Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The hum of the incinerators was the closest thing to music the Department of Memory Integrity ever allowed. It filled the air like a low, endless heartbeat: mechanical, unfeeling, and perfectly synchronised. The sound seemed to come from the walls themselves, from the bones of the building: a subterranean thrum that never faltered, never stopped. Dana Scully had learned to match her own pulse to it years ago. It was easier that way. Easier not to think about what burned. Easier not to remember.

Every morning began the same.

The corridors gleamed in shades of antiseptic white, so polished they reflected light instead of shadow. The overhead fluorescents never flickered, never dimmed; they cast a steady, humming brightness that erased all sense of time. The glass panels along the upper levels refracted that light so sharply that faces blurred into the glare, workers became silhouettes, anonymous figures moving in measured rhythm, outlines of obedience.

Even the air felt artificial. Filtered. Stripped of scent and warmth. It smelled faintly of sterilisation and ozone, a clean so deep it bordered on absence. The air-conditioning carried no variation of temperature, no trace of weather, as if the seasons themselves had been redacted.

Dana Scully moved through it like a ghost.

Her shoes made no sound on the polished floor. Her reflection followed her in every pane of glass, a pale blur, hair twisted neatly at the nape of her neck, white ID tag glinting against the lapel of her grey uniform. Nothing about her stood out; she had been trained for that.

She arrived precisely at 0700 hours, as she had every day for the past four years. The biometric scanner read the veins in her hand and admitted her with a soft chime, a sound more intimate than any greeting. Inside, the temperature dropped by a degree, an invisible cue that she had crossed into the archive levels, where human memory came to be dissolved.

Archive Room 4B, Level 3.

Her workstation was always waiting for her: a metal desk bolted to the floor, a digitiser scanner, a burn chute, and a wall of labelled files arranged in rows so immaculate they looked printed rather than placed. The labels glowed faintly with embedded codes, strings of letters and dates marking which pieces of history were scheduled for “reclassification.”

The word meant erasure.

Today’s directive flickered onto her screen in polite, pastel-blue letters:

OPERATIONAL ORDER 118.5
Directive: Reprocess remaining physical documentation from Revision Year 2001.
Purpose: Reinforcement of National Continuity Narrative.
Authorised Personnel: Level-3 Archivists and above.

The gentle phrasing did nothing to disguise its purpose. It never did.

By now, she knew every form of euphemism for destruction. Reprocess. Streamline. Purify. Reinforce. Each one a different way of saying: forget.

She slipped on her gloves, the synthetic fabric whispering against her skin. The motion was automatic, practiced. She reached for the first stack of files, the paper soft with age, the edges faintly rough where the ink had bled decades ago.

The scanner blinked awake. She fed the documents in one by one, watching the text bloom in ghostly blue across the screen before being overwritten by white light.

CONTENT RECLASSIFIED. SOURCE REDACTED. DISPOSAL AUTHORISED.

A chime. Then another. Then another.

She opened the burn chute. The air that rushed out was dry and hot, smelling faintly of carbon and something sweeter, ink, perhaps, or the ghost of it. The papers disappeared in a hiss of flame that lasted barely a second, the edges curling inward like dying leaves before dissolving into light.

The process was seamless. Efficient. Perfect.

Each sheet that vanished had once carried someone’s life, someone’s moment of rebellion or heartbreak or discovery. Someone’s truth, now made irrelevant. But to Scully, they were only names and dates, patterns she was not paid to interpret. That was the point. Meaning had been engineered out of the work long ago.

She paused only once, when a photo slid across the scanner, an image of three people standing in front of a building, smiling, sunlight breaking across their faces. The algorithm marked it as obsolete. She felt something flicker in her chest, a dull echo of recognition that vanished before it could take shape. She dropped it into the chute and closed the hatch. The heat licked against her gloved fingertips.

She had once asked, long ago, why physical destruction was still required when digital erasure was instantaneous.

Her supervisor, Director Alcott, had smiled, a thin, bureaucratic thing that didn’t reach his eyes.

“Symbolism matters, Agent Scully,” he’d said. His voice was patient, polished, the voice of a man who had long ago stopped questioning his own scripts. “It’s important to see the past die.”

She had nodded then. She always did.

And when he left, she had stared for a long time at the chute, watching the faint line of smoke rise through the vent like breath leaving a body.

The hum of the incinerators continued: steady, tireless, eternal.

But what he hadn’t said, what everyone already knew and never spoke of, was that it wasn’t only the paper that burned.

Every week, scheduled across the city like quiet funerals, came the Reconciliation Sessions. Citizens summoned to clinics, one by one, to have obsolete memories “restructured for continuity.” The phrase appeared in official communiqués and posters, cerulean blue letters on white backgrounds, the kind of colours chosen to calm the mind.

In practice, it meant erasure.

Technicians in pale uniforms would attach neural filaments to the base of the skull, just above the spine, where the brain’s electrical language could be rewritten. A pulse of blue light, a brief vertigo, and then, nothing. The subject would wake clean, docile, and vaguely content, unable to recall what had been removed.

Scully had observed the procedure once during her training years, standing behind glass as a woman in her fifties wept and begged to keep a single image of her husband’s face. The technicians worked efficiently, indifferent to the pleading. When it was done, the woman blinked up at them with a mild, untroubled smile, her eyes emptied of recognition.

“Continuity restored,” the lead technician had said.

The phrase had become part of the culture, uttered in passing when people forgot birthdays, misplaced objects, or struggled to recall a name. A joke that wasn’t really a joke.

Scully sometimes wondered how many of her own memories had been “restructured.” There were gaps she could not explain, blank corridors in her mind where emotion should have lived. Moments that felt half-remembered, like dreams glimpsed through fog. A face she sometimes saw in the edges of sleep: dark eyes, a voice saying her name in a tone that made her chest ache.

She’d learned to silence those thoughts. Curiosity was dangerous. Nostalgia, fatal. As an Archivist, she had been assured that her memories had not been tampered with, as her knowledge was vital to her work. But still, the gaps lingered. 

So she followed orders. She erased, reclassified, incinerated. She told herself it was mercy, that the past was too heavy a thing for anyone to carry.

Still, some nights, when the lights dimmed and the hum of the incinerators softened to a lullaby, she caught herself pressing her fingers to the small scar at the base of her skull, the mark every citizen bore. The skin there pulsed faintly beneath her touch, as if something living had been buried deep within and was trying, very quietly, to wake.

Scully straightened another stack of files, adjusted the angle of the scanner, and let the rhythm take her. The machine’s pulse, her pulse. The hiss, the flare, the quiet.

It was easier this way. Easier to let the world burn quietly, page by page, and tell herself that she was preserving order. That she was keeping the future clean.

Easier not to think about what burned. Easier not to remember.

The department had no clocks, but everyone knew the rhythm of the day by the sound of the ventilation system’s subtle shift around noon. That was when the air recycled, colder, drier, as if reminding them that time had passed. The sound was soft but unmistakable, a faint sigh that ran through the ducts like breath drawn through a mechanical throat.

Scully usually used the moment to stretch her neck, sip water from her rationed cup, and check the burn counter at her station. The screen displayed a line of tidy digits, their incrementing rhythm strangely soothing. She was always ahead of quota. Efficiency was its own reward, they told her. The metrics never lied.

That phrase was painted on the far wall in pale blue letters, beneath the Department’s insignia: Order Through Accuracy. The paint had faded to the same shade as the walls, as if time itself had tried to erase the motto and failed.

A motion sensor hummed overhead, just once, a small mechanical blink acknowledging her continued productivity.

“Dr. Scully,” a voice said from the doorway.

She turned.

Director Alcott stood there, hands clasped neatly behind his back, the faint smile of institutional approval curving his mouth. His suit was immaculate, gray with a red lapel pin that gleamed faintly under the fluorescent light, his clearance level, bright as a drop of blood in all that white.

“Sir.”

“Still ahead of schedule, I see.”

He stepped closer, shoes silent on the polished floor. The scent of his aftershave followed, synthetic citrus, sterile and precise, the kind manufactured for state personnel. He scanned the data display beside her, the numbers glowing faintly across his glasses.

“Remarkable precision, as always,” he said. “You make it look effortless.”

“It is, sir.” Her tone was neutral, practiced, emptied of inflection.

He studied her for a moment longer, eyes moving from her hands to her posture to the steady rhythm of her breathing. There was something quietly invasive about it, as if he were checking her calibration rather than her performance.

“You understand the importance of what you do,” he said finally. “Every page destroyed ensures clarity for the next generation. No contradictions. No confusion. Stability relies on the absence of clutter.”

“Yes, sir.”

He nodded once, the movement slow and deliberate, like a metronome marking the end of an unspoken test.

“Carry on, then. And remember — loyalty to the present ensures peace for the future.”

His voice echoed faintly after he turned away, as though the walls had been built to hold words like that. She watched his reflection in the glass until it blurred into light and was gone.

When he left, the air seemed to expand slightly, as though his presence had compressed the very molecules around her. Scully exhaled, slowly. The ventilation system hissed again, softer this time, almost like a whisper.

She sat back down, her gloved fingers hovering over the next file.

On the far wall, the Department’s insignia, a circle surrounding an open eye, seemed to pulse faintly in the light, though she knew it was only a trick of the fluorescents. Still, she caught herself glancing at it now and then, irrationally aware of being watched.

Somewhere deep below, another incinerator ignited with a low, resonant boom. The sound carried up through the floor, rattling the frame of her desk. She could almost imagine it, the paper curling, the smoke twisting like ghostly script as it rose into the vents, the ash settling somewhere beyond reach.

For a moment, she felt the faintest chill, though the temperature never changed.

Then she continued.

The afternoon shipment arrived at 1500 hours, a dull metal trolley pushed by a pale, quiet courier in a gray uniform. Scully signed the receipt without looking up. Most days, the boxes contained nothing interesting: old census logs, redacted police files, digital storage units slated for meltdown.

But this one was wrong.

The box was older than the others, its corners softened by time, its label faded nearly white. Across the top, written in smudged black type, were the words:

FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION – CLASSIFIED ARCHIVES
DO NOT ACCESS. RESTRICTED MATERIAL.
Transfer Order: Basement 7 → D.M.I. Level 3

Her brow furrowed. Basement 7 hadn’t been active in years.

She scanned the barcode, expecting a rejection notice, but the system blinked green. ACCESS GRANTED.

Strange.

She hesitated only a moment before slicing the tape. The flaps lifted with a soft, tearing sound that seemed too loud in the hushed room. Inside, instead of the usual sealed packets, she found a thick file bound with twine, its manila cover yellowed and brittle. The label across the front had been blacked out, except for two faint, indented lines where the ink hadn’t fully obscured the text.

Scully tilted it toward the light, squinting. The impression slowly revealed itself. Her pulse, usually so calm, skipped once.

CASE FILE X-402: DO NOT DUPLICATE
Agents: FOX W. MULDER / DANA K. SCULLY

She froze.

Her own name. Printed neatly beside another— Fox W. Mulder.

The sound in the room seemed to fold inward, muffled by an invisible pressure. Even the faint hum of the ventilation system dimmed.

She lifted the folder carefully, the twine biting lightly into her gloves. The paper beneath smelled faintly of dust and something older, something almost organic, like ash that had once been flesh. She opened it. Inside were photographs: grainy black-and-white images of dark woods, unmarked vans, faces blurred by flashlight beams. Typed reports, case notes, transcripts of interviews. Her eyes traced the lines automatically, until she reached one sentence that made her breath catch:

Agent Scully’s analysis of the biological sample indicates a non-terrestrial component.

She read it again. And again.

Her hands trembled slightly.

There were more pages, hundreds, it seemed, stitched together by names and dates and references to events she could not recall. Words like abduction, cover-up, psychological manipulation threaded through the text, recurring like echoes of someone else’s obsessions.

Her name appeared dozens of times. So did his. Fox W. Mulder.

But she had no recollection of either the cases or the man. Nothing.

And yet, something in her chest ached. A faint, instinctive recognition that didn’t belong to the mind, but to the body. A hollow behind her ribs, an echo without source.

She glanced toward the nearest security lens. The red indicator light was blinking steadily, recording.

Protocol dictated that any anomaly be reported immediately. But for some reason, she didn’t. She only sat there, breathing too quietly, tracing the ridged edge of the file’s cover as though the texture itself might answer her.

A soft hiss broke the silence, the air vents shifting again, though it wasn’t time for cycle renewal. The recycled air poured through colder than before, carrying a faint chemical tang that made her skin prickle. Somewhere deep in the walls, she heard the distant rumble of the memory incinerators activating.

That was when she realised the faint ache in her chest had a rhythm.

Like remembering something she was never supposed to have forgotten.

The protocol was clear. Any unauthorised file, particularly those marked DO NOT ACCESS, was to be destroyed immediately and logged as a “misfiled relic.” The system even provided an easy button for it: REPORT & INCINERATE.

Her hand hovered over it.

The cursor blinked on the pale screen, a metronome for hesitation. The hum of the incinerator pulsed softly beneath the floor, steady, low, like a sleeping animal waiting to feed.

A fragment of thought surfaced: unbidden, without context.
A man’s voice.
Warm, ironic. You’re afraid to believe.

She flinched. The sound vanished as quickly as it came, but its echo seemed to hang in the charged air.

No, she thought. No, that’s not real.

Still, her chest felt tight. A faint ache began behind her ribs, the kind that came not from exertion but from recognition, like a ghost pressing its palm against her from the inside.

Her fingers slid from the button to the keyboard. Protocol demanded destruction, but training had taught her to verify anomalies first. She opened the archive database window and typed: FOX W. MULDER.

The screen populated with a cascade of references, dates, case numbers, departmental memos. Dozens of entries at once. A sense of vertigo rose as she scrolled, because the format, the fonts, the language all felt familiar in a way her conscious mind did not.

Then, without warning, the records began vanishing.

Line by line, the text blinked out, replaced with empty gray space. Entire entries collapsed like paper burning from the edges inward. At the top of the screen, a notice flashed:

CLEARANCE OVERRIDE – D.K. SCULLY.
EXECUTED BY USER: D.K. SCULLY
FILES PURGED PER SECURITY DIRECTIVE.

Her own clearance. Her own name. Executing the deletion while she sat there watching.

“No…” The word slipped out before she could stop it, barely audible. Her hands were trembling now.

The screen went blank. Only a single error code remained:

ARCHIVE ENTRY NOT FOUND.

She stared at her reflection in the dead monitor, gray light, pale skin, eyes wide as if someone else’s gaze had taken up residence in her.

She stood abruptly and crossed to the burn chute. The file’s weight in her hands felt heavier now, the paper almost alive with memory, with resistance. She opened the hatch. The heat rolled out, dry and white, licking the edges of the folder in anticipation. One motion and it would all be gone.

But she didn’t move.

The vents shifted overhead with a soft hiss, though it wasn’t time for cycle renewal. The recycled air poured through colder than before, carrying a faint chemical tang that made her scalp prickle. The security node above her blinked once, recording her stillness.

She closed the chute slowly, the latch clicking like a soft verdict, and looked around the room. Even the light seemed wrong, more sterile, more watchful. She turned her back to the lens, tucking the folder beneath her lab coat, under her arm.

For the rest of the day, she worked as usual. Perfect pace, perfect precision. She scanned, burned, erased. Her metrics remained flawless.

Only when the final bell chimed and the lights dimmed for night mode did she allow herself to pause.

She slipped into her coat, feeling the hard rectangular edge of the file beneath the fabric. The hallway was empty, the hum of the building subdued to a low drone, like an ocean heard from underground.

At the security gate, she passed through the scanner. Her badge chirped. The guard glanced at her, nodded her through. The system didn’t flag the anomaly. Maybe it wouldn’t. Maybe the file wanted to survive.

