She was his interpreter.

Seven years ago everything she heard about the X-Files division was true. It existed in memory of the fact that Mulder had been VCS's golden boy and they had indulged him, then marginalized him, and he had made himself the king of a vast dumping ground of cases. For him they were all legitimate, be they misunderstood or misinterpreted or... victim to minds less concerned with the truth than he himself was. For her, for every one semifactual case, three were more acceptable lies. A child killer who claimed aliens had made him do it, aliens had taken the children, aliens had planted the evidence found. A series of robberies the cops could not solve became the story of a man who could stretch and contort himself at will. It was all basic psychology, and he was a psychologist, and...

And then she had seen Tooms.

For someone who could manage to accept everything they had seen with such unflappable brilliance, Mulder didn't quite have the firmest grasp on everyday reality. He would chase a UFO through three states, on foot when he ran out of gas; he left witnesses, and plausible denial was a dirty phrase he used only on other people. He held himself to a standard no one else could touch, and that standard didn't include consideration for anyone else. Bouncing basketballs on his hardwood floors, shooting the upstairs tenant, ransacking his own apartment for wiretaps and listening devices. She was surprised his landlord hadn't just raised his rent until he could no longer pay it, forced him out of the building and made life just a little bit easier for everyone.

Mulder needed an interpreter. Someone to stand between him and life, and hold his hand when it got to be a bit too much, to talk him down from rooftops and insane theories and his flagrant disregard for authority. In their partnership, she was the strong one, or at least she had thought so, until she was twisting to watch Mulder stare at the mosquito bites on her back in flickering candlelight. Sometimes she thought that everything she had done since then was just a way to make up for that one weakness.

He needed an interpreter. Someone to pick up the pieces when it all exploded, to keep him on track and in line, to keep him a guided missile instead of a loose cannon. She had been nominated, and she had never backed down.

She looked down at the file. The lab was long deserted. The autopsy bay was hers alone. She pinched the bridge of her nose, found herself already attempting to form the words, but for now, it was inchoate grief, as she looked over at a woman she had known by name, her pale flesh hanging slack over the gleaming metal table.

She was his interpreter and sometimes she hated it. Especially tonight.

Teena Mulder had known for months that she was going to die, but she had left her son with an empty house and the only solace he had ever known, the elaborate lace of delusion and conspiracy theory and rationalization. She had left her son to hear the news from another, and Mulder's insistence had brought her to this terrible place.

Scully sighed and began the tiny stitches, sewing back together the woman whose grandchild she had almost carried.

--

"Mrs. Spooky" was not a job description.

For a nanosecond, that had mattered. Back when she was going to be a brilliant forensic pathologist with the Bureau, a fantastic agent whose life would eventually join that of a mate who wasn't an instructor or mentor or psychopath, when joining Tom Colton's team wasn't just something she accepted but something she wanted. "Mrs. Spooky" didn't belong on a resumÈ.

Mulder had known that, back then. With his fingers tangled in her necklace, he'd told her that he didn't want to be her career killer. His office was a temporary stop on her way up the ladder.

But she was his interpreter. Without her, he was just the screwball in the basement, ignoring paperwork and pissing off local law enforcement wherever he went. Without him, her momentum would pull her over the edge of the cliff she walked for him, drowning in the meaningless tedium of a teaching job at the academy. After staring at the sun, the earth was all washed-out shadows.

Mulder's apartment was just down the street from both a bar and a liquor store. She slowed the car opposite, but set her mouth and passed without stopping.

It was so damned unfair, selfish and meaningless. She had been through the Bureau's grief counseling workshops and that was all it boiled down to. No reason, no logic, only the mitigation of disorientation, confusion, desperation. Teena Mulder had wanted to escape the pain. She had only succeeded in passing it on to someone else.

Scully slammed her fist against the dashboard, drawing in a long breath before she tossed her keys into her purse and shouldered the car door closed. Her overnight bag was in the trunk. Maybe later.

There will be no relief tonight, she thought. For either of us.

--

He had not cried like this since she'd been on her premature deathbed. The denials faded too fast and the tears were already quivering on the edge of his voice before she pulled him into her arms and held him.

