Title: Tuck
Author: MissAnnThropic
E-Mail: miss_annthropic@yahoo.com
Spoilers: Paper Clip
Summary: Just for now, just for tonight, she needed this... and she needed him not to ask.
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.



A cold, resounding drip beat rhythmically from the faulty hotel faucet against the porcelain sink basin below, tapping out a song of prolonged neglect that expected no reprise any time soon. The air conditioner against the wall was humming its incessant tune, though the volume of its efforts were shamed by the actual output it managed, a disregarded part of a much greater whole whose best efforts went unseen and unsung... its waning strength and heaping desperation for help ignored. The room was filled with the smell of hotel, that smell of heavy fabric softener and carpet cleaning powder. The stench of a place so long empty, the memory and mark of any presence that might have once passed through masked and nearly wiped clean only hours after any life had stopped to linger there. A thickness to the air that silently wailed of forever emptiness... perpetual loneliness.

And yet, to the figure that now tried to find sleep within the hollow walls, the emptiness inside her seemed even greater.

Dana Scully stared into the darkness, and as it had been doing as of late, the emptiness and still of the room seemed to seep into her.

The hotel was familiar, but not because it was one she'd been to before. Because it was like a thousand other rooms she had stayed in over the years... and thousand other places that had forgotten her as she left, a thousand places she felt now as though she'd taken with her in some measure. All the lonely places inside her she had buried but carried with her nonetheless broke from their gates tonight. As they had the night before... and the one before that... a stream of regressing nights where something dark inside her had erupted to consume her.

The air seemed thick, as though it could swallow her, and all she could think was, 'let it.'

The choke of a sob crouched somewhere deep inside her chest, but she was beyond the point of crying. A greater agony seemed to strain inside her, begging to be let out in a fit of emotional display and rage, but outwardly Scully couldn't make herself care enough to let it happen.

The nights... they were the worst. During the day, she could force this gloom deep inside her. She could smile for people, laugh for people... act for them. Pretend everything was alright and she was 'fine'... because she was always fine. She could banter with Mulder and argue with his theories, but deep inside her, behind the charade, she was doing it only because it was expected of her. She no longer enjoyed the challenge, nor the little things that had once brightened her day.

Even in the day, she couldn't make herself really care. She could only make herself look like she did... so everything would look 'fine'.

But the nights... there was no one to act for. Nobody to call her back to her part by seeking her attention. There was just the darkness, the hollow sorrow and indifference that burst forth once again.

Scully flipped over with a heavy sigh, having given up any notion of falling asleep. The only way she would fall asleep was because it slipped up upon her, caught her unaware as she continually stared down the blackness. Strange, to know it came from her, but also to lie awake at night trying to keep it away.

It was always a losing battle, she knew that from the start. Because the darkness she faced she recognized. It was her... it always was. When she was holding it off on nights like this, it was never because it was coming to attack her... it was just coming home.

She realized tonight, though, that the days weren't really any better. They seemed that way because there were distractions, sounds, people. But it occurred to her tonight that the days were just as bad as the nights, because she took the darkness with her... inside her.

Scully grimaced in the dark, feeling as though realizing this had let that black beast slip inside her... not completely, but just enough to tie her to the echoing emptiness that was around her. It got hard at times like that to know where she ended and that dark despair began. And even harder when she thought that maybe there was no distinction at all.

Melissa came to her mind as she let out another heavy sigh. It had been almost two weeks since she had died from that gunshot wound... but at night it felt like minutes. In the suspended minutes while lying in the dark, it felt like her sister was slipping from life in those very seconds rather than in the past.

Scully faintly bit her lip. She would be glad to cry... hard as it was to let herself cry, she knew at this point it would make her feel better. But there was no such relief to come to her... only the blackness.

She longed for the day, when people would make her put on her act again. Half the time, she felt like she was almost believing it. When a rapid fire of conversation would grab her immediate attention, for a while it almost felt like she was someone else... someone that didn't have that black demon in her. Someone who really WAS 'fine'.

But then the night would come... it always did, and she would see her devil. The expansive, dark one that bore her face. The hollow eternity that could pull past and present together... enough so to seem to blank out even the idea of the future.

But it was at night that Scully couldn't make herself care.

Scully turned onto her side, pulling the pillow up around her face. There was no hiding, but she could pretend for a few seconds. Enough to think.

Scully took in a deep breath, the cool hotel air carrying the faint scent of the outside autumn, but nothing that could stir any positive emotions in Dana Scully. Not tonight... not for a long time might it ever again.

Missy's funeral came to her every time she let herself become unoccupied. A vivid mental chunk that seemed to have survived her memory better than anything else during that time.

The glossy wood coffin hovering over the gaping wound in the ground. Scully remembered thinking, it wasn't right. The sense of injustice clung to the memory like a scent. Melissa wasn't supposed to die... she wasn't supposed to be killed. Her life wasn't supposed to end like that.

