Title: With Baited Breath
Author: MissAnnThropic
E-Mail: miss_annthropic@yahoo.com
Spoilers: This is Not Happening
Summary: Right then, I know that she has never secretly believed in miracles as she does at that moment.
Disclaimer: I own nasing! Really, I don't. All you see here (that you recognize, anyway) is the creation of someone else. I take no credit.



When I saw her coming, I knew what was going to happen. I've seen it happen before... I've experienced it before. I could see the hope on her face, but also the fear. Maybe something unspoken inside her told her already what she was going to find. The desperation on her face was adamant refusal to believe it could be true.

She came running towards the task force team, emerging from the dark to proceed inevitably only into a bleaker one.

She sees the way we stand around... she has to know something's wrong that we're not hustling about to call assistance to a barely alive Fox Mulder. As a doctor and an FBI agent, she has to know that there can be only one end to this question... our inactivty has only one explanation.

But she still denies all her logic tells her... she doesn't want to hear it. I can't blame her... I didn't want to either when I lost my son. For her, right then, I knew there were a thousand possibilities in her mind... each fantastic and impossible that she was willing to entertain, the only logical one beaten away.

She neared us, demanding at the top of her lungs, "How bad is he? HOW BADLY IS HE HURT?!" I want to console her, 'he's not hurt, Scully... he's feeling no pain.'

And at that... I couldn't let her see him. Right then, I know without doubt, that she had never secretly believed in miracles and the hope in slightest chances as she does at that moment. I couldn't bare to see it ripped from her, and it would be. There was no resurrection for the fallen agent the team stood solemnly around. It's almost funny in a morbid kind of way... as trained professionals we can find beaten and tortured people in the woods and know exactly what to do, but when it's someone dead we're not sure for a while. They did that with my son... it was like, for a brief moment in time, all those on the investigative team were as lost as I was upon finding him.

I reach out, trying to hold Scully back... stop her from seeing him. Stop the truth from coming crashing down on her for just a few more seconds. Let him be alive to her for just two more seconds... it will be two seconds she'll cherish the rest of her life, because after she saw him the rest of eternity would be filled with his undeniable loss.

She fought my hold... not that I expected anything less. My wife... she'd torn toward our son with the ferocity that only a distraught mother can summon.

And then I realize... that is how Scully's fighting. The passion and strength of a desperate mother, acting for all her heart like what she truly is. Then I think of the baby she's carrying, bringing enough of an ache to my own heart remembering my son that my hold on her breaks and Scully tears free. In finding Fox Mulder dead, have I let down the unborn as well as Scully? Was this discovery going to be rendering a child forever without his father, doomed to never knowing the love a father could give his child?

Scully bursts through the hovering investigators who stood motionless around his body, and though it burns to watch, I can't look away.

Even from my position standing meekly behind, I can see the moment she realizes that his return was only to solidify a loss. It's like watching her spirit, her life... whatever it is that makes people hope... it's like watching all these things fly out of her. It's like watching my wife cradle our dead son all over again.

Scully drops down to the forest floor, her sobbing and desperate mutterings, "No... oh no..." reaching my ears. All things I've heard before... pains and losses I know by heart. I couldn't bring him home to her alive... her or my wife. I failed again. I couldn't save our son, and I couldn't save her partner.

I move slightly closer without realizing I've moved. She's reaching out, touching him. She rests her hand upon his face, touches his hair... willing her touch to bring him back in what is probably her farthest leap of faith and hope she's ever known. My wife ran her fingers through our son's hair for minutes... praying, though she'd not been a religious woman. Scully, though she wears a cross on her neck that implies she has some kind of faith, does not pray. Maybe seeing him like this... perhaps it is enough to finally make her abandon her faith... to make anyone abandon what they used to hold as true and seek aid in something else... enough to make my wife for once in her life turn to God. In this case, Scully turns away from him, no doubt in a deeper part of herself angry at him. After all, he'd let Mulder die.

She suddenly bolts to her feet, barking to no one in particular, "He needs help!" and charged back into the night.

I don't know what she thought she was doing... what aid she thought she might be able to bring to a man so irrevocably lost as Fox Mulder is, but I know the angry need to still have hope. She can't let herself believe what she sees; she can't bare the thought that it might read as her giving up on him.

I quietly move to the crowd of agents around the still figure of Agent Mulder. I gently order them away... there's nothing they can do, nothing any of us can do; we all failed, and we all know it. Men slink away in shame, quiet in their loss... ashamed of their shortcomings that could not save this one life.

It was five minutes of eternity before she returned. The look on her face told me why she'd allowed herself to be away for so long... somehow being unable to find something to bring him back (as she'd gone off seeking), she felt she'd failed him yet again. She was helpless, I knew that as well as she did, but she can't come to terms with the fact she'd not been able to find a miracle for him.

