This is a common enough occurrence that she doesn't panic-- though with the water it's particularly dramatic. He hands her a towel, and she wraps her hand in it and presses it to her face before angling back into the spray a moment to rinse off the worst of the redness, the scent of warm metal mingling with flowery soap.
"Like I killed the mood," she says apologetically, turning off the shower and pulling the towel away to check if it's still going. The towel is going to be a total loss, tinged pink down the length of it, but there's not nearly as much as she looks. It should pass quickly, she thinks. She hopes.
Mulder stands there, feeling old and wrinkled and selfish as he watches her tend to her bleeding face. For a moment or two, he'd thought we could live like this, it could be like this - and his reward is the most vital reminder possible of the reasons they can't. Her life is running out of her, drop by bloody drop, and he's daydreaming about playing house.
"No, no," he tells her, reaching for another pristine towel. "Come here."
He'll dry her off, shepherd her off to the bed they've commandeered. He's going to have to start doing research on the options - but he wants to hold her just a little longer.
By this point, the nosebleeds don't panic her. It's an unpleasant reminder of what's to come-- but mostly it's a nuisance, and right now it's a stain both literal and figurative on what was a near-perfect afternoon.
"It'll be okay," she murmurs, coming closer, tucking her tongue against her lip-- it's probably an old wives' tale, that it will end it faster, but these days she'll try nearly anything.
She walks into the towel he's holding, leaning against him, feeling only a bit deflated.
"Yeah," he agrees, lying, as he wraps first the towel and then his arms around her damp body. "It'll be okay. C'mon, Scully."
Walking them out of the steamy bathroom, toward her bed, he sits down at the edge of it, tugging her gently down beside him. In a couple minutes, he thinks, I'll get to work. In a couple minutes, I'll stop touching her and start finding a way back. For the moment, though, all he does is hold her.
She makes a muffled sound of agreement against his chest, the towel still tucked against her face. It's all right, she wants to tell him, but it's really not. It's better, though, to have him beside her; to lean on him more literally.
And lean she does, letting herself sag in his embrace. For once, she's not trying to hide it, not trying to be all right. She's just waiting it out.
"I think it's letting up," she murmurs eventually.
It's an eternity, one that feels longer than his memories. He never experienced her nosebleeds with this kind of intimacy - but still, doesn't this seem worse? What if traveling to the future kicked her cancer into higher gear? Her presence here might well be killing her, even as Mulder basks in the sense of purpose she gives him.
He can't come up with an answer from this vantage point. The best he can do is wait until she reports a change - and when she does, he breathes out, kissing the top of her head. "Good. How do you feel?"
"Not too bad," she murmurs. A mild headache but that's probably mostly the tension. "It's fine-- I promise."
It's not really fine, she knows, and he knows it too. But it's not much worse than it always is, and these days this is the best she can hope for. She's all right. Someday-- someday soon, maybe, sooner than she wants-- she won't be, but for now it's just a nosebleed.
"We can just take it easy, for a minute.... I ought to drink some water."
It's not fine. He knows what's coming next - her chalky skin, the way she lies down nearly as lifeless as a set of hospital sheets. She's going to get close to dying if she's in her own time; here, she'll simply die. And he can tell her none of this, explain nothing about the way that his arms tighten around her when she says it's fine.
"As long as you need," he murmurs, letting her decide when she wants to get up. "We have all the time in the world, Scully."
Patently a lie - but what else can he do? She deserves to have this time. The immortality they joke about should be hers.
Maybe it's easier for her to accept. She's been waiting, watching the results, trying one treatment or another; she's been winnowing away the options until there's only one path left. She's had time to adjust to the inevitability of it; his suggestion of a reprieve is recent enough not to have wholly taken hold. If it's just another promising miracle drug that falls through... She's used to that.
But he's had her, and lost her, and now maybe he has to lose her again. And again, she thinks, it's less that she worries about living for her own sake, and more that she doesn't want to do that to him.
The more things change, she thinks, with the darkest of humor, the more they stay the same.
She doesn't get up. At least the bleeding has abated, truly, and she shoves the towel away haphazardly, but stays leaning against him-- wet hair sticking to his chest, her damp body cooling in the air. The truth is there's nowhere to go.
He might be forgiven for wondering if she's fallen asleep, but eventually, like she's come to a weighty decision--
She's going to live. If she doesn't live, there's no reason for Mulder to - and there's none of her future ahead of her, none of their future. The tragedies they don't deserve, the miracles they do. She's going to live, and he'll get her home.
