Chapter Text
The first time she shares a bed with him she thinks of the woods.
Of the doom-like, deafening silence that had allowed for Mulder’s semi-unconscious whimpers to force-feed her fears that maybe they would never be found this time. That maybe this would be it; that this would be the end; the culmination of years spent working at his side out of a basement, and then not with him and not in a basement, and later, to both her shock and relief, shoved together below ground once more, like unrepentant prisoners. Or bittersweet punishment for some crime neither of them could pinpoint, but that she wished she'd had committed far earlier if it had meant getting them locked up quicker.
The irony is not lost on her of the end inching nearer and nearer as they find themselves on the out again, pushed to the surface and thrust to the sidelines, and dying to be let back into the murk.
Dying – perhaps literally in his case; with his uneven breaths and his chattering teeth under the whitest July heat Scully remembers ever having experienced. Her case: to be determined. Because she wasn’t sure she’d be able to muster the strength to go on if he wasn’t to go on, and she had been too scared to point the question toward the parts of her that want.
She had been avoidant, too, of facing the reality of Mulder’s condition being her fault. Even though she knows deep down that it isn’t, that she had not meant for any of it to happen, it somehow still is her fault.
She had been the one holding the gun, after all. And her unchecked and lonesome guilt had only expanded and nourished itself in the dark, sated in the span of two nights.
Two nights spent drifting in and out of sleep on rough, sun-dried dirt with her fistful of Mulder’s bloodied sleeve that said, Stay here, even though he had been mostly unconscious and all but about to get up and go somewhere.
Two spins of the Earth on its axis that had left her as dizzy as if she had been spinning herself, fastfastfast – like she and Melissa used to do when they were kids so they could watch the world tip and grow crooked.
Forty-eight hours struggling to ignore the pressing, unthinkable decision of leaving Mulder behind to search for help, with no guarantee of finding any before she would get lost. And the unspeakable terror that rattled her bones every time the possibility of never finding her way back to him permeated her thoughts.
Now, with every one of her limbs curled up tight on a snug mattress next to Mulder – his exhales far less labored than they had been in the woods beneath the direct gaze of a million fateful stars – and her back to his battered but thank-the-good-Christ-still-breathing body, Scully finds herself fighting a desperate battle against every muscle she possesses not to turn around and wrap her whole self around him.