Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Mulder opens the door to a still and silent room.

Often on returning from a vacation, or from a case, the apartment seems empty when she returns. This time, though, it seems impossibly full and hopeful, the mere fact of its continued existence - and hers - enough to keep her through the day. Her ears are used to the steady whirring of the hospital machines, and her eyes accustomed to the hospital neon. Somehow, the quiet and the dappled light in her home seem to hum and glow. Mulder has opened the door, she has stepped through it, and he has, under the guise of resting his hand on the small of her back, pressed her forward ever so slightly. It's moral support, rather than lumbar support, really, but it gives Scully the momentum to walk to the kitchen table, to drop her bag, and to offer him tea. His acceptance comes in the form of him making the tea, and she wonders how long this closeness they've found will last.

She presses her palms flat to the table, and looks at her fingers, wondering how long it will take for her hands to expand and soften. Mulder brings the tea to the table and pours it, but she doesn't sit. She remains frozen to the spot, hands pressed down firmly like a gymnast with a grip on the beam, ready to stretch herself off the floor. He's not sure whether she's lost in thought or actively avoiding it, but he does the only thing he can think of. Mulder drags a low-backed chair round to settle just shy of the backs of her knees, and standing just behind her he leans down and smoothes his hands down her arms until his palms rest on top of hers.

She leans back into his chest and breathes into him, sliding slowly down into the seat he has offered. Mulder completes a reversal of his earlier motion, sliding his hands slowly up her arms until he reaches her shoulders, where he gives her the most collegiate, the most innocent of squeezes.

He will pour the hot tea into low china cups, and then they will wait for the tea to cool. They will not talk while they wait, but sit side by side, breathing in and marveling at the reality that they may sit together and wait for tea to cool without speaking.

This is where things will stand, for the evening.

Chapter Text

She opens the door to their little basement office and cannot but be shocked that this room, just like her apartment, has continued to exist in her absence. The Bureau has assigned them a mandatory two weeks' rack time, in which they are required to clear their desks of old cases. They complete case reports and paperwork, file expense forms and find what Mulder termed "credibly creative" ways to write off losses to Bureau property that occurred in the line of duty.

Mulder would ordinarily use rack time to read extensively on crop circles in Slovakia, or abnormalities in chimp DNA which were suggestive of something he could never quite identify. He would also pay close attention to cases being assigned to other divisions, looking for matters that might be X Files to poach from VCU or, on one memorable occasion, the tax fraud department.

This time he continues his research into what appear to be deliberately comic and far-fetched causes (Psychic *koalas*, Mulder??), but he seems strangely uninterested in picking up cases from other divisions. He tells himself that he wants this downtime for her, because of what she has been through, so that she can ease back into the work routine.

The truth is, he needs it for his own re-acclimatization. He finds it strange to have her back, and he cannot trust himself to exercise the emotional restraint that is required, if they are away together, traipsing into dangerous scenarios, sharing hotel walls that are never quite thin enough to discern whether she is crying.

Four days into their two weeks of downtime, when even she grows tired of the office, they begin to throw a baseball (conveniently extracted from Mulder's desk drawer, where it nestles in a mountain of sunflower seed packets) back and forth as they debate his latest theories. The baseball is smaller and packs more of a sting to the bare hand than the softballs she is used to. She doesn't mention her softball days, her stint as third baseman on the JV team; it seems like news for a later and lighter time. (And partly, she must admit to herself, because telling him about this means telling him what position she played, and she's not quite sure whether she's ready for the barrage of third base jokes that will undoubtedly ensue. Or maybe, she wants to save the jokes up, to know that they're there, and to enjoy the anticipation of knowing that there are jokes still to be made, more laughs still to be had.

(He throws the ball, and she catches it square in her right hand.)

"It's not so far-fetched, Scully."

"Mulder."

(She tosses it back at him, hard.)

"They kept up the *logs*, Scully."

(He throws the ball high, so she has to stretch and swipe to the side to bring the ball back down to throwing height.)

"You know how long that ship has been lost? You are familiar with basic arithmetic, aren't you? Your abandonment of conventional physics and chemistry is well known, but arithmetic, Mulder??