Outside, the air was colder than she expected. The city stretched before her, glass towers reflecting the dusk in sterile blues. Above, the broadcast drones drifted silently, scanning for unsanctioned gatherings, unapproved speech. Scully walked with measured calm, her steps echoing faintly against the concrete.

In her pocket, her fingers brushed the corner of the folder. The contact sent a strange shiver through her, as though static had jumped from the paper into her skin.

She didn’t know why, but she couldn’t let it go. Not yet.

For the first time in years, Dana Scully didn’t feel like a machine. She felt something else, something dangerously close to alive.

Chapter Text

The file sat on her kitchen table like contraband.
Its presence altered the apartment’s geometry, like a hidden magnet bending the lines of a compass.

Dana Scully’s apartment was usually a study in sterility: white counters, metal fixtures, a single plant by the window whose leaves had turned the colour of old paper. She’d chosen the space for its anonymity. No mail. No visitors. No distractions. Everything she needed was provided at the DMI anyway, the apartment included.

But tonight, the space felt porous, unstable. She had set the file in the middle of the table as soon as she walked in, unable to leave it sealed inside her coat. The twine had already begun to fray under her fingers, like it knew it would soon be undone.

For a long time, she didn’t move. She stood with her hands braced against the table edge, staring down at the faded manila cover. The words DO NOT ACCESS seemed to pulse faintly under the kitchen light. She told herself it was just her eyes adjusting to the dimness after the bright corridors of Level 3.

She knew she shouldn’t open it. She could still hear Director Alcott’s voice like a nail driven into her skull: Loyalty to the present ensures peace for the future.

But her name was on the cover. And his.

Fox W. Mulder.

She untied the twine.

The folder opened with a soft sigh of old paper. The smell hit her immediately: dust, carbon, the faint musk of something organic, like damp earth. Beneath the smell, there was another note she couldn’t place, sharp and acrid, like ozone after a storm.

She leafed through the contents carefully. Case files. Reports. Photographs printed on curling paper. She had expected dry bureaucratic jargon. Instead, she found images of night fields illuminated by headlights, grainy snapshots of pale figures moving between trees, long scars in the earth like landing marks.

Typed memos on letterhead: Federal Bureau of Investigation. Signatures by directors she didn’t recognise. A Walter Skinner featured on most.

Her eyes snagged on a section marked “Medical Analysis.” The handwriting was neat, small, precise: her handwriting. Notes on tissue samples. Toxin levels. DNA markers labeled “non-terrestrial origin.”

She rubbed her thumb over the ink as if it might smear. It didn’t.

Page after page of interviews: witnesses speaking of lost time, lights in the sky, missing children, unmarked vans. The margins were annotated in her hand, her initials at the end of each notation: DKS.

But she had no memory of any of it.

Her breath came shallow. The hum of her refrigerator was the only sound in the room, low and steady like the incinerators, but it felt different now, conspiratorial.

She shut the folder abruptly and pressed her palms flat against it.

This isn’t real, she told herself. This is fabricated.

But her body disagreed. Her heart was hammering. There was a metallic taste in her mouth, like adrenaline.

She got up and walked to the window. Outside, the city was a grid of sterile blue light. Drones moved between towers like mechanical insects. Their hum vibrated faintly through the glass.

For the first time, she wondered if they were looking at her.

She turned back to the table. The file looked larger now, its edges curling like it wanted to spill itself open again. Her fingers hovered over it, then withdrew.

A question surfaced that she had always dismissed before.

They told her, at induction, that Memory Archivists were immune to cognitive resets. That their recall had to remain intact so they could process outdated narratives correctly.

She had believed them.

Now she wasn’t sure.

Her mind felt full of white noise. The more she tried to remember something specific: her training, her first assignment, the day she’d been hired, the more it slipped away, a word on the tip of her tongue dissolving before she could speak it.

What had she done last weekend? She pictured her apartment exactly as it was now. She pictured herself at her workstation. She pictured the corridors of Level 3.

But nothing in between.

Her throat tightened.

She reached for her glass of water and sipped. The taste was metallic, like the air in the DMI.

She remembered asking, once, years ago, or what felt like years ago, why physical destruction of documents was still required when digital erasure was instantaneous.

Alcott’s voice came back to her: “Symbolism matters, Agent Scully. It’s important to see the past die.”

But another memory, or maybe an echo, rose over it. A flash of a man’s voice, ironic, warm, telling her something about truth. You’re afraid to believe.

She pressed her fingers to her temple.

No. Not real.

Yet the words “Agent Scully” in Alcott’s voice jarred her now. She hadn’t been an agent of anything but the DMI. She’d never been law enforcement. Had she?

She dug through the file again. Her eyes blurred. Her own name stared back at her from dozens of typed reports. Agent Dana K. Scully. FBI credentials.

Her breath came faster.

She went to her terminal. It was a standalone machine, isolated from the Department network, but she had a shadow copy of the archives installed as part of her role. She keyed in Mulder, Fox W.

The system pulsed, searching.

For a heartbeat, data began to appear: name, date of birth, an old photo she couldn’t fully see: dark hair, sharp eyes, mouth half-smiling. Then the screen flickered and went black.

When it came back, the field was empty. No records found.

She tried again. This time, the system locked her out.

A pop-up appeared in polite cerulean blue:

UNAUTHORISED ACCESS DETECTED.
REPORT LOGGED UNDER USER: D.K. SCULLY.

Her own clearance had been used to delete the record mid-search.

Her stomach dropped.

She typed her own name into the database. Her personnel file appeared: basic demographics, clearance level. At the bottom, a new line had been added overnight:

Memory Evaluation: Pending.

The words crawled across the screen like a sentence being written while she watched.

She sat back. The walls of her apartment felt too close, as if leaning toward her. The plant by the window had begun to tremble in the HVAC breeze, its dead leaves clicking softly together like teeth.

How much of her life was real?

She thought of her mother, but could she even remember her mother’s face? A blur of warmth, a hand on her forehead once when she was sick. But no features, no dates. She thought of friends, but nothing. No names.

She pressed her palms into her eyes until she saw stars.

The file was still on the table, patient, waiting.

She reached for it again.

The photographs looked different this time. She saw herself in some of them, only glimpses: her back as she examined a burned circle in a field, her profile caught in flashlight beams, her hand holding a vial of something dark. The date stamps were years before she had supposedly joined the Department.

Another memo: Agent Scully recommended full quarantine of subject. Agent Mulder disagreed.

Her notes in the margin: Inconclusive. Further testing required.

She flipped the page. Another: Mulder claims evidence of government cover-up. Her own initials followed: Possible contamination of the sample. Verify.

A strange ache formed behind her ribs, not just fear but grief, like looking at a photograph of someone you almost remember loving.

She whispered the name under her breath: “Mulder.”

The sound felt forbidden. But right.

Her apartment seemed to shift around her. The refrigerator’s hum deepened, became almost like breathing. The shadows under the counters lengthened, though the light hadn’t changed.

She crossed to the window again. A drone hovered far off, a single red light blinking slowly. It might have been just patrolling. It might not.

Her fingers went to the security badge at her hip. The plastic felt warm, almost alive.

If they’d erased her memory once, they could do it again.

If they’d erased this man from the record, they could erase her, too.

She moved as if under water, each step deliberate and slow, but the air around her felt charged, alive, electric. Her body knew what it was doing even before her mind had caught up. She went to the stove and twisted the dial. The burner clicked twice, then ignited with a soft hiss. The blue flame leapt up, a controlled, living thing, and for a moment she only stared at it, its colour too clean, too precise, like everything else in her life.

Her fingers tightened around the badge. Its smooth plastic edges pressed into her palm. This badge had always been her tether: access, identification, compliance. Her permission slip to exist within the Department’s sterile grid. Burning it felt impossible. And yet, it also felt inevitable.

She raised it above the flame.

The plastic began to soften almost immediately, blackening at the edges. Bubbles swelled and burst on its surface. The embedded chip cracked with a faint, almost pitiful pop. The smell was sharp, acrid, synthetic, burning wires, scorched rubber, the sterile scent of a laboratory caught on fire. It filled her nose and throat until her eyes watered.

The badge curled inward on itself like an insect dying, its once-flat surface warping, twisting, collapsing.

In her mind, a ghost of another image flickered, her hands gloved in latex, lighting a Bunsen burner during medical training; burning tissue samples to sterilise the tray after an autopsy; sealing evidence with a heat-activated strip. Her body remembered the motion, the heat, the smell. This was not entirely alien. Once, long ago, before this job, before this life, had she been someone who resisted? Someone who made choices that did not align with protocol? Someone who questioned?

The thoughts both steadied her and shook her. She could not remember when exactly she had been that person. Or if she had always been who she was now.

She dropped the badge into the sink. The metal of the basin clanged softly, almost swallowed by the hiss of the tap. Steam rose immediately as the water hit it, curling upward like pale ghosts. The acrid scent rose with it, lingering in the small kitchen like the aftermath of a burned-out circuit. It hissed like a warning, but she did not move.

Her hands were steady now. Her pulse had slowed.

She turned off the burner and stood there, the counter cool against her hip, watching the last wisps of steam dissipate. The badge was no longer a badge, just a charred, twisted husk of plastic and dead metal. Its embedded codes, its permissions, its invisible chains, all gone.

She wiped her damp palms on her pants and returned to the table. The file was still there, a quiet, waiting presence. She sat. The chair creaked softly beneath her, and the sound felt intimate, grounding.

Outside her window, the city drones glided past silently, their movement as smooth and precise as clockwork. Their sensor lights swept once across her building, a thin line of red that passed over her window like a finger tracing her location.

She didn’t flinch.

The badge was gone. The file remained.

A strange, muted exhilaration rose in her chest, like the echo of a feeling she hadn’t allowed herself in years. Rebellion. Defiance. A spark of selfhood. 

For the first time, Dana Scully was no longer sure which of them, the watchers or herself, should be more afraid.

She opened the folder again and began to read.

The paper smelled like dust and rain. Her eyes moved over the words, but what she was really reading was herself: fragments of a life erased, a ghost of who she had been.

She dreamed that night.

It began as nothing, just a room, featureless, grey, walls without texture, ceiling like a flat slate, floor hard beneath her feet, though she couldn’t quite place the material. The air was thick and damp, smelling faintly of rain, a wetness that soaked into her hair and clung to her skin as if the room itself were breathing around her. She could hear water dripping somewhere beyond sight, irregular, slow, echoing in the emptiness.

Then a voice spoke her name. A man’s voice.

“Scully.”

She turned, heart starting its erratic rhythm, but there was no one. No figure, no shadow, no source. Just grey, infinite walls and the quiet drip of water. The smell shifted, cigarette smoke now curling around her, thin spirals climbing like tendrils, mingling with the earthy wetness of rain. Her nostrils flared involuntarily, remembering a sensation she couldn’t place, some half-formed memory of inhaling smoke after a long day, feeling the tang of it on her tongue.

Again: “Scully.”

The second time, the voice broke. Warm, desperate. She thought she almost knew it. Something in her chest tightened, a knot of recognition and fear she could not name. Her stomach lurched, and the floor beneath her seemed less solid, as though she were balancing on thin glass.

The room responded to the sound of her thoughts. Shadows pooled in corners that had no corners. Walls extended and contracted subtly, like they were breathing with her. The air was heavier now, thick enough that she felt it pressing against her skin, curling around her limbs. She shivered.

She took a step. The floor felt wet underfoot, yet no water appeared. Her shoes remained dry. Every step echoed unnaturally, a hollow sound that multiplied, as though dozens of people, or echoes of herself, walked behind her in lockstep.

Then a hand brushed her shoulder. She jumped, spinning, but there was nothing there. Only smoke and rain.

The voice spoke again, this time closer, urgent, almost pleading:

“You remember.”

Her knees buckled slightly. Remember what? Her mind tried to grasp at it, but it slipped like liquid between her fingers. Faces, moments, names, everything dissolved before she could pin it down. Only the sensation remained: a longing, a tethered ache that pulled at her chest, an echo of something she had never consciously known but recognised instinctively.

A figure appeared, barely visible, wavering at the edge of her vision. A man. Tall. Dark hair, a sharp profile. Her pulse thundered. She reached toward him, and he receded, drawn back into the grey void like smoke sucked into a vent.

“Scully, it's me,” he said. His voice was a whisper now, carried on the hiss of the rain. Scully…

Her throat tightened. She wanted to speak, to answer, but the words caught in her chest. She could feel tears pooling at the edges of her eyes, but no water came. She ran her hands along the walls, trying to follow him, but the surfaces were smooth, unyielding, without seam or door.

The room shifted again. The smell of cigarette smoke intensified, acrid, stinging her eyes. A soft wind, or maybe it was her own exhalation, whistled through the grey emptiness. It carried voices she couldn’t understand, fragments of sentences: They erased it… They never existed… She shouldn’t remember…

Her chest constricted. She clutched at herself as though holding her own ribs could contain the tidal wave of emotion rolling up through her. Fear, longing, grief, all so raw and unmediated that it left her shaking.

And then, abruptly, she was standing in a forest. Trees rose like towers, dark trunks slick with rain. The smell of wet soil, moss, and pine filled her nostrils. She knew this place. She knew it, though her mind protested with blankness. The ground beneath her boots was soft, squishing slightly, and water ran in tiny rivulets over the leaves.

A van lurked in the distance, unmarked, headlights off, but she could feel it watching. Footsteps echoed behind her again. She spun, and there he was: Fox Mulder. Dark eyes, hair damp, looking at her not with recognition, but with the weight of an entire unsaid history.

“You remember me,” he said, voice low, a tremor in it that betrayed desperation.

“I—I don’t…” she stammered. The words were false even as they left her lips. She knew the sensation, the ache in her chest, the familiarity of him, but no memory came to meet it.

Rain began to fall harder, drumming on the leaves, splattering into the mud at her feet. The smoke from before still lingered, a thin curling haze through the trees, incongruous yet undeniable. She shivered violently, teeth chattering.

He stepped closer, and the air seemed to warp between them, charged, alive. A static that made her skin crawl. Every instinct screamed that she should flee, yet something rooted her in place. She could feel the ghost of her own hands brushing his chest, a memory of touch that never had a chance to exist.

And then the world fractured. The grey room returned, walls compressing around her, closing in like a fist. The rain smell intensified to a choking dampness. She felt water dripping down her face, or was it tears? Hard to tell.

“Remember,” he whispered. She could no longer see him.

Remember what? The word itself was a blade across her consciousness. She clawed at her head, trying to pull back the fog, but the memory fled further, hiding just out of reach. Panic flared. She ran blindly through the grey room, hands outstretched, her breath ragged. The echoes of her steps multiplied, twisting into laughter, or crying, she could not tell.

A sudden metallic tang filled her mouth. Blood? Rust? She could not see the source, could not move her eyes fast enough. The temperature dropped. Frost formed on her skin, not pain, but a sensation she could not categorise.

And then a sound. Her own name, whispered from every corner, every shadow, overlapping with his:

“Dana… Dana… Dana…”

Her body convulsed, a shiver that traveled from her spine to her fingertips. Something cold touched her shoulder. She spun. Nothing. Just smoke, rain, and the half-light of grey emptiness.

Then silence.

She awoke gasping, chest heaving, back drenched in sweat. The room was dark but not silent. The rain smell still clung to the air, though her window was sealed shut. Somewhere a pipe hissed; the hum of the refrigerator was a low, rhythmic pulse. Her heart pounded as if she had been sprinting for hours.

She reached for the lamp. Her fingers trembled violently. The glow illuminated the file that rested on her bedside table. Its cover seemed to exude warmth now, as if it were a living thing, pulsing in time with her heartbeat.

Her palms pressed to her eyes. The scent of smoke, rain, and ozone lingered in her nostrils. Her pulse slowly began to slow, though tremors ran through her limbs. Every nerve ending felt hypersensitive. Every shadow seemed poised to move. Every breath she drew was heavy, loaded with the residue of the dream.

