X-Files (MSR)
Scully has hoarded secrets all her life.
It’s pathological, she knows, like Mulder’s stacks of newspaper clippings. He wants to know other people’s secrets so he can expose them, because he’s naïve and self-righteous and beautiful.
Because while other people’s secrets have torn Mulder’s world apart, her own secrets have kept her safe. Safe from ridicule, from shame, from punishment, from harm. She protects her own secrets, cards so close to her chest that the ink is bleeding into her heart. Sometimes, Mulder presses his face to her chest so hard that she worries he’ll look up at her, stained.