For now, he's simply here with her, the two of them breathing, and when she speaks, he nods.
"Scully." Her name's an agreement, all statement and no question. I'm here, I'm listening. Whatever it is, you probably already know it - but I'll tell you.
Curled against him, there's a certain peace that's hard to break. But at the same time-- she's out of excuses, other avenues of investigation. The question that's been hanging so long in the air feels like the only stone left unturned.
"I think I need you to tell me what happened," she says with a soft sigh.
It's inevitable, this question. He's been waiting for it since she came here and realized just how much had changed: that they'd been together, and that they weren't now. The sheer impossibility of that has clearly eaten at her.
And yet, he hasn't come up with a way to say it. What happened is everything and nothing, too earthshaking to be contained. More importantly, he hasn't wanted to think about it, and so he hasn't. She'll hear it, and she'll understand herself, and maybe that'll get her home - and he'll be alone again.
The best he can do, after a pause, is, "I drove you off."
It's not much of an answer, and maybe it's what she expected. Which is to say she's incredibly suspicious of it; she can't imagine she was that easy to get rid of. (Or maybe she doesn't want to imagine it. It's hard not to blame herself in her own absence.)
She puts her palm on his chest, hoping the contact is some encouragement.
Any touch is an encouragement for Mulder; she might even know it already. This is a story he doesn't want to have to tell, but he knows he has to - she's owed that much, at least.
Mulder lets her go, waiting for her to lift her head and gesturing with his eyes toward the rest of the bed. He doesn't expect a complaint if he crawls under the covers, stretching out with a notion of pulling her into a clinging embrace. He'll tell her there, lying down with her head resting against his shoulder.
It's not a story she particularly wants to hear, either; but she needs to, somehow.
She catches his drift pretty quickly and follows his lead; the blankets' warmth is welcome, and she could care less about getting the sheets damp. She fits herself against him, head on his shoulder, arm across his chest; perfectly placed to be clung to.
It feels, more than anything, right. She needs to understand how she could possibly give this up.
This is the best way to tell it, pulling blankets around them, stroking her hair as he finds the words to explain the unexplainable. How things could fall apart, how much of it is his fault.
Mulder stares up at the ceiling, letting himself luxuriate in her nearness for what might be the last time. "When we settled down - got the house, got your hospital job - I didn't...start working again. It was fine at first...but that changed."
The only way he can find to tell this story is by stating the facts. There's a weariness, bone-deep, that keeps him from trying to explain himself. What could he say? I've been doing things, you just didn't understand. She did, though, and that was half the problem.
"Our lives were too small." That's the only way he can think of it. After all their travels, they contracted into such a small space - and maybe it was too small. You needed more than I could give you, and I couldn't change fast enough to keep you."
This is a strange situation, eyewitness testimony of her own as-yet unimagined behavior. The thing is, she trusts Mulder so inherently; she wants to believe him. And in that way it's easy to make herself the villain-- you're the one who left. But there are missing pieces-- only the smallest of which is that she knows herself, or would like to think she knows herself. There's the lost children-- a great many relationships don't survive that. But it doesn't feel like an explanation.
"You're saying I left because you weren't working?" she hazards, the disbelief evident in her voice. It doesn't sound like her.
"Endogenous depression," he says quietly. Even the words sound sad - limp and self-important. "Long-term major depressive disorder without a clear external factor."
Which is to say, it's just your brain, Mulder. Whirring along like things are fine until there's no crisis to handle, no world to save. He's a wind-up toy walking into a wall, unable to stop until the crank runs out.
"You couldn't take it anymore - and I can't say I couldn't blame you, because I did. But I know it..." He's trying so hard to be fair. "It hasn't been easy for you."
That makes a little more sense. She thinks of his house-- the clutter, the half-forgotten piles of laundry. At the time her working theory had been that he'd fallen into a slump-- understandably-- after being abandoned, but maybe it's not so simple. Chicken and egg.
She'd like to think she wouldn't just walk out on him, but the hopes of that have thinned. She's still defensively angry-- at herself, at a self she isn't yet. May not ever get to be.
"Treatment resistant?" she guesses, because it feels like she has to say something; it's reflexive and diagnostic, her mind falling back on the science of it because she has no idea where else to go.
"Always has been," he says dryly. "Think about the symptoms, Scully: Sleep disturbances, mood swings, inconsistent severity, neurotic thinking. It's not paranoia if they're really out to get you, but that doesn't mean it's not something."
