Work Text:
February 1999
She was tired of looking at life through windows.
Of being forever separated from living by an invisible barrier that cut her off from sounds and smells and physical contact. Of being only allowed to watch life, never touch it.
She spent her days in an office, looking at data on her computer screen, making occasional trips to the coffee maker, simply so that she could pause along the way and look out over Pennsylvania Avenue --watching the passing pedestrians, imagining that she could hear their talk, their laughter.
She saw sunrises and sunsets through the windows of her car, or the metro buses she took to work each day. The glorious colors lighting up, or fading away in the sky. She could only see them as she rushed to and from her destinations, catch stolen glimpses as the hues shifted and changed almost imperceptibly until the sky was blue, or the deep black of night. But she couldn't ever just stop and watch a sunrise, smell the way the air changed at daybreak, feel the bite of the dawn cold against her skin. There were always places to go, people to interview, data to analyze.
The vast landscape of the country rolled away beneath her, seen through countless airplane windows. The mountains of Colorado, the plains of Kansas, the deserts of Arizona passed through her vision, but always from a distance, always removed.
She touched nothing but death. She was a pathologist, of course, and had long grown accustomed to her profession; but lately, it seemed, she never touched life. She handled the bodies for their cases, dissecting them and analyzing them with a detached clinical precision that cost her a little bit more each day. She looked at blood and tissue samples under microscopes--miracles of form and structure that were dying all the while she looked at them.
Even Emily. Emily. She had held that tiny life in her hands--tried to cradle her like a flame that was being threatened by a windstorm; and of course the windstorm had won. She couldn't bear to think too clearly about her daughter. Her daughter. The words were jagged tears across her gut.
That evening she was driving home. It had just turned February, and deep in a Washington winter they had been graced with a day of unexpected, partial, brilliant sunshine--perfect blue skies with high, wispy clouds. She'd promised herself that she would go out and walk around the city at lunch time, even if it was cold in the brisk wind. But lunch time had come and gone, and as usual they worked straight through it--not so much because the work was so fascinating, but because it was their habit.
Driving home that night, she realized that it was an absolutely perfect sunset. She was driving west, directly into the flaming apricots and glowing pinks of the evening sky. In front of her was the copper-orange disk of the sun, already three-quarters gone behind the horizon line, the clouds in the sky every warm color in the palette--red, orange, yellow, fuchsia.....streaks of contrails cutting through the scene like bold adventurers.
Yet all she could see was the stark branches of the winter-stripped trees--their black outlines reaching up to the sky with an aching yearning that echoed somewhere deep in her soul. She could barely keep her eyes from their bitter limbs, finally having to pull her car to the side of the road, watching the branches with a needful desperation that she couldn't name. Watching until their black lines were swallowed up by the night sky.
She drove the rest of the way home without remembering how she got there.
February's child--that was her. Born in a month that promised nothing but greyness. A month that was shorter than all the others, but somehow always felt the longest--the endless bridge between Winter and Spring.
She knew that she would survive to see the spring. She knew that she would survive one more February, but she was beginning to wonder if the Spring held any sort of promise of rebirth for her this year.
She had become one of those winter trees. Sharply honed and defined, on the inside and outside. She had been stripped of all her protective leaves a few at a time, and then sometimes in huge clumps --Duane Barry, cancer, the ice-pod--until there was nothing left of her but the stark outline of her branches, her foundation.
This last brush--hell, full-scale confrontation--with death was just one more reminder of the fragility of life, her life, every life. At night, she sometimes woke to find her fingers running over the barely-healed scar from Ritter's bullet. As though even in her sleep she was trying to reassure herself that it had really happened --that she had escaped once more. But for how long? And did she want to keep escaping? How much longer did she want to survive as simply the stripped-down framework of what she had once been?
She knew that her bout with cancer and the subsequent treatments for it had left her physically sharper, thinner. It was partly a process of age, as well, but she thought those external changes simply reflected the changes of her internal landscape.
Her thoughts, too, had become sharper, thinner. Cases, analysis, interviews, seemed to have distilled themselves into a series of equations that she worked through dispassionately, coldly. Applying the laws of science and logic that had served her so long and so well. Never getting involved with the specifics of their current task, simply working through it, one more equation to be solved and dismissed.