Agent Scully has become a hull, a shell... everything in her feeling like a void. I know... I've lived in that consuming nothingness when I lost my son... when I failed him as she feels she's failed her partner.

She does not speak to anyone, does not even look at them... as if they are no longer real to her. With a set and determined stride that lacks strength, she moves toward him. He lays as before on the ground... unmoved.

Monica is standing beside me, though I only then realize that she's there at all. She makes as if to move toward Scully. I reach out, grabbing her arm rather forcefully, preventing her from approaching the distraught agent. Moral support be damned... at this moment, Scully would just as soon die, hoping that maybe it could reunite her with her partner. Monica doesn't understand, and therefore has even less of a right to interfere. I understand Scully's pain, but I dare not move so much as an inch closer than I now stand. Even Skinner, Scully's friend, knows better than to try to touch her pain... I suppose there are more people than I'd known before who understand this kind of hurt.

The other agents standing at a distance stop, growing still and quiet as they watch the woman nearing the dead man.

Scully, face impassive (I know that too, all she has feels ripped from her... she's giving up), as she reaches his body.

She drops slowly before his figure as she had minutes before in rage and despair. She looks at him a long time, as if still unable to believe that the corpse before her is all that is left of her partner. She reaches out with one hand, touching his face as before, but this time not desperately... this time tenderly. She runs her thumb softly over his still cheek, tears coming to her eyes once more, though she denies their existence. I think maybe I heard her whisper his name, or maybe I'm just projecting; my wife had called our son's name, in a tone like she was merely beckoning him for dinner, as if it would wake him up.

Just as strongly as it had broken my heart to watch my wife eventually start humming to our son's lifeless body, the thing Scully does next tears me apart anew.

She moves next to him, sitting closely to his body, then bends down to lean against him. Like he were alive, she snuggles down against him like a pillow, resting her head on his shoulder as she no doubt did in life... maybe during stake-outs in their early years together. Her right arm comes around his back, hugging herself to him, and then she sighs heavily.

And it was the look on her face that got me. She was not saying good-bye, I realize... she's hoping he'll come back to take her with him. She's asking as only someone in love can for him to come for her... to lead her off with him as he must have done a thousand times in life. From the look in her eyes, I know she has no intentions of rising again... of ever leaving Fox Mulder where he now lay. Not even the baby she's carrying inside her womb is incentive enough for her to stay. She wants to die... to go with him.

She lies there for fifteen minutes, not moving. I would have suspected she'd fallen asleep had her eyes not been open in a catatonic haze the entire time. If it were up to me, I would have let her lie there with him until dawn, but the EMT's had arrived to remove the body, and I knew that someone would have to move Scully away from the empty vessel of Fox William Mulder.

I moved toward her, each step cautious, as if the small disruption even in only a footfall would be enough to break her... to finally send her off with her partner as she is patiently waiting to do. In a way, I wish she were able to join him as she longs to, but the human part of me can't justify letting her go without a fight. I can't help but feel that, if I let her die like she wants to now, I'd also be failing somone else I'd never even known... somehow I'd be letting down Fox Mulder.

I kneel down next to them, trying to stay a good distance away. She doesn't want me close to him, and he wouldn't either.

"Agent Scully," I say softly.

Scully doesn't move, but her eyes water anew with fresh tears... the first human response she's had since settling down, waiting emotionlessly for her partner to honor her desire to be with him... to hear her prayer that was not to God, but to the lost essence of what Fox Mulder had been.

I frown, saying as gently as I can, "They need to take him, now, Dana. It's time to leave."

I'm not sure why she listened to me... maybe I was wrong in thinking that the baby inside her was not enough to carry her on. Maybe it was just enough, and at this point, just enough was all anyone could ask for. She shifts and moves slowly to sit up, eyes turning down to the still form of her partner.

Her chin quivers once again, her stoic stupor broken, and she whispers in a tortured, anguished voice, "Fuck you, Mulder... fuck you for going on a journey where you knew I could not follow."

I know to anyone else, what I said next may have sounded harsh. It might have sounded sadistic... hell, it might have sounded outright satanic. But I know, despite how it sounds, it's not only what she wants to hear, but what she NEEDS to hear.

I offer it quietly, faintly, my own soul plagued by memories of a comparable personal pain years ago, "In time you'll walk the same path, Agent Scully... he's gone where you can and WILL follow. You... WILL... follow."

And it's enough, I think. Enough to bring her to her feet. She stands over him a moment, never taking her eyes from his body, and then she whispers softly, "I'm coming, Mulder. Wait for me."

As she turns to leave under her own power, a testament to a greater inner strength she posesses, I look down at her dead partner. I may not know him, but I know one thing. He'll be there waiting for her with baited breath.



END