Chapter Text
They walked naked two by two. Mulder felt as if his body was moving outside of his mind, like it was on a track, pre-programmed. Lowering his head to avoid a low hanging pipe, he took in the immense spiderwebs of wires and hoses, ductwork and catwalks.
He had been inside a spaceship before, although not as an invited guest. For something as advanced as the ability to create life, the mechanics seemed almost archaic. Possibly because it was a mere transport ship for cargo. Equipped with a satellite lab... for the merchandise . A shiver went up his spine. With each intake of breath he inhaled what smelled like battery acid mixed with burnt oil. The ship itself was hot and steamy, like traveling through a rainforest. Mulder remembered well that the aliens liked it hot. That and their babies grow nails longer than Rihanna’s.
The people mover stopped and out of the floor metal separation walls rose up between Billy Miles ahead of him and the young kid behind. The wall moved forward until it was flush against Mulder’s back. Cuffs closed around his ankles. More cuffs formed to encircle his wrists and snapped closed. Mulder didn’t remember getting the fastpass for the Tower of Terror. With a rough jolt and loud bangs, the metal wall tilted and rose him swiftly into the air, sending him flat on his back. Scully would not have liked the turbulence one bit. It then reversed until it locked, the metal vibrating his bones. A cylindrical case suctioned closed around him like a coffin with a sunroof. Panic finally set in. There would be no little grey welcoming committee. As the egg filled with the icy thick fluid, Mulder looked out the clear shell and saw the others lined up like him. Before the needle stabbed him in the neck and his eyesight tunneled and faded to a black twilight sleep, he felt the wormy tube slide down his throat, and realized he was in the same type of bays Scully had been on her spaceship in Antarctica. Guess he wouldn’t have to dress up anymore for Halloween.
Georgetown, Washington D.C.
Mulder had been taken. Torn from her on the same day she discovered there was life growing inside her. The days passed by in a cloud. The night sky was how she came to speak with him. Looking up to the heavens, somehow she felt more connected when the blue haze of the day lifted to reveal their shared universe. Alive with raw energy she felt it vibrating, whispering in a way untrained ears could not hear, but all that echoed back was pain. Pain and the fear of more pain.
Scully remembered Mulder saying that at night he always felt closer to the truth of what they were and that it exposed the fragility of their rotating rock. To him the night was when the curtain was pulled back, when they got to see out the window of the existence beyond. It was in those moments she would see his eyes smile and his breathing deepen just a little more, when his soul would open up through his scars and outside his protective walls. Now he was out there, captive to those that he once looked at in awe, that lived in the unknown limits, moving with the stars as the galaxies tumbled and darted, among the constellations who’ve witnessed centuries and millennia.
She had to find him, but what more could she do when the powers wanted to close her eyes, silence her voice, and deafen her ears to the realms of extreme possibilities. Scully was ready to believe, but the tools had been taken away. The X-Files had been all but shut down with Mulder gone. Her nights were spent with Skinner and the Lone Gunman reaching out to all who would listen, that they might find a shadow blended into darkness, something left behind that might be the answer to return him to her. Let the stars break and the heavens fall, space and time bend and twist until it all shattered, Scully would be with Mulder again. She would find him.
Night was also the time her subconscious would overtake reason. When her visions of him grew strong enough to meet their connection and what she saw, what she felt, a viscous sac, a feeding tube tightening inside his throat, sending more than food to his body, the emptiness of being without. Scully woke knowing she would be sick. This was how she endured each morning.
Her hand splayed across her stomach. Still flat, though she already felt the life inside. It crossed her mind that the strength of her visions could be a reflection of her connection to Mulder, but it could have also been her own abilities bleeding through her reason, or maybe her unborn child had those abilities as well. Maybe they were reaching out to their father. Or maybe it was all alien. Scully’s stomach churned. She was going to be sick again.
She made herself some tea hoping to settle her stomach, and the gift that Mulder had given her right before his disappearance caught her eye. Tucked away, on the shelf underneath the side table was the nicely wrapped package waiting for her. She hadn’t dared to even touch it since she put it there. She wasn’t sure what she was afraid of.
Maybe her curiosity got the better of her or maybe she just needed to feel closer to him, but she reached for it. It was heavier than she remembered and there was a card she hadn’t noticed taped to the top. Carefully she opened the envelope. In Mulder’s bold flared handwriting was written:
Dear Scully,
You can always find me here.
-M
Puzzling, yet her stomach leapt with a hope she knew was not rational. She removed the wrapping and it revealed a mirror with an ornate gold leaf frame. A thunder rolled inside her and a storm of tears fell down her cheeks, their love story told inside each tear. Spoken in sobs, her heart told the truth, if she was going to find him, her soul would have to come to terms with the most real of pain.