She knew that she had become harder and sharper with the people in her life, too. She worried sometimes about the layer of fine impatience that overlaid her dealings with everyone in her life-- except perhaps with Mulder and Skinner. She had long since lost her ability to make any sort of small talk, and increasingly she found that any sort of casual interaction with people was hard for her. Long days of interviewing witnesses or character references left her tired and aching for solitude.
Even solitude wasn't helping anymore, though. She inhabited the realm of the dead. She lived there literally, in her work with the dead tissue samples and dead bodies that she investigated for their cases. And she had been consigned there metaphorically, too. Clyde Bruckman had told her that she wouldn't die, but she knew better. She had survived her encounter with cancer. For now. But she knew she was living on borrowed time. There was a chip beneath the skin of her neck that had already put her in death's path once. There would be another dam, another call, another fire, and she knew that she might not be spared the next time.
She was so weary of the grey landscape that had claimed her. But she didn't know how to leave it. She wasn't even sure it was possible to leave. Once death has marked you as its own, could the brand ever be erased? Had she been traveling to this point all along the way? Had her choices--med school, pathology, the FBI, staying with Mulder--irrevocably narrowed her world, until this was all that was left? She sometimes felt that she was nothing more than a ghost of what she'd once been. A reflection of some former Dana Scully who was now nearly transparent, insubstantial.
She realized that she had been sitting in her darkened apartment for almost an hour. Her coat still on, her answering machine unchecked, her briefcase and gloves where she had dropped them by the front door as she came in.
She rose stiffly, one more reminder of the price she paid for surviving this winter, and mechanically hung up her coat, and picked up her gloves, but stopped herself before she turned on the lights.
She didn't want to see it. Didn't want to see her tidy living room, slightly dusty in some of the corners, thanks to too many weekends on the road chasing aliens or would-be-terrorists or rain kings. Didn't want to see the carefully-framed photographs, the mementos, the detritus of a life she no longer fully recognized, or wanted.
It was a night for brooding, and so she lit a few candles and settled back on the couch, watching the flames, trying to remember what warmth--real warmth--felt like.
Sometimes it felt like she had never left that cryopod. That she would be suspended forever--aware--in the cold and glass of that space, unable to reach out or scream or touch. She had never told Mulder that she had still been able to see and think while suspended in that icy green. He had assumed that she had been functionally unconscious when he'd found her, and she'd never bothered to correct his assumption. She hadn't wanted to add to the burden of guilt that she knew he already carried.
The candle light in her living room should have been romantic; instead it was simply melancholy. The ambiguous light of the half-dozen flames illuminating nothing so much as the vast echoing emptiness she felt inside her, and the shadows that lingered and hovered in every corner of her life.
For a brief moment she considered getting out the bottle of bourbon she had in the back of her cabinet and simply drinking until she couldn't think anymore, until she could fall into a dreamless, thoughtless sleep. But that way lay danger. Before the thoughtlessness could claim her, she would have to endure the alcohol-induced fragmentation of her barriers and she couldn't face that tonight.
No. Not tonight. As much as she resented the windows that blocked her from touching life directly, sometimes she also recognized the safety they could offer.
Maybe she should just go to bed and try to sleep, try to wake up in the morning less self-conscious, less....introspective. But it was too early yet, and she was far too aware of the emptiness waiting her in that bed with the firm mattress and the soft sheets that never knew the warmth of any body but her own.
When she had been on the road, on those endless trips with Mulder chasing extreme possibilities all across the country, she had longed for nothing so much as her own space, to sleep in her own bed, to pad around her own living room. But now it felt like a carefully constructed prison. A cage that had assembled around her when she wasn't paying attention. And the worst of it was that she thought somehow she had had a hand in its making.
Restless now, she found herself getting up and pouring herself a glass of bourbon. One. Just one. Pacing around her living room and dining room. Pausing at the window that looked down at the street--staring unseeingly at the scene below: the passing cars, the pedestrians hurrying through the night.
None of it had any meaning for her anymore, she realized. What could any of this mean? People going grocery shopping, hurrying home to make dinners for families and lovers and telling about how their days had gone. And none of it was any more real to her than the fictions she saw on the tv screens in countless motel rooms around the country. Somewhere along the way she had disconnected from that strange middle ground that someone had declared to be "normal."
