Visitor (2/13)
by leiascully

Email: leiascully@gmail.com
Distribution: Ask, please

Rating: T for non-explicit sexual situations and some swearing
Categories: SRA
Keywords: Mulder/Scully romance
Spoilers: XF Revival speculation (spoilers through series and 
IWTB)

Summary: Mulder tries to put his life back together after Scully 
leaves him.  

Disclaimer: The X-Files and all related characters are the 
property of Chris Carter, 1013 Productions, and Fox Studios. No 
profit is made from this and no infringement is intended.

Author's Notes:  I had to get all of my feelings out somehow.  
Stories from all fandoms are archived at 
http://archiveofourown.org/users/leiascully.

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2 - Therapy

His therapist is very kind and very bland. Mulder's years at 
Oxford feel like ancient history, something he did in some other 
life, but he still understands this game. He's used his own 
illegible face to his advantage often enough in interrogations.

It's been a few months. He's not sure he's made any progress, 
but at least he doesn't have to come twice a week anymore. 
They've talked about his sister, his parents. They've talked 
about Diana and Phoebe. They've talked about William, a little. 
He tries to avoid talking about Scully, though he knows it's 
painfully evident the way he edges around the topic. It's not 
just that the lack of her jolts through him like the pain of a 
phantom limb. She's such a private person, neatly confined in 
her own skin. To talk about the life they shared feels like a 
violation of her trust, though he's sure she would be the first 
to tell him he needs to be open with his therapist.

Hypocrite, he thinks fondly. He knows she rarely saw her own 
therapist, though the Bureau encouraged it after her abduction. 
He knows she didn't talk about him the way she might have, that 
she cached the greatest part of her feelings in an undisclosed 
location before she opened the office door. But he understands. 
There's no good way to say "this person is everything to me" 
without sounding unbalanced. There's no way to explain that your 
partner is your heart and your mind without sounding fatally 
codependent. They spent those first five years desperately 
pretending there was nothing between them but the firm 
professional handshake of two people assigned to watch each 
other's backs. Maybe it was just that their work was an unending 
series of crises; in the heat of the moment, they revealed 
themselves to each other in order to survive. She was the eyes 
in the back of his head. She was the cautious whisper in his 
ear. She was the finger on the trigger of his weapon. She was 
the voice inside of him that said, "Now." She was the layers of 
kevlar over his heart.

His therapist takes notes. Mulder listens for the faint sounds 
of the nib scratching over the paper. Sometimes she's so quiet 
for so long that he almost falls asleep. He wonders if she gives 
him a discount for all the minutes of silence.

"Do you think you and Dana would have become so close if you had 
been assigned to a more ordinary department?"

"That's a question that can't be answered," he tells her, 
because he's too overeducated for his own good, because he's 
wasting his time and his money in this chair letting years of 
trusting no one but Scully keep him trapped in the grave he dug 
for himself. "The nature of the work encourages a certain 
intimacy. Partners have to be able to depend on each other."

"Were you as close to Reggie? Or Jerry?" He will say this: she 
either has a good memory or is diligent about reviewing her 
notes. The Bureau seems to have sent her a nice little dossier 
on him. She must sit in this office listening to a lot of 
special agents talk about how special they don't feel. Or maybe 
Scully prepared a few remarks. She is, after all, his doctor. 
There's honor among medical professionals.

"No," he says. "Scully is different."

The pen moves. "I've noticed that you always refer to Dana by 
her last name. Is there a reason for that?"

I had to hold her at arm's length, he doesn't say. At first it 
was a way to preserve my isolation and then it was a way to put 
enough space between us that she wouldn't notice that she was 
becoming my world, he doesn't say.

"Protocol," he says. "Kind of a self-reinforcing joke. Call a 
green recruit 'Agent Lastname' so they feel like they fit the 
job description."

"But you still call her 'Scully'," his therapist prompted. "Even 
after the two of you had a child together."

