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oohnotvery · 6 months

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Edges of the Night (Chapter 7)

“It’s about Alan.”

“Alan,” Scully repeats.

She shoots Mulder a questioning look. She’s trying to remember whether she’s ever told him her fiancé’s name. And she’s dead sure she hasn’t. Did Alan’s name appear on T.V. during his interview? No, no it didn’t . . .

That means Mulder must . . .

That Alan isn’t . . .

Oh god. Oh, no.

Her vision blurs. Her lungs refuse to expand. She starts shaking her head, her long hair falling across her face.

“No, no, no,” she whispers to herself.

Mulder leans forward to catch her hand and she shakes her head even harder. The gleam of her diamond seems to fade as she considers the possibility that Alan could be mixed up in all of this.

“No, no, no, Mulder, don’t bring him into this. Please, he’s not—he can’t be—”

“Scully—”

She wrings Mulder’s hand between her own and he winces. “No, Mulder, please,” she begs, fixing him with a hard, desperate look. “Don’t take this away from me too. Don’t let this be fake.”

He’s opening his mouth to protest when there’s a beating sound on the door. Scully startles and Mulder shoots to his feet.

“Larimer County police, open up!” a deep voice bellows from outside the room.

Mulder glances sharply at Scully. The blood rushes from her face. The bed-and-breakfast owners must have seen the news and called the cops on them. Mulder rushes to the door and jams a chair under the handle, then takes two long strides towards her, pausing only to snatch the car keys from the end table. He grabs her hand and starts pulling her towards the window, but she tugs loose to slip into her shoes.

“Mulder,” she cautions as he unlatches the windowsill, “we’re three stories up!”

He shakes his head in disregard. “If we’re caught, we’re dead.”

After everything she’s heard, she certainly can’t argue with that logic. She helps him lift the sash and steadily ignores the banging and yelling at the door. Frigid air blasts her face as Mulder leans out the window.

“We should be able to climb most of the way down,” he mutters as he studies the house’s façade. He glances back at her, his face just inches from her own. “I’ll go first.”

She doesn’t bother protesting; at this point, she knows that Mulder is going to do what he wants to do. He throws a leg over the sill and starts hastily maneuvering his body down the side of the house. When his head disappears, Scully wipes her sweaty palms against her dirty pants and throws her legs over the edge. The cold shocks her body and she almost slips as her fingers scramble for purchase on the snow-covered wall.

Below her, she hears Mulder slip and curse and she forces herself not to look down. She’s quickly making peace with the fact that at least one of them will suffer from a broken ankle today.

“Hurry up, Scully!” he shouts under her, but she’s having trouble finding hand and foot holds on the icy surface.

“Shut up, Mulder!” she shouts back, but she forces herself to climb lower, yelping when her feet slip. Her legs swing out from under her and she frantically digs her fingers into the wall.

“Steady,” Mulder calls out, and she glances down to see him already safe on the ground. Curse him and his long, lanky, naturally athletic body. He braces his hands against the wall, creating a place for her to land. “Just jump, Scully! There’s no time!”

Her arms are shaking and she hasn’t even reached the second story. If she jumps from this height, she could very well knock Mulder unconscious. She’s scrambling to find a new place for her feet to grip when she hears it above her—the crash of a door banging open.

“Jump, Scully!”

The sound of people bursting into the room spurs her to action and she grabs for an icy gable that hangs a foot or so below her. Her fingers are curling around the slippery surface when a head pokes out of the window above her.

“Freeze!” the police officer shouts, and out of her periphery, she sees the shiny metal glint of a gun.

Oh, fuck.

She doesn’t even bother glancing down to see if Mulder is still in position. Whether or not it’s a testament to their partnership or simply her desperation to escape the law, she lets go of the wall.

Falling two stories feels both longer and shorter than it should. The breath catches in her lungs and stays suspended until she collides roughly with Mulder’s tensed body. He doesn’t quite catch her as much as he breaks her fall, but before she can even assess whether either of them is injured, he’s grabbing her around the torso and shoving her towards the parking lot.

