Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Scully

Scully hates him at first sight, if the water running down his face is any indication.

He keeps a smug face as she walks out, but deep down he’s impressed – although he has to admit his ego is a little hurt.

John Doggett is used to questioning people, pushing them to their limits, making them talk before they even understand what they’re saying, but Dana Scully is nothing like the average suspect. Not that he was expecting it to be easy – after all, she is used to questionings herself – but he certainly wasn’t expecting to find the very image of someone who has nothing to lose.

He came here treating her as a suspect due to her history when it involved Mulder’s disappearances (he was especially interested in that bit about how she lied so convincingly once that everybody believed Mulder was dead), but he doesn’t think this time is like the others. She is hiding something, that is for sure, but the pain reflected in her face, in the tone of her voice and in her palpable anger are far from being fake.

He looks around as the agents who witnessed the whole scene avert their gazes to the papers in their hands and some others walk away.

That’s right, show is over!, he wants to say, but he just stands up and goes to the restroom to wipe his face.

He looks in the mirror and scoffs at himself, wondering what part of the conversation exactly pissed her off. Was it the trust part or the women? Maybe both.

It is none of his business anyway and it probably won’t make a difference to his investigation, but he can’t help the curiosity that starts building. Are the rumors he heard true? Were Scully and Mulder more than professional partners?

He enters Mulder’s apartment with the key the FBI confiscated, hoping to find more clues to what may have happened to the man. Something seems off about Kersh’s approach to this case, but he can’t quite put his finger on it. He’d better investigate further before thinking Scully might be right about someone tapping her phone and watching her every move.

This last part is almost true, though, he’ll give her that.

He stands at the door for a while, glancing around to see if something catches his eye, and he smirks as he sees a woman’s purse on the couch. He’s pretty sure who the owner is.

Is she here to hide any evidence?

Silently, he starts surveilling the small rooms in the apartment with the intention of catching her off-guard, but instead he’s the one surprised – Scully is sleeping in Mulder’s bed, with the tip of her fingers resting over a shirt that certainly isn’t hers.

The way she’s sprawled across the mattress tells him she spent all night here, and he can’t help feeling a little embarrassed for happening upon what seems such a private moment. She is familiar with this place, he realizes. Maybe too familiar.

It’s none of your business, John, he reminds himself, but he has no time to walk away because she wakes up and sees him at the door.

Good. Now they’ll have to talk. What can he tell her that doesn’t sound suspicious?

He’s seen her reaction to this whole thing already, and maybe he should take a different path regarding the way he presses her for information this time, but he’s learned that people tend to talk when they’re irritated above their limit.

What he really doesn’t understand, what is still making him treat her like a suspect, is all this UFO crap she and Skinner keep on insisting on. Would a woman so grounded in science say or believe such things?

He has to be honest, though, doing this job doesn’t please him.

“What are you doing here?” she asks defensively.

“I could ask you the same,” he challenges.

“I came by to feed Mulder's fish.”

“And then you got tired and decided to take a nap.”

He can’t help it; the words leave his mouth almost instantaneously.

She is quick to change the subject and she too pushes his buttons. This woman can be annoying, for crying out loud! The way she talks to him takes the conversation into a different direction, but he holds on to the image of her sleeping in Mulder’s bed as a card up his sleeve for future use. He secretly hopes it doesn’t come to that, though.

He’s only doing what he’s told, but sometimes what he has to do and what he feels is right are two completely different things. In this specific case, despite their mutual disaffection, he is tempted to put himself in Scully’s shoes to see not only if he has any insights, but also to try and understand what she is feeling. From all the bits and pieces he’s gathered so far, it seems that Scully and Mulder’s relationship is far more complex and a lot deeper than what he was led to believe.

He stops in front of her hospital room and looks through the small window. He doesn’t want to do this, not right now; she seems rather hurt already to take another blow. Because he just knows it will be like a knife to her gut to learn that he is going to replace Mulder for a while.

Not that he can substitute her partner in any way, but at least Scully is going to have a little help in searching for her friend. He could see it in the desert that no one wants to find Mulder more than she does, no matter what it takes. She could have lost her job for pursuing her own investigation, her entire career could have turned to pieces below her feet – hell, she could have even died – but still, she wouldn’t mind any of that if it meant Mulder would be back. It was almost heartbreaking to see, actually.