Her focus pulled back a little and she suddenly saw her reflection in the window pane. With the candlelight behind her, her face was pale, almost, ghostlike--suspended between the street below and the room at her back. Trapped between her prison and the world outside.
She was aware of how others saw her. Knew the image she projected --tough, self-confident, independent, capable. She cultivated it. As masks went, it was a useful one. But it did have the tendency to isolate her from the rest of the human race. To add one more layer of glass between her and everything and everybody else.
The bourbon burned liquid fire down her throat to her stomach, settling in low and tight for an instant before easing into a dull glow.
Whose fault was it that so-called life had passed her by? Could she really blame anyone? Mulder? Skinner? Kersh? She smiled grimly. As tempting as it was to blame Kersh, she didn't think she could quite get away with it.
Fate?
Maybe. Mulder would blame fate, of course. Or blame himself, if he had any inkling that she thought there was something missing from her life. They spent so much time pushing each other away and then desperately recanting that possible separation. An endless tug-of-war with no winner or losers, simply the constant loss of energy. She knew...they knew that life without the other was really no longer possible. But they had neglected, or were somehow afraid of defining what that life together was or could be. Whether it was ...complete.
In the dark of lonely nights, she sometimes allowed herself to imagine a different partnership--a physical union of touch, and taste, and skin meeting skin, and roving hands. But she also found herself wondering if she imagined him simply because she knew so few other men--so few other people. And if maybe she was mistaking their intellectual and investigative partnership ease with something else. Maybe she had simply forgotten what it was like to be close to another person.
She had once known other people. She supposed maybe she still did. Although, even there, her world had narrowed. Melissa, with whom she had begun to build a friendship that finally transcended all their sibling sniping, was dead. Pendrell was gone, a fellow scientist gunned down in way that would never make sense to her. The women she'd gone through the academy with had gone their separate ways--to field offices, other units. And she'd lost her ability to make new friends, it seemed.
There was still her family, of course. And Skinner. Skinner, who remained an enigma to her. The epitome of the Marine, the commander, the Bureau man. And yet, he had confessed to her as he lay dying that he felt that he should have been a part of their quest. But he had been. He had been there, for them, for her...had risked more than he had ever told them, she thought. Mulder had once hinted at something...some deal...
Something tugged at the corners of her consciousness. She sharpened her focus on the street below, but it still took her a moment to identify what had caught her attention. It was a man-- standing half-hidden by the shadows of the building across the street. He'd caught her eye because he wasn't moving. He was staring up at her building--at her windows she thought--and she was suddenly chilled by fear. Stalkers. Duane Barry. Abduction. Then a passing car partially illuminated him, and she realized it was Skinner. For a moment she wondered if she had simply conjured him up out of her musings.
He had instinctively tracked the movement of the car, and then he looked back up and saw her watching him. Even from across the street she could see him flinch. At first she thought he would simply walk away--could almost read that impulse in him. She wondered if he would say anything about it at work the next day. Or if in fact, she had actually seen him at all.
She had forgotten that he was never a coward. He met her gaze for a long second and then with a barely-perceptible nod, crossed the street to her building.
She met him at her door.
Neither spoke at first. Skinner seemed to be struggling to find words, and she was still uncertain if all this was really happening.
"I suppose I owe you an explanation." His voice seemed to be pulled from somewhere deep inside him. From beneath his AD's voice, beneath the voice that she had heard from him in that hospital room. It sent a dark shiver down her spine.
"Come in." She heard herself almost making it a question.
He simply nodded and followed her into her apartment.
She saw him taking in her darkened room, the candles, the glass of bourbon in her hand. No overt reaction. Simple assessment.
"Can I take your coat? Do you want something to drink?" Social niceties seemed absurd, but nothing more substantive was coming to mind.
He shrugged out of his trenchcoat with a leonine grace that caught her unaware, and as he hung it on her coat rack, he answered, "I'll have some of whatever it is you're having."
As she was getting his bourbon, she wondered if she should put out the candles, close the curtains, turn on her lamps, but some ancient impulse stayed her hand. She came back to her living room to find Skinner sitting on one end of her couch. She handed him his glass, and settled on the other end of the couch. Her back against the arm, she turned toward him slightly, stiff, questioning.
They waited in uneasy silence.
