Archive of Our Own ^beta

Maggie Scully had never seen a man cry like that before.

Not in church. Not at Bill’s funeral. She’d seen grief — raw and dignified, loud and private — but never this. Never someone kneeling by her daughter's hospital bed, hand fisted in a white sheet, shoulders shaking like the world was cracking open inside him.

Mulder didn’t know she’d seen. She’d come to the room quietly, intent on leaving a sweater at the foot of Dana’s bed. The nurses had said she was asleep, and Maggie hadn’t meant to interrupt anything. But then she heard him — not sobbing, not really. Just breathing like it hurt.

"Please," he whispered. "Please don’t go. I can’t—I can’t lose you."

Maggie had stood frozen in the doorway, sweater pressed to her chest. It felt wrong to watch, but more wrong to leave.

So she stayed.

She’d never presumed to understand the full scope of their work, and she didn’t always like what it did to her daughter — the hours, the danger, the way Dana had grown quieter, harder, since joining the Bureau. But this? This she understood.

This was love.

Not the kind written into romance novels or spoken aloud in grand gestures. Not even the kind Dana would admit to — not yet. But Maggie had seen it long before this, back when Dana had disappeared. When they'd all thought she'd been lost.

Mulder had come to her then, hollow-eyed and shaking, and she'd seen something in him that frightened her: the depth of his belief, the size of the hole her daughter had left in him. He’d held Dana’s cross in his hand like it was the last piece of her left in the world, and she had given it to him — not just as a symbol, but as a thread. A hope. A way to hold on.

They’d talked a little, back then. Nothing too personal. But she’d offered him a meal and he’d accepted. They’d sat in silence for most of it, until he asked if Dana had ever spoken of her faith.

"Only with reverence," Maggie had said. "Even when she questioned it. Especially then."

He’d nodded like that mattered.

She had seen his grief then — restrained, brittle. She saw his guilt, too, though he hadn’t said it aloud. That was the night she started praying for both of them.

Now, here he was again. Still holding on.

She saw it in the way he sat beside Dana every day, sometimes in silence, sometimes telling stories she half-heard through the door. He would rest his hand against hers, never moving, never asking for anything. Just being there. His presence was not loud, but it was unwavering.

Sometimes he would come in and think no one was watching and brush her hair back from her face, his fingers trembling like he was afraid she’d vanish. Once, Maggie found him asleep in the chair beside the bed, head tilted at an awkward angle, Dana’s hand still in his.

She hadn’t woken him.

Maggie wasn’t a fool. She knew this wasn’t conventional. There were no flowers. No declarations. No tidy labels. But she also knew what devotion looked like.

And she knew — without a doubt — that Fox Mulder loved her daughter.

It was in the ache of his silences. The way he never looked at anyone else the way he looked at Dana. The way his voice softened when he said her name, like it was a prayer.

She thought sometimes about what kind of future could exist for two people like them. Their lives were so unlike anything she or her late husband had known — filled with secrets, shadows, and threats Maggie only half-understood. But what she did understand was this: there was something steady at the center of it all. Something constant.

One evening, Maggie sat beside him while Dana slept, her daughter's monitors beeping softly behind them.

“She’s always been strong,” Maggie said, offering him a cup of coffee. “But even the strong ones need someone who never stops believing they’ll come back.”

He looked at her then, startled. His eyes were red-rimmed, tired.

“I never stopped,” he said. “Not once.”

She nodded. “I know.”

He seemed on the verge of saying more — something big, something breaking — but he didn’t. He looked back at Dana instead.

That was fine. She didn’t need the words. She’d seen all she needed to know.

Maggie wasn’t his mother. She never tried to be. But she cared for him, fiercely, quietly, the way one cares for someone who has stood vigil for their child in the dark.

Because when the world had started to fall apart, he had believed enough to bring her daughter home.

And what more could a mother ask for than that?