(She has not returned it yet, but throws it quickly between her hands, stroking the stitches as she does so.)

"Scully, the Marie-Celeste may be the best potential example of a ghost ship case."

"This is the best; this is the best you have for the entire concept, and you, my friend, have precisely nothing. And you will not convince me with a slide-show.?

(She punctuates the nothing with a short, direct return of the ball. He catches it a little sloppily, some part of his brain and concentration still hooked on her uncharacteristic use of the phrase "my friend." For reasons he cannot articulate, this phrase has caught his attention.)

"I do not have nothing. I know that they kept logs til their disappearance; I know that there was no sign of a struggle; I know that no survivors were ever found. Why doesn't it make sense for the ship's passengers to have been taken into some kind of alternate dimension? Perhaps that's at the heart of all the ghost ship cases."

(He does not return the ball yet, but turns it, worrying it in one hand, and counting off each proposition he makes on the other hand.)

"Mulder, I know you're not a fan of Occam's razor, but your methodology these days seems to have a perverse absurdity; it's like you're casting around for the most ridiculous answer to any given question."

"You wound me, Scully."

He feints as though he intends to pitch the ball at her, but lobs it into a soft, easy-to-catch highball, and when she catches it, they both break out into laughter.

"Spend one more day on ghost ships, Mulder. Just one, and then please, for my sanity, move on to vampiric werewolves or something more plausible, won't you?"

"Deal, Scully."

They end the day, as they have been ending each rack day, at 5.30 on the dot. This is the best part of the job, she thinks: when they sit, and pause, and wait a moment or two before the next battle. When they allow themselves to joke (wryly), and smile (hopefully), and discuss what has been. She had forgotten, after being away, what it was like to do this at the end of the day, how much it meant just to be able to walk to their cars together. How much it meant to linger a little too long, but never long enough, and to turn the key in the ignition and drive and sing a little with a soft grin on her face. Sometimes she shows him the grin, sometimes she doesn't. They reward one another with the smallest of gestures and the briefest of touches; in their currency, one full grin is a valuable thing.

She returns home, and performs the rituals that end her day. She splashes cold water on her face, and then rubs toner across her eyes again and again, willing the last stains of eyeliner to unlatch themselves. She looks at her near-transparent skin in the mirror and thinks. Scully doesn't know precisely when it happened; when it changed from Mulder being her partner, her co-agent, to being her, well, de facto.

At some point he gave her his key, they became one another's emergency contacts, and it became acceptable to call past any version of a polite cut-off time. She knows the error of this easy slide, and its forking problems, the way it gives her a sense of entitlement, and the disinterested and in-denial possessiveness it creates in him. She remembers thinking of talking about this to a friend - if she still had friends with whom she could discuss such things - and of saying how hard this all is. But she knows the lie in that; this is the easiest thing; this is the only thing that she knows how to do, that she can do.

Chapter Text

It has occurred to him that he has spent more time surreptitiously watching the side of her face than he has looking at her front-on, or indeed, looking at anything else he can think of. He knows the difference in freckle-count - if not in number, in distribution and depth - for each side of her face. He has watched her, sometimes openly, sometimes covertly, throughout their partnership. He watches her with his eyes flicking quickly past, as she cuts and weighs in the morgue, as she reads through files, neatly highlighting, and kindly ignoring his double-underlined and heavily doodled notes. He breathes a little slower as he watches her interact with mystics and psychics, the seers of unseeable things, as she reels in answers and doles out analysis in the perfect Scully ratio, her inquiries pressing as far as skepticism goes before passing politesse.

Now he watches her in the car: he is not driving, which frees him up to study her a little more closely. But, most unusually for them, she is not driving either, so he must fold his glances into waves of conversation and imagined surveillance. There's also the slight possibility that Agents Stonecypher or Kinsley, riding up front, might detect what is going on, but he doubts it; for all their team building and communication, they seem to be utterly lacking in subtlety and intuition.

It's like being on a date that isn't a date, he thinks, like being in high school all over again. It's riding in cars with your parents up front, wanting to leave your hand open for hand-holding should the need arise, but dear god not wanting to suggest it. It strikes him, just weeks after she has left the hospital, that they can operate only in extremes when it comes to one another. Right now, there will be no touching, beyond the incidental and the excusable: the polite touch on her back, the resting of his hand on her shoulder to get her attention, and the leaning slightly too close to her ear to stage whisper something.

