Mulder gets bitten by a genetically modified spider, which has profound impacts on his life and his partnership with Scully.
There were various stories that Mulder could tell about his life, all starting and ending at different points, some going on indefinitely, sure to carry on even beyond his death. They intertwined with one another, creating a tangled mess of threads that only few could unpick.
This story started with a case.
It had seemed simple enough at the time—lab employees going missing, winding up dead, the company they’d worked for denying any responsibility, fighting with all the influence they had to prevent an investigation into their role in the deaths—but Mulder hadn’t expected any of the events that followed.
In the academy, they had learned how to come to terms with the psychological aspect of working in the field: the danger, the unsettling knowledge that any case could be their last.
Unexpected death, he could somewhat deal with, but Mulder had never been taught, as far as he could recall, how to deal with unexpectedly becoming a superhero.
When he walked into work on a random Tuesday, when he opened the file of a case he’d just been assigned, Mulder didn't know these would be his last hours as a relatively normal person.
Sure, people thought he was odd, spooky—and, sure, they called him names, belittled his work, but, in all honesty, a lot of those same people, if asked out of earshot of other agents, probably would’ve admitted that he was pretty normal. Before webs started shooting out his wrists, that was.
This was the case that changed everything: a lab in the city, suspected conspiracy and cover-up, nothing too out of the ordinary.
The white, clear, unmarred ceiling is mocking Scully.
You have something I need.
The words bounce around her mind, ricocheting between parietal bones before then echoing through the rest of her body like a war drum through a valley, the sound amplifying a warning of what’s to come.
The white, clear, unmarred ceiling is mocking Scully. She is not sure her body is quite so pristine.
OR
Scully copes with her cancer diagnosis with distance and sex.
read chapter one of EAT ME ALIVE on ao3, or below the cut!
The white, clear, unmarred ceiling is mocking Scully.
You have something I need.
The words bounce around her mind, ricocheting between parietal bones before then echoing through the rest of her body like a war drum through a valley, the sound amplifying a warning of what’s to come.
The white, clear, unmarred ceiling is mocking Scully. She is not sure her body is quite so pristine.
***
She’s right. Of course she’s right. She wakes up coughing not long after falling asleep. She wipes blood from her face, but not before it drips onto her pillow. Once the bleeding stops, she flips it over and makes a note to change the case in the morning before Mulder wakes. When she settles back in, he reaches an arm towards her, as if he can sense her unease while asleep. For the first time Scully can remember, she brushes off the contact.
***
There’s one front-facing desk in the basement office. One nameplate on the door. One rose petal in her hand, the byproduct of a stranger’s mourning. There is no space for her to leave empty, no evidence of her existence in this room to which she has dedicated years of her life. Nothing permanent, except for her name in a casefile.
***
She doesn’t know what she’s doing. She’s in a bar with a man who is not her husband. She is pulling her waistband down a couple inches to make way for a needle. She is a teenager again, sneaking cigarettes to taste rebellion before the impermanence of youth slips through her fingers like the smoke through her lips, like the life she now fears might slip out of her body.
She doesn’t sleep with him. Of course she doesn’t. She’s being reckless, yes, but not cruel. The most permanent thing is the ink, and even that will decompose with the rest of her.
***
Scully does not like to admit when she is scared. The flimsy scan trembles between her fingertips. She slots it onto the lightboard to ponder it closer, the growth of darkness behind her eyes.
Cancer. Cancer.
She needs Mulder. Her fingers are dialing before she even realizes what she’s doing.
***
Mulder is stepping out the front door on his way to work when his phone rings. He had woken up to an empty bed with a vague note about an appointment left on the coffee maker, so it’s not a surprise when he finds it’s Scully on the other end.
“Mulder.”
“Mulder, it’s me,” Scully says through the tinny speaker. “I need you to meet me at the hospital.”
Mulder pauses, standing in the middle of their front sidewalk halfway to the car. “Are you okay?”
“I… haven’t been admitted.”
“Scully?”
Her voice is small on the other end. “Please, just come.”
“Where should I meet you?”
“The oncology ward.” The words are unsteady when they wobble out of her mouth and reverberate through his chest as he processes what she’s saying in waves.
Oncology. Cancer. Scully.
“Okay.” He tries to keep his voice steady, keep himself steady, for her. “Okay, I’ll be right there. I love yo–” She hangs up before he can get the words out.
