Title: This is the Way
Author: Mary (parkerma@gmail.com)
Fandom: The X-Files
Pairing: Mulder/Scully
Rating: G
Notes: Character death. Oh, snap, I gave it all away.

Scully had thought about it so many times. There had to be fifty ways, a hundred ways to leave him. She composed monolithic explanations of the reasons for her departure, novellas of resignation letters, a thousand brief notes that started “Dear Mulder” and never got further than her striking out the dear.

“Mulder” they all began. “Mulder, I can’t.” Sometimes “Mulder, I won’t.” And that was as far as she ever got. Her wastepaper basket was a morgue of cadaverous cryptic notes, all “From the Desk of:” although she didn’t have a desk. Scully spent the long hours alone in the office steeling herself against his hazel eyes and his beautiful mind, calculating probabilities and calmly dissecting her emotions, but he always got to her. He called or walked through the door and she rolled her eyes but went along. There were some forces a physicist couldn’t ignore; she wasn’t sure if this was love or gravity, but it was inexorable. One way or another, she couldn’t escape his orbit.

In the end it was simple. He left her in the swiftest and most permanent way possible. Her hair had grown long by the time they found him; at the funeral the wind blew snowflakes into it as the frozen earth sifted through her fingers to rattle on the coffin.

Get yourself free