![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
anythingbutgreyokay, this is my last x-files fic. i'm done. promise. and i don't like this one as much as the last one (writing mulder is hard) so any concrit is, as always, appreciated. :)
i should be packing.
Title: You're the Light in My Deepest, Darkest Hour
Pairing (Fandom): Mulder/Scully (The X-Files)
A/N: thanks to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
snowfire for the beta again! title from the bird and the bee's "how deep is your love." it is also the title of the icon i'm using. how convenient.
Spoilers: Through The Truth.
Summary: There’s not enough time, and he is the worst scratched CD, catching on the most insignificant of supplications.
There are still nights where he asks, “Do you ever wish –”
She always stops him before he can finish.
“No.”
He doesn’t believe her, and it makes every one of his molecules feel like anvils lie within his skin, leaving him as frozen as the night his sister vanished, just that stilled, with just as much to lose.
Often, one of them will want to take the other by the shoulders and scream, I am in love with you just because the world is going to end and the time for hiding and hanging back is long past. They have nothing but each other and an expiration date now.
They say it less often than they should. Half the time neither can bear to think it.
After all, that’s the point – it’s the end of the world – they already have too much at stake.
Sometimes she will say, “You know the truth; stop running after it.”
After everything, she wants that quiet normal life that runs across their television screen on nights neither of them can sleep. The sitcom lifestyle with two rambunctious kids and a laugh track makes her mouth water.
He doesn’t know how to tell her – I’ve been chasing or chased for so many years I don’t know how to stop moving and just be still here with you.
There are days at a time where they can’t speak to each other. Even after nineteen years (nineteen, the number is so high he sometimes has to gasp it in) they still can’t manage to say what they need to say.
The clock ticks to midnight and he switches the wall calendar to January 2012.
Scully leans against the doorframe without speaking, her mouth turned in a frown as he somehow manages to poke his thumb with the tack.
Behind the calendar, a spot of blood sticks to the wall. They never notice it.
This New Year’s, they do not celebrate.
He says, “It’s too soon. I’m not ready to – to lose you.”
Her eyes shut, the lashes fluttering against his skin.
“I know,” she says. “But you’re not going to lose me. We’ll fight. You and me.”
Which is the way it has always been, the two of them, bar a couple abductions and mistaken deaths. The idea of one without the other has left them paralyzed and clinging to each other on the bedspread, each breath shallow like the oxygen in the room is slipping out.
It’s easy to have nightmares after so many years of chasing monsters in the dark, and their numbers only increase in their last spring in a solid world. The dreams fall into different forms and shapes, bright colors and darks, swirling images and solid forms. Scully wraps herself around him when he wakes screaming, calms him with quiet whispers near his neck, which is soaked in sweat. His hands grip hers such that in the mornings, calm again, he worries he might have come close to breaking her hands.
Scully smiles and shakes her head, but sometimes he thinks he can see bruises on her wrists. It makes him feel sick.
Three nightmares reoccur:
One – William. William, lost and bloodied and pulled out a window in a spinning bright light while he, Mulder, stands screaming his name and feeling like he’s back to twelve years old.
Two – His own abduction, screaming Scully’s name through every test without meaning to, like she had interlocked into his hypothalamus, which regulates temperature, and breathing, and all other involuntary actions. There were moments when he found himself shuddering in a corner repeating Fox Mulder, Fox Mulder, like he might fade away. But Scully – by that point, she had become as solidly a part of him as his own hands; losing her would have been just debilitating. She never faded. Had they kept him, he knows he would have remembered her name long after he had forgotten his own.
Three – Scully sick, Scully dying, Scully crying, Scully running, Scully bloodied and broken. This is the one always burns the most.
Some nights, they lie awake silent and clinging to each other like drowning children.
“We’ll survive this,” someone says. He doesn’t know which of them. Probably Scully – she has always been the stronger one.
“How?”
Neither answers. The television hums along, but the words don’t form into concrete sentences. The only thing that translates in his mind is Scully, blood sneaking out of the corner of her mouth and empty, open eyes that look like a question – Why did you bring me into this life?
His grip on her tightens, like he can keep her afloat by his own hands.
“We should be doing more,” Scully whispers. Her breath is warm against his face, her lips so close to him they have blurred in his vision.
They have collected up contacts and quiet armies building thicker skins, but, she’s right, it never feels like enough, because it won’t be enough. It will never be enough. They can and will fight to the last, but there will be a last. Sometimes he wants to grab Scully and run and run and run like there’s somewhere to hide.
Outside, summer rain falls and echoes off the air conditioning unit of their room. The sounds that surround them makes him feel compressed, sheltered under someplace untouchable, as though nothing could possibly be about to go through such a radical, destructive shift. Really, the world can’t be allowed to end, because twenty years of Scully quite simply isn’t long enough. There are still facts of her he doesn’t know – her favorite food at age six, if – in a life or death situation – she would choose strawberry or chocolate ice cream, and, yes, you have to choose, no excuses.
There’s not enough time, and he is the worst scratched CD, catching on the most insignificant of supplications.
2012 is the first year she doesn’t buy a Christmas tree. Their living room looks lonely without it. He has never seen her so exhausted.
