Title: The Way Back to You

Rating: T for now, MA later.

Category: MSR, Angst

Disclaimer: The show and characters belong to Chris Carter and various affiliates.

A/N: Thanks to those of you that have taken the time to review. It really means a lot, to get a notification.

One Month Later

"Scully?"

She lifted her head from the mountain of reports on her desk, blinking through the eye-strain to focus on Mulder at his desk. "Yeah?"

"I've decided to sell the house."

Of all the things she expected him to say in that moment, declaring his intention to sell off their shared home was not a considered option. For a long few seconds, she didn't really understand. "Oh," she replied at last.

"Yeah, you know, for work. It's just more practical to be closer to DC." He looked pained, as though he were breaking the news to her that her dog had died. "I'm sure you have other things you'll want to pack up." He rolled a pencil between his fingers, back and forth. "I can make arrangements to be out, if you want."

She glared at him, hating that he had decided to take such a painfully formal approach to the splitting of their assets. Like an acrimonious divorce. "That's hardly necessary," she replied coolly. "I'll come by in a few days."

True to his word, subsequent to that night in Montana, Mulder hadn't mentioned their relationship again. He was polite, cordial, even. He made fun of her, cracked jokes, fell into the easiness of their relationship of old. If he felt in any way brooding about them, he'd mastered the art of appearing indifferent. Sometimes it felt nice, to be back to the way they were. It was easy to remember how their dynamic had turned heads at the bureau, because Mulder and Scully were simpatico. It was a dynamic that worked, like a well-oiled machine.

Sometimes, Scully felt the frisson was still there - ever simmering beneath the surface of the facade Mulder had imposed. Two weeks ago, during an excursion into an underground sewer tunnel, their bodies had been forced together in the cramped quarters. Plundering through the unromantic environment, it seemed like the least likely place for the remaining embers of their romance to flare up. But as she'd manoeuvred through the concrete tube, sliding past him towards the metal ladder towards escape, Scully had felt his erection against the small of her back, and just like that, she'd been swamped in her own desire.

Then, without a word, he had turned away - and that was it. Never to be mentioned or discussed.

She wanted to know if he'd lain in their once shared bed that night, stroking himself to climax at the memory of their bodies so close together. Mulder would have wanted to take her, right there amongst the pungent sludge and grime. She knew him better than anyone in the world - knew his libido. And he knew hers. He would have known she masturbated to a dissatisfying orgasm that night.

"Obviously we will split the-"

"Mulder?"

"Yes, Scully?"

She stared at him, through the hazy gloom of the basement office. "This is a discussion we don't need to have. I have no worries you will withhold assets from me. Please, don't sully things with needless platitudes." She was angry at him, because up until this moment, her afternoon had been perfectly pleasant. Their silence was amicable, reminiscent of the old days.

"Fine," he said, returning to his work.

Scully found it strange, returning to the home they'd shared for so many years. It was the same, but irreversibly different. Her smell wasn't present any longer; the ever lingering scent of her perfume, clinging to fabrics and drapes. Although some of the knick-knacks chosen by her remained where they'd been placed, she felt an odd sense of apathy towards them. They didn't belong to her now, any more than Fox Mulder belonged to her. Truthfully, she couldn't think of many things she wanted to salvage from the house before it went on the market.

Perhaps a handful of medical journals, the odd photographs ferreted away somewhere. Everything else was part of the wreckage, and she had no desire to loot through the devastation of their relationship.

Scully stood in the living room, thinking of the years they'd spent here. Winter nights, draped in heavy blankets, watching television. There'd been laughter, once. She didn't truly know what happened, except that Mulder seemed to almost grow... discontented with domesticity. The moment he was claimed by paranormal obsessions, she began to lose him - piece by piece.

He wasn't home. He'd mentioned casually his intention to swim a few laps of the FBI swimming pool, but it was an excuse to be absent. He had no desire to watch his formal lover pick through the detritus of their union, and frankly Scully was relieved. Coming here was harder than she'd imagined it would be, and from the second the front door clicked shut behind her, she felt a suffocating need to be done with it all. Maybe selling the house was the best thing, after all. It wasn't as though those moments of happiness could be reclaimed. There was no rewind button. Only forward.