She pressed her forehead to the table, hands still covering her eyes, willing her heart to slow. The room smelled of wet paper, rain, cigarette smoke, and something else, something she could not name but recognised instinctively. Her chest ached with it, with recognition, with longing.

Her mind kept returning to the voice: warm, desperate, familiar in a way that was impossible. How could she recognise someone she could not remember?

For hours she sat there, caught between sleep and wakefulness, the file on the table like a talisman, a curse, and a proof all at once. The hum of the refrigerator beneath her, the echo of rain somewhere beyond the glass, the faint, lingering smell of smoke in her hair, they all insisted on a truth she could not reconcile: she had once known him. She had once lived these cases. She had once remembered.

And yet, her conscious mind could grasp nothing.

All she could do was wait.

And tremble.

The next morning, the Department’s hallways felt narrower than usual. Scully kept her pace measured, her face composed, but her nerves thrummed beneath the surface like a plucked wire. Every footstep echoed too long, like the sound had been caught and replayed just behind her.

The lights overhead glowed their usual antiseptic white, but today they felt colder, almost surgical. The polished floors reflected her outline as she walked, elongating her shape into something spectral. Every time she passed a reflective surface, she caught herself glancing sideways, not sure whether the flicker at the edge of her vision was her own movement or someone else’s.

The ventilation system hissed above her, a thin, continuous whisper. Usually, she could tune it out. Today, she swore she heard a cadence in it, a rhythm that almost sounded like words, though when she tilted her head, it dissolved back into static.

She forced her breathing to stay even, as she’d been trained: neutral expression, neutral pace, no sudden motions. Inside, her heart beat hard against her ribs.

By the time she reached the security checkpoint, her stomach had knotted itself into a tight coil. The scanner sat on its pedestal like a silent sentinel. She reached into her coat pocket, knowing that her badge wasn’t there.

Her heart skipped.

She patted her pockets again. For appearance. Nothing. Her hands trembled slightly; she forced herself to still them.

“Dr Scully,” the security officer said, his voice clipped, almost bored. “Badge?”

Scully held up her hands, forcing calm into her tone. “It… it must have fallen out last night. I—I thought I had it here in my pocket. I can get a replacement, of course.”

The officer raised an eyebrow, scanning her with the impassive scrutiny of someone trained to notice inconsistencies. “Lost or damaged badges are serious. You’ll need a replacement by the end of the day. Security protocol.”

“Yes, understood,” she said smoothly, though her pulse was hammering. She kept her gaze fixed on his face, measuring, calculating, lying as naturally as she had burned the badge itself.

He handed her a temporary access card. “This will get you through Level 3, but it expires at 1700 hours. After that, no entry without the new badge. Don’t lose it.”

She nodded, sliding the flimsy card into her pocket. The plastic felt alien: weak, temporary, a placeholder for the control she had just torn from the Department.

As she moved past the scanner, the faint hum of the ventilation shifted again, sharper, colder, like the building itself had taken note of her transgression. Every reflective surface she passed seemed to flicker, her elongated shadow bending unnaturally, as if recoiling from her.

She kept her pace steady, her composure intact, but beneath the surface, the adrenaline surged. 

When she reached her station, her screen was already on.

That wasn’t normal.

Her fingers hovered over the edge of the console. She never left her system unlocked; protocol forbade it. The login sequence was biometric, layered with security phrases, and impossible to bypass without tripping an alert. But there it was — already active, waiting for her.

A message pulsed in polite, pastel blue letters at the center of the screen:

PERSONNEL RECORD UPDATE: DANA K. SCULLY
Accessed: 04:17 hours
By: SECURITY DIRECTORATE

Her stomach went cold, a weightless drop as if the floor had vanished beneath her feet. 04:17 — she’d been asleep then. Asleep and dreaming of a voice calling her name.

She clicked the notification with a steady hand that did not feel like hers. The personnel file opened.

Inside, her data had been altered. Nothing dramatic, just small, quiet adjustments that felt somehow more sinister than any obvious change. Her clearance level was downgraded by one point. Her medical record flagged for “routine evaluation.” Her residence listed as “under review.”

A footnote at the bottom in the same pastel blue:

ALL ACCESS UNDER CONTINUOUS OBSERVATION.

Her pulse roared in her ears. She scrolled to the access log. The last entry made her skin crawl:

Update executed by User: D.K. Scully

Her own name. Again.

Her hands froze on the desk, palms flat against the cool surface. The security node in the corner blinked once, twice, slow and deliberate, like a heartbeat she couldn’t see. The sound of the ventilation shifted above her, a hiss, then a low sigh, as though the building itself had exhaled.

They knew.

She didn’t move. Even blinking felt dangerous, like a signal someone could misinterpret. 

For an instant, she imagined reaching up and tearing the security node out of the ceiling, hurling it to the floor, crushing it under her heel. The fantasy sent a brief thrill through her body before dissolving into a wave of nausea. That was exactly the kind of action they expected. That was exactly how you got disappeared.

Instead, she forced herself to breathe. In. Out. She typed her password as if nothing were wrong, as if she were simply resuming a routine morning. Her fingers moved automatically, but her thoughts were racing:

How long had this been happening?
Had she been under surveillance for days? Weeks?
Had the file been bait?

The screen flickered. For half a second, she thought she saw another window flash open, a black screen with a single word in white text: REMEMBER. Then it vanished, replaced by the usual dashboard.

Her palms were damp.

She leaned back in her chair and made her face neutral. Neutral expression, neutral breathing. Just another worker. Just another day. The walls of Level 3 seemed to draw closer, their once-bland beige taking on a greenish tinge under the lights. She could feel her pulse in her neck, a dull, insistent beat.

Someone in the aisle behind her coughed. She didn’t turn. The sound of their footsteps moved away, but she could not shake the sense that someone was still standing just behind her, leaning in, reading over her shoulder.

She imagined the Security Directorate reviewing footage of her face right now. She imagined them scrolling back, watching the moment she took the file home, watching her sit in her kitchen as her eyes widened over the pages.

The idea felt less like paranoia and more like a certainty.

She forced her eyes back to her screen and pretended to work, but her thoughts were a white noise of panic. She could taste metal at the back of her throat.

She thought about the dream. The smoke, the rain, the voice calling her name. Scully.
Had that been a dream? Or a memory clawing its way back?

Had her memories been erased?

No. She’d been told they hadn’t. She’d been told, again and again, during the intake process at DMI: “Your history remains intact. Your placement is voluntary. Your loyalty is voluntary.”

But what did that mean, now?

Her fingers hovered over the keyboard. She knew it was foolish, dangerous, even. But she felt compelled. She opened a new search window, typed slowly, deliberately:

FOX W. MULDER

The cursor blinked.

The database returned nothing.

She refined the query, tried variations of the name, case numbers. She reached for a cross-reference tool buried three menus deep, one that only senior staff typically used. Her hands were steady, but inside, her thoughts were fracturing.

The database loaded. This time, a single result flashed into existence, then blinked out mid-refresh.

Record not found.

She tried again.

The same flicker: a page, a name, a date: then nothing.

Her stomach twisted. She dropped deeper into the system, scrolling to the access logs of the archive. She watched as her own clearance credentials appeared, executing the deletion in real time. The timestamp matched the moment she had first typed his name.

Someone was wiping the record as she looked for it. And they were using her identity to do it.

The cursor blinked at her, patient, expectant.

Scully sat frozen, staring at her own name in the log file, fingers hovering just above the keyboard. The security node blinked again, once, twice, like it was breathing with her.

They didn’t just know.

They wanted her to know they knew.

All day she worked in silence. The clatter of scanners, the hiss of the burn chute, the soft mechanical heartbeat of the ventilation system, everything was familiar, methodical, expected. Her metrics were flawless. Every page scanned, every file burned, every record reclassified, executed with the precision of a machine. Yet, each step she took sent a small tremor of heat into her chest, a quiet insistence that she could not ignore.

Every so often, the corner of her eye caught a flicker of movement, a figure slipping past a hallway junction, a shadow bending just behind a pillar, but when she spun her head, there was nothing. The polished floors reflected only the lines of fluorescent light, slicing the walls into geometric patterns that felt too sharp, too deliberate. The ventilation cycle shifted, colder now, sharper, like it had been tuned to her pulse. Her breath formed faint clouds in the filtered air, momentary ghosts of her presence that dissipated before they could be tracked.

She walked among her coworkers with the same measured cadence she had maintained for years, but every face seemed just slightly wrong: too symmetrical, too still, too practiced. A cough echoed behind a wall and made her flinch, even though the person was nowhere to be seen. Her mind catalogued everything, every anomaly, like a soldier noting enemy movements, but her thoughts kept circling back to the file. To the name Fox W. Mulder. To the inked evidence of things she shouldn’t remember yet somehow did.

Lunch passed unnoticed, swallowed by the hum of machines and the sterile scent of institutional cleaning fluids. She poured a cup of water and drank mechanically, tasting only the faint metallic tang of the filtered pipes. The sound of the burn chute beside her, the tiny hiss of flame consuming history, became a metronome to her rising tension.

When the final bell chimed, signaling the end of her shift, she did not move toward the exit as usual. She paused, hands gripping the edges of her desk, feeling the vibration of the building in her fingers. The hallway outside awaited her, and for the first time, it felt like a corridor of traps rather than a passage to freedom.

Scully found herself descending to the lower levels of the building, the ones reserved for security and 'personnel support'. She rarely came down here. The walls were darker, the lighting softer, but somehow harsher too, as if it were designed to reveal imperfections rather than conceal them.

The elevator doors opened with a hiss that echoed far too loudly in the empty corridor. She stepped out, the temporary badge in her pocket feeling like a brand. Ahead, a single counter waited behind a thick pane of glass. The sign above it read IDENTITY SERVICES – AUTHORISATION REQUIRED in stark white letters.

A man sat at the desk. His hair was pale and slicked back, his face unlined but strangely featureless, like a sketch someone had never finished. His hands moved with precise, insect-like motions over a keyboard.

“Name,” he said without looking up.

“Dana K. Scully,” she replied, her voice even.

“Reason for replacement?”

“Lost and damaged,” she said automatically.

He glanced up then, and his eyes were grey, too pale to be natural. “Lost and damaged,” he repeated. “That’s unusual for you.”

Scully felt her chest tighten. She forced a neutral smile. “It was an accident.”

He typed something into his terminal. The screen’s glow reflected faintly across the glass and onto her face, making her skin look almost translucent.

“Security Directorate flagged your file,” he said without inflection. “Clearance level reduced. Medical evaluation scheduled. It’s all standard procedure.”

He slid a small black scanner toward the glass. “Place your hand on the panel.”

Her pulse kicked hard, but she did as instructed. The panel was cold, colder than it should have been. A faint vibration ran under her palm, like a heartbeat in reverse.

“Retinal scan,” he said.

She leaned forward. The device beeped once. She felt a thin thread of panic coil inside her, an almost physical sensation, like a wire tightening around her lungs.

As she stepped back, she caught her reflection in the glass, but for a second, it wasn’t her. The reflection’s mouth twitched upward in a grimace she hadn’t made. She blinked, and it was gone.

The man handed over a new badge. Its surface gleamed too brightly under the light, as though it had been polished for her. Embedded in the plastic was a new chip, the edges faintly pulsing.

“Wear this at all times,” he said. “The old badge was compromised. This one is more secure.”

Scully reached for it, her fingers brushing his for a fraction of a second. His skin was cool, unnaturally smooth, like wax.

“Compromised,” she echoed softly, curling her fingers around the badge. It felt heavier than it should.

As she turned to leave, she felt it, the unmistakable sensation of eyes on her back. The room had no visible cameras, but she knew she was being watched. Her pace stayed even, but her jaw locked tight.

Inside the elevator, she pressed the button for the ground level. The doors closed slowly, too slowly. For an instant, she swore the pale man was still looking at her through the narrowing gap, his expression unreadable.

When the doors sealed shut, she exhaled. The new badge was still in her hand, cool and slick. It didn’t feel like a badge. It felt like a leash.

As the elevator rose, the faint pulse of the chip under her thumb synced perfectly with her heartbeat.

The sterile plazas outside stretched before her like frozen stages. Glass towers mirrored a sky that seemed unnaturally clean, unblemished, too perfect. Reflections bounced along the surfaces, fracturing the world into angles and lines that didn’t exist, multiplying the sense of being watched. Her shadow, elongated in the late afternoon light, seemed to hesitate at her feet before stretching forward in obedient imitation.

Every step felt measured, but her mind was on the file in her apartment, on her table, a secret she carried against protocols that were suddenly suffocating. Her fingers itched to touch it, to feel its texture, to reassure herself that it was real. And then there was the badge, her security clearance hanging from a cord in her pocket, cold metal against her palm. She knew she was being watched. She didn’t need the logs or the updates to know it. The air itself seemed thick with observation, a subtle static pressure that made her ears ring faintly.

She passed a surveillance drone hovering briefly above a plaza fountain. Its optic lens swept across the plaza, caught her reflection, and she pretended not to notice. But the pressure in her chest increased, a slow squeeze that made her stomach knot.

By the time Scully reached her apartment, dusk had thickened into a kind of metallic twilight, the city’s endless hum filtering through her walls like an electric pulse. She set her bag down with practiced precision, but her movements felt mechanical, borrowed from an older version of herself that still believed in order.

The new badge was clipped neatly to her coat pocket. She could feel its faint weight tugging at the fabric, a silent reminder of surveillance disguised as routine. When she unhooked it, it left a small, cold impression against her palm. The thing was too smooth, too perfect. It caught the dim light like an eye.

She placed it on the counter beside the file, the two objects seeming to oppose each other: one sanctioned, one forbidden. Authority and disobedience sharing the same surface.

For a long moment, she stood motionless, her reflection fractured across the kitchen window. The city outside glowed sterile blue, its towers flickering with the restless movement of surveillance drones. She could almost feel their gaze sweeping over the building, thin beams of invisible scrutiny brushing the glass.

Her pulse was uneven. Every beat seemed to echo in her ears.

Scully crossed to the table and sat down. The file waited exactly where she’d left it, its edges softened by handling. The paper seemed to breathe faintly in the quiet, as though something inside was alive, patient.

She brushed her fingertips across the cover. The sensation was rougher than she expected, fibrous, fragile. The new badge, by contrast, gleamed in the corner of her vision, its embedded chip pulsing faintly, almost rhythmically. She realized the pattern matched the thrum of her refrigerator. The thought made her skin prickle.

She reached out and turned the badge face down.

The small act steadied her.

The silence in the apartment was thick. When she finally untied the file’s frayed twine and spread the contents across the table, the pages whispered softly, like they were remembering how to be touched.

She read until the words blurred into each other, case numbers, names, coordinates, autopsy reports written in her own careful hand. There were sketches of symbols she didn’t recognise but that made her throat tighten, as if her body remembered something her mind did not.

At one point, she thought she heard movement in the hallway outside her door. A soft, measured step, then another. She froze, breath caught halfway between her lungs and her throat.

Nothing.

When she looked back at the papers, one page had shifted, slid slightly askew as though nudged by an unseen hand.

She closed her eyes for a moment and let the stillness return, fighting the impulse to glance toward the window or the door. Paranoia was an infection here; it spread fast once it got in.

Her gaze landed again on her own handwriting—D.K. Scully, looping neatly at the corner of a typed report on 'anomalous biological matter'. There was an addendum beneath it, written in a darker ink:

Subject exhibits resistance to memory-conditioning protocols. Recommend containment or removal.

Her hand tightened around the edge of the paper until it crumpled.

She looked back toward the counter. The new badge lay face down, but now a faint red light blinked once beneath it. Then again.

A tracker.

Of course.

She rose slowly, her chair scraping against the floor with a sound that seemed louder than it should have been. The air felt heavier, pressurised, as if the apartment itself were holding its breath.