"I'm sorry." It wasn't quite an apology. "I hardly know..." an unaccustomed uneasiness to him. "I wasn't trying to invade your privacy, Scully. It's just that...I saw you leaving today, saw your face. You looked so...haunted. Almost like you weren't sure where you were going."
The shock of his description rooted her to the spot--motionless, frozen in disbelief. She had been haunted today, haunted by herself, her past, her indefinable future. He had read her so clearly. In a way that even Mulder had failed to see.
Skinner drained his glass in a single swallow, and set it down. He looked at it hard, as though trying to read some message in the light reflecting in the cut-crystal surface. Then he stood in an abrupt, fluid motion. She still couldn't move, except to follow him with her eyes.
"I am sorry. I followed you. I had to know...." He was moving slowly in front of the couch--a deliberate, heavy pacing--his voice weighty, serious.
"That chip." He was behind her now, and for just a second she felt the rough, warm pads of his fingers brushing over the base of her neck. The feelings spiraling out from the point of contact shivered and jangled along her nerve endings.
"We still don't know....that dam....those burned bodies...." His voice ever darker and softer and she thought he was losing himself in some nightmarish vision, but she was helpless to move, to try to bring him back into whatever small light she still had.
He moved in front of her and crouched down so that they were eye-to-eye. "Some nights I just need to know that you're safe."
Her breath caught in her throat--a gasp that felt like a sob. He was so unreadable in the uncertain light of the candles, in the uncertain clarity of her soul. But his words reached her in a place that she thought had frozen over. She could feel the glass that isolated her beginning to crack.
"And you?" Her voice no more than a whisper. "Who watches for you at night to make sure that you are safe?" Finding courage from a forgotten place, she reached across and laid a tentative hand on his wrist, surprised to find his flesh warm and alive beneath her touch.
Something arctic and bleak flashed through his eyes. She had no words to answer the desolation. She could only lean forward and gently kiss his cheek--an impulse that took them both by surprise. She could hear his sudden gasp, felt his ever-more frozen stillness. His evening beard rough under her lips; his sharp musky scent in her nostrils creating an unexpected tightness in her belly. She sat back again, still lightly touching him, and watched his eyes for a long moment.
"It's ok." Her reassurance was vague, and she wasn't entirely sure what she meant, but something shifted deep beneath the frozen surface of his gaze. "It wasn't the chip tonight. It was just me." Her voice still soft, almost breathless. "Sometimes...after all that we've seen....sometimes I just have to run--even from myself."
He was so still. She thought he had somehow lost himself in another space and time, leaving only the shell of his body here in her living room. Then he shook his head almost imperceptibly. "I know." His voice deep, and quietly rough. "I do know." A pause. "Thank you." His eyes pinned her to the couch.
She nodded at him, not even sure what it was she was acknowledging. Then she knew. "But you, who watches for you? Who makes sure that you are ok?" She instinctively knew that he didn't want this conversation, didn't want to face these questions, and she only knew that she had to pursue them, had to know. "You, too, could be....controlled ..."
He stood suddenly, his quick movement shocking, disturbing. Her hand had dropped away, as he moved, and she felt the loss of contact completely out of proportion to the minute touch it had been.
A near growl. "You don't have to--"
"What? Worry about you? Why not?" At his impatient gesture. "If not me, then who?"
And now she stood to meet him. "You have me listed as your next-of-kin in your medical files." A challenge, nearly a question. "I think that gives me the right to worry."
He met her gaze squarely, his emotions tightly masked, but she could feel the tension radiating through him. Could read some of the things he wished to hide, but couldn't. Not from her.
She reached out to touch him again. To take his hand, wrapping her fingers around his, fighting his tension, his unwillingness to be touched.
"I know what it's like. To live like this. To wonder if this.... thing in your body--"
The ice floes moved across his eyes again, leaving behind devastation and loss. She tried to understand the anguish--it wasn't just his own fear and wondering. She had seen the look before: in Mulder's eyes. A flare of anger. An instinct to hurl a rock through a window--violent, lashing out.
"It's not your fault! The chip in my body..." Fighting for control, trying to reach him, to make him see. "The things that are in your blood stream. Do you think you're to blame for them? That I am? That Mulder is?" Wanting to shock a reaction from him.
"No. I told you--I don't think this has anything to do with you, or the X-Files." He pulled his hand from her grasp again, but she had the distinct impression that he did so unwillingly.