She shifted the empty box she'd carried with her, wandering room to room in search of anything worth taking. Scully paused at Mulder's office, pushing the door open with the tips of her fingers. She expected to see the walls, covered in newspaper clippings and documentation of the unexplained - but the walls were blank, and freshly painted. Boxes were piled on his desk and on the floor, filled with files and books. There was a reed oil-diffuser on the window sill, so out of place in the midst of Mulder's crusade. The air smelled musty, with an underlying hint of roses. Perhaps he didn't want to put off potential buyers, hence why he'd packed everything away.

Scully eased the door shut, continuing onward. She collected the odd personal belonging along the way: books, photographs, a keep-sake silver trinket handed down from her grandmother. Everything else brought back painful memories. No, she thought; not painful. The worst thing about this house was that it wsasn't painful memories. The memories were good, happy, contented. They were a glimpse into a life of normalcy that had been snatched away.

As she prepared to leave, Scully heard Mulder's car pull up outside. She stood by the window, watching as he hefted his gym bag from the passenger seat. He slammed the door, and hesitated. He didn't see her, spying from behind the glass. It was dark outside, and she'd kept the lights off. Watching him like this, unencumbered, she ached with longing. He'd been hers, once - and she'd left, because the man who'd been with her for twenty odd years had never been able to give himself to her fully. That's what it was, she decided. For awhile, Mulder had been completely hers, and she'd been unable to adjust to the unexpected distance. Mulder was not the unfaithful type, but the bottomless abyss of the unexplained was his mistress, and he was powerless to resist her.

The front door slammed.

"You here, Scully?"

"I'm upstairs."

"I'll leave you to it."

Scully descended to the ground floor. "I've just finished," she said, holding the box beneath her arm.

He glanced down, at the handful of items littering the bottom. "You didn't take much," he remarked.

"No, I suppose not." She counted six things in total. Six - in a house of thousands.

"I spoke to the realtor, and there's two families interested already." Mulder folded his arms. He smelled of chlorine, and his hair was still damp. She thought about how it would feel to rake her fingers through the strands. The back of Mulder's neck was ticklish; he liked when her nails whispered over the baby-fine hairs there. "So I guess I should start packing too, and look for a new apartment." The conversation was stilted, nothing like the easiness of their time together in the office.

"Yes, I suppose so."

"I was thinking about Alexandria. Since we seem to be going back in time, it's a fitting choice." He smiled, but the light reached nowhere near his eyes.

"I better go," Scully said, because the painful awkwardness made her head and heart ache. "See you tomorrow?"

"Bright and early G-Woman." She smiled at that. "Do you need help with the box?" Mulder asked.

"I think I can manage all four kilos of this, thanks." Her smile was playful, but Mulder's eyes clouded. She saw the shutters come down around him, and she was perplexed. How could such a throwaway comment cause him to retreat? "Alright, good night."

"Night, Scully." He followed her to the front door, closing it behind her. He didn't wait to watch her depart, and something in his mannerisms seemed... off. The lamp came on inside the living room, and his silhouette moved around the room - as though he'd forgotten she was there already, before she'd even started the engine. It was beginning to feel that the biggest enigma in the world, right now, was Mulder himself.

One Month Later

"Hold on, Mulder!" Scully screamed, dropping to her knees. His hands scrambled through broken floorboards, searching for traction. His fingers slipped, and before she could reach him, he tumbled three storeys to the basement of the abandoned warehouse. His body made a sickening thud on the ground, and when she finally reached the gaping hole in the wooden boards, she saw him lying in a crumpled heap far below. "Mulder! Are you alright?"

"No," he replied, his voice pained and muffled. "I think I've broken my rib."

"Shit," Scully breathed. "Wait there, Mulder; I'm coming down." She scrambled to her feet, ignoring the decade's worth of dust clinging to her suit. It seemed to take an outrageous length of time to locate the stairs. She raced to descend to the basement as quickly as possible, but when she reached the bottom step, the door was locked. "Fucking hell," she growled, unholstering her weapon. Trust Mulder to get injured. He'd probably lost his gun in the process, too.

Scully fired off two rounds and the door swung open. She found him in the floor, huddled over himself. "I'm hurt, Scully."

She fell to her knees, pulling his shirt from his pants. Her fingers traced the nuances of his ribs, and he hissed in pain. "We need to get you to a hospital, Mulder. You're so lucky it didn't puncture your lungs." Scully removed her cell-phone to call an ambulance, but there was no signal in the dingy basement. "Can you get up?"

