He knows he’s got it wrong when she looks up at him and her eyes are cold. He’d hoped for summertime ocean and landed somewhere closer to arctic circle.
‘I don’t want this darkness in my home Mulder’.
He tries for levity, because it’s the season for it but she is unrelenting, screwing the top of the bag shut as though he has brought her garbage instead of.
‘It’s just tinsel Scully.’ He begs, but he already knows the tinsel is as doomed as his misguided turtleneck and the novelty throw he’d bought for the new couch (the one to replace the one he’d slept on after she left him).
The tinsel goes back to the store but he stays and calls it home. Again.
( @thexmasfileschallenge Day 5 Prompt - Tinsel. I though you deserved some fluff after the last two)
Or the second coming of Ed Jerse. Post IWTB. Pre-Revival.
You can blame @dangerscully @defnotmeyo @startwreck @sunflowerseedsandscience and the rest of the rewatch reprobates for this. It’s definitely mature, tw: for rough sex and extreme angst. No beta and my apologies. In advance.
Scully hadn’t noticed him at first. She’d been too busy holding it together, painting on a neutral mask that identified her neither as the terrified newcomer or someone who truly needed to be in this dingy hall. She’d avoided eye contact, made crap coffee at a table whose uprightness was only slightly more precarious than her own, and found a seat without incident. She could do this, she reasoned, keeping her shoulders square like this whole scenario wasn’t a last, desperate resort. The therapist that the hospital had forced her to see after the incident had insisted she try group therapy. The words had been kind, logical even. “Your insistence upon isolating and internalising your unhappiness is hindering any sort of progress”, but Scully knows that her personal brand of tragedy goes far beyond what any other person, let alone group of people, could understand.
After all, that’s why Mulder won’t -
No.
She doesn’t want to think about him now. She needs FBI distance to survive this hour of shared human misery. Her fingers crimp the cup and the coffee inside swells up and subsides along with the averted crisis, taking with it the noise in the room as introductions begin.
Dana. She says quietly. These people don’t need Scully. That’s all she says as she scans the circle of faces impassively and selects an area of mottled wall to drown out the sympathy she can’t stand to see. She plans to offer no more. She plans to sit, to count out her hour, in breaths and heartbeats and then go back to the darkness of their home where at least she can hide from it all.
But there’s movement on the edge of her vision. A pale crescent of anonymous face leaning in, again and again, until not looking becomes harder than just a glance and for the first time in her life Scully sees a ghost.
Under the fluorescent striplights his face is flat and wraithlike and his eyes are hollow. Maybe this was always how he looked in the light, but Scully had only known him in shadow, in the flickering sin of a neon sign, in the stark white lines street light cast on tangled sheets. By firelight.
“I’m Ed. Jerse,” he says. To the whole group but really just to her and his voice is a nightmare that burns through three years of numbness to coil in her belly.
He keeps talking. Sharing, Scully vaguely assumes as words reach her in unanchored bursts. “Prison,” and fingers of fear creep through the bars of her ribcage, ruffling the calm, cold detente she’s built to survive. “Regret,” and there’s a depth to the hard black of his stare that makes her lean in, just in time for, “forgiveness”. Doesn’t he know that there’s no such thing, she wonders, watching his fingers twist in his lap, scars rippling, remembering how they had felt on her body, under her clothes.
“I just wish,” Jerse says, sincerity balled up between his teeth and delivered on a sad smile, “that I could find a way to tell her, the last woman I hurt, how sorry I am. How badly I wanted her to be able to save me. How much it meant that she tried, even though she barely knew me.”
Scully bites back a laugh, teeth sharp on her lip to the point of pain, she’d never wanted to save Ed. Not really. Every moment with him had been about trying to save herself. Or destroy herself to start over. Whichever it was, by the time she’d realised the danger, preservation had been her only priority, appealing to the ego over the ergot and praying it would be enough. It hadn’t been, and as the death glow of the furnace washes through her memory bringing with it the fatty smell of cooking skin, she tastes blood and comes back to the present.
The group is gathering its things. Except Ed, who is sat staring at her, eyes fixed the the bloody seduction of her bottom lip, hands finally still.
She shouldn’t go over, but she does, standing just an inch too close, towering over him as he had once in his hallway.
He looks up, half cloaked now in her shadow and much more like the man she once knew. She feels almost like the girl she once was. Before the cancer. Before love was a word she spoke out loud. Before she really knew what broken was. She wonders if this counts as group therapy. Stepping closer she relishes the empowering recklessness of a bad decision made for selfish reason/
‘Dana-’ Jerse begins and she silences him with a flash of blue.
“You want my forgiveness?” she asks, the words molasses thick and treacle bitter on her tongue and he nods, despair and desire battling in his gaze. “Okay” she says, and leaves the hall, knowing he will follow.
She drives her own car, the steady glare of his headlights intense as a lover’s stare, unblinking in their devotion to whatever she is willing to give. He is her terrified, tantalised shadow at the motel check-in, a sharp inhale when the devil in her requests the suite with the fireplace and turns to watch his cheeks burn with shame.
In the room she makes him watch her build the fire, silence stretching ever thinner between them as the newspaper dissolves the day’s news into ash, along with the last of her sanity, and the flames lick seductively across the pale tiles of the hearth.
“Touch me”, Scully says finally, when the charge becomes unbearable. “Make me forget”, and Jerse knows enough about pain and regret not to ask what it is she is trying to bury.