"I'm sorry." She kept chanting it, and he gave no indication that he heard or cared, but she had to say something. His apartment was so still, and she had brought no distractions. Nothing to dull this. Nothing other than his rough gasps and tears on her blue shoulder. She pulled her arms tight around him and he was shaking.

"No." It wasn't a word but a pained groan. He surged suddenly against her, her back striking the coffee table as he swept an arm over and something crashed to the floor. A coffee cup, an ashtray, magazines, his service weapon, she didn't know or care. She buried her face against his shoulder. Grey cotton.

"Mulder, no."

He struggled again and gasped in a breath, his eyes wet, and she reached behind her and found his wrists, twined her fingers around the bone and cooler flesh. His brow furrowed but she held his hands down, away from the sharp corners, the sudden hard rush of pain that would drive this guilt and anguish from him for the barest moment. He drew a long loud breath and twisted his wrists in her grasp, curving his fingers around her own wrists, the pale flesh of her forearms.

"She wouldn't do this." She wouldn't leave me.

Scully closed her eyes and waited. She was tired. She was tired and she was the only one standing between him and the cliff, and she was broken, exhausted by their case and the night that stretched out before them, the end. He had finally been abandoned by the last relic of his tortured past, leaving him as they had been the last seven years. The two of them against the world.

She hated Teena Mulder then, with a brief blinding trembling-red hatred, for doing this, for leaving a cipher of a suicide note on her son's answering machine before she took the easy way out of life, leaving them only with questions, solving nothing. On Scully's own deathbed, when she had known that her cancer would take her mind and breath and strength, the thought that she would leave this man behind, broken and undone, that had pulled her back. It wasn't over. It couldn't be over. Not like this.

When she looked into Mulder's eyes she knew that he had never fully believed it. He had never believed that the cancer was terminal and she would be taken from him. Together the two of them were immortal, Fellig's bullet and Mulder's predicted destiny. If he had believed it even for a second, that they would be parted by such a meaningless act,

a beesting on a summer afternoon

nothing would have been able to pull him back. Nothing.

She didn't know if she herself had the strength to do it now.

"There are no reasons," she said softly. Her knees on either side of his thighs, in a weak attempt to restrain him, when he could easily throw her across the room without blinking. "And we'll never know."

"Why didn't she tell me."

A plastic sleeve of mixed flowers in his hand as he gazed with her at the shadow buried in her brain, the reversed stain of death nestled inside her skull. Scully had never considered waiting, avoiding, omitting, not from him. She had been his strength for so long, and now she would fail, through no fault of their own. To acquaint him again with slow death, when his entire life had been nothing else.

Scully released his wrists, put her palms against his cheeks. Anguish in his eyes. "I don't know," she whispered. "She didn't want to hurt you."

"And this is better?"

She shook her head. "Mulder."

He climbed ungracefully to his feet and she was pulled along until they were both standing. He brushed past her and she stood for a moment, gathering her strength. The kitchen. The oven. Glass and knives and numbness.

She wheeled around and picked her way through the indistinct shadow of broken pottery on the floor. His elbows were on the edge of the sink, his face in his hands.

She hesitated before letting her palm fall gently against his shoulder, only the barest reminder of her presence. "Fox."

"We had the rest of our lives," he said, his voice breaking. Rage. How dare she hurt him this way, and how dare he express it. "She was all I had left. She. My Mom."

Scully had never seen Teena Mulder unbroken by grief. She had never seen Mulder without the shadow of his sister's disappearance writ large and unmistakable on his face, there for the world to see and exploit. "The Mulder family passes genetic muster," he'd told her, in the buzzing daze of a small backward town, and maybe they did, unbowed by the tragedy of Samantha's disappearance. She had never seen him whole, but she had made him so.

"She was at peace." Ashes and tears dried on her skin. How much peace could her decision have afforded her, in the end.

She could feel him tensing before he lashed out again, the side of a closed fist against the countertop. He made a low frustrated noise and she trailed behind, unable to stop him, waiting to pick up the pieces.

--

Another minute and she would have called the all-night pharmacy, ordered him whatever she could find. Another minute of this.