After everything Doggett has witnessed – or hasn’t, for that matter – he is beginning to understand that Kersh’s loyalty lies somewhere else, and that assigning him to the X-files was his boss’ way of punishing both him and Scully. Maybe Mulder isn’t as paranoid as John was told, for now he is having second thoughts about the FBI’s true efforts to find their agent. It seems they’re actually just putting up a show so that later no one can say they haven’t tried.

The thoughts dissipate as he takes a deep breath and finally enters the room. She is awake, although her head is turned to the wall instead of to the door. He wonders for a moment if she is also seeing only walls instead of windows in her mind, as he himself did every time the search for Luke hit a dead end. He doesn’t ask her, though; they’re not even remotely close for him to ask such a thing.

Her face shows she’s surprised when he tells her he is officially her partner now, but she doesn’t seem to be so angry that she would throw another glass of water in his face. Or maybe it’s only because there are no glasses near her, who can tell?

He almost chuckles at his own thoughts, but manages to keep it together. Seeing Scully so vulnerable lying on that hospital floor when he found her before has made his heart a little softer, for the scene reminded him that she is a human being just like everyone else.

That and all this apparent charade is what has made him more determined to find Mulder, he concludes. He will find him for Scully, for Skinner, and even for Kersh. It would be nice to rub it in the Deputy Director’s face that people are more important than whatever policies the FBI has in place.

Deep down he knows that he will also do it a little for himself. Maybe finding Mulder alive will make the memory of finding Luke dead a little more bearable.

She has come to trust him with her life as much he has come to trust her with his in these few months of partnership. Yet, on a personal level, there seems to be an invisible barrier that separates them, even after their initial bickering was put to rest. Her personal files are her personal files, she made sure to emphasize, and that’s basically all he knows about her. She hid even her pregnancy from him, and that says a lot.

I doubt we agents ever really truly know each other, even our partners. Not at the end of the day. Their real lives, their friends, girlfriends, deeply personal things, issues.

He almost laughs at the realization that his own sentence has come back to bite him in the ass.

While he waits for a call, she is circling and writing down stuff on their current case’s files. He admires her ability to keep going, even though there’s not much else they can do regarding this investigation. He knows how hard she’s been trying – not only to see things the way Mulder did, but to be Mulder in her own way.  

Because that's just how he came at things... without judgment and without prejudice and with an open mind that I am just not capable of.

Her words and tears after she said that in their previous case made him regret some of his actions in the beginning – maybe all of them if truth be told. If only he knew when they first met that Scully was probably the only person who truly knew Mulder, he wouldn’t have acted like such a dickhead.

Knows. The only person who knows Mulder. Present tense, John.

He never breaks any promises, and the castaway agent has to be somewhere.

He wonders about Mulder sometimes, about how he was able to captivate Scully in such a way that she would follow him to hell and back with a smile on her face. Maybe he will get to find out for himself sometime in the future, or maybe…

“What made you follow Mulder?” he blurts out.

She looks at him as if annoyed for being interrupted, but her face is also quizzical.

She puts the papers she’s holding on the desk, along with her pencil, and her whole expression changes as she starts speaking softly.

“His relentlessness, his passion, his belief that uncovering the truth could save mankind somehow. The way he put his heart into everything he did. His loyalty to the ones he really cared about…” She stops a little as a sad smile shows up shyly. “In the end, I followed him for who he was as a whole, not only for who he was as a professional. He showed me a different world in every single aspect of life, a world that I would have never seen if I hadn’t met him.”

She gets quiet for a while, as if reminiscing, but the small smile is still on her face. He can’t help smiling himself.

It may be cliché and all that, but he knows love when he sees it.

“Remember to use the present tense, Dana. Mulder isn’t gone, he’s just missing.”

She seems surprised upon hearing her given name, but she doesn’t make any comments. Instead, she just nods weakly, as if considering if there is truth to his words, and then goes back to examining her papers.

It’s not the first time he sees it in her face and mannerism that her certainty is not the same as it was when they started working together, as if her hopes and faith started fading with time. Fading along with her joy, he would add.

This new perception brings back a question he hasn’t asked himself for at least a couple of months: what if Mulder doesn’t come back at all?

He’d better get to work before his mind gets away with him.