"All of us are going to die, Scully. None of us know where or when. I just know how. That's all. It means no more or less." His tone and eyes were as flat and endless as the plains of the Midwest.
She started to argue with him. To try to force him to acknowledge their mutual situations, their commuted but inevitable sentences of being at the mercy of technology. But she stopped herself. Who was she to try to force anyone to talk about their feelings unwillingly? She had hated all those who had tried similar tactics on her during her cancer. She had refused to have this very conversation with Mulder about her chip.
"I'm sorry. I overstepped...." Not wanting to apologize for caring, but needing him to know that she understood about barriers, even those made of glass, and of the need for boundaries around private thoughts of death.
Skinner had turned away from her when she began to argue, but at her apology, he turned back. She was shocked by his eyes, and by her reaction. He had removed his glasses, and his eyes were naked and lit with a tempest of longing and fear and something that nearly stopped her heart. She was helpless before the heat flaring through her, the sudden animal recognition of his hard male presence in her living room. The need that swept her, leaving her hot and breathless and utterly, utterly incapable of moving.
Mother of God. Where had this reaction come from? It was so unexpected, so unlooked for. And yet, not. She had been wanting to reach out for life this evening. She simply hadn't expected the source. How had he managed to touch her to life, how had he touched her with that single look? Did he know what he had done? Was he feeling this moment, this live electrical wire pulsing between them?
The sound of his ragged breathing finally reached her ears over the pounding of her own heartbeat. He seemed as stunned as she. And equally unable to move.
They were locked in each other's gaze. Drowning in the suddenly dense atmosphere, aware of the danger that surrounded them. She started to lift her hand toward him--watched his eyes track the gesture, and then looked down in bemusement at the gesture, wondering what she had meant. Her hand stopped in mid-air, an indecipherable question.
But it broke the stasis. Skinner strode forward and took her still raised hand, and brought it up to his lips. Only at the last moment, he dropped his head, and gently placed a kiss on the inside of her wrist, a caress against the veins pulsing with her lifeblood.
She stopped breathing.
He shifted his head and met her gaze--cold no longer, the ice evaporated under the weight and blaze of the fire she had long known was banked somewhere deep inside him. She shivered with nothing at all like cold; with something almost like terror.
She had wanted to touch life. Had wanted to know something beyond the stillness and death that surrounded her, and here it was. Holding her hand, and gazing down at her with a question and a challenge in his eyes.
Could she take this dare? Would she risk this moment?
Did she dare let this moment pass?
In stepping around or through her window, she risked exposing herself to the raw elements, or of cutting herself on the shards of glass she might pass through. And yet, and yet, she had really only one choice before her.
She twisted her hand lightly, almost causing him to drop it, but she pursued it, chased it, and caught it, twining her fingers through his, a clasp tight and strong. All the while she held his eyes. Answering his challenge, deepening it.
Understanding the limits of this moment, accepting them, encompassing them.
A dark rumble in his chest, her name hissing through the darkness. "Scully..." And then his mouth descended to meet hers.
No quarter granted, none asked for. His lips moving over hers were explorers--bold, conquering, claiming her as his own. And she willingly surrendered to his claim, acknowledged it and returned it --branding him with her passion, her need.
His free hand tangled in her hair, stilling her restless movements, so that he could taste her, his tongue invading her mouth--sweeping gently, inexorably across her tongue, her teeth, her palette. Each sweet movement leaving her both weaker and stronger, breaking down the last of her resistance, laying her bare to her foundations, where she found herself reinforced and ready for something that she hadn't expected, but wanted more than she could name.
She groaned, a sound almost unrecognizable to her, and reached for him with both her hands, pulling him closer, tighter. Reveling in the hard planes and lines of his body. Twisting in his arms, raising up on her toes, trying to erase their height difference, trying to erase the boundaries between their bodies.
His hands molded her back, strong fingers caressing into her muscles, learning her frame, her shape. One settling heavy and possessive on the small of her back, pressing her hips into his. Allowing her to feel his arousal, the iron heat of him drawing her like a magnet.
He bent lower and she felt his hot, moist breath along her jawline, drawing out and away, until his lips grazed her ear. His voice a whisper only, a suggestion of near-silent sound, "Scully......So beautiful." His voice sent quicksilver sparks down her veins, pooling fire in her core.