She trips over him and they both plunge into knee-deep snow. She barely registers the sensation of ice soaking through her pants before he’s yanking her up by her armpits and throwing her towards the car.

Either Mulder underestimates his own strength or overestimates her own amount of bodily control at this moment, because she crashes into the car door with an oomph.

“Shit, I’m sorry,” he curses, but before she even registers the blow, he’s grabbing at her left hand. His eyes dart to hers just briefly before he starts wiggling the diamond ring off her finger.

“What the hell?” she asks, jerking her hand protectively into her chest. But he pulls her hand back, so roughly she flinches. “Jesus!” she yelps as he yanks the ring from her finger. She lurches forward to grab it but he catches her wrist tightly. His eyes are dark, defensive.

“We’re being tracked, Scully,” he warns. “They’re finding us somehow, and I’m starting to wonder if this is how.”

Her mouth falls open and she starts to protest that Alan would never, that Alan could never—

But Mulder said there was more. More about Alan, specifically. Pain lashes through her chest and shock stuns her into stupor. Mulder swipes a quick, reassuring thumb across her cheek before he turns and chucks the ring as far as he can. His pitcher’s arm is strong and the ring disappears into a snowbank many, many yards down the road. He turns back to her and squeezes her left hand tightly.

“I didn’t do that just for show, Scully.” His eyes are full of a certainty that she herself doesn’t have.

She thinks of the X-Files, imagines them burning in the hallways of the Hoover Building. Her mind flashes to an image of Mulder strapped to a bed in a psych ward, the nurses shoving medications he doesn’t need down his throat night and day. She remembers standing in the basement office, listening to him say hateful, hurtful things to her while Skinner looked on in dismay. She watches him step shakily out of the wreckage of a car crash, his head bleeding and hands tied, his eyes fixed firmly on her.

All of it to protect her. All of it to save her life.

She meets his gaze and nods. He nods back, then runs to the other side of the car. She waits breathlessly as he fits the key into the lock, his frozen fingers slipping as he wiggles it in.

She’s sliding into the passenger seat and slamming shut the door just as the police officer, tailed closely by the BNB owners, darts out the front door. The officer aims his gun at their windshield just as Mulder shoots the car into reverse. A gunshot reverberates loudly against the front bumper and Scully takes a moment to thank God for the officer’s poor aim.

Even with their new snow tires, the car swivels and skids in the icy driveway and Mulder overcorrects as he yanks them out into the road. The car starts slipping into a ditch and Scully screams, planting her hands against the dashboard as Mulder tries to whip the car back towards the road. They miss the ditch by mere inches and Mulder has to fight the wheel to urge the car back onto the unplowed street. Once they finally get going, they’re traveling much faster than they should. But behind them, the officer has jumped into a big, bulky police truck and he’s riding close on their tail.

They fly down the road in a tense silence, Scully’s hands intermittently grabbing at her seat or the console when the car slides across a patch of ice or gets stuck in a deep snowdrift. Behind them, the cop isn’t gaining on them but also isn’t losing them. His sirens and lights seem wildly out of place in the otherwise peaceful, snow-quiet morning.

“How do we lose him?” Mulder mutters to himself, and Scully wishes she had her weapon. If she could blow out a tire on that truck, they could make their getaway.

“His truck is better equipped than ours to handle these roads,” she notes, and Mulder’s jaw clenches in response.

“And it’s only a matter of time before his backup arrives,” she points out pragmatically.

“Gee, Scully, got any more words of encouragement?” he snaps.

Ignoring him, she turns her focus back to the truck. Once they’re well outside of town, they start climbing up into the mountains, and the snow gets deeper and more treacherous. She feels her little car just barely gripping the roads as it weaves its way up a pass. The higher they climb, the slower Mulder must drive to stay in control. She’s so focused on the road conditions that she almost doesn’t notice when the truck behind them drops back, then turns off onto a different road.