Which is to say, he believes something's wrong with him - finally, after much argument and cajoling on a different, older Scully's part - but it's always felt like a manageable problem. A little vice, almost, the thing pushing him to work endlessly and stay awake at all hours. Depression as indulgence, his work the only refuge from the void.
"I take medication," he adds, after a moment or two, since it seems likely what treatments, how, when are the next questions. "I used to see someone. It just wasn't enough to save us."
Okay, she makes some attempt to keep the bitterness out of her voice. Mulder might not really blame her-- not her, but her later self-- but Dana Scully is young, and her temper can cover them both.
Mulder hesitates, torn between the desire to hear Scully on his side for once and the desire to protect her own good name. The silence probably answers her implied question for her, his hand moving endlessly through her damp hair, but still he has to make himself speak.
"You tried, Scully." She deserves the credit she's not getting; he knows he's become a beast to live with, that if she could have stayed, she would have. It just feels inevitable, in retrospect, that he'd chase her off. Nothing and no one stays for Fox Mulder. The best-case scenario is that he'll lose what he loves due to others' machinations, or worse, to fate; the worst-case scenario is this one, in which there's some fatal flaw in him that ruins everything. "You tried for years."
Even so, it seems impossible to her. In this moment-- maybe that's the problem, though; all of this is too new. An unimaginable future full of promise must look different from the other side, weighted with grief and all too aware of the entropy of depression.
Still, she thinks, stubborn and-- as always-- harder on herself than anyone else, I shouldn't have left him like this.
She doesn't know what to say, so she curls in tighter against him-- as if holding him close now might make up the difference.
He'll take it, even as he's painfully aware he doesn't deserve the comfort. Scully here, holding him like he's blameless, like there's still reason to love him, even knowing what it'll cost her - he buries his face in her hair and tells himself he needs to get her home before his selfishness kills her.
But he doesn't move.
Eventually, he murmurs, "You deserved so much more than I could give you, Scully. Don't blame yourself."
As far as she's concerned, he deserves everything she can give him-- what little that is, for what little time they might have. Either way, he's going to lose her-- to the past or to the future.
"I'll blame myself if I want," she murmurs, quiet but defiant. "She can handle it."
She kisses his shoulder aimlessly.
"Do you think there's anything that could have made a difference?"
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
"Like I killed the mood," she says apologetically, turning off the shower and pulling the towel away to check if it's still going. The towel is going to be a total loss, tinged pink down the length of it, but there's not nearly as much as she looks. It should pass quickly, she thinks. She hopes.
no subject
"No, no," he tells her, reaching for another pristine towel. "Come here."
He'll dry her off, shepherd her off to the bed they've commandeered. He's going to have to start doing research on the options - but he wants to hold her just a little longer.
no subject
"It'll be okay," she murmurs, coming closer, tucking her tongue against her lip-- it's probably an old wives' tale, that it will end it faster, but these days she'll try nearly anything.
She walks into the towel he's holding, leaning against him, feeling only a bit deflated.
no subject
Walking them out of the steamy bathroom, toward her bed, he sits down at the edge of it, tugging her gently down beside him. In a couple minutes, he thinks, I'll get to work. In a couple minutes, I'll stop touching her and start finding a way back. For the moment, though, all he does is hold her.
no subject
And lean she does, letting herself sag in his embrace. For once, she's not trying to hide it, not trying to be all right. She's just waiting it out.
"I think it's letting up," she murmurs eventually.
no subject
He can't come up with an answer from this vantage point. The best he can do is wait until she reports a change - and when she does, he breathes out, kissing the top of her head. "Good. How do you feel?"
no subject
It's not really fine, she knows, and he knows it too. But it's not much worse than it always is, and these days this is the best she can hope for. She's all right. Someday-- someday soon, maybe, sooner than she wants-- she won't be, but for now it's just a nosebleed.
"We can just take it easy, for a minute.... I ought to drink some water."
no subject
"As long as you need," he murmurs, letting her decide when she wants to get up. "We have all the time in the world, Scully."
Patently a lie - but what else can he do? She deserves to have this time. The immortality they joke about should be hers.
no subject
But he's had her, and lost her, and now maybe he has to lose her again. And again, she thinks, it's less that she worries about living for her own sake, and more that she doesn't want to do that to him.
The more things change, she thinks, with the darkest of humor, the more they stay the same.
She doesn't get up. At least the bleeding has abated, truly, and she shoves the towel away haphazardly, but stays leaning against him-- wet hair sticking to his chest, her damp body cooling in the air. The truth is there's nowhere to go.