She walked to the counter and picked up the badge. The light blinked again, steady now. Her reflection stared back at her from its surface, fractured and cold.

She wanted to crush it. But not yet. Not until she knew more.

Instead, she carried it to the far corner of the room and dropped it into the drawer beside her obsolete appliances: pager, analog watch, a dead phone. Things the system no longer listened to.

She returned to the table.

The file’s pages glowed faintly in the dim orange light filtering through the blinds. Outside, the city shimmered, indifferent.

Scully bent over the papers once more. Her pulse steadied, her breathing deepened. Each sentence she read felt like peeling away another layer of silence. She traced the lines of ink with her fingertip, slow and deliberate. The deeper she read, the more she felt something stir, a ghost of herself, half-buried beneath years of sanctioned forgetting.

The hum of the refrigerator was back, low and constant, but this time it didn’t sound neutral. It sounded like breathing.

She ignored it. She kept reading.

And somewhere between the words, between the fragments of her, supposed, old life, she began to feel something dangerous: recognition.

She read, but this time differently. With the badge out of sight, the weight of surveillance momentarily lifted, she could read like someone claiming her own eyes, her own mind, her own agency. Every annotation, every note, every typed report felt closer, more intimate. It was as though the words themselves recognised her renewed attention, pulling her deeper into a history she should have forgotten, a life she was only now beginning to confront.

The rain pattered against the window. Somewhere distant, a vehicle passed, tires hissing on wet asphalt. Smoke curled faintly from a chimney down the block. All of it, the ambient details, grounded her. The world was still real, still tangible.

And yet, the ache in her chest remained, her name, her writing, his name, his words, the pull toward a man she did not remember, a name that should not mean anything, yet resonated with an impossible familiarity.

She turned another page.

Chapter Text

Two weeks had passed since the file had invaded Scully’s apartment, and with each day her movements had become less mechanical, more hesitant, as if her own body were questioning routines it had long accepted.

Her mornings still began with the same antiseptic rhythm: Level 3 clearance, biometric scan, silent elevator descent. She would pass the same checkpoints, exchange the same clipped nods, feel the same retinal scan’s cold pulse of light against her eye. Yet lately, she found herself pausing, fractional hesitations so small that only she could notice them. Her hand lingered above the scanner before setting her ID against it. Her gaze flickered to the surveillance cameras she’d long learned to ignore. The world’s precision had begun to feel not reassuring but predatory, as though the building itself were tracking her heartbeat.

In the archives, the hum of the incinerators had grown unbearable. It pressed into her skull like an invisible frequency, resonating with the faint ache that pulsed behind her ribs. The air felt thinner. Fluorescent light fractured on metal shelves and glass panels, too bright, too exact. The walls seemed to close around her, lined with the silence of a million erased records: histories stripped of names, of consequence, of witnesses.

She tried to focus on the motions: scanning, reclassifying, incinerating. The mantra of order. But her eyes caught on the edges of certain documents, phrases like “neural memory extraction” and “cognitive dissonance retention ratio.” They should have meant nothing. Yet her pulse reacted before she could rationalise it. Her breath shortened. The hum deepened.

And always, there was the sensation: a faint ache that lived behind her sternum, persistent and unyielding, like the echo of an emotion she could not name.

Sometimes, as she sat at her terminal, she would touch the back of her neck, almost unconsciously. A phantom itch, a sensitivity. Her fingers traced the spot where the skin was unbroken, smooth, and yet she thought she could feel something beneath it, a wrongness just out of reach.

That night, when she left the archive, the corridors seemed longer. Her heels clicked against the polished floor, and the sound echoed in a rhythm that didn’t belong to her. The fluorescent panels flickered briefly, and her own reflection shimmered in the walls’ glass: pale, taut, eyes shadowed. She almost didn’t recognise the woman staring back.

A scent caught her mid-step.

It was faint but distinct: rain on concrete, wet leaves crushed underfoot, and cigarette smoke curling upward through cold air.

Her breath caught. The air seemed to shift in pressure. For a second, she thought she heard something, her name, whispered like a thread of sound in a dark room. She turned sharply, scanning the corridor.

Nothing. Only the endless sterile light.

The scent dissipated, leaving a hollow sensation in her chest, as though something vital had just receded beyond reach.

By the time she reached her apartment, night had deepened into the kind of mechanical quiet that belonged only to cities after curfew. Her new security badge hung neatly from her uniform, identical to the old one, but lighter somehow, more fragile. The act of accepting it had felt like stepping back into a cage.

Her building was as silent as a morgue. The lock recognised her touch; the door opened with a pneumatic sigh.

Inside, the air was too still. Her apartment was a precise grid of compliance: sterile counters, pale walls, regulated temperature. Yet lately it had begun to feel haunted, not by ghosts, but by memory itself. The faint scent of paper lingered, mixed with dust and something faintly organic, like skin warmed by lamplight.

The file was still there, under the small lamp on her kitchen table.

It had no right to exist. She had burned its serial code from every record. It should have vanished into system oblivion weeks ago. But here it remained, manila folder, edges curling, twine fraying, quietly waiting for her.

Scully sat down without turning on the lights.

The only illumination came from the streetlamp outside, its amber glow filtering through the blinds, slicing the room into pale bands of shadow. The folder lay between her hands like a relic, something illicit and holy.

She untied the string. The paper rasped softly, a sound that struck her nerves like static.

Inside, documents she had already memorised, photographs she had already questioned, names that dissolved when she searched them. Yet tonight, something felt different. The ink seemed darker. The faces in the photographs less still, as though waiting for her to remember.

She lifted one: a night field, headlights cutting through fog, a blurred figure standing among trees. The photograph trembled slightly in her hand.

Her chest tightened.

The air shifted. She smelled the rain again, this time clearer, closer. Wet grass, ozone, the metallic tang of breath. Her fingers twitched as if recalling the weight of something cold and familiar: the handle of a gun. Her pulse quickened, a pattern of remembered adrenaline firing through a body that shouldn’t have known it.

She pressed her palm flat against the table, grounding herself. The texture of the wood felt different, more porous, as though the surface itself were breathing.

Her other hand found her pen, the same regulation-issue pen she had used that day, years ago, or maybe never. Her mind stuttered around the thought. She remembered writing. Or thought she did.

For a moment, she saw a flash, her own handwriting across a sheet of paper, looping letters, urgent and deliberate. “Subject resists alteration. Proceeding with…”

The sentence dissolved before she could finish it.

Her head dropped into her hands. The air felt thick, clotted with silence. The world outside continued in its clockwork precision, monitors pulsing, drones humming through the sky, but inside her apartment, time seemed to slow.

She closed the file and sat motionless, staring at the floor.

Her thoughts moved like a tide beneath the surface, slow, involuntary, returning again and again to the same impossible questions.

What had she been before all this? Who had she written those words for?

And why did she feel, when she breathed too deeply, that someone was missing from her life, as real as breath and as unreachable as a dream?

She stood finally, moving to the window. The blinds parted with a faint whisper.

The city stretched before her: glittering, orderly, suffocating. Drones drifted past in even intervals, their searchlights glancing off glass towers. Somewhere below, a siren wailed once, then fell silent.

Her reflection wavered in the windowpane: sharp shoulders, eyes rimmed with exhaustion, mouth set in an expression she didn’t recognise.

She turned away.

But as she crossed the room, she paused. The faintest sound, a scrape, almost imperceptible, came from the hallway outside her door.

Her heart stuttered.

She moved closer, holding her breath. Nothing. No footsteps, no voices. Just silence. But when she exhaled, she caught it again: smoke.

Faint. Acrid. Human.

Her pulse raced. Her gaze flicked toward the ventilation panel above the door. The faintest curl of smoke, imagined or not, seemed to trace through the beam of streetlight cutting through the room.

She reached instinctively for her sidearm, regulation issue, holstered against her hip even off duty. Her hand trembled as she unclipped the strap.

There was no one there. There was no evidence of intrusion.

And yet the air carried the unmistakable weight of presence.

She stood there for a long time, gun lowered but not holstered, staring at the shadows pooling beneath the door.

Later, she would try to rationalise it. Electrical malfunction. Air contamination. Residual scent from the corridor.

But she couldn’t explain the other thing, the pulse that rose in her throat, the heat behind her eyes, the visceral certainty that someone, somewhere, was watching her, not with malice, but with recognition.

When she finally lay down that night, sleep came fitfully. Images flickered beneath her eyelids: headlights cutting through fog, the press of cold air against her face, a hand reaching for hers, the sound of someone saying her name: not in command, not in warning, but in reverence.

Her chest ached with the effort of waking.

In the darkness, she touched the back of her neck again. The skin was smooth, but the ache was deeper now, radiating through her skull like static.

Her body remembered something her mind had not yet earned the right to recall.

Outside, the streetlights flickered once, like a pulse syncing to her own, and the scent of rain drifted faintly through the ventilation system.

Somewhere far below, in the city’s shadowed depths, a man who had refused to forget her stirred.

The archive was nearly silent when the failure began.

Scully had been the last to leave for the night; she always was. The hum of the filtration vents formed a thin, familiar drone in the background, a sound she had long since stopped hearing. The room was sterile, ordered, illuminated by the white-blue gleam of fluorescent panels embedded into the ceiling. The walls themselves seemed to exhale cold air, the kind that dried her throat and made the world feel distant.

She was logging the last record of the night, the file scanner glowing beneath her hands. The interface emitted a low whine, like a small animal in distress, then went silent. The lights flickered once, twice.

Then the power went out.

Everything stopped: the hum, the fan, the mechanical breath of the archive. The silence that followed was almost deafening.

Her first thought wasn’t fear, but calculation. Power failures were rare, almost impossible within DMI facilities. Every system had redundancies, backups, and contingencies. If the lights were gone, something deeper had failed.

Or had been tampered with.

A faint static crackled in her ears as the ventilation systems wound down. Somewhere down the hall, a relay clicked. She could taste the air: metallic, sharp, laced with ozone. Dust floated up from the machines, the scent oddly human, like the skin of an old book.

Her heartbeat quickened. She reached for the flashlight clipped to her belt, thumbed it on. The narrow beam cut through the dark, catching a swirl of dust motes suspended like ash. The archive aisles stretched before her, endless rows of glass-sealed cases, blinking lights dead, shadows bending at strange angles.

She turned, slow, deliberate.

Something shifted behind her.

The sound was almost imperceptible, a scrape of a boot sole, a brief intake of breath. Her body froze.

“Who’s there?” she said, her voice steady but small in the cavernous dark.

No answer.

Her fingers brushed her sidearm. She unholstered it with the same economy she used for scanning, the act mechanical, automatic, yet her pulse betrayed her precision, fast, uneven. She moved toward the sound, each step soft against the polished floor.

When the emergency lights came on, they didn’t blaze; they bled. A low red glow filled the space, seeping through the slats in the ceiling like the pulse of a dying organism. The effect was disorienting; shadows deepened instead of retreating.

And then she saw him.

At the far end of the aisle, half-obscured by the dark, a man stood motionless.

He was real, physical, his outline unmistakably human, but somehow he looked wrong in this place, as though the air itself resisted recording him. His clothes were clean but untraceable, no insignia, no fabric tag, the kind of clothing that didn’t exist in DMI databases. His face was drawn, his eyes wide and fixed on her.

“Dana Scully,” he said quietly.

The sound of her name, spoken like that, with weight and something she couldn’t name, hit her harder than the sight of him.

Her breath stilled. Her full name, Dana Scully, hadn’t been used aloud in years.

“I don’t know who you are,” she said, the words automatic. “You need to leave this facility.”

He didn’t move. His gaze softened. “You don’t remember me.”

The way he said it wasn’t accusatory. It was sorrow.

She tightened her grip on the gun. “Step into the light.”

He obeyed slowly, almost reverently, as if afraid to startle her. The red wash caught his features, the sharpness of his jawline softened by fatigue, stubble across his chin, eyes shadowed but lucid. He looked both aged and ageless.

Her stomach dropped. There was something painfully familiar in the tilt of his head, the way his eyes seemed to search her face for recognition rather than trust.

“I’ve been looking for you,” he said softly. “For a long time.”

His voice carried reverence, the kind used for lost languages or extinct stars.

“Who are you?”

“Fox Mulder.”

The name landed like a cipher in her brain, unfamiliar, yet her body reacted as if to an electric current. Her pulse stuttered; a strange ache bloomed at the base of her skull. She blinked, trying to steady her breath.

“I don’t know that name,” she lied. Even though she had read it countless times over the past two weeks. 

“I know,” he said, voice low. “They took it from you. From both of us.”

“Stop talking.”

“You asked questions,” he said. “And I followed you into the dark. They didn’t want us to remember.”

Her chest tightened. The flashlight shook in her hand, beam trembling across his face. His eyes caught it, reflecting not fear, but something more devastating, relief.

He took one step forward. She raised the gun instantly.

“Stay back.”

“I’m not here to hurt you.”

“Then what do you want?”

His throat worked, a flicker of emotion breaking the calm. “To see you. To make sure you’re still real.”

The words shouldn’t have mattered. But the tone, quiet, reverent, slipped past her defenses. Something deep in her chest shuddered.

The air thickened with the smell of ozone and dust. The red emergency light pulsed faintly, casting both of them in alternating bands of shadow and bloodlight.

She took a slow step back, the edge of a console pressing against her hip. “If you don’t leave now, I’ll—”

“—call security?” His mouth curved in something like sadness. “They won’t hear you. The system’s down.”

Her breath hitched. He moved another inch closer, and she caught the faintest scent off him, rain and something else. It shouldn’t have meant anything, yet her knees weakened. She’d dreamed that scent.

Her body betrayed her with every small tremor. The ache in her ribs intensified. Her mind scrambled to classify the sensations, but language failed her.

“Who are you really?” she asked.

“I told you.”

“Prove it.”

He hesitated, then moved with deliberate care. “You’ll hate me for this.”

Before she could respond, he stepped close enough that the air between them changed, warmer, charged. His hand lifted toward her face, stopping just short of contact. “May I?”

“Don’t—”

But he did, gently, his fingertips brushing the skin just behind her ear.

The sensation was electric. Not pain, recognition. The muscle at the base of her neck spasmed as though responding to an old wound. Her vision blurred. For a split second, the sterile red light fractured into something else entirely: headlights in rain, a voice shouting her name, the metallic taste of blood, the smell of wet earth.

She gasped and stumbled back.

“What did you do?”

He lowered his hand slowly. “Nothing. I just reminded your body what your mind forgot.”

The ache in her skull pulsed like a heartbeat.

Her voice cracked. “You’re lying.”

He shook his head. “You had a scar there. A mark of extraction. Not at the back of your neck, not like the others. They used it to rewrite the Memory Revisions: your precision, your discipline. They took away all the things that mattered. But when you started remembering, they made you forget.”

Her mouth went dry. The gun wavered.

“You’re insane,” she whispered.

He nodded faintly. “That’s what they call anyone who remembers.”

The red light flickered overhead. For a moment, the room went dark again. She heard his breathing, quiet but steady.

When the lights returned, he was closer. She hadn’t heard him move.

“Don’t,” she said, raising the gun again.

He stopped, his expression unreadable. “You don’t have to believe me. But you need to leave this building. They’ll come for you now. The moment the power cycles, your terminal will report the interruption.”

“I’m not going anywhere until I get some answers.”

“You always said that,” he murmured.

Something inside her buckled. She didn’t know why that sentence hurt.

He glanced up, scanning the walls. “There are cameras everywhere but the old supply cupboard, behind the west stacks. It’s shielded.”

She didn’t answer. Her rational mind screamed at her to call it in, to detain him. Yet her legs followed when he turned, almost against her will.

He led her through the aisles, past dormant scanners, the glow of red emergency strips strobing across their faces. Every step deepened the sense that they were moving through something forbidden.

He opened a narrow metal door, unmarked, utilitarian, and gestured her inside.