"I can try," he murmured, accepting her hand. Scully hefted him to his feet, slipping beneath his arm to brace his body against hers. "It wouldn't be tradition, if I didn't succumb to an injury." His breath fanned across her forehead as he huffed through the pain, stumbling towards the stairwell. "At least I didn't land on ectoplasm."

Scully didn't smile. She never saw the humour in watching her partner get hurt. One day, she might not be around to come to the rescue. "Take the stairs slowly," she commanded as they ascended to the first floor. "We need to get you to the hospital."

Mulder made an impatient tsk sound with his tongue. "Does this mean I'm going to be holed up, out of action?"

"For a few weeks at least, yes," Scully replied as they reached the top of the stairs. Somewhere below, something growled and they both froze.

"Did you hear that?" Mulder asked, his gaze locking with hers. They'd come here in search of the so-called Devil Dog, a wolf-like creature with glowing yellow eyes. There'd been rumours the animal had been living in the abandoned warehouse, coming out to scavenge for food. It's delicacy of choice was human beings, and the Devil Dog was being blamed for a spate of murders in Maryland. Until this moment, Scully had believed the whole thing to be hokum.

"It was probably nothing," she replied, holding her gun close to her thigh anyway. "But just in case... let's get a move on." She let him hobble forward, walking backwards to make sure at least one of them was facing any potential enemy that might clamber out from the bowels of the old building. There was a faint, distant rumble that might have been another growl, but otherwise - nothing. A fleeting glimpse of something that might be paranormal, but never any solid evidence.

Mulder had driven the car to the site, because despite the many arguments about his blatant chauvinism, he still insisted on being the one behind the wheel. He was in no state to drive now, and Scully helped him into the passenger seat. She thought about being petulant and insisting he take himself to hospital, if driving was so damn important to him. But he'd gone pale, and he wore a mask of pain.

The nearest hospital was ten miles away, and they barely spoke for the duration of the journey. She asked if he was doing okay, he replied in the affirmative. His arm cradled his ribcage, pressing against the fracture, and she found his posture mirrored another time he'd been injured: when mauled by zombies on New Year's Eve 1999. The night he kissed her in her public for the first time. Not in private, because that had come as she'd sobbed in his arms, seconds after almost having her heart ripped out.

She escorted him to the emergency room, pulled rank with her federal ID and got him rushed through to see a doctor. Government status was good for some things, she supposed.

Even with jumping the line, Mulder spent four hours in the hospital. X-rays confirmed what Scully had guessed when she'd checked him out herself: that his fifth and sixth ribs on the right side had snapped. Treatment was a prescription for mind-numbingly strong painkillers, and weeks of doing very little. Work was out of the question, as was exercise.

"Looks like you'll be flying solo at the office for awhile," Mulder said as she walked with him back to the car. The skies over Maryland were darkening as dusk settled. It was a cloudless early-summer night and the air smelled of freshly cut grass and pollen.

"It looks like it," replied Scully, feeling morose. She hated long days spent holed up in the basement office alone. Even worse, there was the prospect of a temporarily assigned partner, the very notion of which made her heart race with something akin to panic. Scully was a creature of habit and familiarity.

"I'll take you home."

Their house had sold quickly, without fuss. The family liked it, paid upfront and rushed the paperwork. The last Scully had heard, Mulder had packed up and moved. To where, she wasn't exactly sure. It never came up. It was a topic that bordered on personal, and they'd been studiously avoiding such conversations.

"Oh, um, just drop me off at The Georgetown." He struggled to clip his seatbelt into place, and she felt as though he were firmly avoiding eye contract in the mean time.

"The hotel?" she clarified, starting the engine.

"Yeah. I haven't officially moved into my new place yet. It's undergoing some renovation works at the minute." He looked so lonely, so utterly helpless that Scully hated herself for being the one responsible for his imposed solitude. The thought of him recuperating from his injury in friendless anonymity of a hotel was a bitter pill to swallow. "Stop it, Scully." The effects of his medication made his words seem less crisp, like blurred lines.

"Stop what?"

"The self-flagellation. I'll be fine."

She drove through the evening traffic, to her own apartment in Georgetown. It was only when she parked at the curb-side that Mulder noticed. He squinted up through the darkness at her apartment building, frowning. He was high on pain meds - she recognized the signs. There was no way he'd be able to take care of himself.

"You're staying with me," she said.