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When Scully gets home from the hospital a day later, she makes three more phone calls to her mother. She almost cries, her voice breaking when she leaves her yet another voicemail. She almost begs her, mommy please, just pick up the phone, like she's that ten year old again who fell off her bicycle, but the words get stuck in her throat behind the lump she can't seem to swallow down. In the end she only tells her to please call her back when she can. She's probably out of town, anyway.
You could've known that if you'd been a better daughter and called more often.
She finds a banana and some old bread in her kitchen. She makes toast. It's soothing, this action on autopilot. A routine. It tells her life goes on. Mulder is missing, maybe dead, but the world keeps spinning. The bread still toasts.
That, and she needs to eat. She's been living off of hospital jello for the past two days. Even less before that, just a few cups of decaf coffee and a sandwich she threw up in an Arizona roadside diner an hour later. She's underfed, she knows, feels it when she gets up too quickly and almost passes out. It's a risk for the baby. But eating not just makes her feel sick, it makes her feel guilty. It reminds her that somewhere out there Mulder might be alive, maybe tortured, without being able to enjoy the mundane things like buttered toast and bananas.
She scratches her wrist, which is barely skin over bone at this point. It reminds her of being sixteen and living off of cheap beer and dry bread, and truly, she should be getting bigger, shouldn't she? She should be storing fat and energy for the baby. But then, this godforsaken body has never done what she wants it to, and she curses herself for it, wants to crawl out of her skin to find herself another one that suits her better.
Her hand crawls protectively over her belly. It doesn't belong to just you anymore, she tells herself. You have a responsibility.
She focuses on the task at hand. Because what else is there to do? She applies extra butter to the toast with shaky hands. She forces herself to eat the food, and has a glass of lemonade for extra sugar. Then she makes herself tea.
She hurls her guts out twice before she finishes it.
She sits on her bathroom floor and stares at the floor. Her vision blurs, tears quietly rolling down her cheeks. She doesn't cry, can't, doesn't have the energy for it, but the tears fall regardless. She tries sitting against the wall but her back aches, cuts from shards of glass still raw and painful, so she sits on the floor, knees drawn up to her chest, fists balled angrily, as if she could fight anyone in her current state. The truth is, she's weak, and small, and thin, and tired, and if anyone burst into her apartment right now, she'd be a dead woman.
Her thoughts drift back to Mulder. He'd be here, if he could. He'd sit on the floor with her, holding her hand, hugging her cold body warm, holding back her hair when she pukes. The thought causes new tears.
She holds back her own hair when she throws up a third time.
Eventually, she gathers enough strength to stand up. She eats some yoghurt and manages to keep it down. She takes a shower, scorching hot, scrubbing at her skin until it's raw.
She makes sure to keep the cuts on her back dry. She's not in the mood for another hospital visit.
She changes into one of his sweaters. She took it with her the last time she was at his apartment. She closes her eyes, inhales, and it still smells like him, albeit faintly. It's not enough, but it's enough not to make her lose hope. The sleeves are so long they cover her hands completely, and it's too long for her, but it's soft, and if she closes her eyes, she can almost imagine it's his embrace against her skin.
She stands in her bedroom, in the dark, frozen. Her eyes wander to her alarm. 12:21. She closes her curtains. She sits on the edge of her bed.
And just like that, Scully finds herself at the end of her routines.
Now what.
Now, she's alone. She'd never realized before how much time they truly spent together. Sure, she knew, but it wasn't a conscious thought in her mind until he disappeared. All the nights they talked on the phone, for hours on end. It seemed they never ran out of things to say to each other, topics to argue about. The nights he spent at her apartment, or she at his. Watching shitty sci-fi movies until they fell asleep on the couch. Some nights, climbing into his lap, tearing at each other's clothes like teenagers, making love like they were the only thing in each other's universes.
Scully realizes now that that might be true. She doubts it's a good thing. This… co-dependant partnership. Tethered to him in ways she cannot possibly fathom.
She has no one else. No real friends. No one to talk to.
She supposes she could call Skinner. He'd at least talk to her for a while about how he's doing. It would keep her busy. But he calls her Dana in a consoling way that reminds her too much of her father, and she hates that. Hates how she loves it, hates how it makes her want to cry. Hates how it reminds her of the death of her father, and of all the loss.