“Mulder,” she says quietly, unwilling to speak too loudly for fear it will distract him from his main task, “the cop is gone.”

He frowns. “If we can manage these roads, so can he.”

“Suppose he knows a different way around the mountain? Think he’ll be waiting for us on the other side?”

He clenches his jaw. “That, or someone deliberately called off the dogs.”

His eyes flit to hers meaningfully. She swallows hard. “They let us get away,” she murmurs.

He nods tightly. “They let us get away.”

As the morning sun rises, the snow turns slushy and the roads become more passable. By midday, they’re well into southern Idaho, where the snowplows have cleared most of the roadways. Hunger forces them to stop at a gas station, where Mulder quickly fills up the car while Scully pays cash for a huge bagful of food, four long-sleeved t-shirts in sizes large and small, two jackets, two knit beanies, and some basic hygiene products. The gas station clerk pays her little attention and although her heart is racing, she’s confident they’ve flown under the radar at this pit stop.

Back on the road, they tear silently through lunch and Scully tries unsuccessfully to change into fresh clothes without exposing herself too much.

“Dinner and a show,” Mulder jokes approvingly as she pulls off her dirty work blouse and yanks on the gas station shirt. “And who says romance is dead?”

She rolls her eyes and gratefully swipes deodorant under her arms, then manages to brush her teeth using a water bottle and wash her face with a cleansing cloth. She is amazed at how much better she feels after tending to these basic needs, and when they pull over on the side of the road so Mulder can pee, she forces him to do the same.

But now that the adrenaline from the car chase has worn off, dread has taken its place. She and Mulder still have some unfinished business.

“So,” she starts quietly.

He looks at her with mind-reader eyes. “You ready?”

She isn’t ready to hear the truth, and maybe she never will be. Mulder seems to sense this, because his hand flits over to graze her knee. He squeezes.

“You deserve the truth, Scully. And maybe you always have.” His voice turns somber and serious. “I was wrong to ever think I could keep it to myself.”

She closes her eyes briefly, grateful for this acknowledgement. But she knows her partner well, and she understands—somewhat—his misguided attempts to protect her. He was always going to be the martyr. He was always going to take on the pain to spare her the suffering.

“Lay it on me,” she finally says.

“You said you didn’t want Alan to be fake,” he begins. Her chest constricts with the reminder. “And I don’t think he is, at least not in the way you think.” He pauses and the anticipation builds and builds and builds.

“Just say it, Mulder.”

He rips off the Band-Aid. “Alan is a friend of Skinner’s. And a friend of . . . mine. We sent him to California to watch over you.”

Blood rushes to her ears. Not real, not real, not real. None of it was real. Images flash through her mind: meeting a handsome young nurse at the hospital, getting invited to coffee several times before she finally said yes. The coffee dates turning into dinner dates, the dinner dates turning into sleepovers. The first time he kissed her, just a gentle press of lips. The unbelievable feeling of being wanted. The press of his erection against her belly that one night. His whispered ‘I love you’ a few months later. A seafood dinner, a walk on the beach, a knee bent in the sand, a diamond ring. A yes to forever.

“To watch over me,” she repeats numbly. Her hand clutches the leather of the seat. She’s either going to throw up or faint. She shakes her head disbelievingly, trying to logic her way through this. “But Alan said—on T.V.—he said he didn’t know you. That he hadn’t even heard of you.” Surely this isn’t the truth. This can’t be the truth.

Mulder’s eyes tighten. “Someone was making him say it. Someone was making him put on an act. Be the concerned spouse, and all that.”

She winces. His eyes flash apologetically to hers and he quickly begins to backtrack. “I mean—I do believe the concern part was real. I don’t think that part was fake, Scully.”