Why did he give her a mirror? Did he know he would be taken or was this given with some other intent? She cried till her eyes ached. He was gone. If she was going to find him she had to trust him. She looked in the mirror at her heated skin. Her freckles burning bright within the rouge. He was right of course. She had to accept her dreams as visions. Accept what he was telling her. The only way to find him was within.
Every day after, Scully started her day staring into the mirror. Finding him, finding herself, finding the courage and the strength to move forward, to dig out who she was from her core. To go against the world if she had to. No one else on the planet was going to, so she had to be his 1 in 5 billion and she had to believe. Scully took it one moment at a time, one button, one shoe. One harrowing, echoing, lonely step, with all eyes and whispers on her.
Mrs. Spooky walked down the hallway past the bullpen, past the offices of control, got into the elevator and entered Mulder’s office. Only today, she found it being searched, dust bunny to file box. The rest was a blur of anger and frustration. The helplessness she felt was like trying to scratch your way out of a steel coffin. The lies, the coverup. It was happening again. Her and Skinner were walking on a tightrope and the powers were begging for them to slip so they could drown in the fiery lava pit of obscurity. Inbetween it all, her baby reminded her that they were alive, there with each wretch and cough, with each regurgitation of a sandwich better had it not been swallowed. Then she met Doggett.
*
The Bounty Hunter swiped Mulder’s passcard as he entered the FBI building. He had made certain he was seen in the skin of Mulder: by the landlord at Scully’s apartment, on the cameras of the FBI. Even said hello to security. He left Mulder’s stain in enough places to cast doubt on anything Skinner or Scully might dare to say. It also gave him time to plant evidence, falsify records, steal computers, laptops and anything else that might have proof of their plans. Leave no trace. Except the ones that obfuscate. The Bounty Hunter’s hand trailed down to his pocket. The Walther PPK. Damn. He’d have to go back to Mulder’s apartment and put it back under the sink. He had already taken his computer and placed the rental receipts inside the desk. If Doggett couldn’t put the pieces together, he might have to shove it up his ass so he could see it better.
He had been in Mulder’s skin when he had shot the soul-eating man. Lots of eye witnesses. Couldn’t risk having anyone capable of bringing the dead or dying back to life when they returned the abductees. It was too risky. The dead must have time to transform into the supersoldier army they needed. He’d have more healers to eliminate, but first he had to ensure the complete annihilation of all evidence of possible extraterrestrial life. Even the humans that were a little too human. Gibson was next. What a bounty he would bring. The bounty hunter knew he would have to hurry. After all the years of the pure hell the man they were told not to touch put him through, he wanted to witness when Mulder took his last breath.
*
Scully’s heart skipped a beat when her landlord told her he had seen Mulder in the apartment building, but when she saw her laptop missing, she knew this wasn’t Mulder. She felt it wasn’t him. Still, wanting him got the better of her. She had to prove herself right so she went to Mulder’s apartment. A place she couldn’t bring herself to go since his disappearance.
The clacking of her heels on the hardwood ripped through the grievous silence. He was not there and neither was his computer, though his bedroom lay untouched. Scully scanned the room for clues, until her eyes rested on his dress shirt. She held it gently in her hands and everything else melted away. Within the stale acrid apartment air hung the ghosts of Mulder’s breaths, an air of excitement and unknown, as he packed to go with Skinner for Oregon.
The shirt was clean; it had that freshly washed appearance, but his scent was all over it. Reality drained her. The baby brought her the rest of the way as she laid down on his bed. She needed more, she needed him.
Scully held his shirt tight as if he might materialize inside it. The subtle striped pattern showed both masculine and feminine all at once, just like him. How the fabric moved with him when he had worn it. The linen of his shirts always had soft crinkles that were so much softer than ironed cotton, so much more tactile. She liked that about Mulder, how he himself had a need to touch and be touched. When you combined that with his warmth and emotional generosity there was so much he offered. He was the first to extend an arm, to lean in for their first kiss, to offer a well meant compliment or critique. He held her as if she were his only treasure, as if he could feel her love as easily as smell her perfume.
For the first time since they parted she allowed herself to be comforted by the thoughts of them together. She imagined the last time he wore that shirt. The way the collar played about his neck in the warm wind, the fabric close enough to show the shape of his chest and abs. It would have been pretty in any color on him; something Scully wanted to touch, hug, lose herself in, if only for a moment. The way he would catch her eye, then acknowledge it with a simple flex and wiggle of his brow, undetectable by anyone but her. A smile ready to light his face, one to match the gleam in his eyes.
