could you maybe write something where scully actually believes mulder is dead in gethsemane???? extra points for crying
Hello!! Thank you so much for this prompt! I don’t get sent a ton of angst, but tbh it’s one of my top favorite genres to read and write. I hope I did it justice! Also, I will not lie, I think I subconciously remember an older fic with this type of premise, but I think they end up fucking. It was amazing and great and I tried to find it so I wasn’t subconciously regurgitating it, but alas, I cannot find it.
Also, tw for implied suicide (but he’s fine)
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“He said that the men behind this hoax, behind these lies, gave me this disease to make you believe.”
It was probably the worst thing she could have said to him. If she’d learned anything in this journey with him, it was that the truth he was always searching for always managed to appear where they least expected. That, and the truth was always far more cruel than anything they could have anticipated.
When he stormed out of the lab, every instinct in her body told her to follow him; the part of her still recovering from this shocking news crudely reminding her that following him was exactly what put a tumor in her head. She’d never known each step she took behind him was just a glorified death march.
She squeezed her eyes shut and wiped her hand tiredly across her face. She didn’t believe that, not even for one moment. But she knew Mulder did. Scully didn’t have a single doubt that Mulder had always been chastising himself every moment of their partnership. That hurt more than anything the men in power had done to her. If Mulder regretted the work they’d done together, then this all would have been for nothing.
She sighed and made her way to her own car. Part of her considered trying to follow him, he was probably going down his usual path of self-doubt and angst, but ultimately she decided to take the long way home so she could calm herself down.
An hour and a half later, she arrived to her apartment with a plan to call Mulder in the morning. “Scully,” she sighed tiredly into her phone, using her free hand to fumble for her keys.
“Is this Miss Dana Scully?” an unfamiliar female voice said over the line.
Scully’d had enough of cryptic messages from anonymous sources and, probably a little too curtly, stated, “Yes. Who is this?”
“This is Danielle Morten, I’m the building manager for your friend Fox Mulder,” she wearily replied, sounding stressed.
She had no idea where this was going and she felt her brow furrow as she stopped fiddling with the door after unlocking it. “Is everything all right?” she asked.
“Um, no, I’m afraid not,” she rushed, setting fear in the pit of Scully’s stomach. “I-I’m so sorry to tell you this, you were just his emergency contact-”
“He said that the men behind this hoax, behind these lies, gave me this disease to make you believe.”
An overwhelming sense of dread filled her entire body. What did he do? “What’s wrong?” Scully demanded.
“His neighbor called and said she heard a gunshot-” Scully felt a ringing sound in her ears as her legs grew weak. “-when I went to check, no one answered the door, so I had to use my key-” I should have fucking followed him. “I’m so sorry.” Scully felt ice creep into her veins and nothing made sense.
She pushed open the door and all but fell inside. “W-was he there?” she asked not caring that her keys fell out of her shaking hand as she pushed the door shut with her weight. Had the woman already said? Maybe it was an accident and he shot the floor? Why was she saying sorry?
“ I called an ambulance, but it was too late,” the woman choked, clearly distressed.
Scully heard her bag fall to the floor and the door slam shut more than she recognized doing it. “A-are you positive it was him?” she asked, her voice quivering despite her best attempts to reign it in. She didn’t want to seem irrational when everything this woman told her was surely some sort of misunderstanding. Maybe there’d been a fight at his place. Maybe the woman was just confused.
But their lives had been so stressful the past few months. With every new development escalating to him walking out of that warehouse, he’d seemed so defeated and lost.
“I knew something was wrong when I saw him in the hallway, he looked like he’d been crying and I could tell he was off,” she explained.
Mulder’d been crying. Because of what she told him.
Finding her voice, Scully repeated, “Off?”
“I told him he might need to leave next week because of fumigation and he said it didn’t matter. I-I just thought he was tired. I didn’t understand what he meant,” the woman rambled, trying to put it all together in her mind.
It didn’t matter? Why would he say that? Surely he couldn’t have been implying-
“Are you certain it’s Mulder,” she reiterated, hoping for some clue that would lead to this all being a big misunderstanding. She was trying to ignore all the warning signs she’d been blind to. This had been affecting him so much and she’d just blamed it on his obsession.
“The body looked like him,” the woman said, sniffling a little bit.
Her legs were shaking too badly for her to support herself and she ended up sliding down the frame onto her knees facing the door. “The body?” she breathlessly repeated.
Hanging? Bleeding? In the bathtub? On the floor?
“T-there was no-that’s all there was,” she woman sobbed.
Scully felt her blood run cold at the implication. Not that, god, please not that. She thought back to that face, the same one she’d spent hours sitting across, the face of the man she admired and trusted.
Trusted to be by her side no matter what.
“Can you call me to tell me where they take him?” Scully whispered, not trusting herself to speak at full volume without breaking.
She thinks she heard the woman say yes, but the phone clattered out of her hands and deafeningly hit the floor at the same time as she gasped for breath.
He killed himself?
She didn’t believe it, but then again, this was a man who’d just learned his most sacred mission was being used against him to make him look like a fool. The one friend he had was dying and he blamed himself.
She knew how he felt.