Chapter Text

5 Year Appointment Party: Washington, D.C.

She has studied quantum physics, has re-written Einstein, has tested bodies up and down the coasts and cut her way back through the middle. There is no science for this, though. There's no science to explain this: the way her body curves into his without them touching, the way he hovers a degree away, at all times. She can't remember a time before this, before she was acutely aware of his presence, before she began to track his moves whenever they shared a room. It is the fifth anniversary of Skinner's appointment as Assistant Director, and they are celebrating in a hastily convened and poorly catered event on the 6th floor of the Hoover Building. Scully is flattered - and Mulder purportedly nonplussed - by Skinner's invitation for both of them to join him and a small number of colleagues at a dinner following the reception.

Agent Kalleneen, a young female agent fresh from Quantico, obsequiously interrogates Skinner about his career, while Scully performs her well-practiced technique of listening politely to one conversation while frantically eavesdropping on another.

On hearing Mulder begin a sentence with "Well, Nessie, as they call her, may not be such a monster," she finds herself peculiarly relieved that he is discussing Loch Ness - rather than say, loss of time in abduction cases - and returns her full attention to Skinner and Kalleneen.

She realizes uneasily that Skinner has been discussing her, and wonders whether she's missed much: "Agent Kalleneen, Agent Scully is a medical doctor. Scully frequently employs her medical training in the course of her work, usually in performing autopsies. Scully, Agent Kalleneen is an MD, also."

Scully smiles at the younger woman. She begins to formulate an encouraging question, when Agent Kalleneen beats her to speaking.

"I hear you've come up with some unusual, or should I say, spooky, theories in your time on the X Files, some real Twilight Zone scenarios."

Scully considers the answer that she is often tempted to give, in response to questions like these: "Absolutely. Normally after I've performed some autopsies, run lab tests, analyzed forensic data and debated the psychology of the suspect with my partner, I just get out a Ouija board and wait for advice from my dead dog Queequeg."

Instead, well-practiced in the delicate art of deflection, she replies, "Oh really? You must hear some terribly exciting things."

Looking at Skinner, she adds, "Assistant Director Skinner, I'll see you at dinner- I should really say hello to AD Blevins," and turns on her heel to find Mulder.

And there he is, behind her and without warning, perching his mouth just short of her left ear. "Let's get out of here, Scully."

Turning suddenly towards him, and into and under him, she is shocked by the effect he has on her. She had long ago begun her training in ignoring, tamping down and meagerly indulging her romantic fantasies involving him, and sexual repression- or misdirection - was a valuable skill in her repertoire. But there are moments like this, when she sees him suddenly, often up close or from afar; beyond the safety of their usual middle distance, when she is struck by the need to be near him, and is overwhelmed by her bodily pull towards him. Scully tries to steady herself with science: The gravitational attraction between two objects is proportional to the mass of the first times the mass of the second divided by the square of the distance between them. The closer the objects are, the greater the pull. This is normal. But Newton speaks of the universality of gravitational attraction. This is more Mulder-specific gravity.

It is all she can do to slowly ease out her sudden intake of breath and smile, first at him, then with eyes darting shyly downward.

There were too many reasons, and none at all, why this couldn't work and would never happen. Sometimes the lack of reasons scared her more than the many good, rational reasons she'd massaged into a pithy mantra. These thoughts occur to her in split-second flashes, not so much as coherent themes, but as images and bold keywords well-worn in the late-night musings of her mind. She does not need to exercise them fully, to stretch them out, in order to know precisely what they were. Scully is brought back to reality by Agent Kalleneen, who has quickly and quietly appeared at her side.

With one hand on Scully's wrist, and facing Mulder, she asks, ever so innocently, "Now Dana, you don't mind if steal the elusive Fox Mulder as my date for dinner, do you? You see him all the time, but I'm so keen to hear about his Monty Propps profile. It was practically my bible during my final profiling class at Quantico. You're not the jealous type, are you?"

