These Things Keep Us From Sinking by anythingbutgrey Pairing: Mulder/Scully Author's Note: Many thanks to snowfire for the beta! Spoilers: Through IWTB Feedback: mylittletornado at gmail dot com Summary: It takes until morning to speak again, but every time, one of them will say, "You can't die first." Most of the time they can live like the world isn't ending. She has some bad nights. He has them too, less often, but more explosive. Sometimes she dreams of rain, but then wakes to his tears pooling on her collarbone and his arms so tight around her it's impossible to breathe. She can do nothing then but clutch back, grip at the cloth of his shirt or the very skin of him for hours until her hands burn. Her bad nights are quieter, with her fingers tight in his, the knuckles bunched together and stinging under pressure. It takes until morning to speak again, but every time, one of them will say, "You can't die first." - There are weekends he still vanishes with just a small note, "I'll be back." Each time she hopes it's a day or two, but sometimes it will be four, and by day three she grows certain that this is it, this is the time he won't come home again. But each time the door clicks open somewhere around two in the morning and she will rush to the door in half a second, nearly slipping and falling on the way. When he opens the door, every single time, every damn time, he eyes her panic with the most twisted of grins, chuckles, "I said I'd be back." She could kill him. Instead, he grabs her wrist and kisses her like it's been years rather than days and forgiveness comes easily to her when he's concerned, always has. In the morning, calmer, she smacks him. Every time. He grins and kisses her over cereal. - A year after they go into hiding her resume lies flat on the kitchen table. "Are you sure it's safe?" Her fingers drift over twelve years of falsified information, hospitals that no longer exist and without references to check. His hand stills hers. "I don't want you just hiding in the dark with me anymore, Scully." She pulls away. Ten years and he still doesn't understand that the dark with him is brighter than August summer days with anyone else. "And besides," he smirks, "we're going to have to eat eventually." Her lips don't twist up into even the smallest of grins; she can see through him too easily to allow herself that. All the same, she mails her resume out the next day. - Marcia, the woman interviewing her, taps a pen against the corner of the clipboard. "You live in a very isolated area, Dr. Scully," she says. "Especially for a woman living alone." Her tongue sticks to the gums. "I get by." That night, the statement trails her. Mulder leans back in the chair by his desk, the reminder of Samantha pinned to the door. She reminds him to keep fighting whenever Dana's not there. "I don't like it," she says, leaning against the doorframe. "I know I have to lie about this, about you, but I -" The sentence doesn't have an ending she can touch. Mulder stands and crosses to her in two swift paces. "I don't like hiding us either." And that's it, really. Her laugh is long and loud and he follows with wide grins and hands on her hips. He leans his forehead against hers. He says, "I love you," and it's the first time for that confession she already knew, but she still stops breathing. That's why she doesn't like the deception; theirs is the sort of love that she has always been unable to scream out. At first it was a secret from each other, and now just a secret from everyone else. She'll take the present tense. The past is so far behind them sometimes she just sits and wonders what took them so long. - She settles back into medicine with very little need for uncomfortable transition time. Still, the other doctors don't like her. The priests don't like her. Everyone finds her standoffish and cold with her silences, her intelligence she makes no attempt to mask. Dana learned a long time ago that being a beautiful, smart, successful woman is uncomfortable territory for the general population. They eye her with an odd mix of disdain and interest at her quiet. She's never been good at making friends - they tend to be thrust upon her and sneak into her life before she even knows what's happening, and things are even harder now, with all her eons of secrets. Sometimes she hears the nurses cackle that she will never find a man. If only they knew. Mulder listens to her complaints without interruption until her ranting breath has run out and then he holds her hand, says, "Well, that's why you come home to me, Scully. Nothing like some good West Virginian isolation with someone who loves you to protect you from the big, bad world." Dana still finds it astounding how the butterflies won't fade, and instead grow more resilient to all forms of weathering. Sometimes she wants to turn to him, say, I never thought this -- you would happen to me. There have been eleven years of them, and she still gets through every single day for the simple reason that he exists. - It's December when she realizes she's now incapable of sleeping alone. December 22nd is already a difficult reminder of one year down until everything burns. Their twelfth year together he vanishes again on some new case they don't have the money for. He leaves a note with Christmas cookies. Learning to cook was his great struggle, with many disasters and sometimes she'd get calls at work - "Scully, the house might be burning." But it's so quiet all day and he can only run after his ghosts for so many hours, and so he learned to cook. Eventually. The note with the cookies reads, I'll be home for Christmas. "You better," she whispers out the kitchen window with something unsettling rolling around inside her. That night, she keeps turning to face him and, finding him gone, cold rushes her system and jolts her awake again. When he returns two days later, she starts crying even before he shuts the door. "Scully?" he says, moving to her quickly and holding her by the elbow. "What happened?" All she can manage is to shake her head, her breaths in choppy sobs that leave her spinning as Mulder sits her down on the couch. The fabric of his coat, still worn, bunches in her hands, the melting snow from outdoors catching between her fingers. Her palms slip along the fabric. "What is it?" he asks, his eyes tight and