He honestly doesn’t remember the drive to the hospital. Or where he got the flowers. The crack he makes about stealing them from a guy with a broken leg could be true, for all he knows. The only thing he cares about, the only thing pumping through his mind, through his veins, is Scully, Scully, Scully.
And then there she is, in front of him, standing and staring at her own insides, at her own cancerous mass.
Steady. He has to be steady. He does his best to wipe the worry off his face and out of his voice; he doesn’t think it works.
He doesn’t know how to breathe when she says the word tumor. Something is being sucked out through his chest. He’s not sure if it’s his heart or his soul, but something is being pulled out of him with unending force, out out out–
Steady.
“You’re the only one I’ve called.”
She explains it with her doctoral clinical detachment, like decline and death are a simple fact and he can’t stand it. He can’t let that be true.
“I refuse to believe that. I– I–”
“For all the times I have said that to you,” she interrupts, “I am as certain of this as I have ever been. I have cancer. It is a mass on the wall between my sinus and cerebrum. If it pushes into my brain, statistically, I have about zero chance of survival.”
The last four words trickle through his body before leaching out through the hole in his chest. He just got her. He just got her, in his arms and properly his, his, his Scully, and now she’s… leaving him. Being ripped away from him.
But not yet. For now, she’s fighting. Not just the cancer, but the people he’s made her enemies by virtue of existing next to her.
***
After delivering Scully’s overnight bag, Mulder sits on an uncomfortable and uncomforting plastic chair in the hospital corridor with his phone in his hands, Maggie's contact highlighted but not yet selected. He's never called her with good news before. She’ll know something is wrong the second his number blinks across her screen.
His hands are shaking. When Scully had told him, back in DC, it hadn’t been concrete. It had been information he had taken in, but Scully was upright, smiling at him, and investigating like she would be on any other day. Her cancer wasn’t tangible to him; it wasn’t real. The bridge of her nose has just been another beautiful inch of skin he longed to stroke, unaware of the danger lurking behind the bone.
Maybe he had just fallen for the facade she had erected. Maybe she had been holding that wall up for days, weeks, months, feeling sick and not telling him to spare his concern, but now she’s in the hospital and sick and dying, and what does he do with that? What does he do when his wife has a disease growing behind her eyes?
He doesn’t realize that his chest is growing tight until his lungs are refusing to expand and he’s choking on worry. The image of the phone he’s rolling between his fingertips begins to swim. He’s gasping and he’s choking and he’s dying like Scully's dying until a hand falls to his shoulder. He looks up and sees shoes, then further to see a man in a flannel, an understanding look of concern splashed across his features.
“Breathe with me,” a low voice demands, and Mulder sucks in a slow breath at the stranger’s instruction. It makes it most of the way in before his throat catches, and he forces it back out.
He follows the man’s instructions for a few minutes, until his arms stop threatening to detach from his body and his eyes are clearer.
“Diagnosis?” the stranger asks. Mulder just nods, his feet on the ground. “You or a loved one?”
“My wife.” He might as well tell the truth while he still can. While he’s still a husband, instead of a widower.
“How bad?”
“Not good.” The moment stretches before Mulder continues, “It didn’t — we found out a couple days ago, but it didn’t feel real. But now she’s… she’s in a hospital bed and asking me to call her mom, and I don't know how the hell to do that.”
“Are you close with her? Her mother?”
Mulder pauses at that, unsure how to answer. He knows he does have a good relationship with Maggie, but most of their conversations happen when something is wrong with Scully and they’re afraid she’s dead or dying. And here he stands, about to have another one, exactly the same.
“More or less,” he settles on. The man nods in understanding.
“When my wife told her mother… she meant to do it herself, she really did. But how the hell do you tell your parent that they're likely to outlive you?” He shakes his head. “We had her mom sat down in the living room, but Cheryl… she got so choked up. I couldn’t — I couldn’t make her do that alone, with everything else she was dealing with. So I ripped the bandaid off.”
“And how did she react?”
“As you can expect. She cried. It… sucked. But by now, I’ve had the ‘my wife has terminal cancer’ conversation enough times that it’s routine. It’s not any easier, it still feels like I’m being shot every time I have to say it, but I know how to go about it.”
“What the hell do I do?” Mulder asks, his voice rough.
“Love her. Be there for her. Things I’m sure you do anyway,” the man advises. “And if she’s anything like my wife, don’t treat her like she’s made of glass; she’ll hate that. Listen to her when she tells you what she needs.”
“She’s not,” Mulder sighs, pushing a hand through his unruly hair. “She’s not good at telling me when she needs something. She tends to bottle it up.”
