Prompt! Vulnerable post-case Scully. She can be prickly (because I love your Scully) but also delicate. Case-related vulnerability is my most favourite vibe in the series and every so often I get sad that there are no more moments to watch. Thank you 💜
By the time she gets around to taking it off, her blood-soaked starched blouse has all but melded with her skin. They have to peel it from her body with a crackling sound. Her jacket is already stiffly tented in the corner.
He will burn those items later, he will burn and burn and burn.
Acrid scent of gunpowder in the air still. Blood like pennies baking on hot tarmac. Cortisol, adrenaline.
Her grasping fingers, her grasping hands, her wracking sobs even as he pried her away to check for wounds.
Mulder helps her to his bathroom, holding her elbow as she staggers beside him like a fawn. Her hair is dried in ragged, bloody clumps.
He settles her onto the toilet lid, gets the bath running at her preferred level of scald. He squirts in a few blobs of his pine-scented body wash, which begin to foam. Scully smiles a heartbreaking smile in thanks.
“Bubbles,” he says, inanely.
Scully’s chest is caked with blood, even with her shirt removed to reveal the stained satin of her bra. Her belly is streaked with it, her black trousers rusty and stiff.
How is there any blood still inside her? How is she still here?
She has her arms crossed at her lap, her head bowed. He cannot see anything but her white shoulders and her draggled hair and her dark, narrow thighs.
She gazes up, hollow-eyed. “He didn’t…” she begins. “We never….”
She looks away, lower lip between her teeth.
His hands are gentle at the clasp of her bra; he turns his eyes from her breasts even though he’s seen them.
He unbuttons the fine wool trousers at her waist, slides them down with her dark panties. He doesn’t look or touch or breathe more than he has to because the idea of connecting any of this to lust makes him sick.
Her hips, the dark triangle of sunset hair between her thighs, are also sticky with blood. The lace clings a little and she winces. Her trouser lining tugs. Finally, she is nude. She is so small and so bloody and so bare, like a newborn creature.
Mulder guides her towards the tub, averts his eyes like she is Artemis bathing. Tries not to think the name Diana.
Scully, breast-deep in bubbles. Scully dripping rusty rivulets in the steam. Her tears are silent now, streaking paths down her blood-smattered kidskin face.
Mulder fills a scuffed blue plastic Knicks cup with water, curves his palm around her eyes. “Look up,” he murmurs, and she does, distant, outside of herself.
He sluices water over her head until it runs clear, until she is sleek as an otter, a siren, a goddess. She gasps a little, spreads her fingers against her skull.
Her freckles are magnified by the falling water, her eyes a little too big. A little too round. Her nose is straight and queenly throughout however; her lips parted like a budding tulip.
He massages pearly-blue Head and Shoulders shampoo into the rare, persimmon beauty of her hair. He massages her scalp until she purrs a little. He touches her until his nerves are settled.
“Mulder,” she says, and grasps his forearm in her fine, pale hand. Her face is pre-Raphaelite. Her face is like a D below middle-C; a plucked bowstring, still quivering.
Agent Mulder is already in love.
“Padgett was crazy, he was -“ she begins.
“Sshhhh,” he says. “I have conditioner.” He holds the bottle out, a drugstore brand promising THICKNESS!!! and SHINE!!!
She laughs and it warms him like a hot toddy, like the sun in August, like the sand at Ninigret Pond.
Scully is clean, finally, even her smudged makeup rubbed away. They’ve drained and refilled the tub with fresh water, with fresh bubbles. She seems like herself again, not so dazed.
He passes her his robe, turns his head to hold it out when she stands.
“Oh, you know how much I love to lie back and think of England.” He glances over. “The memories are so nice, Phoebe and all.”
Scully ties the too-long belt in a big square knot. “It was kindly meant.” Her smile is soft.
They shift awkwardly for a moment in the small space. Scully looks like a kid dressed up as an angel for a Nativity play in that enormous robe, her bare face and bare feet and tumbled halo of hair.
“Thank you,” Scully begins finally. “I couldn’t have-“
“I’m sorry,” he says at the same time.
Scully frowns. “Why on earth are you sor-“
“My neighbor. So I feel like I..I don’t know. I led him to you.” He picks at a non-existent hangnail.
Scully sighs. “Oh, Mulder.”
He shakes his head. “No, I don’t… I didn’t mean to make it about me, I know these are your choices, that you’re not some damsel in distress. I just hate when these things hurt you.”
Things is such an inadequate word, but no word ever could be adequate.
Scully blinks. She opens the door, wafts into his bedroom with the steam. Trails his bathrobe like a court gown.
Mulder follows after, wary. Watches her sprawl on his bed, far from the blood stains in the living room. He’s already called the crime-scene cleanup company.
She pats the bed next to her. “I promise I won’t take advantage of you.”
He laughs a little at that, remembers her looking a lot like this years ago in Bellefleur, in that awful motel with that terrible brown Clairol wash on her hair. He flops next to her. “Any mosquito bites you want me to check, Doctor Scully?”
She thumbs his cheek. “I was a child.”
He kisses her nose so that he doesn’t kiss her mouth. Though why shouldn’t he? Why shouldn’t they?
“I was a child and she was a child in this kingdom by the sea…” he quotes. Trails off. What are they doing, this isn’t a partnership. This is strange and awful and gorgeous. Her dying baby in his arms, her ova, her-
“In her sepulchre there by the sea…” Scully murmurs. “In her tomb by the sounding sea.” She closes her eyes.
They breathe one another’s air. They breathe artificial pine scent, dryer sheets, warm nitrogen. Faded cotton, old paper.
“Are you okay?” he asks, so he doesn’t slip a finger between her thighs. So he doesn’t say I love you the way oysters love the morning tide.
Her finger at his lips, her breath on his lashes. Her sweet, warm skin and her extraordinary brain and the scarred palimpsest of her body right here.
“No,” she says, stroking his jaw. “But I will be.”
She stays with him all night and he stays with her all night and they are arranged like the Lovers of Valdaro.
His coffee pot is programmed. His carpet is soaked in her blood, her gun is going to be the subject of an investigation.
He and Walter will protect her.
She loses the robe at 2AM, mumbling something vague about being tangled and too hot. Her naked body is now asleep against his chest and he lets go, finally, in the sweet vulnerability of her slim arms that can heal and kill.