“It’s not real, though,” she mutters. “He was a watchdog. A plant. A . . . spy.” She turns sharply to Mulder. “You sent a man all the way to California to date me? You sent someone to sleep in my bed and get to know me intimately and—and to do it so convincingly that I thought he was in love with me?” Her voice breaks. “How could you, Mulder?”

He starts protesting, begins waving his hands in the air as he tries to explain it away, but all she hears is how once again, someone has made a mockery of her life.

She slams a hand into the dashboard. “After all I’ve been through, after everything that’s been taken from me, you couldn’t even let me have this one real thing? You—you ripped me away from my job, my work. From you.” Her voice drops to a whisper.“That hurt, Mulder. It hurt. But even that wasn’t enough for you. You went and messed with my relationship too.” A pang rips through her chest and she’s briefly reminded of how it felt to lose her father, to lose Melissa. She scans the tangled mess of emotions inside herself and tries to determine whether she’s grieving the loss of Alan himself, or simply the loss of a life she thought was real. But all she can really parse out is anger.

“How could you?” she repeats defeatedly.

Mulder reaches over and grabs her wrist. She tries to pull away but he clamps down tightly, so tightly she’s sure to bruise from it.

He shakes his head vehemently, his eyes darting between her and the road. “No, Scully, no. I truly believe that what you had—what you have—with Alan is genuine. I actually didn’t—I hadn’t even heard he proposed to you. He never told us that part. He was only ever supposed to work with you, just to keep track of you and make sure you were safe. He wasn’t a plant or a spy or anything like that. He was supposed to be a bodyguard of sorts. But in performing that role, he spent a lot of time with you and . . . and he fell in love.” He sucks in a deep breath. “That’s not so hard to do, Scully.”

She doesn’t even bother dissecting that comment. Instead, she tries to recall her memories of meeting Alan, of getting to know him, of starting to care for him. What was real, and what was an act?

Nothing is real, her brain insists angrily as her eyes fall to her empty ring finger. Nothing in your life is real. Everything good is taken from you.

She buries her head into her hands and stifles a scream. “Nothing is real,” she breathes, digging her nails into her palms. “Nothing about my life is real. People use me and take advantage of me and play me for the fool. And this is the consequence.” She gestures wildly around the car. “I’m on the run with someone who tricked me into leaving my job and who tricked me into a relationship with some guy that I may or may not really know. I let Alan—Jesus, I let him fuck me, for Christ’s sake.” She ignores the way Mulder’s hands clench on the wheel. “And despite all of that, despite everything you put me through to keep me safe, I’m still stuck running. I’m not safe. And the life I thought I had was never even real. I’m left with nothing. Nothing.”

She sinks her head back into her hands and just barely registers the jolt of the car as Mulder pulls off the road and slams it into park. She feels him lean over the console and pry her hands from her eyes. He cups her cheeks, his palms warm and steady against her face.

“I’m here,” he says adamantly, “and I’m real. You and me, this is real,” he promises. Firmly but gently, he pulls her chin up until she’s looking him in the eyes. “Scully, it’s true that a lot of people have messed with your life. Me—me included.” His eyes crease painfully. “I’m ashamed to say it, but I have. But I’m here right now, staring you in the face and telling you the truth as I know it. You know me better than anyone in this whole goddamn world. You know what I’m willing to do to protect you. And I’ve gone about it the wrong way, I see that. I thought I was protecting you but I was just—I fucked it up.” She tears her eyes away and his hands fall to grip her shoulders. He shakes her gently until she looks back at him. “But don’t say you have nothing, because this is real, and you have this. From day one, from the moment we sat in that motel room in Bellefleur, Oregon and I told you about Samantha. You know every part of me, all of me. And we’re here, and we’re running, and everything is shitty and uncertain, yes. You have lost a lot of things, yes. But not me, okay? Not me. This is real, and you haven’t lost me.”