The cupboard was small, almost claustrophobic. The air was warmer here, tinged with dust and faint traces of machine oil. The door shut behind them with a dull click.

Scully’s breath came too fast. The walls were close enough that when she turned, her shoulder brushed his chest. The proximity was unbearable, his presence alive and human in a world built to erase both.

He said her name again. Softly. Scully.

Her eyes flicked up to meet his, and for a heartbeat, she forgot to breathe.

He looked at her the way someone looks at a miracle they’re afraid to touch. Awe and grief lived side by side in his expression. His eyes shimmered faintly in the dim light.

“I thought they’d destroyed you,” he said, voice breaking on the last word. “Every record, every trace. I thought—”

He stopped, his throat working. The restraint in his voice hurt more than desperation.

Scully’s gun hand trembled. “You’re delusional.”

“Then tell me why you’re shaking.”

She couldn’t.

Her pulse roared in her ears. The smell of rain lingered, phantom and impossible. Her hand tightened on the gun, but it felt insubstantial now, an object from a lesser reality.

“Why are you here?” she demanded.

“To remind you that you’re more than this,” he said softly. “You were never meant to forget.”

Her mind rejected it, but her body leaned infinitesimally closer. His presence disrupted the sterile geometry of her world, and for the first time, the air in her lungs didn’t feel state-issued.

He watched her with reverent patience, as if waiting for her to rediscover language.

Something in her broke. The pressure behind her ribs surged; her throat closed. Tears rose unbidden, burning. She reached up, hesitant, mechanical, and touched the place behind her ear where he’d touched her. The skin was smooth, unbroken. But beneath the surface, something pulsed, something that hurt.

“Why do I feel like I know you?” she whispered.

“Because you do,” he said simply.

The silence that followed was unbearable. The world seemed to contract around them: the air, the hum of distant systems rebooting, the faint hiss of her own breath.

She staggered back, the motion instinctive, desperate to reclaim distance. The gun rose again, clumsy in her grip.

“Stay there.”

He did. His expression didn’t change.

Her hand shook violently now. “You don’t exist. None of this—”

“I know,” he said softly. “That’s what they wanted.”

Her vision swam. She could feel the edges of something vast pressing against her mind, memory trying to surface, reality fighting it back down.

When she blinked, she thought she saw rain again. Laughter.

Then it was gone.

The emergency lights flickered once more, and in that stutter of darkness, they both froze, their breath visible in the thin air, the hum of the archive returning like a pulse.

The light steadied.

Scully stood with her weapon raised, her other hand clutching the place behind her ear as if to keep her world from spilling out.

Mulder stood before her, still as prayer, reverent and unafraid.

Neither spoke.

The silence filled the cupboard like water, dense and heavy.

And then the lights flickered again.

She stood there shaking, the cold of the cupboard’s metal shelving pressing into the backs of her thighs, her fingers still trembling around the gun, though her aim was useless now. Her breath came uneven, short, shallow. The air in the room felt dense, charged, alive with static. The hum of the machinery hadn’t returned; the world outside the emergency lights had gone still. The small red bulbs along the wall pulsed at measured intervals, painting everything in a deep crimson rhythm: heartbeat, heartbeat, heartbeat.

Mulder didn’t move. He stood a few feet away, his silhouette half-consumed by shadow, his breath visible in the chill. When he finally spoke, his voice was lower now, reverent but fractured at the edges.
“Scully… It’s really you.”

Something in his tone undid her. It wasn’t the words, it was the way they trembled between devotion and disbelief, the way they carried years of something she couldn’t yet name. Her throat tightened. She looked at him through the red light, her vision blurred not just by tears but by the thin film of unreality that had settled between them.

Her hand fell from the gun. It clattered against the floor, loud, metallic, obscene in its finality. The sound echoed around the room and was swallowed by the dark. She pressed her palms to her knees, trying to anchor herself, but the tremor in her body deepened until she had to clutch the wall beside her just to stay upright.

“I don’t—” She stopped, breath catching. “I don’t remember you.” The words were shards of glass in her mouth. “But I—” She couldn’t finish. The next breath came ragged. “I feel like I should.”

Mulder’s eyes glimmered in the low light, wet, alive. “You don’t have to remember everything,” he said softly, almost afraid to push. “Just — believe that this is real.”

Her laugh broke somewhere between disbelief and grief. “Real,” she repeated, but her voice splintered. “You talk about ‘real’ as if that still means something. I don’t even know what I am anymore.”

He took a careful step forward. She didn’t recoil this time, only stiffened, her breathing shallow.
“When they erased you,” he said, voice raw, “I thought it was the end. I searched every system, every encrypted database. There was nothing left. Not a trace. But I couldn’t let go of you, Scully. Even when I thought maybe I’d made you up.”

Her lips parted slightly at the sound of her name on his tongue. The syllables hit something deep, a place beneath her reason, something physical, visceral. Her pulse stuttered.

“I’m not who you think I am,” she whispered.

“You are,” he said, stepping closer. “You’re exactly who you’ve always been. You just don’t know it yet.”

She shook her head, the movement small but desperate. “No. I’m… I work for the DMI. Level Three clearance. I process personnel files, I—” Her voice faltered. She’d said those same words a thousand times before, an oath recited, an identity constructed. Tonight, they rang hollow.

Mulder’s gaze softened. “And yet you found something you weren’t supposed to.”

Scully’s head jerked up, startled. “What?”

“You said you process files,” he said carefully, watching her reaction. “Tell me what you found.”

Her breath caught. She hesitated, glancing toward the far wall as if the archive itself could overhear. The lights flickered again, and for an instant the red glow deepened to black before sputtering back. She exhaled shakily.

“There was… a file,” she said finally. “Two weeks ago. It came through the Level Three transfer channel. Classified FBI archive, pre-Integration era.” She swallowed. “It shouldn’t have existed. The metadata was scrambled, and the clearance stamp was outdated. I thought it was a clerical error.”

Mulder said nothing. He only took a half step closer, as though afraid the sound of his breath might interrupt her.

“I opened it,” she continued, voice quieter now. “There were names, mine. And yours. Dana Katherine Scully. Fox W. Mulder. The Bureau. Field reports. Investigations into… anomalies.” Her brow furrowed. “X-Files.” She said it as if tasting the word for the first time, uncertain, disbelieving. “I didn’t understand what it meant. It read like fiction. Like a myth someone wrote to test the system.”

Mulder’s throat worked, his jaw tightening as if holding back something too fragile to release. “It wasn’t fiction.”

Her hands were trembling again. “Then what was it?”

“It was our life.”

The words hit her harder than any physical blow could have. She flinched, as if he’d spoken directly into the nerve endings beneath her skin. A sharp, involuntary tremor passed through her body, and she pressed a hand to her chest as if to contain it. “No,” she whispered, shaking her head. “No, that’s—”

“You felt it,” he said, quietly. “Didn’t you? When you saw it. The file.”

She hesitated, eyes unfocused. The memory came unbidden: the dim light of her apartment, the paper under her fingers, the faint static ache beneath her ribs. She remembered the scent of rain and smoke that had come from nowhere, the sense of déjà vu that had hollowed her out. Her throat constricted.

“Yes,” she breathed. “I felt… something.”

Mulder stepped forward again, close enough now that she could see the streaks of exhaustion around his eyes, the unshaven stubble catching the red light. He smelled faintly of rain, ozone, and something warm, familiar, impossible.

“They left traces,” he said. “They couldn’t erase everything. The body remembers what the mind forgets.”

Her fingers twitched at her side, and she realised she was shivering, not from cold, but from the weight of something awakening.

The silence between them stretched taut, vibrating with things unsaid. Outside, the world was still dark, the drones still gliding through the smog.

Then, without a word, he reached out. Slowly, deliberately. His fingers brushed hers, not enough to close the distance, just enough to let the air between them spark. She froze, breath caught, her body a map of nerves.

The contact, if it could even be called that, sent something through her. The scent of damp earth. A flash of headlights cutting through fog. The sharp sting of sea wind on her face. A heartbeat pressed against her palm that wasn’t hers.

Scully gasped. The room seemed to tilt. For a moment, her consciousness fractured, images bleeding through her mind like water seeping through cracks: a motel room lamp, a half-eaten sunflower seed shell, the sound of laughter in the dark, a gunshot echoing across wet asphalt.

She staggered backward. Mulder caught her instinctively, hands at her waist, steady, grounding, but she recoiled as if burned, breath breaking. “Don’t touch me!”

He released her immediately, hands raised, his own breath shaking now. “Okay. Okay.”

Her knees buckled. She gripped the edge of the shelf, knuckles white. “I don’t—” Her voice cracked. “I don’t know what’s happening.”

He looked at her, eyes dark with sorrow. “You’re remembering.”

Her gaze darted toward the door, as if the sterile hallways beyond might offer safety, but Mulder stepped between her and the exit, not menacing, only present. “They’ll see us if you go out there. Cameras, sensors. You know that.”

Her pulse thudded painfully in her ears. “Then what do you want from me?”

“I just needed to know the truth,” he said, voice raw. “To know you were still alive.”

The simplicity of it broke her. A sob escaped before she could stop it. She pressed a shaking hand to her mouth, as if to force it back, but the sound still came: small, strangled, human.

Mulder stood helpless before her, caught between reverence and despair. He wanted to go to her, to hold her, but he stayed still. Every part of him trembled with restraint.

“You said… years,” she managed finally, her voice thin. “How long have you been looking?”

He hesitated. “Since they took you.”

She stared at him, uncomprehending. “Took me?”

He nodded. “After you vanished, I thought it was another abduction. But this time they didn’t just take you; they took everything. Your records, our cases, every trace of us. I’ve been living off fragments ever since.”

Her breathing slowed, shallow but controlled now. The shock was still there, but something else began to form beneath it, a terrible, fragile curiosity.

“And now?” she asked. “What happens now?”

He exhaled, almost laughing but without humour. “Now I don’t know. I didn’t plan beyond finding you. I never believed they’d actually let me get this far.”

They both fell silent. The archive’s hum had resumed faintly, the red lights steady now. Dust motes floated lazily in the glow, drifting between them like suspended particles of time.

Scully rubbed her temple, eyes unfocused. “If what you’re saying is true,” she murmured, “then I’m…,” she trailed off, unsure how to finish.

“You’re more than who they told you to be,” Mulder said softly.

Her lips parted, but no sound came.

For a long time, they just stood there, the hum of the systems reasserting itself, the faint hiss of the ventilation, the slow return of order. Yet the air between them remained altered, alive.

Finally, she looked up, eyes rimmed red but steady now. “The file,” she whispered. “It’s still in my apartment.”

Mulder’s head lifted. “Can you get it?”

“Yes.”

“Then I’ll come back for you.”

She didn’t argue this time. She just nodded, slow, mechanical, as if the gesture itself might keep the moment from dissolving.

And then they stood there, silent, two people separated by a gulf of years and erased memory, bound by something deeper than recognition. The air hummed around them, sterile and indifferent. But within that hum, Scully felt something her training had never prepared her for: the unmistakable pulse of something human, something alive, something returning.

When she finally spoke, her voice was barely a breath. “Mulder.”

He froze at the sound of his name, her saying it, soft, uncertain, but real. His name said by her, a sound he had longed for.

She looked at him, tears glinting faintly in the emergency light. “If they see you here, they’ll erase you too.”

He smiled, small and aching. “They’ve already tried.”

And for the first time since the world had gone dark, she almost smiled back.

Chapter Text

The city was in lockdown. Sirens wailed across the skyline of D.C., slicing through the usual hum of surveillance drones and filtered air. Scully’s boots echoed against the polished concrete of the empty street, each step sounding like a trespass she had not consented to. Her coat clung damply to her shoulders, the paper file pressed under her arm like a guilty heartbeat. Streetlights flickered sporadically, casting long, disjointed shadows that seemed to lurch toward her, reaching through the fog that rolled along the avenues. She had left the apartment early, thinking to make it to Level 3 of DMI, to her station, to the semblance of order, but the city had other plans: every panel of glass, every towered office, every street now felt like a trap.

A voice came from the side alley, careful and soft, threading through the mechanical cacophony. “Scully.”

She stopped, hand inching toward the small holster at her hip. Her eyes darted through the shifting shadows, scanning for the impossible, the unsafe. And then he was there, stepping out from a maintenance hatch, clothes unremarkable but lived in, like someone who had existed without permission, and yet who should have existed somewhere.

“Mulder?” The word came out as a question and a warning, but it sounded strange even to her own ears. Her pulse pitched against her ribs.

“Yes,” he said, almost reverently, as though speaking it aloud might fracture some fragile illusion. “I’ve been waiting.”

Her first instinct was to refuse, to run back into the sterile world she knew, to trust nothing. But the alarms, the flashing lights, the impossible blanket of city-wide lockdown pressed against her senses. The air smelled of ozone, wet asphalt, and the faint burn of something metallic, a prelude to danger. And still, some fragment within her, the part that muscle memory had never fully erased, responded to him, a thread she could not sever.

“Follow me,” he said, and without waiting for a decision, he guided her toward a service hatch tucked behind the side of a government complex. The metal was cold under her fingers as she climbed, the faint vibrations of the city’s restless heartbeat thrumming through the walls. Maintenance tunnels extended before them, narrow, dimly lit by flickering fluorescent strips. Dust motes floated lazily, catching the shafts of light and turning the corridor into a miniature galaxy of suspended particles.

Scully’s senses were hyper-aware: the chill of concrete against her palms, the faint drip of condensation from overhead pipes, the distant, almost imperceptible hum of air filters. She could hear her own breathing, sharp and shallow, and the thrum of blood in her ears. Mulder’s presence beside her was steady, a counterpoint to her jittering vigilance. Every so often, a hand brushed hers in passing, light, unobtrusive, but she recoiled slightly, fighting the memory that flared at the contact, the ghostly recognition that she could neither name nor claim.

They walked in near silence, except for the occasional whisper of his voice, instructing her to step carefully, to stay close, to trust nothing but the walls themselves. He had survived here for months, years, perhaps, moving untraceably beneath the surveillance grid, and every decision he had made had been for this one purpose: to find her.

At last, the corridor opened into a sub-basement, a space removed from the world above. The door closed with a heavy thunk behind them, muting the city’s alarms into a distant wail. The lights were dim, improvised, casting a golden glow over worn blankets folded on the floor, a small table cluttered with relics, and stacks of carefully preserved documents. The smell of old paper, the faint metallic tang of circuitry, and a hint of wool wrapped around her senses like a living thing.

Mulder gestured to the table. “I kept most of it,” he said quietly, reverently, not touching her, giving her the room to encounter what she had lost, what the world had tried to erase. “Everything I could recover.”

Her fingers brushed a photograph first: a younger Scully and Mulder standing side by side in front of a government building, smiles faint, hesitant, unrecorded elsewhere. The edges were worn, corners curled, as though the paper itself had been waiting for her touch. Muscle memory flared: the press of a pen to paper, the tilt of her head as she examined evidence she no longer recalled analysing. Her chest tightened. She sat at the table and removed the file from under her arm, placing it beside the other items. Her hand gripping the photo more tightly.

Mulder watched her carefully, noting the micro-expressions, the shallow catch of breath, the subtle tremor of fingers on the photograph. There was no push, no insistence. Only presence, patient and reverent, as if she were fragile and sacred all at once.

She turned the photograph over, finding her own handwriting along the back, annotations that her mind denied claiming. The letters were precise, small, meticulous, but the act of recognition, however fleeting, made her pulse spike. A scent drifted faintly from the paper, something earthy, a memory of night air and wet leaves, and her stomach lurched.

“Where… how—” she started, voice tight.

“They implanted this,” he said softly, producing a tiny microchip, no larger than a fingernail, engraved with his initials. “To suppress recall. To make us ghosts in a system that could not afford our persistence.”

