or twice every month—if she's lucky. Usually after a particularly hard week, when Doggett's been on her case and her hormones have been driving her crazy. Usually after she's spent mornings in bed, wondering what good it is to get up anymore, or when she's spent nights sobbing into her pillow.
She doesn't understand life without him. She never understood it with him either.
After the Mary Hendershot incident, she comes back to her lonely apartment to find him standing by the window, with an empathetic look on his weathered face. Mulder takes her face in his hands, plants a kiss on her forehead and embraces her while she sobs. Scully asks him when he's coming back, and he replies that he's trying, god how he's trying.
She tells him all about the X-Files, Doggett, Skinner, everything that happens even though she senses he already knows. And he sits next to her in the living room while they drink beer, and she tries to make him tell her where he is and what they're doing to him.
All he does is shake his head, and then he gets up—as if to leave—and she catches him from behind, embraces him, and when she wakes, he is gone.
It is never a dream or a hallucination. He is there. When she unlocks her door to find him, Scully is never overjoyed or shocked. She never jumps for joy or runs to embrace him. In fact, she never has. He is there, and she is there, and it is simply another form of existence. It is a tired world, a worn caress and weary smilebetween the two of them. He is there, and she has tried time and time again to convince herself otherwise.
She moves towards him as if it were a dream, emotions dampened, mind running slowly but clearly still. But it is never a dream. And she wishes it were that way more than anything.
The mornings after are always the hardest; Scully wakes to find him gone. Even though it happens every time, it is always a harder grief to deal with.
Those are the days when she goes to work and listlessly does her job, stays at Mul—Doggett's desk while John goes to the cafeteria to eat with people less depressing, and holds Mulder's nameplate—running her fingers over the carved surface and wondering where's he's been. Wondering where he is and where he's going. He's an asteroid, she thinks later, He hits everything in his path, damages them, disappears forever into the blackness of a universe to vast to comprehend. Later, damages becomes "irrevocably alters." She can't stand to love somebody she resents so much.
Scully wakes in the early mornings, dreams in the late nights, lives asleep in her waking hours. She thinks maybe she went to bed in the Bellefleur room and never woke up again.
Maybe she'll wake up someday, and it will still be the day Mulder held her in his arms and he will still be sleeping; she'll be eons older and it will only have taken a second.
The bright sun shines through her bedroom window, and Mulder is asleep next to her. He is not a dream or a hallucination. He is not real in any accepted sense. But he is there.
She decides to sleep in today.
A/N: Thanks to my 5 reviewers. I love you very much.
This piece was inspired by some very weird impressions of the X-Files I had in the days before I started watching it.