“You could have still bought the tree,” he suggests, her head lying on his knees as they watch television from the couch.
Her shrug rustles against his jeans. “No time for that. We’ll be fighting a war come Christmas.”
“There’s still the yuletide spirit to think of,” he smirks. “We still have a few more weeks.”
But his words just still them, still their hands, still their breath. Every inch of him hurts, his stomach gutted with a fishhook, his skin torn off, his hands begging, “Keep her safe” to anyone at all.
Never has he so wished someone was listening. But God is her territory; his universe of flying saucers and things that go bump in the night – that’s what’s lurking heavy with death blowing in.
Only when she kisses him does he snap back to reality to realize they’re both crying, too much desperation fusing with something terrible and freezing in the December air, and in this most imperative of closing acts when he should be doing something brave and heroic and, above all, loving, all he can do is kiss her, and kiss her, and gasp as though shot, It’s too soon.
The night before the end of the world, they don’t sleep. They couldn’t if they wanted to. Instead, he can’t stop touching her. His lips, his hands run over every inch of her with eyes open, memorizing the sights and smells and texture of her for when it all ends, so that when he dies he can close his eyes and taste her. The pads of his fingertips feel hypersensitive, so that the hair follicles, the wrinkles that have grown over her, every bump in her skin electrocutes.
As the sun begins to rise, they huddle by the window draped in blankets, facing each other, letting loose twenty years of I love yous too often kept huddled and feared in the dark. They alternate – she says “I love you” and then he says “I love you” and it will never be enough.
She interrupts their intonation and it startles him – the repetition had grown chant-like after a time.
“When do you think it will start?” Her voice cracks.
“I don’t know,” he whispers, and he misses having the right answers.
Scully’s eyes shimmer as she looks up at him. “I just can’t believe it’s today. I never thought it would – there always seemed to be so much time left.”
His eyes fall. She has no idea how often he wishes he had kissed her the instant she woke up from the coma after her abduction or maybe even before. If he had known what was waiting for them twenty years down the road, perhaps he would have.
“That’ll teach us to procrastinate,” he says with an anemic laugh.
She smiles, though, at the things that never change, like twisting jokes with death on the wind. Her hand extends and flattens over his, her fingers reaching to cover his clenched fists.
“Let’s go,” she says with her voice still wavering but stronger now. “There’s a war coming on.”
Mulder stands and shuts the blinds. The sun spills through the slits in the window coverings and traces long streaks of light amongst the heavy rectangles of shade. His revolver rests on the dresser. It clicks into his holster as she grabs his hand, pulls him out the door.
He dares to hope – Maybe we’ll survive.
*
feedback?
i should be packing.
Title: You're the Light in My Deepest, Darkest Hour
Pairing (Fandom): Mulder/Scully (The X-Files)
A/N: thanks to
snowfire for the beta again! title from the bird and the bee's "how deep is your love." it is also the title of the icon i'm using. how convenient.Spoilers: Through The Truth.
Summary: There’s not enough time, and he is the worst scratched CD, catching on the most insignificant of supplications.
There are still nights where he asks, “Do you ever wish –”
She always stops him before he can finish.
“No.”
He doesn’t believe her, and it makes every one of his molecules feel like anvils lie within his skin, leaving him as frozen as the night his sister vanished, just that stilled, with just as much to lose.
-
Often, one of them will want to take the other by the shoulders and scream, I am in love with you just because the world is going to end and the time for hiding and hanging back is long past. They have nothing but each other and an expiration date now.
They say it less often than they should. Half the time neither can bear to think it.
After all, that’s the point – it’s the end of the world – they already have too much at stake.
-
Sometimes she will say, “You know the truth; stop running after it.”
After everything, she wants that quiet normal life that runs across their television screen on nights neither of them can sleep. The sitcom lifestyle with two rambunctious kids and a laugh track makes her mouth water.
He doesn’t know how to tell her – I’ve been chasing or chased for so many years I don’t know how to stop moving and just be still here with you.
There are days at a time where they can’t speak to each other. Even after nineteen years (nineteen, the number is so high he sometimes has to gasp it in) they still can’t manage to say what they need to say.
-
The clock ticks to midnight and he switches the wall calendar to January 2012.
Scully leans against the doorframe without speaking, her mouth turned in a frown as he somehow manages to poke his thumb with the tack.
Behind the calendar, a spot of blood sticks to the wall. They never notice it.
This New Year’s, they do not celebrate.
-
He says, “It’s too soon. I’m not ready to – to lose you.”
Her eyes shut, the lashes fluttering against his skin.
“I know,” she says. “But you’re not going to lose me. We’ll fight. You and me.”
Which is the way it has always been, the two of them, bar a couple abductions and mistaken deaths. The idea of one without the other has left them paralyzed and clinging to each other on the bedspread, each breath shallow like the oxygen in the room is slipping out.
-
It’s easy to have nightmares after so many years of chasing monsters in the dark, and their numbers only increase in their last spring in a solid world. The dreams fall into different forms and shapes, bright colors and darks, swirling images and solid forms. Scully wraps herself around him when he wakes screaming, calms him with quiet whispers near his neck, which is soaked in sweat. His hands grip hers such that in the mornings, calm again, he worries he might have come close to breaking her hands.