Logic warred against sensory truth. Every object, every photograph, every scrawled note screamed reality, yet her mind sought rational dismissal. He could be delusional; he could be dangerous. And yet, muscle memory, the flicker of familiarity, the inexplicable pull in her chest, refused to comply.

She sank into the chair, scanning the table slowly. There were more photographs, letters, fragments of their erased pasts. She picked up a page of her own handwriting, lines of observation about an experiment, notes she could not recall writing. The ink smelled faintly of iron and dust. She breathed in sharply, tracing a line with her fingertip, a shiver crawling along her spine.

Mulder knelt nearby, not imposing, just observing. His eyes held the ache of years spent searching, the reverence of someone rediscovering what had been stolen. “You don’t have to believe me,” he said, voice low, intimate, “but it’s all here. And I waited for you to come to it, to remember in your own time.”

Scully’s hands shook as she set the documents down. The distance between disbelief and recognition was a taut wire straining beneath her skin. She felt the ghost of a heartbeat—hers? His?—against her ribs, and the subtle ache behind her neck throbbed like a reminder she could neither name nor escape.

He moved slightly closer, the movement careful, deliberate, as if not to startle her. “Dana,” he whispered, almost a benediction, “I’ve been here, always. Waiting. Waiting to find you. Preserving what they tried to erase.”

Her gaze met his, and something in her chest broke slightly, a pulse of longing she could not rationalise, an ache for connection that memory alone could not explain. She swallowed, tasting metal on her tongue, the remnants of fear, and some small, hidden hope.

Mulder reached out, tentatively, and brushed a strand of hair behind her ear. She flinched, tension coiling through her body, but he did not retreat entirely. His fingers traced the ghost of the scar she had felt earlier, the mark of extraction, and she gasped softly, almost involuntarily. The room seemed to tilt, warm light pooling around them, shadows dancing on the walls, dust motes spinning in the glow. Her breath caught, shallow, tight, and she felt the tug of a memory that was half-there, teasing her like a phantom limb.

“I… I don’t…” she stammered, voice trembling. 

Mulder’s lips barely moved, his eyes fixed on hers with an admiration that made her chest ache. “Shh,” he murmured. “You don’t have to say anything. Not yet.”

Her heart pounded as she reached out hesitantly, touching the skin behind her ear herself. Cold metal, rough edges of photographs, the faint texture of old paper, everything converged into a mosaic of truth her mind had long denied. The ache behind her ribs flared, muscle memory tugging at her fingers, at the tilt of her head, at the rhythm of breath and touch she had once shared with him.

And then it happened. He moved closer, so close that she could see the fleck of gold dancing in the hazel of his eyes. A culmination of tension, longing, and forbidden familiarity. Their faces drew close, lips almost touching, and time seemed to slow, the flickering light painting them both in the amber glow of stolen seconds. Her breath mingled with his; her pulse matched his. A quiet, intimate universe existed here, in this hidden sub-basement, suspended above the sterile chaos of the outside world.

But reality intruded: sharp, brash, unrelenting. An alarm clanged through the corridors, a shrill, mechanical scream, like the city itself correcting the anomaly of their presence. The moment shattered; instinct took over.

“Move!” Mulder whispered urgently. He grabbed her hand, pulling her toward the narrow exit of the sub-basement. Papers scattered behind them, photographs fluttering to the floor like wounded birds. They ran through the dim tunnels, her heels clattering against concrete, echoing through the metal pipes and low ceilings. The world above seemed impossibly distant, the city’s sirens a relentless reminder of the order they had violated.

She stumbled once, catching herself against the wall, and he steadied her with an unexpected tenderness, fingers pressing briefly to her arm. Her pulse roared in her ears, a wild rhythm, and in that fleeting contact, she felt a tether to a world she did not fully remember, but desperately wanted to understand.

They emerged into a network of subway tunnels, dimly lit and quiet compared to the chaos above. Her lungs heaved, body trembling from adrenaline and revelation. Mulder sank to a corner, laying down against the wall, and she followed, dropping beside him, exhausted, every muscle taut.

For a long moment, they simply existed in that muted space, breathing together in shared vulnerability. Scully traced the skin behind her ear again, whispering the name she had avoided, almost unconsciously: “Mulder…”

He froze, the weight of relief, awe, and grief pressing into his features. His lips parted slightly, as though she had named a sacred thing long lost to him, and his eyes glistened faintly. He did not reach for her; he never would without permission, but his presence alone spoke volumes.

Her exhaustion softened into quiet grief. The world above, the alarms, the surveillance, the bureaucracy that had erased them all, faded into the tunnel’s hush. Here, with him, fragments of memory bled into her perception, faint scents of rain and smoke, flashes of handwriting she once wrote, the press of a pen she could not recall. And in this shared exile, intimacy unfolded not as passion but as recognition: tethered, breathless, and profoundly human.

Mulder’s gaze remained fixed on her, reverent and patient, as if she were a relic recovered from the ruins of a system that had tried to obliterate them both. He was alive, unrecorded, and had found her again. And for the first time in years, she allowed herself to feel the pull of a life she could not fully remember but desperately wanted to reclaim.

The tunnels breathed around them, silent witnesses to a reunion that was as fragile as it was undeniable. Her mind recalled the microchip he had shown her, cold and metallic, and she realised that the truth of their shared past had survived in fragments. She thought of the photographs, the letters, the notes, and the faint scent of ink and dust that had mingled with the underground air.

She was overwhelmed, trembling with recognition, fear, and a longing she could not articulate. And yet, in this makeshift sanctuary, with him beside her, the world above muted and irrelevant, she felt something she had long thought impossible: safe.

Exhaustion, from the revelation of it all, claimed her limbs, and she finally leaned against him, eyes closing briefly, surrendering to the quiet. The shadows of the tunnels flickered in the dim emergency lights, dust motes spinning in the faint air currents. Somewhere above, the city raged, but here, in this vanishing room, memory and intimacy began to weave themselves slowly back into her chest.

Her lips parted slightly, whispering again, almost without thought, “Mulder.”

He froze once more, the name a fragile pulse against his heart, eyes shining with the grief of years spent searching. No words followed; none were needed. He simply held his vigil, bruised, patient, and utterly devoted, as the two of them huddled together in the hush of the sub-basement, the sanctuary of fragments, shadows, and rediscovered truths.

And the tunnels waited, silent and faithful, as they caught their breath, hearts pounding in tandem, ready to face whatever the city above would send next.

Chapter Text

The city never really slept, but under lockdown it became something stranger, a machine running on half its power, humming through its own paralysis. Streets that once teemed with controlled movement now lay vacant, lit by the eerie pulse of emergency lights. The skyline flickered as though the grid itself were gasping. In the distance, drones circled methodically, the sweep of their beams cutting through the haze like slow, mechanical heartbeats.

Scully sat in the corner of the tunnel hideout, her back pressed to cold concrete, the file open on her lap. The paper felt like contraband, alive with something forbidden. She hadn’t gone back to the DMI that morning. The thought of walking through those sterilised corridors, pretending at ignorance while something vast and predatory watched her every movement, it was unbearable. She didn’t remember making the decision to stay. It had happened in increments: one missed transmission, one unreturned call, one more hour of sitting across from Mulder while the world above screamed.

He was quiet beside her, cleaning a small radio with practiced focus. His sleeves were rolled to the elbows, revealing the faint lines of scars, old burns, and fresh cuts that told a history her memory refused to conjure. He moved with a deliberate gentleness, the kind of patience that came from living unseen. She found herself watching him, studying the curve of his hands, the stillness between his movements.

“You don’t have to keep looking at me like that,” he said softly, eyes still on the radio.

“Like what?”

“Like I’m either about to save you or ruin you.”

The words startled her, less for their content than for how calmly he spoke them. There was no arrogance, no accusation, only weary knowledge.

“Maybe I’m trying to figure out which,” she said, voice low.

He smiled faintly, not turning. “That’s fair.”

Silence unfurled between them, gentle and unforced. The low hum of the ventilation system filled the gaps, steady as breath. Somewhere far above, the world continued to police itself, cameras blinking in empty hallways, screens flickering through warnings about civilian containment. Down here, the air smelled of oil, rust, and old fabric, an oddly human scent, grounding and disorienting at once.

She returned to the file. Lines of text, fragments of encrypted reports, diagrams she half understood. Each page bore the insignia of the DMI, each stamped RESTRICTED: CLASS-9 CLEARANCE. But someone, perhaps the former her, had marked them with faint pencil annotations, circled words, and drawn connecting lines. The Revision Directive. The phrase appeared again and again, like a buried refrain.

Mulder noticed her pause. “You’ve found it,” he murmured.

Her eyes flicked up. “You knew it was in here.”

“I knew you’d find it.”

He rose, crossing to her side, crouching low enough that she could feel the heat of his proximity. The map of the Revision Directive was a mess of timelines and reference codes. Some pages described scheduled realignments of collective memory, while others detailed identity reassignment protocols for dissident subjects. It wasn’t rewriting history; it was rewriting people.

Scully’s throat tightened. “How long has this been happening?”

He exhaled slowly, as if the question carried weight. “Long enough that no one remembers when it started.”

She stared at him, the implications pressing in like static. “You’re saying none of this is real?”

“I’m saying it’s real because they want it to be.”

Her breath caught. “And me?”

He hesitated, gaze steady but pained. “You were part of the team that uncovered it. We both were. You found the data leaks first. You tried to take it to the press.”

“And then—”

“They came for us.”

The words hung there, terrible and quiet. She stared down at her hands, the faint tremor returning. “Then why can I still feel things I don’t remember?”

He gave a small, broken laugh. “Because they could edit your memories, Scully. Not your heart.”

The air between them grew charged, intimate in its silence. Her name on his lips still felt like a violation, yet part of her wanted him to keep saying it, to anchor her to something solid. She forced herself to look away, at the lines of code and the maps of her own rewritten past.

Hours later, when the sirens above dimmed and the night settled into the rhythm of containment, he said quietly, “We need to move.”

“Move where?”

“There are people who can help.”

They left the sub-basement under the cover of curfew. The tunnels opened into maintenance corridors beneath the old metro lines, unmonitored zones, ghosted from the surveillance grid. Mulder led the way, his flashlight beam slicing through the dark. She followed, one hand brushing the cold walls for balance, her pulse elevated not just from fear but from the proximity of him, the strange safety it implied.

The house was hidden behind a rusted service door, its entrance disguised as a collapsed passage where the city’s forgotten maintenance routes converged. Mulder led her down a narrow stairwell slick with condensation, one hand brushing the concrete wall as if retracing an old path. The air grew warmer the deeper they went, humming faintly with electricity.

When he pried open the door, a low light spilled out: amber and fractured, a living pulse in the dark.

Inside, the room looked like the aftermath of an endless experiment. Twisted bundles of wiring crawled along the ceiling; monitors flickered with green code and static, throwing quick, nervous shadows across the walls. Maps of the city, annotated, dog-eared, patched with tape, covered one side of the room. On another, a kettle steamed beside a pile of soldering tools and a plate of uneaten toast.

The air smelled of burnt circuitry and instant coffee.

Three men looked up as they entered.

“Agent Scully,” one of them breathed: tall, bearded, neatly dressed even in exile. His voice was soft, reverent, disbelieving. “You’re—”

She froze.

Their faces stirred nothing in her conscious mind, but the look in their eyes, like believers confronted with a resurrected saint, made her chest tighten. She wanted to step back, but her legs didn’t obey.

“They’re friends,” Mulder said quietly beside her. “You trusted them once.”

The tallest, Byers, Mulder called him, recovered first, offering a small, trembling smile. “You always said we were paranoid,” he said. “Turns out we weren’t paranoid enough.”

Langly, the one with long blond hair, laughed under his breath, a sound cracked with emotion. “Welcome back, Agent Scully.”

The last one, Frohike, was shorter, solid, eyes glinting behind thick lenses. He didn’t speak at first, only stared at her with an expression too layered to name: awe, relief, and something heartbreakingly paternal.

She didn’t know them. But she felt known, and that was somehow worse.

They moved around her carefully, as if approaching a wild animal that might vanish if startled. Byers offered her a chair; she took it without thinking, her gaze flicking to the cluttered desk nearby. Photographs lay scattered among the tools, grainy surveillance shots, notes scribbled in an unsteady hand. One photo caught her attention: her own face, mid-laugh, turned slightly toward the camera.

“When was this taken?” she asked.

Langly looked at Mulder, then back at her. “Before the Directive,” he said simply.

The word dropped between them like a stone.

Mulder’s hand came to rest lightly on the back of her chair, not touching her, but there, an anchor. “They can help,” he said. “If you want them to.”

Frohike stepped forward, holding a small device, a handheld scanner, sleek and improvised, its metal casing patched with soldered seams. On the table beside him, an array of tools had been laid out with surgical precision. “We’ve been tracing the suppression patterns for years,” he said, voice rough. “The implant’s tuned to a specific neural frequency. It doesn’t erase memory, it scrambles recall. We can remove it. You’ll start to remember.”

“Start?” Her voice was steady, but her throat felt tight.

“Not all at once,” Byers said gently. “Memory’s like a circuit that’s been rerouted. You’ll need time for it to reconnect.”

Scully reached up, fingers brushing behind her ear. The scar was faint, barely a crescent, but under the harsh light it seemed almost luminous, as though her skin itself were remembering what had been done to it. A shiver ran through her.

Mulder crouched beside her, close enough that she could feel the warmth of his body, the faint scent of soap and dust and something metallic clinging to his clothes. “You don’t have to do this,” he murmured.

Her eyes found his, steady, defiant, scared. “I do.”

He nodded once, then stepped back.

The procedure was quick but disorienting. Frohike’s hands were deft; the hum of the scanner filled the air, its tone oscillating like a living pulse. Light bled red across her vision. She gripped the edge of the table, teeth set, every nerve vibrating with the sensation of something unmooring inside her skull.

Then, with a soft click, it was done.

Frohike withdrew the instrument, his movements gentle, deliberate. “There,” he said, exhaling. “Clean extraction.”

He dropped the microchip onto a metal tray.

The tiny object clicked against steel, an impossibly small thing, dull silver, catching a single thread of light before settling still. The sound echoed through the room, final and absolute.

Scully’s head swam. For a moment, she couldn’t tell if the tremor in her hands came from fear or relief. The air seemed thinner, charged, humming faintly against her skin.

Langly leaned forward, peering at her face. “You okay?”

She nodded, though her voice wouldn’t come. Something inside her had shifted, like the faintest tremor in the fabric of her mind. Beneath the hum of monitors, a new rhythm emerged: the quiet recognition of her own heartbeat.

Mulder placed a cup of water in her hand. “You did good, Scully,” he said softly.

His voice trembled.

She looked at him, searching for something, truth, maybe, or the shape of memory, but all she found was the reflection of her own confusion mirrored back at her.

Byers began running diagnostics on the chip, muttering about signal encryption and bioelectric frequencies. Langly typed furiously at a terminal, the light of the screen staining his face green. Frohike, meanwhile, hovered close to her, eyes unexpectedly kind. “You always were the brave one,” he said.

She blinked. “You say that as if you know me.”

He hesitated. “We do.”

Her throat tightened.

Mulder turned away, studying a monitor, pretending not to hear the crack in her voice.

A minute passed, two, maybe. Then the first memory flickered.

A sound, faint and familiar: the rustle of paper. The dry snap of sunflower seeds. The low murmur of a man’s voice: half a joke, half a confession.

Her vision blurred; the edges of the room shimmered.

She reached for the table to steady herself, but Mulder was already there, his hand finding hers instinctively. The contact jolted something deep inside her, a sense of having reached for him before, again and again, across years that suddenly felt both infinite and immediate.

When the tremor subsided, she drew her hand back slowly, pulse skittering.

“What did you see?” he asked.

She shook her head. “It wasn’t… visual. More like... pressure. The shape of a voice.”