His service weapon was tucked into her waistband and he knew it. His bedroom was in shambles. He slid from numb slow to furious in seconds, and only stopped when she grabbed his wrists, forced him to look into her face. Once he'd made a grab for the gun and she had nearly slapped him, shaking with exhaustion and fear. Not for herself, but for him. Now son of a suicide.

"Let me go."

"No."

His eyes welled up again. Standing still too long, thinking too long, brought tears, the curious caricature of a stone face. "Scully, please."

"I'm not going to let you go."

His lip pulled back in a snarl, and he jerked his hands back but she kept her grip and was pulled against him. His breath came in pants, his chest heaving, and she closed her eyes, her cheek against the warmth of his chest. Waiting. He jerked his hands back again but she held onto him.

"Why are you even here right now," he said. "Why are you doing this."

I don't know anymore. "Because I'm your friend and you're hurting."

His head fell against her shoulder again, his face against the side of her neck, his breath on her skin, and after a heartbeat she released his wrists and wrapped her arms around him, hard. Loud gasped sobs, his fingers digging against the blue cotton, pressed into her skin. From his tone she knew he was murmuring the same recriminations, the same repeated iterations of guilt and blame.

"It's not your fault." Her fingers found his shoulder blades, his neck, and she traced a hand over his hair, over his spine, soft slow strokes. "You didn't do this. You know that. You know she was hurting. It wasn't you."

"Why didn't I call her," he groaned, his voice muffled against her.

"Because you didn't know." Her lips brushed his cheek. "You would have done anything for her, you would have moved heaven and earth for her, and she knew that."

"Then why..."

She began to back up, without bothering to look behind her, until her calves brushed against the mattress. "She didn't want to go through the pain. She didn't want you to go through it."

"Is that how you felt?"

Scully's hand stilled on the back of his neck. "Mulder, look at me."

He pulled back, his face streaked wet and eyes swelled with tears. "Scully."

"I will never leave you."

His face crumpled, then, and he looked away. "You can't promise that," he said roughly.

She closed her eyes, her hands finding his before she lowered herself to sit on his bed. "I will never willingly leave you."

He smiled, the briefest curve of his lips in the darkness, but it was something. He pulled himself back into the circle of her arms and she put her arms around him again, willing her waning energy into her partner.

"I just can't believe she's gone."

--

Once his breathing had gone slow and even she had put their guns together in the bedside table, then lifted his arm and tried to shift out from beneath it, but he made a displeased noise in his sleep and wrapped his arm around her again. Already drained and exhausted, she just lay back down beside him. Very unpartnerlike conduct. But she wasn't his partner, she was Mrs. Spooky.

While she waited for sleep to find her again, she let her head roll to the side, to face his. A thumb over his cheek traced the dried tracks of his tears. He shook his head gently against her palm, and then his eyes open, glazed with sleep and emptiness.

His fingers against the first button of her blouse. She hadn't bothered to do anything other than kick her shoes off before she had rubbed her palm over his back in slow strokes, listening as he curled into a ball and cursed everything that had brought him to this point. Her father, her sister, her daughter; his father, his sister, and now his own mother, and now she alone was the only touchstone in his life.

His fingers loosed the button, and she drew a long breath to protest, but released it when he nestled his face into the join of her shoulder and neck, his lips against her collarbone. She let her hand drift over the back of his head, again, swearing to herself that if he moved...

Tomorrow. Tomorrow there would be repercussions and the harsh light of his first day without her, but for tonight, his body wrapped around and over hers, his breath against her skin, and she shuddered.

"Don't leave me."

His eyelashes fluttered against her jaw and she closed her eyes. "I won't leave you," she whispered.

"You're the only one left," he murmured into her skin. "They're all gone. Everyone I've ever cared about, everyone I've ever loved. Only you."

Her fingers sliding through his hair. Her fingers tight around the needle as she sewed the vacant shell of his mother back together. She sipped in a long breath, his heart beating against hers, and the first tear slipped over her cheekbone, down into the hollow of her ear.

"Sleep," she whispered. "Go to sleep. I'll be here when you wake up."