“You two have been through a lot together, huh?”
Mulder just nods, eyes staring holes into linoleum tiles.
“Then you’ll make it through this, too.” The man gives Mulder a final pat on the back. “You’ll have her and she’ll have you. On the other end, you’ll have me.” A business card is being pressed into Mulder’s hands with “Malcolm Henries” in bold lettering across the top.
“Thank you,” Mulder says simply, and slides it into his pocket for safekeeping.
“I’ll let you make your call.” Malcolm gives Mulder a final sad smile and departs down the hallway, disappearing around a corner as Mulder sits, watching blankly with his phone laying dumbly in his hand.
Mulder is not a doctor. He is not a surgeon. He cannot take a scalpel and a bone saw and delicately pluck out the parts of Scully’s body that wish to hurt her. Mulder cannot cure cancer, but he can do this.
He runs his thumb across the button of his phone lightly, the pattern of his fingerprint catching on the raised CALL lettering. Before he can overthink it any further, he presses down and raises it to his ear.
“Hello?”
“Maggie,” he says, voice rough, “Hi, it’s, uh, it’s Fox Mulder.”
“Fox?” Worry is inked into Maggie’s voice. She knows, too. She knows they only talk now when something is wrong with Scully. Maybe that’s Mulder’s fault, only reaching out for necessity despite his affection for the woman, and the kindness and caring he receives in return.
“What’s wrong?” she asks, breaking Mulder from his thoughts.
“Scully, uh, Dana’s asked me to call you. We’re in Pennsylvania right now; she’s been admitted to the hospital.”
“What happened?” And oh, god. Mulder hasn’t said it yet. He needs to say it.
“She–” His voice wobbles, and he swallows the unease. “She got a diagnosis a couple days ago. Cancer. On her skull.”
“Oh my god.” Maggie sounds like she’s been punched in the stomach, just as Mulder had felt when Scully had first told him. “Brain cancer?”
“No,” he clarifies hurriedly. “Well, not yet. We found a doctor who has treated people with this form of cancer before.”
“Successfully?”
Mulder is silent for a moment, before settling on, “Scully is hopeful. She, uh, wanted you to bring some things for her.” He rattles off the list Scully had given him, consisting largely of hospital records and a few personal items, and Maggie agrees to pack her daughter’s things.
He can hear the tears in his mother-in-law’s eyes when she says, “I’ll be there soon.”
“Do you want me to organize for–”
“No,” she interrupts. “You be there for my daughter until I can, Fox. Please. Be there for her.”
“I will,” he vows. His voice is small. “I promise, Maggie, I will.”
Fanfic writers spend years trying to come up with realistic “bed sharing” scenarios, and the X-Files writing team drops a cow through the roof of Mulder’s motel room.
Scully believes that her feelings for Mulder are one-sided. She later comes to her senses.
It was Valentine's Day. When Scully woke up, that was the first thing she thought: it’s Valentine’s Day. There wasn’t any real reason for it to be at the forefront of her mind, but—despite her lack of plans for the day—it was.
She had the feeling that she’d just woken from a dream, though she didn’t remember what it was about. She was pretty sure that Mulder was there, but she couldn’t hold onto the memory.
With each second of consciousness, it was slipping further and further away from her, like sand through her fingers or a small boat being dragged away by a strong tide.
As she got out of bed, Scully saw Queequeg sleeping peacefully at the end of her mattress. She stopped for a moment when she saw him, almost surprised that he was there, and she had a strange feeling that she hadn’t seen him in a while.
Standing in her bathroom in front of the mirror, minty toothpaste foaming in her mouth, Scully thought about the significance of Valentine’s Day or, rather, the insignificance of it.
I love to read transman Mulder as asking everyone to call him Mulder cause it SIGNIFICANTLY lowers the chances of getting deadnamed. Outwitting the haters
While Scully is hospitalised due to her cancer, she and Mulder have an important conversation.
The bright, fluorescent hospital lights were starting to burn holes in her retinas.
It had now been three days since she’d been admitted. The medicine wasn’t working how it should be. As much as it pained her to admit, she could die any day now.
Three days in this room, and she couldn’t see a way out that involved her going back to her apartment, back to work, back to her life. The only end to this—the only destination of this journey—was to lie under six feet of bitter earth.
Mulder visited her every day, often multiple times, and Scully wondered whether he felt it too, whether he could also sense that the end was near.
Scully wondered if he went home after visiting hours ended, or if he just stayed there.
