A post-ep one shot for Monday, written beta-less for @txf-fic-chicks post-ep/missing scene challenge. This one is for Kristin. She knows why.
He grabs Scully’s elbow as soon as Skinner’s door edges shut, desperate to grasp her firm angles and so rewrite his last sensory memory of her, warm hand on his dying chest, with his living breathing partner. She looks at him like he’s insane. She’s looked at him like that a hundred times in the last hour as his always questionable testimony was distilled from a barely plausible chain of events to him saying over and over, “I just knew”. Scully can’t apply science to his gut, and Mulder wishes there was some way for him to tell her that he’s lived the same day 24 times and watched her die 24 times and that all he can think right now is that she’s alive, they both are, and please, please, never let him live that Monday again.
He’d slept like the dead last night, passed out on his couch under the weight of two dozen heartbreaks, and woken convinced another was on its way. His commute had been surreal, the newspaper headlines telling him Tuesday seeming just a cruel trick, until Scully had brought reality through the basement office door, red hair and rosy cheeks telling him that it really was over. He’d wanted to hug her then, to close the distance that Diana and a thousand almost arguments have opened between them but when Scully had met his gaze, he’d realised she didn’t remember; that all those Mondays, all those desperate goodbyes as Bernard’s hand had dropped finally, fatally to that killswitch, were his burden to bear. And so he’d told Skinner, with a nonchalance betrayed only by the clench of his hands in his lap as he relived that explosion over and over again, Scully flying boneless away from him in a marble framed inferno, that he “just knew”.
When they reach the elevator, there’s a question on her lips, a “What the hell Mulder?” that he can’t answer and so he drops the curtain on his coping face and lets her see the panic. She understands. No amount of distance and dissonance in their partnership can take away six years of learning to read each other and so she doesn’t argue when he steers her out of the lift at the exit level, hand in it’s long claimed but recently deserted spot on her lower back. She doesn’t even blink when his fingers press a little harder than usual, clinging to the solidness beneath the layers of shifting fabric as if by holding tight he can drag this moment over all those impossible ones that came before, blackout the flashbacks with her constancy.
He drives them to a bar they used to frequent, a bar where he once stuck a sparkler in a snoball to mark off a year that might have been her last, and orders them both a finger more of Scotch than Scully permits on a weeknight. He sits slightly too close, in an aching silence, his eyes fixed on the gentle curve of her hand around the glass, so different from the desperate way she’d hefted her gun in so many of her last moments.
The whiskey burns him inside the same way Bernard’s fire had swept him away, and he wants to cry. He wants to tell Scully and not have her think him insane. He wants to share his nightmare but keep the darkness from her door. He wants her hands on him again, to feel her fingers on his chest and her weight against him in a moment where they are both recklessly alive, to drag her mouth to his and breathe into her, fill his lungs with her, feel her blood pump around him, bury himself inside her until there is no space, no sound but a shared heartbeat and her melting into him.
But she moves away when Mulder lets his knee rests on her leg. Just an inch but enough that he knows she doesn’t want the same things, that her mind is still puzzling out his strange behaviour. The intoxicating fingers of the liquor have not pried open the walls Scully has put up between them, and though liquid courage is reacting in his belly with three agonising weeks of losing her every day, her glass is mostly full and her eyes are cloudy with doubt. Mulder wants to tell her everything. Words tingle on his tongue; both the insane truth and all the things he tried to choke out in their final seconds, heavy four letter words and thank you and sorry and “at least we’re going together”. All that comes out is air.
And before he can try again, it’s over. His glass is empty and she’s sliding out and taking his keys, dropping him at the apartment where his floor is still three weeks wet though the leak only happened yesterday morning. She’s not meeting his eye when he takes her hand over the console and tries to squeeze some meaning into the the gentle desperation of his grip. She’s not offering to stay, to chase away her own ghost when it stands before him at 3am, holding his pay cheque and her gun on the bloodied tiles of Craddock Marine Bank and asking him why this has happened to them, why he couldn’t save her.
Wednesday dawns cold on the once comforting leather of his sofa, and for the first time since all those Mondays, Mulder goes into his bedroom. The deflated corpse of his waterbed lies shrunken in its frame and he knows how it feels. He retrieves something Armani from his closet, and straps on his sidearm and a neutral expression, arriving at the office on time for the first time on three weeks, smiling blandly at Scully’s leading “Good morning?”. In time he will forget how she looked, leaning over and begging him to live, in time he will forget how she looks when she is dying. For now he will remain upright and not tell her the truth, not about his head or his heart. He will bury himself in their work and wait until his denial becomes acceptance. It always does.
Tomorrow acceptance will be an argument she wants to have about time travel. On Friday it will be her insistence that he have, and eat, a salad along with his burger. In three weeks time it will be her kicking him out of their “marriage bed” in Arcadia and a week after that the ease with which she slips of her wedding ring while he lingers just a little too long. But it will come, assuming that the sun keeps rising, time goes back to being a universal invariant and Mondays stay locked between Sundays and Tuesdays, far, far away from the nightmare days that exist now only in Mulder’s mind.
Thank you @kateyes224 for listening to my meltdown earlies, and to @piecesofscully for being an inspiring cupcake queen. Your blog is my happy place.