Her face crumples. “But I have lost you,” she whispers in protest. “You pushed me away, you let me go. You destroyed our work and you lied to me and although I’m starting to understand why you did that, I—I don’t know where we stand.” Dread crosses Mulder’s gaze. “I trust you, Mulder, but what we used to have is gone.”

“Gone,” he repeats slowly.

“The respect, the friendship, the partnership, the—the—” She can’t get it out. She can’t bring herself to say the word love. Whether it was platonic love or romantic love, whatever existed between them, whatever she glimpsed during her fight against cancer, that isn’t there anymore. If you love someone, you don’t cut them loose the way he cut her loose. Even to save her.

“I did a lot of things that have hurt you,” he acknowledges. “But I don’t agree that we’ve lost all of that between us. And if you feel differently, fine. But we haven’t lost trust. That’s real, Scully. If you don’t believe that anything else in your life is real, look to that. Look to us.”

She bites her lip hard, tastes blood. His thumb swipes gently at her mouth and her eyes fall closed. She is an exposed nerve, a live wire. If he touches her just so, she will combust.

“This is real,” she repeats, as if under a spell. She opens her eyes and sees him nodding encouragingly. But Alan wasn’t real. Her heart constricts again in pain and she tips her forehead to Mulder’s chest. His arms curl around her neck and she feels a hand stroke soothingly down her spine. She breathes him in, the unfamiliar gas station deodorant and the all-too-familiar Mulder scent underneath. She thinks of the way she let herself fall from two stories high this morning, knowing his arms would catch her; she thinks of the way she drove hours and hours across the country on just his meager explanation and nothing else. She has lost so much, but some part of her still deeply trusts him, still feels intimately safe with him.

After a moment, she pulls back, nodding as if to reassure herself.

“Thank you for telling me everything,” she manages to say, although she doesn’t really feel grateful at all. He runs a thumb across her cheek and she realizes she’s crying.

“I do believe that Alan cares for you deeply,” he says gently, and she sees the honesty in his gaze, “but I also believe he could be working for someone else. I don’t—I don’t know exactly whom to trust right now. Except for you.”

She nods. He’s right. He’s completely right. She stares into his grey-green eyes, notes the stubble on his cheeks, runs her eyes across his messy dark hair. It hits her like a freight train. This—this right here—could be the rest of her life: him and her, on the run. Never being certain of another single thing except for this thing that stretches between them. This bond. This thin, fragile rope connecting their hearts. Call it trust, call it history, call it shared circumstances. But don’t call it love.

He pushes a strand of hair behind her ears. His touch grounds her and she clasps her hand over his. “Is there anything else?” she asks quietly.

He sighs and pulls away, his hands falling from her face. She resists the urge to lean back into him.

“Just that I should have involved you from the start,” he says. “I shouldn’t have tried to hide it from you. You’d been through so much with your cancer. I thought I was protecting you. I—I had so much on my mind then, Scully. I thought if I didn’t share what I knew, if I kept it to myself, if I forced you away, it protected you. It saved you from doing this. From being here.”

“Here?”

“Running, Scully. Being chased for the rest of our goddamn lives. Having targets on our backs forever.” He shakes his head. “That’s not a life.”

No, but at least it’s real, her mind provides.

She reaches over and grabs his hand. She squeezes. He squeezes back.

The rest of Idaho passes easily and they’re halfway through Montana when the sun sets. The roads have been relatively empty of other vehicles, but Scully checks the mirrors every few minutes to make sure they aren’t being followed. She isn’t quite sure whether it’s a good or bad thing that no one is pursuing them anymore. She’s not sure what it means that the police officer gave up on them so easily.

It’s nearing midnight by the time they finally roll into Kalispell, Montana. Scully knows from family road trips that this town is the gateway to one of the most beautiful national parks in the United States. If it were daytime, she’s sure they’d be treated to crisp, clear mountain views. But it’s pitch black now and their eyes are trained on less awe-inspiring things.

They’re looking for a road.