Scully's mother had been beside her, both her brothers next to Maggie. She remembered distinctly what they wore, the sounds of their sniffling... even felt all over again their quick glances to check on everyone else in the clan, though their concern was only a second thought. Everyone was lost in their own world, grieving the dead in their own way. Some of Missy's old friends had been there, too... people Scully had known once fleetingly as Melissa's little sister what seemed like ages ago, but felt she didn't anymore. Strangers who looked at her as if they no longer recognized her... would rather disavow knowledge of her than try to decide how to express their condolances to the poor little sister.

And Mulder had been there. Just as he was now only a room away, linked to her room by the connecting door between hotel rooms, he had been with her at her sister's funeral. No one else had seemed to even notice his presence but Scully at the time, her brothers and mother so focused on Melissa, so consumed by tunnel vision that she would have wondered if she even saw him there were it not for the tactile, physical memories of him being with her. Standing behind her... close enough for her to smell him and feel his body heat against her back. That was in the memory too... the smell of Mulder touching her senses as the winches creaked while lowering the coffin into the open earth.

But most of all, what Scully remembered feeling as she watched her sister's body laid to rest was that she was among the most important people in her life... and she had never felt more alone.

And Scully realized, it was a distance and loneliness she had brought upon herself.

It was and always had been her nature not to open up to people. It wasn't anything she'd ever been able to help... just the way she was. Not just friends, but even those in her family she'd always kept at a certain emotional distance. As close as they could have been, and she never let them. Not even Missy.

It had always before made her feel stronger. To know she could depend on just herself had made her feel a little more in control of anything and everything that might happen. To know that no one had been allowed to get so close to her had always before, to her, seemed like a strength.

Standing there, at Melissa's funeral, Scully realized that she had severed herself from being able to turn to anyone in her grief. Her mother and brothers drew together in their grief... and Scully discovered she had no one. She had spent years, all the time she'd been alive, letting people know how close they could get to her, and they all had limits... lines they weren't allowed to cross, bridges they weren't allowed to step over.

And everyone was at some amount of distance. Her brothers could only get so close, her mother a little closer, and Mulder about two steps further than that... but that was as far as anyone went. Her gates closed at anything closer than Mulder was allowed to venture to her.

In her haste to set up her defenses, she had failed to see that she had barricaded herself in... alone.

But her construction had been foolproof, and now that she realized she was trapped, she couldn't get out.

And no one would come to rescue her. She could scream, signal, beg for help... but everyone who she was close to would know better than to move closer than they were allowed. Scully had trained them all and they were trained well. They all kept the distance asked of them.

And it was killing her.

Scully stared up toward the ceiling, thinking. There was one slight exception. Mulder was one to test boundaries... he would take the tentative step past his limits to try and reach her just a little more, but not even he would think of barging in on her fortress. Her family knew better from having lived with her her whole life, and Mulder was starting to learn.

And Scully understood that she was always going to be completely alone once he did.

It wasn't even so much about Melissa's death anymore. Death Scully could handle, had before and undoubtedly would again. It was that black beast her untimely passing had unleashed.

She didn't WANT to shut people out (there had been a time when she did, but that time was past), but it was beyond her control. Just as a wolf couldn't help the slaughter, Scully couldn't help the hole she'd backed herself into. She wouldn't let herself allow them close.

She was no longer her own guard... she'd become her own enemy.

And it hurt to know that she couldn't go to them. She was trapped in her place as much as they were. She couldn't go to anyone... couldn't turn to anyone, because as painful as her system was, it was stable. To forget the boundaries and the rules, to disregard everything that had been built over years would throw everything into utter chaos.

That was the last thing she needed to deal with right now, because the way she felt now, she wouldn't care enough to put things back together, and the rest of her world would start to fall apart.

But, for the first time, Scully didn't want to be alone.

She recalled with aching nostalgia being a little girl... when she hadn't felt restrained about running up to her father and hugging him, feeling him welcome her and comfort her when she didn't even need it. Just knowing then that she had a shoulder to rest her head on that wouldn't look at her funny for the gesture... unconditional love and touch that need not be explained or justified... she missed being able to seek out another human's contact and company without it meaning that something in the system had broken down.

She ached for and the blackness taunted her with the days when she could have asked for a hug and gotten one... no questions asked and no curiosities aroused.

On nights like this, she just missed being human... the kind of human where a little comfort and unquestioned contact was common place and not only typical, but expected.

She missed that feeling she'd had as a little girl when she knew she could crawl up in her dad's lap just to be in his lap. She missed what she couldn't have anymore... because she'd told herself long ago she didn't need it... and now was discovering that she'd been wrong.

She silently cried for having someone who would give her a shoulder to lean on and not need to know why.