Langly glanced over from the console. “That’s how it starts. The data’s still in there. Your brain’s just figuring out how to read it again.”

She nodded absently, though the words felt distant. Her body was humming, an undercurrent of memory, or maybe grief.

Mulder watched her quietly, jaw tense, eyes soft. Every time she doubted him, it seemed to hurt him in ways he never let her see.

Outside, a distant siren began to wail, a rising, mechanical sound that made the walls tremble.

Byers looked up sharply. “Lockdown’s intensifying. We should move soon.”

Mulder nodded, his hand already reaching for his jacket. “We’ll rest here a few hours,” he said to her. “Then we’ll go underground.”

Scully sat perfectly still, her fingers tracing the cool edge of the table, her gaze falling once more to the discarded chip. It was smaller than a fingernail, but it had held her whole life hostage.

Mulder followed her stare. “You want to keep it?”

She looked up. “As evidence.”

Something in his face flickered, half a smile, half sorrow. “That sounds like you.”

Her chest tightened, inexplicably.

The others pretended not to watch as she stood, unsteady but resolute, and slipped the chip, now in a little glass bottle, into her pocket. It felt heavier than it should have, like a seed waiting to take root.

The next day bled together in movement: underground routes, rationed food, and brief sleep in hidden alcoves. Each hour brought another fragment: the smell of his cologne, the echo of their laughter in a long-forgotten room, the memory of him saying Scully like a prayer. Each time, she caught herself glancing at him, searching for confirmation that it was real.

He never demanded it. He never reminded her of what they’d been. He only walked beside her, aching and patient, carrying the weight of recognition so she didn’t have to yet.

By late night, they were camped beneath an abandoned metro station. The tunnels hummed softly with passing trains above, the vibration low and soothing. Mulder sat beside her, cross-legged, a small candle flickering between them.

She watched the light move across his face, softening the harshness of exhaustion. Something in her chest eased, fragile but real.

“You’ve been running a long time,” she said quietly.

He gave a dry smile. “Feels like I’ve been waiting longer.”

She looked down at the candle, its flame wavering in the draft. “And if I never remember?”

“Then I’ll remember for both of us,” he said simply.

The words lodged in her chest like a heartbeat. She didn’t answer. She couldn’t. Instead, she let her hand drift closer to his, almost touching.

When her eyes lifted again, he was watching her with that same quiet reverence, the kind that frightened her because it felt like recognition she hadn’t earned.

“Fox William Mulder,” she said softly, without thinking. The name slipped free, natural as breath.

He froze, eyes widening.

It hit her then, the weight of it, the ease, the instinct. She hadn’t had to think. The sound of his name had felt inevitable.

Her throat tightened. “I don’t—”

But he only shook his head gently, eyes bright with something unsaid.

In the flickering half-light, silence settled between them: thick, fragile, and full of possibility. Somewhere above, the city continued its endless revision, erasing and rewriting. Down here, though, beneath its noise and order, something was beginning to remember itself again.

And for the first time, Scully let the ache of recognition bloom without resistance.

Chapter Text

The safe house sat at the edge of a quiet suburban street, its clapboard siding muted beneath the pale wash of late afternoon light, and Scully felt a strange tug in her chest as Mulder guided her through the gate. She had walked past countless identical houses in her life, and yet this one carried a weight she couldn’t name, a resonance that throbbed faintly beneath her ribs. The street was empty, no children playing, no cars moving, not even the hum of the city’s distant surveillance drones. A hush had settled over the block, like the world had held its breath, and she wondered if the stillness was a sign or a threat.

Mulder’s grip on her elbow was light but steady, a tether she did not yet know she needed. “Scully. Stay close,” he murmured, and the soft cadence of her name made the skin along her spine tighten. His voice carried the familiar reverence of someone who had carried her image in his mind for years, as though she were sacred and lost and found all at once.

The front door was unremarkable, paint peeling faintly at the edges, but the lock slid open easily under his deft touch. Inside, the house smelled of dust, lavender, and the faint tang of old wood varnish. Scully moved through the entryway, hands brushing the stair banister and the edge of a side table. Every surface seemed to hum faintly under her touch, charged with a memory she did not fully recognise but could sense pressing against her nerves.

Mulder watched her quietly from the doorway to the living room, his shadow stretching along the floorboards in the slanted light. He had chosen this place because it existed in the cracks of the city, in the forgotten spaces where the DMI’s tendrils could not reach. Yet he had left it unchanged: preserved, like a fragment of a world they had once known.

Scully’s eyes drifted to the framed photographs on a mantelpiece. They were subtle, unobtrusive: a housewarming snapshot of a woman with a child, a winter scene in an unfamiliar park. The colours were faded, but the faces carried the sharpness of memory, of time fixed. Her fingers traced the edge of one frame, a slight shiver running through her at the tactile reality of it.

“Who lived here?” she asked, voice low, brittle, almost afraid to break the fragile quiet that seemed to hover in the hall like dust. Every sound, the scrape of her shoes along the carpet, the faint hum of the air vent, felt magnified, intrusive, as if the house itself were listening.

“Your mother,” Mulder said simply, reverent, almost as if saying the words aloud might shatter the illusion, and she felt that truth vibrate in the air around them. “She… was real. And she matters. Even if the world says otherwise.”

Scully swallowed, dry and tight, her throat constricting. “Mom… she’s… gone?” The words emerged hesitantly, as if testing a surface she feared would break under them.

Mulder’s gaze softened, gentle but heavy with sorrow. “Not gone. Just… not here. Officially, she doesn’t exist. But she left traces. That’s why I brought you here.”

The hallway seemed unnaturally long as Scully moved down it, toes dragging lightly along the threadbare carpet. Each step carried a weight she could not name, a subtle ache that rose behind her ribs, a body memory she could not place. Her fingers brushed the walls, tracing the faintly patterned wallpaper, strangely familiar, yet alien. She did not recognise it, not consciously, yet there was an echo of something long erased tugging at her skin. A draft pressed against her back, bringing with it the smell of dust, damp wood, and the faint tang of rain on concrete from outside. Her chest tightened; her pulse stuttered.

She reached the bedroom that had belonged to her mother. Light flickered through the blinds, casting angular shadows that pooled in corners. The room was almost painfully preserved, objects frozen in time, everything neat, staged, lifeless, yet aching with the latent energy of lived experience. It was like stepping into a memory she didn’t own, a life that was hers by inheritance but denied by erasure. The air carried a faint trace of lavender and old paper, scents that pricked something buried deep in her nerves, untraceable and immediate.

Mulder followed silently, letting her explore, letting her see, letting her touch without interruption. The absence of cameras, of oversight, of those recording eyes that always pressed against her in the outside world, made the space intimate, almost unbearably so. Her body tensed, muscles coiled instinctively, because intimacy in a place she could not remember was both a threat and a relief.

Her gaze settled on a small desk near the window, where papers were stacked in neat columns, some yellowed, edges curling faintly. She bent forward, fingers hovering over a folder labeled Scully, Margaret – Nonexistent. When she finally touched it, the paper under her fingers seemed to vibrate with silent accusation. Her breath caught. The room tilted subtly, as if the walls themselves pressed against her perception. The ache in her chest sharpened; a phantom pulse rattled behind her ribs.

“They erased her too,” she whispered, so softly it might have been the room speaking rather than her. The words hovered in the dim light like dust motes, fragile and slow-moving, and the ache in her chest deepened, an unfamiliar, hollow weight.

Mulder came closer, careful, reverent, a hand brushing past her without touching. “They wanted to erase everything that mattered to you… to me. But it’s not gone, Dana. Not completely.”

Scully’s eyes flicked to him, searching for something stable in his face, the truth in the faint lines etched by years of worry and watchful isolation. She saw it there: the tremor in his jaw, the tilt of his shoulders heavy with exhaustion, the quiet reverence in his gaze. He had carried the memory of her, the fragments of their lives, the grief and love and absurd little victories, in silent agony for years. The realisation hit her suddenly, viscerally: she had no memory of any of this, and yet here he was, the living proof of a world that had tried to erase her, of a past she could not claim, of a devotion she had never known but that now pressed against the fragile walls of her heart.

Her stomach knotted, and the faint echo of muscle memory rose unbidden: the ghost of a hand brushing hers across a desk, the distant hum of fluorescent lights, the whisper of voices she could not place. She could not remember, but she felt the truth of it, clawing at her nerves, insisting she acknowledge it.

The room felt impossibly small, impossibly intimate, each object a whisper, each shadow a memory refusing erasure. Her chest ached with recognition and denial, longing and terror. And through it all, Mulder waited, patient, unwavering, a tether to a past she did not yet own but that demanded acknowledgment.

She sank onto a chair near the window, the weight of recognition pressing against her chest. “All of it,” she whispered. “Everything… gone. And you…” Her voice faltered, a tremor threading through it. “You remembered it all?”

“Yes,” he said, voice low, almost a whisper, reverent, filled with the awe of someone who had found a ghost and refused to let it disappear again. “Every detail. Every failure. Every quiet moment we shared, every argument, every time you didn’t believe me, even when I needed you to… I remembered. I remembered you.”

The words pressed against Scully’s chest. Her fingers fidgeted with the hem of her sleeve, tracing the fabric absently. She could feel the faint, electric pull of memory, flashes surfacing in fragments: the hum of an incinerator, a slip of paper with her handwriting on it, the warmth of a hand on her shoulder she could not place. Her eyes blurred, and tears pricked at the corners.

“I… Mulder, I want to believe,” she said, voice breaking. “I don't know what's real anymore.”

Mulder knelt beside her chair, careful not to crowd her, hands resting lightly on his knees. “This is real, Scully. You and me. You’re here. You’re alive. And I’ve been chasing you across a world that keeps trying to make you vanish.”

Scully turned her head, glimpsing the faint tremor in his jaw, the tightness around his eyes. He had carried the pain of her absence, the uncertainty of her erasure, the solitude of his obsession, quietly, for years. And now he sat before her, bruised, patient, present.

A flicker of silver caught her eye, moonlight glinting against it: a small, framed photograph half-hidden behind a stack of folders. She reached for it, lifting the glass to her face. The image froze her breath in her chest: herself and Mulder, smiling at the camera, side by side, hands brushing, a shared laugh suspended in the frame. Her fingers trembled as they brushed the glass. It should be impossible. But every detail, the tilt of his head, the light catching her hair, the warmth of his smile, was too real.

Mulder leaned closer, not touching, giving her the space to discover the truth herself. “You don’t have to say anything,” he whispered. “Just… see it. Just… feel it. It’s real. It was real.”

The photograph became a catalyst. Her chest tightened, the phantom ache behind her ribs flaring as fragments of memory pressed against her nerves: the smell of the archive, the scratch of pen on paper, the quiet warmth of his hand resting on hers as they worked through another case. Each fragment was fleeting but electric, piercing through the fog of her confusion.

“I… I don’t understand,” she whispered, tears spilling freely now. Her hands shook as she held the photograph. “How… why?”

“Because I couldn’t let you go,” he said, voice low, trembling. “Even when the world said I had to. Even when they rewrote reality itself, I kept searching for you. For us. For everything we were before it was stolen.”

Scully’s knees buckled slightly, and she lowered herself to the floor, clutching the photograph to her chest. The weight of grief, of relief, of memory pressing through the gaps, overwhelmed her. She could feel the pull of their past, the tether of shared experience she couldn’t fully place but recognised with visceral certainty.

Mulder moved closer, cautiously, kneeling beside her. His hand hovered, uncertain, over her shoulder. “You don’t have to remember everything now,” he said gently. “It will come, piece by piece. But you’re here. You’re alive. And I’ve found you again.”

She exhaled shakily, the photograph trembling in her grasp. Her mind refused to organise the chaos of sensation into coherent thought. She touched her lips lightly, tasting the remnants of tears and the faint tang of dust from the photograph. Her breath hitched as a fragment of memory pierced the fog: a long night in a fluorescent-lit archive, the hum of machinery, and his voice, low, patient, intimate, speaking her name as though it were sacred.

“I… I think I remember…” she whispered, voice raw. “Some… some pieces.”

Mulder’s eyes softened, reverent. “That’s all I’ve ever wanted, to find you again, to help you remember in your own time.”

Scully looked at him then, really looked, and for a moment the world beyond the safe house seemed to fade: the empty street, the erased city, the watchful drones. There was only him, only the tangible presence of someone who had preserved her, who had carried the weight of her absence, who had waited for her to arrive at this fragile intersection of past and present.

Her hands fell from the photograph, resting on her knees. The tears continued, but she drew a shaky breath, trying to regain composure. A fragment of memory surfaced unbidden, a whisper from the past, a mantra she had once clung to in moments of fear: "Trust no one." The words trembled on her tongue, almost audible in the quiet room.

Mulder’s chest rose and fell rapidly, eyes glistening with something like awe and grief intertwined. “Scully,” he breathed, reverent, as if hearing that echo of her former self was a revelation. “You… you remembered.”

“I… I didn’t try,” she said softly, voice barely audible. “It just… came back.”

Mulder reached forward then, gently gathering her in his arms. She leaned against him, trembling, and he held her tightly, as though the simple act of proximity could reclaim years of lost time. After a long moment, he pressed a gentle kiss to her forehead, a silent promise and an acknowledgment of the love he had carried alone for so long.

Scully’s fingers rested lightly on his arms, the photograph still tucked under her knees, the weight of recognition and grief pressing against her heart. She did not speak; words felt impossible. But the stillness between them was enough, a quiet cathedral of shared loss and rediscovered intimacy. The city outside remained lifeless, sterilised, and orderly, but inside the walls of the safe house, in the fragile space they now occupied together, the world had not erased them entirely.

Time stretched. She felt the ache of longing, of memory bleeding slowly back, of truths too long buried pressing against her chest. She allowed herself, for the first time in years, to simply be present with him, to feel, to remember in fragments, and to acknowledge the tether that had always drawn them together.

The silence endured, heavy, tender, complete.

The lamp in the corner of the room cast a muted, amber glow, uneven but intimate against the walls of Margaret’s preserved home. Shadows pooled in corners, revealing the dust-laden surfaces of a life half-erased, frozen by the Revision but never quite gone. Scully sat on the edge of the bed, knees pulled close, the photograph still clutched loosely in her hands. Her chest ached with the weight of recognition she couldn’t name, fragments of memories bleeding through her senses like thin streams of water beneath a frozen surface.

Mulder sat opposite her on the floor, knees drawn up, hands clasped loosely around them. His gaze never wavered from her, reverent, almost fearful that even a sudden movement might shatter the fragile line they were treading. “Scully,” he began, his voice low, cracked at the edges, as if holding back years of exhaustion, “I’ve… remembered everything. Since the last Revision. Every erased day, every record rewritten, every fragment of you that they tried to bury, I carried it with me.”

She looked at him, startled by the intensity, the raw, unpolished weight of his words. The lamplight caught the fine lines at the corners of his eyes, the weariness etched into his face, the tremor that betrayed the cost of years spent in pursuit. He continued, almost pleading, “I’ve been tracing the shadows you left behind, Scully. Across every archive, every falsified record, every corridor of memory I could find. I didn’t know if I’d ever find you again… but I could never stop.”

Scully’s lips parted, but no words came at first. Her fingers pressed against the photograph as though anchoring herself to reality. The room smelled faintly of dust, paper, and something almost metallic, the memory of the house mingling with her own phantom recollections. A fragment passed through her mind: a corridor, fluorescent light flickering above, the click of a pen against a desk, a hand brushing her shoulder in reassurance. She shivered involuntarily.

Mulder’s eyes softened, catching the movement. He reached a hand toward her, hesitant, careful, as if the air itself might reject his touch. “You don’t have to—” he began, then paused, swallowing against the knot of emotion in his throat. “I mean… I can’t make you remember. I can only… show you that it’s still there. That you were never truly gone to me.”