That’s all the Gunmen could give Mulder—the name of a road and the description of a cabin. They drive up and down the main drag three times before they finally spot the street sign. The road turns from asphalt to gravel, then from gravel to dirt, then from dirt to a sloshy, sloppy mud-and-ice blend. The car protests the thick sludgy mixture and there are a few moments when Scully is sure they’re going to get stuck.

But they don’t. They travel slowly along the road for four miles, maybe five, passing nothing but tall stands of fir trees and aspen groves. They drive for twenty minutes without passing a single house. When the road abruptly dead ends, Scully, who is driving, slams on the brakes, narrowly missing another crash. Mulder helps her reverse out of the tight spot and then they spend several minutes arguing about whether the cabin really exists and whether they need to wait until daytime to properly find it.

She’s turning the car around when her headlights illuminate something far away to the left and down the hill. She grips the wheel tightly as anticipation thrums in her chest. She spies a small cabin, nondescript in every possible way, nearly impossible to see amongst the thick trees surrounding it. It’s not clear at all how they’re going to get the car down to the house, but they can’t leave it on the road in plain sight. Mulder offers to take the wheel but she shrugs him off. She is the better driver, after all.

In the end, she tears up the car driving it through all the thick brush. What she really needs, she thinks, is a Humvee or some sort of Army vehicle. Definitely not an Oldsmobile. Still, she manages to maneuver the car behind the cabin, hiding it from view of the road, and breathes a huge sigh of relief when she throws it into park.

“I don’t think your car’s ever going to forgive you,” Mulder jokes as he cracks open the door. Cool night air floods in, sending chills up her spine.

She rolls her eyes and grabs the bag of items she bought at the gas station. “If we’re going to get supplies regularly, we’re going to have to figure out a better way to get in and out of here.”

Mulder frowns. “Has anyone ever told you how sexy you are when you talk logistics?” he ribs, and Scully can’t help but shake her head in amusement. Apparently, being off the road and into the relative safety of the cabin has made Mulder giddy.

They walk to the front door quietly, their FBI training alerting them to every possible sign that the cabin is already occupied. Not for the first time, Scully wishes she had her gun, and finds herself slinking along the cabin walls with her hands subconsciously pointed into finger guns. When Mulder catches sight of it, he cracks a wide grin and she smacks his arm.

But her finger guns are for nothing: the cabin sits unlocked and untouched. They sweep the rooms quickly and precisely, and although Scully is thankful to be off the road, she’s slightly bothered to discover that the place is tiny: a bite-size kitchen, a bathroom with the smallest shower she’s ever seen, a small sitting area with a fireplace, and one bedroom. With one bed. Still, the cabin does seem to have some access to electricity, because there are lamps in the bedroom, bathroom, and living room.

They spend a few minutes securing the place as best they can, shuttering the windows, moving furniture across the front door, and scouring cabinets for possible weapons. Mulder is thrilled to find a hunting knife in the bedside table, and Scully considers it good luck that the kitchen is well-stocked with heavy, skull-crushing cast iron pots and pans. It’s bitterly cold inside and she wishes she could put Mulder to work getting the fireplace going, but she knows better than to give away their location with a smoke signal. They find a few musty blankets in the bathroom closet and pile them onto the bed. Scully unloads their meager supplies and tries to find some joy in brushing her teeth over a real sink.

When it’s clear there’s nothing else for them to do, they both walk into the bedroom and stare at the bed. Mulder glances at her and shrugs, and she shrugs back.

They crawl into bed and Scully arranges a half dozen blankets on top of them. Mulder kicks at the extra covers and complains he’ll get hot.

“Suit yourself,” she says, pulling the blankets up to her chin.

The air around them feels frosty and cold, tinged with the fresh scent of pine. For a moment, she is quietly content, warm and safe after days of running from trouble. But then the realization hits her: this could be it. This could be her bed—their bed—for weeks, months, years. This could be their life.

She closes her eyes and tries not to think about it.

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