A Broken Fox

16) She Pretends

When she returns, she greets him with yet another kiss--oh, how Mulder has grown to despise such affection!--then holds up a gun. Mulder leans forward until he's sitting on the very edge of the chair, waiting to drop at any second.
"There was once a man who loved me," she says coldly, admiring the light reflecting off the metal in her hand. "He loved me so much. And then he left." She looks up at Mulder, eyes full of longing and lust. "He left me with so much love, Fox. So much love that I didn't know what to do with it. They say love can change you, and I guess it can, can't it? You know that, of course."
His eyes only concentrate on the gun. There's a slight bit of fear, just barely making his heart beat faster, but he doesn't really mind. He's just waiting for it. That's all he's doing. Sitting and waiting, drugged and bound. Scully will take care of his mother.
"I've tried to love so many other men, Fox. But none of them were the same. None of them will ever love me back," she continues, her voice getting harsher as she goes on. "So I try to teach them to love me. They don't do what I want, I punish them. And if they can't learn..."
She aims the gun directly at Mulder's forehead as her whole expression changes to cold anger.
"They die."
BANG!
Mulder stares at her blankly. Slowly, she looks down at her torso, where a red stain is quickly expanding. Her hand goes limp and the gun falls, then she looks up at Mulder with a small, satisfied smile. She collapses, and Mulder can see a figure standing several feet beyond the body.
Scully stands with her gun still raised in both hands, arms shaking. Her eyes are hollow and her mouth is slightly open. She looks exactly like she always does when she kills someone.
Slowly, the trembling fading, she returns the gun to her hip, taking pained steps toward her partner. She steps over the body, giving it only a look of disgust, then tears apart the simple knots that bound Mulder's wrists, jerked back into reality.
"Mulder, are you okay?" she demands, resting her hands on his shoulders.
His dark brown eyes are still slightly unfocused from fear, hopelessness, and the drug, making it appear as though he can't see Scully at all.
"Talk to me, Mulder," she says harshly.
"She said I wanted to die," he answers numbly.
His eyes move down to the body on his floor, but Scully moves to the side, blocking his view with her crystal blue gaze. His eyes seem to focus a little on the pale woman, and he seems to be a bit more aware than he was a second ago. He slowly folds his arms over his stomach and curls in on himself ever so slightly, a faint memory of a thought echoing in the back of his head: She won't find out.
"Mulder, that's not true," Scully says slowly, as though talking to a child. "No one really wants to die. They only want their problems to be over."
"My problems are never going to be over," he mutters softly, almost as though to himself. "I am just going to keep living, waiting for the truth until I die wrapped in lies."
Scully's expression hardens, and she just barely shakes Mulder as she speaks. "Everything gets better, Mulder. Do you hear me? I am not going to sit here and listen to you talk like this. Do you hear me?"
The question was rhetorical, but Mulder nods in the slightest before leaning into Scully's shoulder, forcing her into practically holding him up. After a few moments, she feels a trace of dampness on her suit jacket, accompanied by the slightest tremor in Mulder's back. She tightens her grip on him in a protective way, but says nothing. She pretends that his shivering is that of cold, not the terror of a lost and hopeless child. She pretends to not know he's trying to not cry, and that his choked swallowing is from a minor cough. She pretends to not know that she just killed someone, and that the body is dangerously close.
Mulder's arms uncurl from around his middle and, slowly, they wrap around Scully's small frame. He slides off the edge of the chair onto the floor, pulling Scully ever closer to his body. He practically engulfs the smaller woman, but his head still remains buried in her shoulder. All Scully can do is hold him up, ignore the growing dampness his forehead presses into her shoulder, and quietly go shhh every so often. She pretends to not feel him desperately clutching at the fabric over her back, and that she can't feel the scars on his.
She pretends that she doesn't understand his quiet murmurs of, "Please don't go," into her shoulder.
She pretends to think that he'll be okay.