She should have followed him. She felt hot tears streak down her face as she looked absently at where the door met the floor. She knew how he got about things like this…but she never would have thought…
In a sudden bolt of panic, she went to stand up to go to him, but her legs were shaky and she ended up crashing back onto the hardwood floor with her tailbone, a pain registered in the back of mind but she paid it no attention.
He wouldn’t just leave her like that.
“He said that the men behind this hoax, behind these lies, gave me this disease to make you believe.”
She felt another gasp rip through her lungs like she’d never taken a breath before and a choked sob came out on the exhale. Scully drew her knees to her face and wrapped her arms around her legs in an upright sitting fetal position. Another strangled cry left her mouth as her grief consumed her.
She’d been with him just over an hour ago. He’d been fine, he’d been healthy, and now he was dead. Wetness started to seep into the pant fabric on her knee where her face rested and she simultaneously felt her body start to tremble.
She should have followed him. She should have followed him. She should have followed him. She should havefollowedhim. Sheshouldhavefollowedhim. She-
She felt a hand clamp down on her shoulder and she let out a small scream that came out like a sob as she lurched away, only resulting in falling onto her hands and knees. She turned around so that she was on her butt and was face to face with… Mulder?
“Scully?” he questioned softly, his hands up in peace as he kneeled in front of her, a look of pure concern adorning his face.
She didn’t understand. It was too much information thrown at her at once and she didn’t know how to process any of the last five minutes, hell, any of the last day. “M-Mulder?” she said weakly, her voice trembling on every syllable. She felt like a kid right now. Her knees hurt from falling, her lip was quivering, and she felt tears well hot and mortifying in her eyes before spilling down her cheeks.
“Hey, hey,” he rushed soothingly, moving to sit down in front of her while reaching for her hands just to have some contact. “What happened? Did someone hurt you?” he asked, his eyes roaming every inch of her body for some indication of why she was sobbing in her entryway.
“Y-your landlady called. She t-told me you were d-dead,” Scully explained, her teeth chattering as she shook. Somewhere in her brain she recognized she was experiencing symptoms of shock, but all she could focus on was the fact he was here with her.
“It’s a misunderstanding, and that’s actually why I’m here. There’s a dead man in my apartment right now,” he explained, rubbing his thumb over the backs of her hands in an attempt to help calm her down. “Scully, I’m fine.”
She hadn’t even thought about why he was here, only relieved that he was. He must’ve been hiding somewhere in the apartment and came out when he heard her sobs.
“She told me you were dead,” she repeated in a sob, clutching his hand like he’d disappear again if she let him go.
In a sudden impulse to comfort herself, she launched herself forward onto her knees. It wasn’t a graceful move, so she ended up tipping forward, but Mulder caught her with one hand on a bicep and the other on her opposite forearm. “Woah, Scully-” he started, only to be interrupted by her grabbing his arms with a vice grip.
She felt the warmth from under the cotton of his shirt as she touched him and her eyes focused on the spots her hands roamed. She went from his arms to his chest to his neck to his face, committing the feel of him to memory. She saw he was staring at her with a look of curiosity and she lowered her hands to his shoulders. “I thought you killed yourself,” she rushed on an exhale before choking out a sob and bowing her head in front of him.
Scully thinks he might have said something but she threw herself into his arms, wrapping her own tightly around his neck as she sobbed against him. “I’m sorry.”
She felt his arms wrap around her back, underneath her coat, pulling her closer to him as he rubbed soothing circles onto her shirt. “Shh, you have nothing to be sorry for.”
She pulled back slightly, so that they were still in each other’s arms, but face to face. “Yes, I do. I-I shouldn’t have been so hard on you today. I don’t blame you for any-thing, I hope you know that. I don’t regret my ti-me with you even for a moment, and I don’t want yo-u to think I do,” she rushed, choking on her words from her speed.
Mulder brought up a hand to the side of her head, brushing her hair back as he stroked her scalp. “Breath, Scully. You’re working yourself up,” he said, not commenting on her confession.
She sniffled and breathed for a moment before whispering in a quivering voice, “I thought you killed yourself because you blamed yourself for what happened to me.”
There was a guilt in his eye that let her know that, despite him being in front of her right now, her thinking wasn’t wrong. “It’s not your fault, Mulder. They do what they do because they are evil. You’ve been fighting them since the beginning, it’s not your fault,” she repeated, moving her hands to cup his face, idly feeling his five o’clock shadow.
Mulder raised himself up to his full height, while still being on his knees, and placed a kiss to her forehead, then to one cheek, and then the other, before leaning back to look her in the eye. She felt that her face was still red from crying, but she was finally calming down.
“I’m sorry,” she murmured, easing away and standing up, wiping the tear tracks from her face and trying to fix her makeup with the pads of her fingers.
“Don’t be, I’m sorry you had to go through that,” Mulder replied with a slight tone of disbelief in his voice, like he didn’t expect she’d have this reaction to that news.
She let out a humorless chuckle and sniffled again, taking off her coat and hanging it up to give herself something to do. “Well, think about me next time you think of doing something reckless or insane.”
She turned and caught him standing in front of her, rubbing the back of his neck with his hand. A favorite nervous tendency of his. “Well I have a feeling you’re not going to like what I’m about to tell you then.”
She invited him to her dining room as he explained what he’d gone through since they parted ways and what he thought they needed to do. It was reckless. It was insane. But she’d do anything she could if it meant keeping him safe.