He can't explain the way their names became talismans, the way 
they could put a whole speech into just one word. "Watch out" or 
"I love you" or "You're so full of shit your eyes are brown", 
all in a name. A Scully by any other name wouldn't be his 
partner. They invented an entire language and crammed it into 
two words replete with nuance.

He shrugs. "Habit."

"One thing we're trying to do in these sessions is change some 
old habits, Fox," his therapist says gently.

"I called her 'Dana' when her father died," he tells her. Things 
had still been mutable between them then. They might have left 
each other then, and been functional citizens, plausible friends 
and neighbors and lovers of other people.

"I understand it's difficult to alter these patterns of 
behavior," she says, "but you need to understand that people and 
relationships can change."

"I understand that," he says, his mouth dry.

"Maybe you could try referring to her as 'Dana' just in these 
sessions," she suggests.

He looks down at his hands. "Sure."

"Tell me about being partnered with Dana," she says.

He knows what they look like from the outside, him and Scully. 
What they looked like. He knows that codependency is an easy 
label to pin on them. She enabled his obsessions. He enabled her 
careful disengagement. She had been easy to befriend once, he 
thinks, her heart as open as a rose beginning to bloom. He had 
had friends too, before he'd discovered the ladder of success 
had lower, darker rungs that descended all the way to the 
basement. They became a pair of chronic underachievers together 
from the Bureau's point of view, or conceptualized their own 
definition of achievement. In the field they had nothing but 
each other, in sickness and in health, forsaking all others; she 
was his shield and his sidearm. Moment by moment, they were 
forged by the strangeness of the world into a self-contained 
unit. Maybe dysfunction had kept them together toward the end, 
but their isolation had honest beginnings. Who else could 
understand the hollow depth of his guilty sorrow? Who else could 
feel the weight on her narrow shoulders? Who else knew the 
horror of Tooms or Pusher or being eaten alive by a giant 
mushroom? Who else felt the same spark of tension seeing a slick 
of oil in a parking lot? They were the only witnesses to the 
vast uncanny potential of the world and to the shadowy 
machinations of the should-be protectors. They were the only 
tellers of implausible truths. In the face of that loneliness, 
they had turned to each other. It was the only saving grace.

"Dana and I..." he begins, and stops, because her name feels so 
strange. His tongue trips over it. "The things that Dana and I 
investigated weren't easy to explain to other people. You would 
only believe them if you saw them."

"What did that mean for your partnership?" she asks quietly.

"Neither of us could talk to other people about our work," he 
says, twisting his fingers together. "It feels like - it felt 
like - she was the only person who knew me. She was the only 
person who could understand what I'd been through. What we'd 
been through."

"Do you think that was true?"

"It was true," he says, a little too sharply. "She was the only 
person I could believe. She was the only person I could trust. 
There was literally no one else who had seen the things we saw, 
and done the things we had done. Try telling your neighbor or 
your barista that you hunt monsters for a living."

"Is that how you saw your job at the Bureau?" she asks.

"We investigated the unexplained," he says. "Dismissing that 
which can't be categorized as monstrous is a fairly common 
response."

"Do you think that's how Dana saw your work?" she asks.

"She believed in the work," he says. "She wanted to bring 
justice to the victims of these crimes, whether the motivations 
or explanations of the criminals fit the usual profile or not."

"But you've told me her investment in the work wasn't the same 
as yours," his therapist prompts.

"I can't speak to her experiences," he says. "I can't speak to 
her motivations. But she was there, every time I needed her, 
without question. I don't need to work through my partnership 
with Scully. I need to work through fucking dying."

His voice is too loud in the quiet office. His fists are 
clenched in his lap.

"Our time is up for today," his therapist says. "But I'll make a 
note for next week. I appreciate your engagement in the process, 
Fox."

"Sure," he says, an emptiness in his chest. "Fine."

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Feedback is welcome at leiascully@gmail.com.  Stories from all 
fandoms are archived at http://archiveofourown.org/users/leiascully