realmof_themuse 2009.23 - 6/30/2009
Unable are the loved to die. For love is immortality. ~Emily Dickinson
”Death by lethal injection.”
John Doggett's face blurred before her eyes, shifting and changing as if by a watercolour painting caught in the rain, emotions seeping downward in a slow, miscoloured run. Scully's face contorted, a shifting and moving of her own feelings, circling in a slow, painstaking orbit around the inevitable despair that she knew would break her apart if she gave in to it. But there was nowhere to go anymore, nowhere other than where she was headed, caught in the whirlpool of her own loss, an anguish that wouldn't be soothed.
It was over.
And yet she wondered if she had known, somewhere in the back of her mind, that it was over before this day. Scully had knelt on the cold, concrete floor and watched Mulder where he lay in a cold imitation of sleep, his hands tucked between his knees for some shred of warmth. He had frightened her then with what he had said, because the words were punctuated with a condemned man's surrender, and she didn't want him to surrender to anything, now or ever again.
But the trial - the disgraceful, sham of a trial - had been nothing more than a false formality. Mulder's fate had been sealed courtesy of the forces he had been fighting all his life the moment he had been caught, and there had been no going back. There was no way out then, and there wasn't going to be one now. It was over.
Time passed in a shift of aching sadness, but Scully didn't know just how much time had come and gone. It didn't matter, either, or rather it didn't seem to, not with the sentence looming its ugly, cold stare on the future's horizon. She almost didn't move when Monica Reyes touched her shoulder, first with the faint pressure of compassion and then again moments later with a hard push of urgency.
“Dana. Dana, get up. Get your coat.”
Why?
“I don't -”
“There isn't time. Get your coat and go with Gibson.”
The urgency in Reyes' voice had stirred a dim rush of adrenaline she had believed to be dead, and Scully smeared her fingertips across the fringes of her eyelashes to bring the world into focus again. Gibson was there now, sitting across from her and looking at her intently with round, bespectecled eyes.
“Scully,” he said quietly, “we have to go. We have to go now.”
The question why? was ringing around in the back of her mind, starting as a dull whisper and then raising to a deafening scream, but Scully shifted the weight of her aching heart and pushed it aside for now, for the sake of one final stretch of faith.
She pushed her feet into her shoes and pulled her coat from the closet.
- - -
The road would have been busy at any other time but the hour of the night was so late that traffic was dim, sparse. Scully had seen a few trailers with bleary-eyed drivers behind their wheels rushing forward to one direction or another, but no one paid any mind to herself and Gibson waiting by the side of the road.
When the dark SUV turned in their direction, bumping and hesitating here and there along the dirt road, Scully's heart sprang into her throat and beat there like that of a trapped animal. But John was behind the wheel, she could see Monica's face in the shadowed semidarkness, (was that Kersch, as well?) and there was another person half hidden by shadows as well -
It took his opening the car door and joining the night for Scully to be able to say his name.
“Mulder?”
Mulder crossed to stand by her side, still pulling an overcoat over his shoulders, and in that moment Scully dared to believe, once again, that everything might somehow be all right.
Muse: Dana Scully
Fandom: the X-Files
Word Count: 654