Scully smiles and shakes her head, but sometimes he thinks he can see bruises on her wrists. It makes him feel sick.
Three nightmares reoccur:
One – William. William, lost and bloodied and pulled out a window in a spinning bright light while he, Mulder, stands screaming his name and feeling like he’s back to twelve years old.
Two – His own abduction, screaming Scully’s name through every test without meaning to, like she had interlocked into his hypothalamus, which regulates temperature, and breathing, and all other involuntary actions. There were moments when he found himself shuddering in a corner repeating Fox Mulder, Fox Mulder, like he might fade away. But Scully – by that point, she had become as solidly a part of him as his own hands; losing her would have been just debilitating. She never faded. Had they kept him, he knows he would have remembered her name long after he had forgotten his own.
Three – Scully sick, Scully dying, Scully crying, Scully running, Scully bloodied and broken. This is the one always burns the most.
-
Some nights, they lie awake silent and clinging to each other like drowning children.
“We’ll survive this,” someone says. He doesn’t know which of them. Probably Scully – she has always been the stronger one.
“How?”
Neither answers. The television hums along, but the words don’t form into concrete sentences. The only thing that translates in his mind is Scully, blood sneaking out of the corner of her mouth and empty, open eyes that look like a question – Why did you bring me into this life?
His grip on her tightens, like he can keep her afloat by his own hands.
“We should be doing more,” Scully whispers. Her breath is warm against his face, her lips so close to him they have blurred in his vision.
They have collected up contacts and quiet armies building thicker skins, but, she’s right, it never feels like enough, because it won’t be enough. It will never be enough. They can and will fight to the last, but there will be a last. Sometimes he wants to grab Scully and run and run and run like there’s somewhere to hide.
Outside, summer rain falls and echoes off the air conditioning unit of their room. The sounds that surround them makes him feel compressed, sheltered under someplace untouchable, as though nothing could possibly be about to go through such a radical, destructive shift. Really, the world can’t be allowed to end, because twenty years of Scully quite simply isn’t long enough. There are still facts of her he doesn’t know – her favorite food at age six, if – in a life or death situation – she would choose strawberry or chocolate ice cream, and, yes, you have to choose, no excuses.
There’s not enough time, and he is the worst scratched CD, catching on the most insignificant of supplications.
-
2012 is the first year she doesn’t buy a Christmas tree. Their living room looks lonely without it. He has never seen her so exhausted.
“You could have still bought the tree,” he suggests, her head lying on his knees as they watch television from the couch.
Her shrug rustles against his jeans. “No time for that. We’ll be fighting a war come Christmas.”
“There’s still the yuletide spirit to think of,” he smirks. “We still have a few more weeks.”
But his words just still them, still their hands, still their breath. Every inch of him hurts, his stomach gutted with a fishhook, his skin torn off, his hands begging, “Keep her safe” to anyone at all.
Never has he so wished someone was listening. But God is her territory; his universe of flying saucers and things that go bump in the night – that’s what’s lurking heavy with death blowing in.
Only when she kisses him does he snap back to reality to realize they’re both crying, too much desperation fusing with something terrible and freezing in the December air, and in this most imperative of closing acts when he should be doing something brave and heroic and, above all, loving, all he can do is kiss her, and kiss her, and gasp as though shot, It’s too soon.
-
The night before the end of the world, they don’t sleep. They couldn’t if they wanted to. Instead, he can’t stop touching her. His lips, his hands run over every inch of her with eyes open, memorizing the sights and smells and texture of her for when it all ends, so that when he dies he can close his eyes and taste her. The pads of his fingertips feel hypersensitive, so that the hair follicles, the wrinkles that have grown over her, every bump in her skin electrocutes.
As the sun begins to rise, they huddle by the window draped in blankets, facing each other, letting loose twenty years of I love yous too often kept huddled and feared in the dark. They alternate – she says “I love you” and then he says “I love you” and it will never be enough.
She interrupts their intonation and it startles him – the repetition had grown chant-like after a time.
“When do you think it will start?” Her voice cracks.
“I don’t know,” he whispers, and he misses having the right answers.
Scully’s eyes shimmer as she looks up at him. “I just can’t believe it’s today. I never thought it would – there always seemed to be so much time left.”
His eyes fall. She has no idea how often he wishes he had kissed her the instant she woke up from the coma after her abduction or maybe even before. If he had known what was waiting for them twenty years down the road, perhaps he would have.
“That’ll teach us to procrastinate,” he says with an anemic laugh.
She smiles, though, at the things that never change, like twisting jokes with death on the wind. Her hand extends and flattens over his, her fingers reaching to cover his clenched fists.
“Let’s go,” she says with her voice still wavering but stronger now. “There’s a war coming on.”
Mulder stands and shuts the blinds. The sun spills through the slits in the window coverings and traces long streaks of light amongst the heavy rectangles of shade. His revolver rests on the dresser. It clicks into his holster as she grabs his hand, pulls him out the door.
He dares to hope – Maybe we’ll survive.
*
feedback?