****



Fox Mulder lay sprawled on his back, the comforter kicked away to the floor, the thin sheet the only thing he used for a blanket and that only rose to drape over half of his white T shirt-covered torso. His own air conditioner sputtered and trilled with a continuous rattle of something always caught in the belt. It was able to cool the room even less than its valiantly fighting friend next door, and the covers to the bed had been quickly discarded as not only unnecessary, but ridiculous.

The room was quiet, no dripping of a broken faucet to shatter the air, but the very faint and constant ticking of Mulder's wristwatch that sat on the nightstand by the bed stopped the room from seeming dead still.

Mulder slept, unaware, as the door to his hotel room soundlessly and slowly swayed open.

When he and Scully had connecting hotel rooms while on assignment, he never locked the door between their rooms. There was no situation in which he could image wanting to bar her entrance. So now, as always, the door was open to her.

The door swung open slowly... just enough to allow a woman's slim figure to slip into the room without a sound.

For a moment, nothing moved in the darkness, and only the sound of two people breathing could be heard. The deep, sigh-like breath of the sleeping man, the slightly faster, awake breaths of the standing woman, and the wristwatch and air conditioner keeping constant vigil over the night's symphony such as it was.

The woman was quiet, not making a sound, as she stepped closer to the bed in the dark. Her eyes were accustomed... just enough to make out the bed and the figure upon it.

Mulder did not stir as the figure moved silently closer to him, but he roused faintly when the mattress under him shifted and dipped with an added weight.

The woman gingerly crawled on to the bed, moving over the mattress toward Mulder and considering him a moment as his breathing hitched just enough to show he noticed the movement, even though still asleep.

The woman hesitated, then slipped underneath the thin sheet and laid down on the bed, resting on her side facing the sleeping Fox Mulder... watching him.

She laid at a short distance from Mulder for only a moment in the stillness, then shifted closer... closer... moved until she could touch him.

The woman, suddenly seeming to feel no fear (perhaps the need outweighed the fear), snuggled up to Mulder's warm body as wholly as she could, cuddling closer and resting her head on his chest.

Mulder slowly awoke, noticing the room seemed considerably hotter than when he'd gone to bed. A second later he caught scent of a very familiar smell, stronger than it should have been at a room's distance away... then he realized that a woman was curled up to his side.

Mulder blinked, startled faintly, then asked in a gruff midnight-voice (as it had only taken him the well-known scent to recognize his guest), "Scully?"

She didn't answer, just laid where she was... head on his shoulder and body as near his as she could comfortably get it.

Mulder frowned, "Scully, are you okay?" he blinked the sleep from his mind, coming awake and noticing that she had not answered.

Mulder reached up, finding the dial on the lamp by his bedside without having to move and twisting the knob, turning on the light.

Mulder winced initially at the onslaught of light, then turned his eyes down to the figure beside him. She was still unmoving, but Mulder knew something was wrong. Though she didn't seem hurt, this was unlike his partner. Just as if she were harmed, he became concerned and protective of her at her uncharacteristic, quiet proximity.

"Scully?" Mulder shifted faintly on the bed to try and elicit some action from her (though not enough that she might interpret it as a request to get off him, for until he knew what was wrong he wasn't going to risk looking like he was turning her away) while asking gently, "what's wrong?"

Scully was still a moment, then she took a breath and lifted her head from his chest, turning her face up to look at him.

She said nothing. Instead, she sought his eyes, looking to speak to him in a way they only could to one another. A language that knew no words, and a speech that had no voice.

Mulder looked into the blue eyes he usually could read so well. He saw in them her strength, as he always did, but this time there was something different. A shadow of what almost could have been called the gaze of a child seeking something, mixed in with everything she usually comunicated to him with her eyes. Underneath what he normally saw in her look, the strength of her character and the power of her person, he saw that whatever she had come here for tonight she had found... as long as he didn't try and deny her. He saw that she needed this... just for now, just for tonight, she needed this... and she needed him not to ask.

So he didn't.

Mulder reached back to the nightstand and turned off the light, then casually but tenderly brought his arms around Scully and pulled her close against him, welcoming her to return to the place where she'd apparently found solace. An invitation that carried with it no asked promises for an explanation later... it was just simply that, an invitation to come back to him.

Scully relaxed from a state of tension neither had been consciously aware of before and let her head drop back to his chest with a grateful and content sigh, discovering that even more of the darkness was chased away when he reciprocated by wrapping his arms around her.

Mulder sighed, beginning to drift back off to sleep with his partner snuggling against him. Something in the way Scully's body grew lax against his let him know she was comfortable and relaxed, maybe even close to falling asleep herself. For whatever reason she had come to him, she felt safe again, or whatever it was she had felt that made her come to him like she had. He wasn't sure why Scully had needed this tonight, but he would give it to her no questions asked... just giving her a place to tuck her head.



END