Her own eyes closed, almost feeling as if he was still physically by her side. She knew it would take her, the skeptic, to cross the line and shout his gospel off the rooftops. If that’s what it took, then she would cast away her own fears and disbeliefs, gather up his courage and stand tall against the watchers that disapproved and the judgement they felt entitled. If she had to lift the world with a single arm and push back the tide with only her mind she would do it and believe it could be done. For him. Because of him. The rain tapped rhythmically on his sill, the way it did the night they spent in his bed and she professed her love. Filled with the sense, touch, and sounds of his surroundings, her sickness subsided and she drifted to a peaceful sleep she had not known since… only for the visions to jolt her brain. Cold metal, needles, a drill through the roof of his mouth, another slicing open his chest. Mechanical and intelligent. Probing and forced defilement. Her eyes flew open and was met with Doggett.
Hours later and Scully was back at headquarters with more of the unexplained. She stared at the stone, and her body felt numb, frozen. Reality had slipped away and she had been sent to this unending purgatory where everything was turned upside down and inside out. Scully wasn’t certain how much more she wanted to endure when Doggett tossed the papers in front of her.
The medical reports that Doggett uncovered were not any she had ever seen. Ignoring Skinner as he looked to Scully to back up the claim of Mulder’s “full recovery,” she read the details. Yes, she knew that his temporal lobe had remained damaged and full of scar tissue, but Mulder had said he felt fine. There were no more symptoms. His neurons had formed new pathways so he could function normally. Hadn’t they? He had not told her of any progression. These papers, they told a different story. A history of decline..
Why hadn’t she pushed to go with him to the doctors when she saw the MRI after they saved his lungs from the insects? Had she been in denial? What made her not push forward? Would Mulder have told her if he knew he was dying? Not if he had his reasons. If he knew he was dying, it might have been reason enough for him to decide to risk it all and step onto that ship. Dying. Had he known all along? Through the IVF, through their decision to deepen their relationship, was it all a lie?
“Mulder was dying,” she whispered the truth aloud. Whatever the motivation behind the secrecy, whatever happened, the proof was in black and white. A clear record of his decline. Her head buzzed and she fought off the rush of lightheadedness.
Scully wasn’t buying what Doggett was selling until he said, “So far as to stage his own disappearance?” Yes, Mulder had done that in the past, but she knew. She was the one that had lied for him. He always reached out to her in some way.
Scully’s tongue was working overdrive over her top lip and Skinner’s temper was coming to a boil. It was one thing for Mulder to be adamant about aliens, but for Skinner to be so certain. Scully delicately pulled at Skinner’s sleeve. He had to pull back. If this was all a trap, they were running right into it.
*
“We will find a way, Scully,” Mulder breathed hard onto her skin. “If I have to rewrite history.”
His mouth crashed down on hers, his fingers laced through her hair. Scully clutched his collar in a balled fist and dragged him down with her, against the bench seats of the buick rental, spreading her legs for him. Her lips, plump and wet, hot and perfect, needing no permission. His whole body buzzed. Mulder fisted her hair with one hand and dragged his free one between them, cupping her breast and squeezing hard.
Her tongue invaded his mouth, melting every obstacle they ever had. She was so good at every move and reaction her body had to his. His hand moved farther south, pulling up her skirt, down her underwear, rubbing the fabric, creating friction that made Scully moan and writhe.
Hot. Everything was hot.
His face. His nerves. His heart.
“You’re so fucking wet,” he said, pinching her clit through the soft cotton. She scraped at his shirt and arched her back, groaning into another desperate kiss. Their bodies faultlessly attuned the same way as their souls.
Scully reached between them and grabbed at the thick hard ridge through his jeans, rubbing up and down. “Take them off,” she demanded through breaths, her tongue still in his mouth. He was trying to fight it, find composure. Instead he ripped her underwear away and stared into the heaven between her thighs. She was incredibly wet, as he watched her dripping just for him. Unable to control himself he swiped between her folds like he was at a crime scene, and took a taste. Smoldering honeysuckle. Mulder pulled away, flattened the backrest and lay against it. His cock a steady throb as he grabbed Scully by the waist, and sat her down on his face, his tongue plunging into her, penetrating her in one movement. Scully cried in pleasure and surprise, grabbing at his hair.
He almost came in the chair as he groaned and murmured, “Fuck my tongue, Scully. Fuck it hard.”