She reached impatiently for his jacket, tugging it open and back and off, not even noticing it hit the floor, intent already on undoing the buttons on his shirt. He let go of her long enough to rip his tie off and then remove his shirt in a quick jerk up over his head. She mirrored his movements, discarding her shirt and bra almost without thought.
He was carved marble in the dim light of the room, something raw and elemental. For a moment she wondered if he would be cool to the touch, but it didn't stop her from reaching out.
Skin met skin with a shock of unfamiliar recognition. Heat arcing between them, binding them to each other with gossamer strands of tempered iron. His fingers tracing fiery runes and hieroglyphics across her skin. She arched up into his touch, surrendering to the simple fact of finally being here, feeling this, living this moment.
Time stretched and accelerated, minutes sped by, and then slowed as though to allow her to experience each sensation individually.
This was life--living. She was here alive. He was here alive. They could and would claim this moment, this hour, this night.
His hands moved across her breasts with a reverent intensity. A touch both sure and new. For a countless time, she allowed herself to simply be, to allow his hands to rove, his mouth to brand, his body to meet hers. Let her hands wander his skin, learning the heated smoothness, the roughness of his hair beneath her fingers, the pulse beneath his skin.
She felt his fingers find and then carefully trace the edges of the scar left from Ritter's bullet. She caught her breath, waiting for the pity, the shock. But he never stopped his caressing movement, encompassing that memento in the same gentle touch that accepted everything else about her. Her fingers reminded her that he, too, carried scars. They each wore an external history that was only one part of who they were.
Then his hand smoothed down her hip, and the hot tide ripping through her stole the last of her reason.
Operating on nothing but instinct and want, she took his hand once more and quickly led him down the short hallway to her bedroom. Not a word as she stripped back the covers of her bed.
He was behind her as she straightened, and her whole body was pressed up against his, form to form, no space left for air or thought or doubt.
One arm locked across her shoulders, cradling her to his chest, while his other hand--how could he still maintain such control-- began removing her pants. She felt him pressing kisses along her shoulder, small nips interspersed with soothing touches. She was loosening, liquefying.
She reached back, awkward but determined, found the clasp and zipper of his pants, undid them, reached for his erection--tempered steel in her fingers. Stroked, touched, felt him buck into hands.
No more time, no more waiting.
Clothes shed and then she was beneath him on her soft bed, yielding mattress under her, and Skinner's hardness above. His eyes were endless in the reflected moonlight. Depthless wells that had drowned more than their share of sorrow already, that would undoubtedly drown more, but that tonight offered an odd salvation.
Looking down at her, a strange sadness suddenly passed over his features and then was gone, almost too quickly for her to truly believe she'd seen it. He bent to kiss her once more--lingering, sweetly.
"Scully...." It was the only word he seemed able to find.
"I know. I know." Rocking up into him. Parting her legs. No more waiting. Now, now, now. She needed this touch. He needed her.
He sank down into her wet warmth, filling her gently and inexorably. His length finally embedded in her, he paused and looked down at her. She was lost, dazed, complete in a way that defied description. The expression in his eyes stole her breath, and she could only reach up to touch his face, trying to tell him everything with that simple touch.
He turned his head and kissed her palm, and then slowly began to move within her. Each thrust and shift echoed through her body, creating ripples of heat and light and fire that threatened to incinerate her.
She surged up to meet his movements, finding his cadence, stealing it and then the two of them wove a new rhythm that belonged to them alone.
Tighter, harder, deeper, and now, oh now, faster and harder, and the sparks ignited along her limbs, traveling up and around her heart and core and soul and then she was disintegrating into tiny flares and embers and flashes, and Skinner was a lightning bolt transforming her into pure energy and matter.
Her orgasm ripped through her, sundering her into individual atoms. In the midst of the storm, she felt Skinner surge raggedly against her, once, twice and then he, too, was forever lost in the reaches of time and space.
Eons later, her separate components reassembled, and she realized that Skinner had pulled the covers up over them, and that she had fallen asleep in his arms. She could feel his body behind hers. His heat and scent wrapped around her, his arm heavy across her waist, his broad chest eclipsing her back and shoulder.
She fell asleep again, knowing that when she woke in the morning she would be alone. But knowing that she would survive February. Knowing that Spring was possible.
END