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“Ah, hold on,” Dana sighed, running her hands through her hair. “I forgot the tape recorder.”
Mulder frowned, leaning against the car. “What?” he asked, fumbling around in his jeans' pocket for his keys.
Dana shook her head, crossing her arms over her chest. “The autopsy is on there, I need to go get it.”
“Leave it,” he instructed, finally pulling out the keys and swinging them around his finger like a toy.
She scoffed in reply, snatching the keys from his hand. “Unlike certain people,” she jeered, “I like to gather non-refutable evidence to support my theories.” A small smile quirked the corner of her lips. “And if anybody around here is going to believe one of your crazy theories, we’re going to need a lot of it.”
Her partner raised his hands, palm-up in mock surrender, with a grin on his face as he gazed down at her. “Ouch, Scully,” he said with a playful wince, moving one hand to rest over his heart, “You went a little deep with that one.”
She rolled her eyes, turning away to hide the fond smile across her lips. “I’ll be back in a minute,” she called over her shoulder as she headed back into the building.
***
“How does he find anything in this mess?” she muttered under her breath, fishing through the dense junk littering Mulder’s desk, and then gently nudging things across the floor with her foot in search of her tape recorder.
It was an absolute mess in there, and the small size of the room did not help the matter. If he wasn’t FBI, Dana thought maybe a professional hoarder could’ve been a backup career.
One by one, Dana started going through the drawers. She considered that somehow Mulder may have mistaken it for his own and tossed it into-
A sigh of relief escaped her lips and she slid the recorder out of the drawer. When she pressed play, she was expecting the droning sound of her own voice, depicting every detail of her autopsy procedure. What she didn’t expect, and what made her heart freeze in her chest, was the gravelly voice of her partner. It was so familiar, yet so foreign – so filled with emotion. Dana had never heard anything quite like it from him.
Her wits quickly returned, and she knew she should stop listening – whatever this was, hearing it was a breach of his privacy. Her finger hovered the button, just about to press down when Mulder’s hoarse voice echoed out.
“ Dana. ”
At the sound of her name – her first name, at that – her whole body went rigid and her finger remained hovering above the button, losing its will to move.
There was a long bout of silence, nothing but a low static sound picking up on the recorder before the husky voice started talking again.
“ I… I feel like an idiot, ” he hissed, and quiet laughs rang through the device. “ This was my fault. Duane, the- the people that took you…” A long sigh. “All of it… it was because of me. ”
Dana held her breath, invested in the vulnerability of her partner’s voice. It was hard, even for her, to believe that the tender words she was hearing belonged to Mulder, the same man whose mouth's life purpose was to spew sarcastic witty comments.
“ For years, I had nobody. Nobody to trust. To rely on, to care about. And after so long of being on my own, I hadn’t realised – until now – how lonely that was, ” a younger Mulder confessed quietly, still making those breathy laugh noises that Dana was starting to think weren’t laughs at all, but choked sobs. “ They’re all saying it’s time to move on, but what am I gonna do without you, Scully, huh? You’re all I have left. ”
Tears stung her eyes. Dana placed a hand over her lips to suppress her own inevitable cries. These were words she was never supposed to hear, and yet she couldn’t stop herself from listening, no matter how heartbreaking every catch in her partner’s voice was to hear. Fox Mulder’s pain, usually hidden away behind a terrible sense of humour and impulsive recklessness, was speaking to her. Dana was determined to listen to it, to understand it, so she could understand him.
“It should have been me,” he growled. “I’d do anything for us to switch places right now.” A shaky sigh slipped past his lips. “I’m so angry about what they did to you – it’s making me want to hit things. Skinner keeps telling me there’s nothing I can do, just like everybody else, but I need to do something. I can’t sleep, I can’t eat, not until I put a bullet in them all – anyone who laid a finger on you.”
“ What am I saying? ” he scoffed, a strangled cry tearing free from his throat. There was another period of silence with the exception of his dejected shallow breaths. “ Open your Goddamn eyes, Scully, ” he pleaded, and then the recording stopped.
It was finished.
The recorder slipped from her tremulous hands, back into the drawer she’d found it in with a thunk. A flurry of tears streamed down Dana’s cheeks and she slammed the drawer shut. She knew her comatose state had wounded him, but she hadn’t known it was to this extent. She couldn’t imagine what she’d have done if they had switched roles. If Duane had taken Mulder, and the next time she saw him was in a hospital bed with a machine breathing for him…
She shuddered.
Behind her was the sudden sound of the door creaking, and then Mulder’s voice – a complete contrast to the one she’d just heard from the recorder. “Scully, I have been waiting out there for—” He cut himself off as she turned around with vivid red circles surrounding her eyes. His features creased into a concerned frown as he asked, “Scully, what’s wrong?”
In haste, Dana quickly wiped her face dry of tears and threw on a smile. “Nothing, I’m okay,” she declared, sniffling. “Let’s just get out of here.”
Her partner offered her a quizzical look. “What about the tape?”
A clipped laugh escaped her lips. “I think I’ve heard enough of those for one night,” she answered, voice strained. Then she approached him with a weak, sad smile and reached up to straighten his crooked tie. “Let’s go.” She slipped past him through the door. “Aren’t you coming?”
Mulder blinked. “Uh… yeah,” he replied, bemused, before trailing after his partner.