She shook her head, a dry, uncertain sound that caught halfway to a laugh. “I don’t know how this is possible,” she whispered, her gaze flicking toward him and away again. “But… something about what you’re saying, it feels…” She faltered, searching for words. “It feels true.”

Her voice was unsteady, but her body had gone still, as if the air itself had shifted. The ache behind her ribs pulsed, not from doubt this time, but from a fragile, dawning recognition. Images flickered behind her eyes: a flashlight beam cutting through darkness, his voice calling her name, the sound of her own heartbeat answering. She exhaled shakily. “I believe you,” she murmured. 

Mulder’s expression softened, the relief in his eyes tempered by reverence. “That’s enough,” he said quietly. “You don’t have to force it. Just… trust what you feel. Even if it doesn’t make sense yet.”

She looked at him then, really looked, and something in his face, in the exhaustion and the unguarded tenderness there, steadied her. Her shoulders loosened slightly, and the tension that had held her at a distance began to dissolve. “I don’t remember everything,” she said, voice faint but certain. “But I believe in you.”

He nodded once, slowly, as if afraid to break the fragile balance between them. “Scully,” he whispered. “That's more than enough.”

Her hands trembled as she lowered the photograph onto the bed, her fingers tracing the edges of the frame. A sudden memory flickered in her mind, the faint, unmistakable scent of antiseptic, the sound of her own name spoken with soft urgency, the brush of someone’s hand against her shoulder. Her breath caught, sharp and sudden, and her knees buckled slightly.

Mulder immediately leaned forward, settling next to her on the bed and wrapping an arm carefully around her shoulders, anchoring her to the moment. His other hand brushed a strand of hair back from her face, as if the gesture itself might solidify her hold on the world. “Shh,” he murmured, voice low, reverent. “You’re here now. You’re safe. Just… let it come, whatever wants to return.”

Her body relaxed marginally against his, though the tension never fully released. Tears fell freely now, unbidden, hot and quiet against the cool fabric of his shirt. She remembered flashes: her hand pressed to a patient chart, the low murmur of a hospital corridor, a pen tapping against a file, the faint click of a scanner. And him, always beside her, a presence she couldn’t name but recognised viscerally.

“I… I don’t even know what this means,” she whispered, voice breaking. “All of it. Us.”

He exhaled slowly, a shudder passing through him. “It means,” he said, carefully, voice trembling with the weight of truth, “that even when the world erased us, I… I never stopped remembering. And I never stopped…” His voice caught. He swallowed. “…loving you.”

Scully’s head lifted abruptly, meeting his eyes. Her own were wide, vulnerable, raw. “You… loved me?” The words were simple, incredulous, yet carried a resonance that made the air between them tremble.

“Yes,” he said, quietly, devastatingly, reverently. “I loved you. I still do. Every day. Every revision, every erasure… it never changed that. And I never gave up on finding you again.”

Her chest constricted at the weight of the admission. She wanted to protest, to assert control, to reclaim the rational distance she had always maintained, but the tears betrayed her. She shook her head, exhaling shakily. “I… I don’t know what to say,” she murmured.

“You don’t have to say anything,” he said softly, pressing a gentle kiss to her temple, a quiet, intimate benediction of the space between them. “Just… let yourself feel it. That you’re here, that it’s real.”

Hours seemed to pass in the subdued glow of the lamp. Scully remained in his presence, the tremor in her body slowly ebbing as the quiet intimacy settled around them. She felt the memories brushing closer, sharper: his voice whispering through dim corridors, his laughter low and unguarded, the tentative touch of his hand guiding her through files and fears alike. Each fragment teased her mind, coaxing recognition without demanding belief.

Eventually, exhaustion pulled her down into the bed. She slumped into its worn cushions, staring at the faint glow of the streetlights filtered through the blinds. Mulder sat across from her, his gaze soft and watchful, ever attentive to the fragile rhythm of her breath and the ebbing tears.

She finally asked, voice small, tentative, “Mulder… what were we… what were we to each other?”

He hesitated, the question reverberating in the silence of the room. Then, in the stillness, he spoke simply, as though stripping away years of artifice and fear: “Everything.”

Scully’s eyes filled anew, a mixture of fear, hope and the first glimmers of understanding. She wanted to retreat, to escape the vulnerability that threatened to engulf her, yet the ache in her chest tethered her to the reality of him, of this unrecorded truth. She exhaled slowly, shuddering, allowing herself a fragile surrender to the moment.

Later, unable to sleep, she rose quietly. The house was hushed, the kind of stillness that felt almost deliberate, as if the walls themselves were holding their breath. Her bare feet pressed against the cool wood of the floorboards, which groaned softly under her weight, a cautious protest against her intrusion. The dim lamplight from the hallway pooled in uneven patches, tracing the contours of furniture long abandoned to shadow. Dust motes hovered lazily in the amber glow, caught in the occasional flicker of the bulb, drifting like ghosts in a world that had almost forgotten them.

She moved with tentative steps, each one measured, mindful, as though the sound itself might fracture the fragile calm. Her hand brushed the plastered walls, feeling the subtle undulations of decades-old paint, the texture rough beneath her fingertips, grounding her in the tangibility of this erased past. A faint draft whispered through a cracked window, carrying with it the smell of wet asphalt and faint decay, an echo of life beyond the sterilised certainty of the city.

She paused before a dresser in the far corner, a sheet draped over its mirror. Her fingers lingered at the edge of the fabric, hesitant, almost afraid to disturb it. Lifting the cloth carefully, she exposed the glass, and there was the photograph.

It was candid, an unguarded moment preserved in silver halide and memory. She saw herself, Mulder, and her mother, all smiling, alive, luminous with a warmth she had been denied for so long. The edges of the image curled slightly, worn by years, but the emotions it captured were sharp and immediate. Her chest constricted, a sudden, jarring clarity, a piercing ache that carried every year of erasure, every absence, every longing she had never been permitted to name.

The photograph anchored her, pulling her into a moment that felt impossibly real, impossibly intimate, yet it also shattered her. It collapsed decades of loss, bureaucratic control, and stolen identity into one irreducible fragment. The air seemed heavier here, laden with dust, faint ozone from the overhead wiring, and the unspoken weight of what had been hidden and what had been forcibly forgotten.

She sank to the floor, knees drawn to her chest, the photograph clutched loosely in one hand. The tears came unbidden, streaking down her cheeks, and she let them fall without shame or restraint. Her chest heaved, shoulders trembling with the force of emotions she had not permitted herself to feel in years. She was raw, exposed, suspended between disbelief and recognition, between grief and a fragile, dawning hope.

Mulder appeared then, silent as a shadow. She hadn’t heard him approach; she hadn’t realised she had been holding her breath. He knelt beside her, deliberate, reverent, the scrape of his knees on the floor whispering against the room’s quiet. His arm slid around her shoulders naturally, instinctively, as if he had memorised the curve of her body in absence, the way she needed grounding, the spaces she left open for care. His cheek pressed lightly against the top of her head, and his lips brushed her forehead in a gesture so soft, so sacred, that it seemed to sanctify her very existence.

She leaned against him, yielding, letting herself be held. Her hands rested on her knees, trembling faintly, and her gaze remained fixed on the photograph, willing it to explain everything at once, though she knew it could not. The lamplight flickered slightly, catching the edges of the image, illuminating the tears on her face, tracing the curve of her jaw, the line of her neck, and the silent acknowledgment of survival they shared.

Her mind was a storm of fragments: the echo of a hand on her shoulder, the scratch of pen against paper in an archive long erased, the ghost of a voice calling her name. Each memory was fleeting, a pulse of light in a dark room, yet they were tethered to the solid, present certainty of Mulder beside her. The ache behind her ribs softened, no longer a warning, but a reminder that she was not alone, that something unbroken persisted beneath the ruins of her erased life.

Time lost its rigidity. Outside, the city remained meticulously surveilled, precise, cold, and unfeeling. Inside, the dim sanctuary of the safe house exhaled human truth, a warmth, a pulse, a fragile echo of the lives that had once been hers and his.

Scully’s breaths slowed, deepening, syncing with the quiet rhythm of Mulder’s presence beside her. Her body, once tense, uncurling slightly, allowed the first hints of remembered intimacy to bloom. The touch of his arm, the softness of his cheek against her hair, the calm steadiness of his gaze, they were anchors in a world that had tried to erase everything she had loved and been.

And in that hush, in that fragile, trembling embrace, Scully allowed herself to believe that memory, love, and survival could coexist. She closed her eyes, feeling the weight of all that was lost and all that remained, knowing, in the quiet certainty of Mulder’s presence, that she was home, at least for this moment, within the fragments they still shared.

Scully’s body trembled against him, her small frame shaking with the residual shock of grief, relief, and the slow awakening of memory. She lifted her face just slightly, voice raw and uneven, “Hold me… please.”

Mulder’s chest tightened at the plea. He didn’t hesitate. Gently, reverently, he lifted her from the floor, feeling the fragile weight of her exhaustion against him. Her arms went around his neck instinctively, clutching him as though he were the only remaining constant in a world that had tried to erase her.

He carried her towards the bed, each step measured, careful. The floorboards groaned faintly under their combined weight, and the dim lamplight cast long, wavering shadows across the walls. Mulder was acutely aware of the subtle tremor of her fingers against his collarbone, the shallow, uneven rhythm of her breath, the soft intake of air that betrayed the tears she had been holding back.

Once at the bed, he lowered her with deliberate care, arranging the worn blankets around her like a cocoon. Her head rested lightly on the pillow, and he smoothed a lock of hair from her face, lingering at the warmth of her temple, the curve of her jaw.

Without pause, he climbed in behind her, careful not to startle, letting his body mold gently against hers. His arms circled her, pulling her into his chest. She let herself sink into him, her cheek pressed to his shoulder, her small, shivering frame seeking the grounding he offered.

The lamplight flickered, casting a soft amber glow across the room. Dust motes drifted lazily in the light, settling onto the blankets, into the still air that smelled faintly of paper, rain, and the lingering trace of their shared past. Scully’s breaths slowly deepened, syncing with his own, her body gradually yielding to the rare, unguarded intimacy.

He held her close, feeling the steady tremor of her heart against his ribs, the tentative shifts of her muscles as they unwound from years of tension, erasure, and disbelief. His fingers traced slow, idle patterns along her arm, across her shoulder, as if memorising the contours he had spent years searching for in fragments of memory and ghostly impressions.

“Shh,” he murmured softly into the quiet room, his lips brushing the top of her head. “It’s okay… you’re safe.”

Her hands clutched at him, small but firm, anchoring herself as if to prove to herself that this moment was real, that he was real, that she was allowed to trust.

Mulder’s eyes closed for a fraction of a second, letting the weight of everything, the fear, the grief, the years of searching, the fragments of erased lives, press into him. He drew in a quiet, steadying breath, feeling the warmth of her against him, the fragile certainty of her presence.

In the stillness, with the city locked down outside and the house silent but for the soft shuffle of their breaths and the occasional creak of settling wood, he allowed himself to think it plainly, devastatingly, finally: he had found her. After all the erasures, after all the years of chasing shadows, she was here. She was real.

And he loved her.

Every ounce of him, every pulse and memory and ache, was tethered to her. He had carried her ghost for years, and now he held her in the living, breathing presence of what had survived. He would never let go, not again.

His arms tightened imperceptibly, protective, reverent. Against her hair, against the curve of her back, he whispered nothing, but his heartbeat spoke everything: a quiet vow, a confession, a truth as undeniable as the air they breathed.

In that intimate hush, Mulder let himself stay there, awake with her, anchored to the fragile certainty that love, real, unforgotten, and unbroken, had endured.

Chapter Text

The storm began in her sleep.

At first, it was only sound, the distant hum of fluorescent lights, the click of a projector reel, the muffled cadence of voices speaking her name. Scully shifted beneath the sheets, a low murmur slipping from her lips. The air in the room grew thick, charged. Mulder stirred behind her, his hand instinctively finding her shoulder.

Then she gasped. Her body arched violently, a cry caught somewhere between breath and terror.

“—Mulder—”

He was upright in an instant, the lamp flooding the room with weak amber light. Sweat beaded across her brow, her eyes darting beneath half-closed lids. The tremor coursing through her body was not dreamlike; it was convulsive, electric, as though something buried deep inside her mind was clawing its way out.

“Scully,” he whispered, hands trembling as he touched her face. “I’m here. It’s okay, I’m here.”

But she didn’t hear him.

Her body convulsed again, her breath stuttering as her mind tore open.

Images surged through her consciousness like lightning splitting through a storm: a hospital corridor drenched in sterile light; a basement office littered with case files and photographs; her own voice, steady, rational, saying ‘Agent Mulder, I’m Dana Scully. I’ve been assigned to work with you.’

Then blood, then white light, then the smell of antiseptic. A needle. A voice telling her to forget.

Mulder held her as her body shook with the force of remembrance. The air around them seemed to warp with it; his name echoed from somewhere impossibly far and unbearably close.

She saw everything at once: the years of partnership and pain, the laughter in dim motel rooms, the cold metal of restraints during abduction, the hollow sound of a little girl's laughter. Her body burned with it, every nerve aflame with the violent restoration of what had been stolen.

Her scream tore through the quiet house.

Mulder’s arms locked around her, anchoring her to the present. He whispered her name again and again, his voice breaking on each repetition. “Scully, please ... Dana, please, you’re here. You’re with me. It’s over.”

But it wasn’t over. Not yet.

Her eyes flew open: brilliant, terrified, alive. She was gasping as though she’d surfaced from deep underwater. Her pupils focused on him, and for one fractured heartbeat, she didn’t know who he was. Then her gaze steadied, her lips parted, and she spoke the first words since her return from oblivion.

“Mulder,” she whispered hoarsely, as if tasting the sound for the first time. “What did they take from us?”

The question split him open.

He cupped her face with shaking hands, his thumbs brushing away the tears streaking down her cheeks. “Everything,” he said, his voice breaking. “But not you. Never you.”

Her breath hitched. She closed her eyes, trembling. When she opened them again, something vast and terrible and tender had returned to them: a light born of memory and pain.

“You found me,” she said softly, voice quivering like glass.

Mulder’s throat constricted. “You always find me first.”

The words broke the last barrier between them.

Scully reached for him with trembling hands, pulling him toward her with a desperation that wasn’t born of passion but of reclamation. Their lips met, not in the fevered heat of reunion, but in a slow, aching exhale, as if both were remembering how to breathe. The kiss was quiet, sacred, a sealing of the fracture between memory and flesh.

It tasted of salt, of tears and time and the unbearable truth of survival.

When they parted, she rested her forehead against his, her breath shallow and uneven. Around them, the air hummed with the aftershock of what she had remembered, images still flickering like broken film: the chance at motherhood she’d lost, the lives they’d nearly died for, the trust they’d built and buried and built again.

He held her as she trembled, as if he could protect her from the weight of what he had given back. His own eyes burned, not with triumph, but with something rawer: guilt, awe, love.

He had restored her. But in doing so, he had forced her to relive every agony they’d survived.

And still, she pressed closer.

Her voice was a whisper against his throat. “It hurts.”

“I know,” he breathed. “I’m so sorry.”

The city outside hummed its sterile, unfeeling rhythm. But inside the small, dim house, two lives long denied their truth had been rewritten back into existence.

Scully’s hand found his, threading through his fingers. “We remember now,” she said faintly.

Mulder nodded. “We do.”

For a long time, neither moved.

And when sleep finally took her again, this time without violence, Mulder lay awake, tracing the outline of her hand against his chest, memorising the pulse beneath her skin. The restoration had bound them again, but he knew what it meant. Her knowledge made her a threat. Their love, a liability.

Still, as he pressed a kiss to her hair, one truth burned steadily beneath the ruin of everything else: Love had survived the erasure.

Remembering was resurrection.

And he would face the cost, whatever it was, because she was his truth, and he was hers.