He might be forgiven for wondering if she's fallen asleep, but eventually, like she's come to a weighty decision--
"Mulder..."
She hesitates.
no subject
For now, he's simply here with her, the two of them breathing, and when she speaks, he nods.
"Scully." Her name's an agreement, all statement and no question. I'm here, I'm listening. Whatever it is, you probably already know it - but I'll tell you.
no subject
"I think I need you to tell me what happened," she says with a soft sigh.
no subject
And yet, he hasn't come up with a way to say it. What happened is everything and nothing, too earthshaking to be contained. More importantly, he hasn't wanted to think about it, and so he hasn't. She'll hear it, and she'll understand herself, and maybe that'll get her home - and he'll be alone again.
The best he can do, after a pause, is, "I drove you off."
no subject
She puts her palm on his chest, hoping the contact is some encouragement.
"How?"
no subject
Mulder lets her go, waiting for her to lift her head and gesturing with his eyes toward the rest of the bed. He doesn't expect a complaint if he crawls under the covers, stretching out with a notion of pulling her into a clinging embrace. He'll tell her there, lying down with her head resting against his shoulder.
no subject
She catches his drift pretty quickly and follows his lead; the blankets' warmth is welcome, and she could care less about getting the sheets damp. She fits herself against him, head on his shoulder, arm across his chest; perfectly placed to be clung to.
It feels, more than anything, right. She needs to understand how she could possibly give this up.
no subject
Mulder stares up at the ceiling, letting himself luxuriate in her nearness for what might be the last time. "When we settled down - got the house, got your hospital job - I didn't...start working again. It was fine at first...but that changed."
The only way he can find to tell this story is by stating the facts. There's a weariness, bone-deep, that keeps him from trying to explain himself. What could he say? I've been doing things, you just didn't understand. She did, though, and that was half the problem.
"Our lives were too small." That's the only way he can think of it. After all their travels, they contracted into such a small space - and maybe it was too small. You needed more than I could give you, and I couldn't change fast enough to keep you."
no subject
"You're saying I left because you weren't working?" she hazards, the disbelief evident in her voice. It doesn't sound like her.
no subject
Which is to say, it's just your brain, Mulder. Whirring along like things are fine until there's no crisis to handle, no world to save. He's a wind-up toy walking into a wall, unable to stop until the crank runs out.
"You couldn't take it anymore - and I can't say I couldn't blame you, because I did. But I know it..." He's trying so hard to be fair. "It hasn't been easy for you."
no subject
She'd like to think she wouldn't just walk out on him, but the hopes of that have thinned. She's still defensively angry-- at herself, at a self she isn't yet. May not ever get to be.
"Treatment resistant?" she guesses, because it feels like she has to say something; it's reflexive and diagnostic, her mind falling back on the science of it because she has no idea where else to go.
no subject
Which is to say, he believes something's wrong with him - finally, after much argument and cajoling on a different, older Scully's part - but it's always felt like a manageable problem. A little vice, almost, the thing pushing him to work endlessly and stay awake at all hours. Depression as indulgence, his work the only refuge from the void.
"I take medication," he adds, after a moment or two, since it seems likely what treatments, how, when are the next questions. "I used to see someone. It just wasn't enough to save us."
no subject
"And I just. Left."
Okay, she makes some attempt to keep the bitterness out of her voice. Mulder might not really blame her-- not her, but her later self-- but Dana Scully is young, and her temper can cover them both.
no subject
"You tried, Scully." She deserves the credit she's not getting; he knows he's become a beast to live with, that if she could have stayed, she would have. It just feels inevitable, in retrospect, that he'd chase her off. Nothing and no one stays for Fox Mulder. The best-case scenario is that he'll lose what he loves due to others' machinations, or worse, to fate; the worst-case scenario is this one, in which there's some fatal flaw in him that ruins everything. "You tried for years."
no subject
Still, she thinks, stubborn and-- as always-- harder on herself than anyone else, I shouldn't have left him like this.
She doesn't know what to say, so she curls in tighter against him-- as if holding him close now might make up the difference.
no subject
But he doesn't move.
Eventually, he murmurs, "You deserved so much more than I could give you, Scully. Don't blame yourself."
no subject
"I'll blame myself if I want," she murmurs, quiet but defiant. "She can handle it."
She kisses his shoulder aimlessly.
"Do you think there's anything that could have made a difference?"
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)