focused, and she knows he's expecting her to say the cancer is back, and this time there's nothing he can do. Mulder has a lot of nightmares. She knows all of them and that one burns the most. Loose strands of red hair stick to her cheeks when she shakes her head. "I can't take this - you running off and leaving." He doesn't breathe. She can see an excuse whirring in his brain. "It's too dangerous," she continues. "One day you're going to go and get killed or arrested and leave me here and I can't - I can't." His mouth turns and he looks so tired. "Can't what?" Swallowing sticks - it almost feels like the muscles in her throat have broken from this most sudden crash. She says, "I can't do this without you." He promises her nothing, but the pads of his fingertips are smooth on her shaking skin and she can feel that, at the very least, he'll start to slow down. Mulder takes to cutting up newspaper articles in the back room and she always wonders if he will ever escape the things that haunt him still, and if it is better to sit and be surrounded by ghosts or chase after the ghosts in his tired, muddy shoes. - Summer is her favorite season. They have full, laughing picnics in the backyard with sunglasses and blankets for when time runs away from them, as it always does, and they fall asleep with the stars hanging high. Sometimes he points in random directions and shout about UFOs just to annoy her. On weekends, they spend entire days in the sun not moving, the way normal people do, people that don't hide from the government or the future. People who fell in love over fine wine instead of viscera. It's so much easier to breathe knowing he spends time outside. It's just that she worries. Her entire life balances on him, and if he stumbles even the slightest, she fractures. "Maybe we should get a dog," she ponders over dinner. "Someone to keep you company while I'm at work." He laughs. "I'm not a total disaster without you, Scully. Just a little disaster." She grins. They don't buy a dog. - When the FBI struts back into their life with a propagated favor, half of her wants to keep Mulder hidden and safe in the house, where she knows he won't run off and get himself shot. It's been years since she has had to bandage his injuries, even longer since she sat waiting and shaking by his hospital bed. Maybe it's just that there is such an absence of secrets between them that she can't keep it from him. Maybe it's that it's a young agent and they always had more loyalty to the FBI than the FBI had to them. Either way, she knows how to convince him despite his heavy anger. "It could have been me once," is her low blow, and it doesn't take her long to wish it hadn't worked. Though, thinking it could have been him makes her sign up. The memories still leave her paralyzed sometimes. Six years and the nightmares don't stop. - Her hands shake and she tries to blame the snow. "This isn't your job now." No, but it always was his life. And, for better or for worse, she fell in love with his life. The essence of him. Her threats to not come home are the emptiest of falsehoods. If she thinks of life without him all she pictures is that empty canvas in the Museum of Modern Art, blank, naked, and waiting for someone. - The hallways at the hospital don't naturally echo, but they seem to when he says, "That's why we can't be together." She nearly runs after him with screams of liar, liar, liar. - Dana swims into Christian's medical files because it's easier to think in broken chromosomes than more inexplicable, more fragile things. There is one nurse at the hospital - Lucy, a shining blond fresh out of school who is giggles at all times - who hasn't been there long enough to dislike Dana. Lucy spies Dana dropping a teardrop onto Christian's files and stops fiddling with the boy's IVs. "Dr. Scully?" she asks. Dana hasn't been called by her first name in such a long time sometimes she has to forcibly remind herself it exists. "I'm fine," Dana says, but Lucy keeps watching even as she slips the IVs into Christian's veins. - There's a moment - just a moment - between knowing Mulder is in danger and knowing Mulder is alive when she is so certain he's dead that she can taste the stench of death that she hasn't had linger in her mouth for years. When it's over, finally over with whirling ambulance lights, and she holds his hand while they transport him to the hospital, she cracks open into sobs that are mere whispers for lack of air. Her insides feel threaded with a blunt needle, each stitch another gasping pain until one of the paramedics actually notes that if she keeps hyperventilating he'll have to treat both her and Mulder. It almost would have made her chuckle if she were sentient enough to interpret the sounds. Later, waiting for Mulder by the hospital bed, she almost thinks this has all been just another one of her nightmares. But then he wakes up and his dry throat cracks on her name, and she knows this is reality, sharp and threatening as a knife. "Feels like old times," he laughs hoarsely, a thumb brushing at the tears she didn't know were spilling out of her like blood from a wound. - After, she asks, "Were you really going to choose the dark over me?" The rupture in her voice burns something deep in both of them. He flinches. "No," he says, low and sincere, because it's true, she knows. After the shadows, he always needs her. But first he gets lost in the dark and needs her to pull him out. Things have always been this way. - The morning of Christian's final operation, her hands shake until the moment the surgery begins. That's when she finds her science, finds her balance, the things that make her back straighten in confidence. The fact is that Christian will never be whole. He will never, no matter what, be like other boys who laugh and play soccer in scraped knees. Over breakfast, Mulder had whispered, "But he'll be alive." And sometimes that's enough. Her hands shake until the moment the surgery begins - and that's when she remembers that of all of Mulder's beliefs, the thing he believes in most is her. - As soon as Christian is discharged to in-home care, she hands in her resignation papers and laughs her way out the door. She pulls into the too long driveway and Mulder is there with suitcases and airplane tickets, but, in the end, all that matters is that Mulder is there.