Instead he crosses to her and runs his hand, thumb first, from her cheekbone to the nape of her neck. A tenderness she hadn’t banked on scares her out of her planned passivity; she needed to be touched, to be wanted, but not like this and not by him.
“No”. And her grip on his wrist is cruel, firmer even than his was in that dingy bar, South Nowhere, Philadelphia, all those years ago. She forces his hand into a fist, trapping her hair inside and then tugs his arm down, jerking her own head back to reveal the delicate column of her throat and the wild, wanton drumming of her pulse.
“Do it like before”.
She grinds herself against him, echoing the way he’d pushed her past recklessness and into his wreckage.
“Fuck me.”
And he does.
The cheap frames on the mantle fall and shatter as he drives her against the wall, lifting her to his hips and setting his teeth to the unsullied snow of her skin. He marks his way across it, teeth and breath melting and biting away all the months of loneliness, all the cold of rejection as she scores her need into the skin under his shirt.
She wants him to bleed. She wants him to burn. She wants him inside her with the prickling anxiety of a tattoo needle, scratching away the last vestiges of something pure and replacing it with lurid, living colours.
And he gives it to her. Bent forward over his knees, skirt round her ass and panties barely to one side as he drags her back to him over and over, slickening and slamming as her heels dig into the wall for some sort of stability. She’s ragdoll powerless in his grip, cock driving and thoughts crumpled with his boxers as their rhythm animates the serpent writhing on her back, temptation turned destruction as it devours itself eternally. It’s not pleasure exactly, it’s more like fire, lighting up the dark spaces inside them, warming at first but soon blazing, sparking shards of agony breaking off and rushing to the nape of her neck, to the knotted scar of Ed’s hand bruising her her hip, to the aching broken place where her heart used to beat.
It’s not enough, she can still think, still feel and she needs to be consumed. She needs him to need her, to sacrifice himself at the altar of her forgiveness, martyr himself to her cause and she throws herself away, arching her back as he looms over her like the animal he became in Philly and begs him for more. She knows there is more. She can smell it on his skin, like alcohol and rye and death.
Scully screams when he drives into her this way. He’s bigger than Mulder, and fucking her like Mulder never would, one hand gripping her throat and the other between her legs, forcing a blistering friction that borders on pain and when Jerse roars out his climax she doesn’t even have the breath left to wonder if maybe he’s going to kill her. All she can see is the ugly maroon carpet, blurring into darkness as her climax carves out what’s left of Dana Scully and leaves her empty.
Ed is gone by the time she works her way back to consciousness, though evidence of his participation is still sticky on her thighs. Scully knows she should feel bad, how many times in her life has her need to make things right led her to the darkest places, but she’s too hollow for regret.
Ed needed forgiveness and she needed to feel something beside the crippling sadness that was Mulder, unresponsive in his office for days at a time. She needed to experience life outside the walls of the hospital where her colleagues handle her with kid gloves, afraid theirs might be the next nose she breaks over a gallows humour joke meant to lighten another hopeless diagnosis. She needed to be something beyond the disappointment she saw every Sunday she showed up to her mother’s alone. She needed to be something to someone beyond their saviour or their sacrifice. She needed to be human and she needed to hurt and be hurt in a way that had a beginning and an end, to break the circle. Ed owed her at least that. He’d been there at the beginning and he’d given her an end.
She stays in the motel, lets her phone die and wonders if by some miracle Mulder will remember he’s meant to search when she goes missing. He doesn’t.
After three days she returns, wheels weary on the long track to their unremarkable desolation of a home.
He’s in the kitchen when she kicks off her shoes, marooned between the sink and the island like he was in the middle of doing something and forgot how to carry on. She wonders how long he’s been there.
“Mulder”. She offers him an opening, tearing just a millimeter into the dam behind which she’s learned to keep her feelings, begging him to hear the hurt and the heartbreak ad to notice that something is terribly, horribly wrong.
But he doesn’t, absently looking at her without seeing and asking where she’s been in a way that makes it clear he has no idea how long she’s been gone.
The darkness inside her yawns and inches a little closer to the surface, almost ready to swallow her, but she will not follow him into this endless night
Instead, Scully seals her feelings back up and grits her teeth, clinging the the spark of anger that is the only thing she still feels beside the numbness of hurt, and stalks over to him, ruffling his space in warning before drawing her hand back to slap him. Hard.
Mulder only blinks and steps back, red blooming under the indoor pale of his skin in a pale imitation of the passion she once used to be able to arouse.
“Scully.” He names her clinically, with no inflection. As if she is a known specimen and there is no mystery, no Mulder left at all.
“I went back to Philadelphia." Scully taunts, playing her last card, calling in a shared horror and holding her hair aside to show him the evidence of Jerse’s mouth on her skin, writing her betrayal in smoke signals in her eyes and praying for a response, for a reaction… for a miracle. He has to remember.
When Mulder doesn’t move, she closes her eyes and prays, though she knows she has little right to another divine intervention. God knows how many they’ve wasted.
The darkness behind her eyelids thickens with finality when she hears footsteps, headed away, and then the study door snicks closed.
It’s over.
The door is still closed two days later when she takes her things and leaves him.
So I just watch ftf and iwtb for the first time in my 15 years of living and all I can say is I think I had a couple of seizures but I’m fine... I had at least 5 mental breakdowns... but um... life is good