Her hips rocked as she did just that, pounding him like an animal, the warm lips of her sex all over his mouth, her clit nudging up against his nose, while he lay a gentle palm on her ass. Happy craving noises leapt from his throat as he ate her. Scully landed fast and hard against him, and he lapped it all up. She clenched around him and her thighs shook, coming all over his tongue. It made his own orgasm begin to tremor through him like an earthquake. From his skull down to the tip of his spine.
Without warning, Scully slid down over the rough stubble of his chin and down his chest, his abs, to slide around his cock. He couldn’t hold the pleasure in, breathlessly diggin his fingernails into her hips. Her eyes blazed with love and carnal need clinging to the bulge of his tricep, groaning with pleasure. She rode him like her mission in life was to use his length to split her in two. Mulder’s hips smashed up into hers as he drove inside her again and again, his cock rubbing furiously against her walls.
“Mulder, you’re so deep,” Scully moaned.
With his eyes shut tight he threw his head back, his cock felt huge as it jammed against her hard and unforgiving. This time he would give her that baby. Mulder screamed out as he came, “Sculllyy! Oh, Scully.”
Bone crunching agony jarred him from the dream. Metal spikes pierced into the sides of his legs and arms pinning him to the metal chair. His eyes grew wide with fear as tiny needles, three on either side, raised and punctured his cheeks, injecting him with what, he didn’t know, but they pulled at his skin with tremendous pain. Naked and alone, even the torment didn’t compare to the waiting. The not knowing what was next was exponentially worse. It was immediately apparent that they had no concept of painkillers. Mulder was nothing, but a rat to them. With the needles in his face, he didn’t have much movement and could hardly see around him. What he heard was the screams of the others. There was no telling of time. He had no idea how long he had been incubating inside that egg-like structure. When his body collapsed from exhaustion, his dreams were only of Scully.
When he woke, he felt the ship around him, listening. It was more than metal or artificial intelligence. The ship was the alien. Devoid of much emotion, it was absorbing his thoughts. But if the ship was gazing into him, might he gaze into it?
Mulder closed his eyes and encased himself in darkness, trying his best to push his brain past the agony and focused on the stars he knew were above his head just outside the dome of the ship. He imagined himself floating through space. Felt as if his body was actually tilting and turning as the putrid stench gave way to fresh breeze. His spirit rose and expanded, and he felt the locks creak open, the bands breaking, he took a deep breath and then let his spirit rise upward drifting like a balloon filled with helium, and the pain lifted with his spirit. His body lay slumped on the chair of torture, his flesh and bone slumbering while he rose, like smoke, past the blinding lights and probes, to the roof of the ship and through.
He could still feel his breath and heart, but now he hummed with electricity as his third eye opened to his soul. He saw the cloud covered the sky, streetlights, a city twinkling with electricity. The patchwork of houses and ball fields, airports and farmland. They were still underneath the Earth’s dome. His body rose till it hovered along the crystal dust of the atmosphere. There he got to look at the massive size of the ship, the wavering field of energy around it. Mulder did this several times across what he believed were multiple days, until he could peer at ground level, like looking through a window of a car out onto many deserts. They were collecting more abductees, but it couldn’t be for destruction because they wouldn’t bother with all the dissection. No, Mulder believed they were being prepped for the next phase of the project.
This was how he tolerated the acts performed on him, on the monotony of sitting helplessly as his muscles atrophied. That and clinging onto his memories of Scully.
Mulder believed the ship had lit up his mind again. Turned on parts of him that had laid dormant or died. He learned to use his mind to hear the ship. To listen. They spoke not in words, or pictures, but something he came to understand. Then, after an undetermined amount of time, Mulder felt another. One that spoke the same as them, but was not. Gibson.
“Mulder?” Gibson asked out into the night.
Mulder responded. Gibson was out there and they were communicating! It was slow at first, Mulder still trying to use words and form sentences, but then as he relaxed, he began to speak to Gibson the way the ship had taught him. Soon they spoke at lightning speed. Gibson told him everything that had happened since they last met and then more recently, about the bounty hunters, and then Scully. Scully was there in Arizona. She had found him. It made him proud and in awe and it also made him understand how truly desperate she must have been. She believed. And then he felt her. Home. The scents of lavender, vanilla, and citrus. The sound of her squeaky whine, music to his ears. He longed for the taste of her lips, her tongue twirling around his. The feel of her forehead pressed against his own. Love surged and swelled his heart. She was so close. And… and…. And she felt him too. Come on Scully, I’m here, see me. I’m here.
A blinding light came from the the sky and Scully turned away from him to look towards it. No! Scully hear me! Out loud he shouted “Sculllllaaaay!! Sculllllaaaay!!!”