Note: This is the first fic I've had the nerve to publish, and I want to give the HUGEST of thank-yous to @gaycrouton for being my unofficial beta; her advice is just as wonderful as her writing, and she's just generally the absolute best.
Summary: Letters never sent.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
She is gone. He is floundering in a dark lake of endless questions, paddling uselessly against a current of conspiracies. He is afraid that soon his limbs will give out and he will drown.
It feels like yesterday that she was alongside him, keeping him afloat with her facts, her science, her unyielding trust even beneath layers of doubt and skepticism. Yesterday feels like an eternity.
He does not know if he will ever see her again. A dark piece of him wonders if perhaps it would be safer, easier to presume her dead. If she were never to come back to him, at least he would be prepared.
But if he gives in to this perverse doubt, the ghost of his life preserver will disappear and his lungs will fill with that cold, dark water.
So he writes her letters.
He hasn’t done that since he was sixteen and his mother found his letters to Sam while she was cleaning his room. She had said nothing, but that night he saw her stoking a quiet inferno in their fireplace and he knew that those tentative branches of hope were the tinder for the flames.
But now, he leaves Scully offerings on his hearth, begging her to come home.
In a cruel twist of fate, many of the things he says to her are things he had said to Sam. He tells her that in her absence, he speaks to no one. He apologizes for every single time he has been cruel or dismissive towards her, wishing that he could go back in time and make every moment spent with her a happy one. He promises that he will never stop trying to find her, and that when he does bring her back, he will give her everything she deserves.
Many of the letters are delicate and wrinkled with his dried tears, but he does not care. All that matters is that his fragile hope finds its way into the universe, so that perhaps she will feel it and return.
But the homecoming is bittersweet, marred by the uncertainty of her survival. He knows that he needs to do more, that simply transcribing the feelings was not enough.
And so, when he rushes home to change and shower after days of agonized vigil, he seizes the sheaf of papers piled on his hearth without giving a second thought to the grief-blurred ink. When he returns to her side, he reads for hours, until his voice cracks and his eyes run dry.
Even after she wakes up, he will not burn these letters. He files them away carefully, hoping that someday he will find the courage to read them to her again.
She can feel the life draining from her, faster every day. The red rivulets dripping grotesquely from her nose grow more vivid, while the brass of her hair and the flush of her cheeks dull.
As her color fades, his intensifies. She can see his eyes burning bright with anger, with the need to fix it.
She wants to tell him to stop looking. She needs him to know that it isn’t his fault. She doesn’t want to spend the rest of her life fighting for a lost cause, and she sure as hell doesn’t want to do it without him by her side.
But every time she opens her mouth to ask him to just spend time with her, he flinches in anticipation. In anticipation of what, she cannot say for certain. Perhaps he is waiting for her to ice him out, or perhaps he is afraid that she will finally tell him that she is in agony.
She supposes that, in a few months, the reason won’t matter.
What matters now is that regardless of what she says, it will shatter him.
So she writes him letters.
She fills a book with the words she wishes she had the courage to say out loud. Her normally neat cursive trembles as the words trip over themselves to enter the universe, begging to be heard by someone, anyone.
She tells him everything he doesn’t know about her, because she doesn’t want him to have more questions than he already does when she’s gone. She apologizes for her unrelenting skepticism and her reluctance to profess her fears and her loves. She tells him that as much as the universe has screwed her over, she would relive it all again if it meant keeping him.
In the end, it reads like an epic, tragic love story.
She prays to God that he never finds it.
His mind is on fire, burning with a thousand tomes of others’ thoughts.
He cannot drown the voices out, no matter how he screams over their incessant crescendo. Nobody can hear him.
He supposes it doesn’t matter. The only person he wants to talk to is barred from his side, perhaps due to others’ fear that she will be the one to hear him.
He talks to her anyway. When the cacophony of betrayal becomes too unbearable, he writes her hundreds of thousands of letters in his head. Often, they are rambling and aimless, containing countless phrases playing on a loop in his mind. Sometimes, however, they say exactly what he needs them to.