He has played the worst case scenario a thousand times in his head. Still, he doesn’t think he is prepared for when she gets here. He promised her he wouldn’t fail, even when he himself wasn’t too sure he could make that promise. He never said he would find Mulder alive, granted, but that was implied, wasn’t it?

His heart seems to weigh some extra pounds right now, especially when her shouts reach his ears even before she comes into view.

“Where is he?”

The anguish in her voice makes his heart break for what she’s about to see. He walks towards her, trying to stop her from seeing Mulder lying lifelessly on that dirty ground. He doesn’t know why he does it; holding her back won’t make any difference. In fact, it can only make things worse.

“How bad is he hurt?”

He can’t bring himself to say the words before she sees it all for herself.

He tries to take her away just a few seconds after she kneels before Mulder, but it’s no use. He just wishes everything were different, he guesses. He wishes this weren’t so similar to his own pain and that it didn’t open so many wounds.

Scully gets rid of him and runs back to the cabin before he can stop her, while he just stands there, watching helplessly.

It takes him a while to notice Monica’s hand is on his shoulder, comforting, trying to bring him back from his thoughts. He is grateful she is here; it’s good to know there’s somebody you can count on in this type of situation.

There is silence all around. Everyone who is at the scene just stands there quietly, waiting for Scully’s return, for orders on how to proceed, and also out of respect for the dead man, for the woman whose cries are now echoing through the woods… there are a lot of things going on in everybody’s head, so silence on the outside really is the only possibility.

Her feet stomping onto fallen leaves break the quietness as Scully gets closer; Doggett knows what it means: she’s run back to be with Mulder for the very last time.

She’s sobbing when she reappears, barely able to run but still keeping herself on her feet. This time, he doesn’t hold her back.

His eyes moisten as he watches her sit next to Mulder, lay her head onto his chest, as if trying to listen to his heart and prove they’re all wrong, that he is alive. She strokes Mulder’s hair, kisses his cheek, touches his lips with her thumbs, cups his face and talks to him, begs him to wake up. Then she lays her head onto his chest once again and repeats this process so many times that he doesn’t think he can handle watching it for longer.

“John, let me deal with this. I’ll stay with her.”

Monica’s voice is soothing, brings him back a little to a rational state.

He shakes his head.

“I need to do this, but I’d appreciate if you stayed too.”

She nods and then turns to walk towards Scully.

If he had never joined this task force, or if he had heard Scully and Skinner from the very beginning, would they be standing here right now?

He doesn’t know if he can forgive himself for having failed once again.

If anyone had told him he would witness a dead man come back to life one day, he would have laughed at this person’s face. And if that hypothetical person could see him now, they would be the one laughing. Belly-laughing.

Doggett’s whole perception of life itself has changed drastically after the latest events, to the point his mind can’t even process it all properly. He would thank Mulder for unwillingly expanding his horizons if it weren’t too weird to thank someone for having died.

He’s been working on the X-Files long enough to understand there are crazy things in the universe, but some theories Skinner and Scully come up with sometimes are just too absurd for him to even consider them. It is why he was against opening Mulder’s grave; it is why he was still against it when he saw Mulder in the hospital with machines breathing for him. The real question in his mind at the time was: what if he died again? It had been hard enough for Scully to get out of the comatose-like state in which she drowned after the funeral. He couldn’t imagine what having to bury Mulder again would do to her.

But they weren’t wrong, John; you were.

Yeah, mind, I know.

He will apologize for this at some point, when he finds the right words to explain why he would have chosen to keep a man who was alive six feet under. Scully hasn’t taken his opinion well, obviously, and they’ve argued in the past few hours more than they did in months working together. Isn’t it a partner’s job to keep the other sane and grounded when they get too carried away, though? Wasn’t he doing his job as a partner and as a friend by opposing to their decision? She certainly doesn’t think that’s what he was doing. Maybe she doesn’t even think they’re friends; maybe they have never been.

Now who’s getting too carried away over nothing, John?

Yeah, maybe he’s being too dramatic. Is it time to apologize yet?

He slowly walks towards the room and doesn’t look through the window before coming in.

He should have, though, for Scully definitely has more important things in her mind.

Mulder is awake.

John can’t understand what he is saying, but Scully laughs in response. It dawns on him that he has never heard her laugh before.