Her father, dead.
Her sister, dead.
Her daughter, dead.
And whose fault is that?
She has no right to resent him. She tries not to. But every now and then, there's a tiny voice in the back of her mind that sounds a lot like her sister's. Would you be here, Dana, if it wasn't for Fox Mulder?
The answer is no. She doesn't know where she would be, her life so tethered to his now that she has no idea what it would have looked like without him, but not here. Not alone, with a trail of dead bodies left in her wake in the pursuit of the truth.
His truth. Her truth. She wonders if there's a difference. Where his ends and hers begins. If they were always looking for the same thing, or if she was only looking for what he wanted to find.
She wonders where he ends and she begins sometimes, too.
She doesn't even really know what her truth is anymore. Her truth used to be science. Proof. Things she could see, rationalize. But she's seen too many things over the years she can't explain. Occurrences she can no longer deny. Her truth is shaky, ruined, destroyed. Just like everything else.
Tell me, Dana, was it worth it?
She doesn't know.
Was he worth it?
She does know that. The one thing she's grateful for in her life is his existence.
Her thoughts drift to Emily now. That happens a lot these days. This baby is a second chance. She's happy. She touches her stomach and smiles, because in the midst of all the chaos at least she has this, and it's real, and it is the closest thing to a miracle she'll ever experience. But then the smile fades, because she's reminded of Emily, and the life they should've had but never got, because she died, because they took her, and who knows, maybe there were others out there she never found, who died before they left the lab, her dead babies treated as science experiments, and that's also a little his fault, isn't it? All roads lead back to Mulder, don't they? You wouldn't have been involved in any of this if it wasn't for Fox Mulder and his X-Files, Dana, her sister says accusatory. She feels guilty for thinking it.
But how fucking dare he get taken? Why wasn't he more careful? Was finding the truth really that important to him?
Was finding the truth more important than her?
(She's never asked him that, afraid the answer might be yes.)
How dare he leave her like this, pregnant with what is probably his baby?
(She tells herself it is, anyway. At night, when it’s dark and quiet, she can’t help but think that that can't be possible, that they must have put this child in her, and that's more terrifying than the thought of never having children ever was to her, so she can’t think that, she might die if it’s true, if when she went with him he did something to her and-)
She wants to scream but no sound leaves her throat. Guilt claws at her. She feels selfish. Mulder might be in pain. Mulder might be dead. Mulder might be a million things worse than dead, and she's here being resentful.
What can she say? Out of the two of them, she was always the more selfish one.
In the end, she just sinks into her pillow, hoping it'll swallow her. She pulls the covers over herself and closes her eyes. A quiet sob escapes her. Her eyes open again. She doesn't want to sleep. When she sleeps, the dreams come. Nightmares, truly, of him strapped down, long needles protruding from his face, almost ripping off his skin. Bonesaws cutting open his chest. Holes being drilled into his arms, his legs, his mouth. She's shocked by how far her morbid subconsciousness can go.
Sometimes she wonders if they’re real. If whatever they did to her when she was abducted has given her some sort of insight into what's happening to him now. She pushes that thought down, though, beyond her own reach. She thinks she might break if the things she dreams are really happening to him.
If he could see her now, he'd probably tell her to get up. To keep going, with or without him. She feels pathetic. He managed to keep going without her when she was kidnapped, didn't he?
She wouldn't want him to see her like this. So she hopes his dreams about her are better. A more selfish part of her hopes they're not.
If he were here now, he'd make her forget. He's good at that. Took some tries before he stopped treating her like she was fragile, but her patience had paid off.
Scully remembers the first night he let go. She hadn't been completely aware of how much rage shimmered beneath his surface, not until he had her pinned down underneath him, sucking bruises into her breasts, his fist curled in her red hair, telling her how she belonged to him.
I don't belong to anyone, she had wanted to say, but in that moment all she could manage was a broken yours while he fucked a third orgasm out of her.
They’re good at lovemaking, yes. But they’re good at fucking, too.
Her hand slips under the cover, under his sweater, finding her breast, her nipple. She pinches it, roughly, the way he would if he were here. It hurts. Good. She likes it when it hurts.
Perhaps she can make herself forget.