He apologizes for doubting her, for betraying her trust. He tells her that he knows he is unworthy of that trust, that he knows he will never deserve her. Most importantly, however, he tells her that he will try. He will try to win her trust again. He will try to be good enough for her, in all her brilliance. And goddammit, he will try to tell her he loves her in the way she deserves.
He swears to himself that these words will not go unheard.
But then the noise deafens him, and he dreams.
He dreams of the life he had never dared to imagine. He dreams of happiness and white picket fences, of calm and quiet.
He knows that something is not quite right. When Diana is gone, he sits down at his desk and drafts letters to an unknown recipient, hoping that they will be able to tell him why something is always tugging at the back of his mind. When he is on the beach, the tug intensifies, yanking him towards the truth, but every time he feels he can reach out and touch it, he is violently jerked from the beach, waking up once more in the life he had never quite wanted.
Finally, she wakes him up, her bright eyes piercing through the disconcerting haze of manufactured happiness. She fixes him, like always. He goes home and sits down to write the words so that he can tell her properly. But there is still a deep hurt in her eyes which sinks its claws into his heart and crackles along his nerve endings every time he picks up the pen. Suddenly, he is terrified of giving the words life, fearing that they may only hurt her more.
The words remain unwritten.
She cannot reconcile these facts in her mind. A world without him is illogical. It is impossible, when he was her world.
She buys a new journal and tries to make sense of the paradox. She begs him to come home and when the life inside her becomes impossible to ignore, she tells him the stakes.
Many of the letters are written in fury, usually at the cruelty of this new reality, but sometimes at him. She tells him that he is not allowed to ditch her now, not when she is carrying his child. On some days she is so angry that she tells him she will never forgive him for leaving her like this.
But then she remembers who he is and what he is to her, and she apologizes for her anger and tells him she loves him and that she will move heaven and earth to bring him home.
Then he is dead, and she screams until her throat is raw and cries until her eyes run dry.
She does not, cannot, and will not understand.
But that doesn’t change the fact that he is dead.
She comes home, numb, and burns the letters.
They do not celebrate Christmas their first year on the run. Seeing the lines to visit Santa is like salt in a fresh wound. They are their own family, but a broken one nonetheless.
Instead, they celebrate New Year’s Eve. They watch the ball drop on the motel television, and she kisses him at midnight. They pull away seven minutes into the new year, cheeks glittering with tears. He gives her a sad smile, and she cups his face in her hands, thumbing away the evidence of his quiet grief.
“Hey,” she says softly, “the world still hasn’t ended.”
He chuckles and leans his forehead against hers. “I love you.”
She kisses him tenderly, then turns to rummage through her duffel bag. “I have something for you.”
He grins and pulls a leather folder from under the bed. “Still haven’t stopped reading my mind, have you?”
She sees what he is holding and laughs. “No, I suppose I haven’t.” With a grin matching his, she hands him a small leather-bound journal. Inside it are the hundreds of letters she has written to him since he came back to life, telling him about their son, trying to work out ways to bring their family together once more. Grief and pain are spattered across the pages, but her love permeates even the darkest blots of ink.
He looks up from the first letter, tears already beginning to blur the ink. He is smiling, though, as he shakes his head in wonder. “Scully….”
She raises an eyebrow, the corners of her mouth curling up, and he laughs. “I...here, you’ll see.” He hands her the folder and she opens it slowly, bemusement creasing the space between her brows.
In it are the letters he had written her when she was abducted, but there are new letters now, too. These are the letters he has written to her since he came back to life. Most of them are apologies: for not being there to see their son grow, for putting her for so much grief, for being cruel to her because it felt easier to distance himself from her in case he never came back. Most of all, he apologizes because he wants to spend every second of his life with her, and he has already wasted too much time.
She stares down at the fragile pages and laughs shakily. “I guess you haven’t stopped reading mine, either.” When she looks up, her eyes are shining with love and tears, and he guides her by the small of her back to the bed, where they sit side by side and begin to read each other’s letters.
tangentwithtanner
dailybridgerton
kianamaiart
yousharknotpass
izzy806
turnnoffyourmind