As she looks towards the door and observes him there, he realizes that, once again, he’s where he doesn’t belong. Scully’s eyes seem to confirm that.

He slowly closes the door, and it is just when he is outside the room that a sigh of relief escapes his lips.

Mulder is going to make it.

John Doggett has kept his promise, after all.

For the first time, he feels hopeful in spite of an uncertain future.

Chapter Text

Mulder

Mulder hates him at first sight, if the push to his chest is any indication.

A great pair they make, Mulder and Scully. Remarkable first impressions.

Doggett’s first impulse, of course, is to ask what the hell the other agent thinks he is doing; his second impulse is to ask himself why.

Of course it takes him a while to get to the why, but he does get there eventually. If he were the one the FBI hated, he would also think everyone that’s not Skinner or Scully was out to get him.

Still, not a good way to meet someone, especially when that someone has helped save your ass. He never considered, even for a moment, that Mulder could be something other than just spooky, but now he is starting to see him as kind of a jerk. A total jerk, actually. He is not at all what Scully painted him to be.

Maybe it’s like they say: love is blind.

His second impression is a little better, although not quite friendly. Mulder still sees him as a threat, in spite of the fact that he’s been trying hard to show him he isn’t the devil. Also, maybe it’s just the animosity between them, but Doggett could swear Mulder is jealous of his relationship with Scully.

Well, he can’t really blame the guy; John himself felt a little jealous when he saw Mulder and Monica interacting so well. It’s like everyone around him understands each other in a way he’s just not able to. He’s the piece of the puzzle that doesn’t fit anywhere.

He hasn’t said it aloud, but sometimes he just wishes there was somebody more like him to back him up every once in a while.

He sighs. He is being unfair, actually. Everyone is great. And Mulder is not that bad either.

The way he explained just now how he saw evil when Doggett wouldn’t believe Monica’s theory was, in a way, comforting. John saw right there what everyone else already did, and what most likely was so enthralling to them: Mulder will be there for you when he realizes you’re not the boogie man trying to scare him at night. He will talk to you and even make you feel like you can trust him with whatever you want to share. It could be his Oxford education in psychology, but John has a feeling it isn’t that.

Judging by how Mulder has been taking care of Scully at the hospital, making sure she is okay and not leaving her side except when she needs to rest, Doggett now sees him as a man who wears his heart on his sleeve and who doesn’t care about what others are going to say or think. He’s just naturally there for anyone he cares about, no matter what.

Does this mean John himself could potentially be included in that very short list of people Mulder cared about? He doubts it, but still, it is progress already to have seen another side of the man. He hopes Mulder has seen another side of him too and will stop pissing him off at some point.

“Thank you for having Scully’s back when I was gone. And thank you for having my back as well in this short period we’ve known one another. I’m sorry I didn’t get the chance to say it before.”

Doggett smiles in surprise as he hears Mulder from the other end of the line. Never in a million years would he be expecting those words coming from him.

Of course, they have come a long way since they first met and Doggett has even come to like the guy, but they are not exactly friends either. Their relationship is kind of a gray area in which they will help each other one day and scorn at one another’s theories and words on the next.

“Doggett? You still there?”

“Yeah, yeah,” he is quick to reply, although it would be less awkward if he pretended to have let his phone drop or something. “I just wasn’t expecting to hear it from you. I appreciate that.”

There is noise on the other end and a woman’s voice mingles with the static. Scully’s, of course. Why didn’t he think Mulder would be with Scully? That also explains why Mulder has been speaking so quietly – the baby.

“Hold on,” Mulder says.

Doggett doesn’t want to pay attention, but it’s impossible not to.

The sound of a kiss reaches his ears, probably because Mulder hasn’t bothered to lower the phone enough for him not to listen. What comes next are mumbled words he can’t really understand, but he is sure ‘love’ is in the middle of it all. He smiles at the mention of the word and decides to hang up. It’s their private moment, and he has taken part in too many of them already.

The only thing he didn’t get the chance to say is that they can always count on him to have their backs. It’s not important anyway; he knows they don’t doubt that by now.

For once, he feels he’s where he belongs; he feels part of this strange family that was bizarrely created by Kersh, even though their boss would never have suspected this could happen.

He is happy with how things have turned out so far. He realizes he fits the puzzle, after all.