Her hand drifts lower. She slips her panties down her legs and kicks them to the floor. Her fingers find her clit. She's sensitive but she presses down anyway, drawing small circles until her body catches up with her mind and she feels her folds coated in slick.
He should be here. He would love this. He would love watching her like this, her cheeks flushed, her fingers moving between her thighs, wearing his clothes. She inhales, smells his cologne on the sweater, and if she tries hard enough she can almost imagine they're his fingers pushing inside, not her own.
She reminisces. The last time they did this, he sat between her thighs, licking and sucking at her until his face was dripping, not letting her come until she was trembling. She wants that now, wants him, craves him, craves his lips against her own, his hands on her skin, his cock splitting her open. He's big, but they fit so well together, and that night he fucked her like he owned her and he wasn’t afraid to break her.
Her fingers move inside her, but it's not enough. She opens her nightstand and pulls out her vibrator. She places it against her clit. It still won’t be enough, compared to him nothing ever will be, but at least this way she hopes she can cloud her senses enough to keep her thoughts from spinning out of control.
Worry lingers, but when she presses the switch on her vibrator and it buzzes to life, pleasure pushes those feelings further to the back of her mind until she can no longer reach them. She's wet, not dripping, but it's good enough for what she wants to accomplish. Her breathing grows unsteady, ragged, and she's not moaning perse, but something close to it, little gasps and breathy whimpers tumbling from her lips into the darkness of her empty room. Her fingers move faster. Her eyes slip closed.
She thinks of him, only of him, of his big hands and his wicked tongue and his strong body covering hers, always making her feel so safe and protected, and when she holds the vibrator against her clit and fucks two fingers in herself, she imagines it's his cock steadily thrusting inside her.
She thinks of when he bent her over his desk that time they were working late. Her nails scratching down the desk. His fingers digging bruises in her thighs.
She thinks of when she sucked him off in a cheap rental car. Her hair curled around his fist. His come in her mouth, down her throat.
Memories flow, one into the other, but all him. Mulder, on his knees between her legs, his fingers moving inside her, playing with her breasts. Mulder, covering her mouth while he fucks her in a cheap motel room and she’s too loud for his liking. Mulder, pressing her against the door of her apartment, slipping up her dress while unzipping himself, not bothering to undress each other, because he just has to have her. Mulder underneath her, sitting in his lap with his pants on the passenger seat, her skirt bundled up around her hips, the windows of his car fogging up while she rides him. Mulder, Mulder...
She deepens her strokes. She wonders if he can feel this, feel her, in the same way she can feel him. If maybe after all these years they've become so intertwined that they share one consciousness. If when he closes his eyes, he knows what she's doing to herself in his name. In a perverted way, she hopes he does. She hopes he knows that she cannot make herself come unless she imagines that it's him fucking her. That even if he is across the galaxy from her, she still needs him, craves him, loves him.
Her wrist cramps. She ignores it. She bites down on her pillow. She fucks herself the way he would fuck her: rough, persistent, pain coloring in her pleasure until her head spins.
In the end, he can be light-years away from her, but every part of her - her mind, her body, her soul, her heart - will always belong to him.
It is that thought that pushes her over the edge. She comes, a trembling moan wrenching itself from her throat. And there, in the dark, quiet solitude of her lonely room, she lets the tide pull her under, lets her orgasm wash over her and cloud her senses. She surrenders to it, and allows herself to gasp his name just once, calling out a broken, strangled, Mulder, hoping he hears it, hoping he feels it in his bones.
She shuts off her vibrator and drops it on the floor. She wipes her hand on the sheets. She lays on her side, facing the window, waiting - praying - for a light to appear that brings him home. But it won't appear, she's sure of it, because the universe has never granted her anything, so it definitely won't give her this.
The pain slithers back into her mind. She tries to fight it off, squeezes her eyes shut to keep it out. She feels sleep tugging at her, and admits defeat. Succumbing to her exhaustion, she lets sleep wash over her, and for once, the nightmares stay away.
The following morning she awakens early. Still sticky between her legs, her clothes smelling like Mulder. For a very short, but blissful second, she forgets where she is and what has happened, and she moves her hand to the space beside her, expecting to find him.
She finds nothing. The bed is still cold and empty.
Reality crashes back in. He's still gone.
But she will find him.