Kalleneen asks that final question with a laugh, and Scully realizes that the younger woman has that talent envied by social climbers and schemers everywhere: she can phrase a question in a way that determines its answer. She finds just the words and just the tone to make anyone disagreeing with her suggested action seem reactionary, overly-sensitive, or plainly unreasonable.

Clearly, anyway, Mulder is swayed by the force of her argument, directing an indulgent and quizzical shrug of his shoulders in Scully's direction, and offering a still more indulgent arm to Kalleneen. "Nothing whets the appetite like homicidal mania. Shall we?"

Scully tracks down the stairs a minute after them, having paused overly long to set down her glass and wipe her hands with a napkin. She is a safe distance behind Mulder and Kalleneen, and quite content to be alone for the moment. The evening, she reflects, is her first real social occasion (visits with her family and Mulder obviously not counting) since her illness; the first in a long time. She welcomes the momentary peace; the silence and the absence of questions or pitying eyes. And, after too many nights spent in a hospital room of recycled air and reconstituted food, it is something just to be outside and walking. She revels in the cool bite of the air, and enjoys the slow sensation of pulling her delicate cashmere jacket over her shoulders. It is enough, for now, to know that she is safe, and he is safe, and they are going someplace together. Agent Kalleneen be damned.

Chapter Text

The lights glance off the edge of his steak knife, and Mulder cannot help but be nostalgic for Scully. He considers the absurdity of being nostalgic about watching his partner perform autopsies and realizes that it is nostalgia for her independence and her strength. He wills (knowing that he cannot will it) her to stay healthy, prays fervently to a god he does not believe in that she will stay well. Kalleneen is droning in a high-pitched chatter of all things careerist and tiring.

Mulder considers trying to make an effort, and decides against it. He puts her off deliberately with a joke about Reticulans - which he pitches in a not-entirely-joking way - to unsettle and bore her, to remind her that he does not have what she is looking for. He observes Scully quietly sipping her water on his other side, and realizes what he must do.

"Oh, Sculleeyee," he begins, teasingly.

"You know that your ability to stretch my name into three syllables is not *impressive*, don't you?"

"Well, Scully, I was just thinking, we should get out of here. We have an early morning slideshow tomorrow. Those slides won't gross themselves out."

"That makes only marginal sense, Mulder, even as a joke. But I could leave, I'm not sure I'm up for waiting for another round of brandy to be absorbed and sweated out."

He makes his apologies to Skinner by way of a smiling nod.

Scully moves to shake Skinner's hand, and is surprised as he leans in to kiss her on the cheek. Scully turns as she leaves and smiles sweetly at Kalleneen, saying in a quiet voice, "Good luck, Agent."

They walk the short distance back to her car slowly, crunching the autumn leaves under their feet, both of them content to pretend that they are leaving because of the slides, and that this is any ordinary night. He long ago found the charm in loneliness and solitude, and long ago exhausted it, sucking it dry of all its melancholy value. He considers the beginnings of the conversation they are about to begin, the changes they might begin to make, and thinks of what brought them here.

And then he speaks.

"Scully, you know that when you were sick, it gave me time- time to think, about how we started this journey together, and how long we've been going down these roads. I thought of all the nights, and the roads and the early morning wake-up calls, and how somewhere amongst all of this, you'd become my best friend and my family; you'd become my conscience and my protector."

Scully could not help that her jaws would separate, and that her mouth would hang slightly open. Somehow it helped that he linked his arm through hers, their coats forming a warm link between them.

"Scully, I know that this might not be what you want to hear, but-"

"Mulder."

They stop, unlink arms, and face one another. They stand under a barren tree, its leaves a bed beneath their feet.

"This is everything to me," she says.

"As it is?" he asks hesitantly.

"For now."

"Well," he asks, "What if I say that there is still more, more than all of this?"

"Then wait, and know that I am waiting for you, too."

He looks at her and nods, knowing that she is right. For the moment, it is best not to try to change her mind; best for both of them. He smiles carefully, ignoring the tears that are welling in both their eyes, and places his hand lightly over hers. She accepts it, interlacing her fingers with his, and squeezing his hand with all the gentleness and meaning she can manage. They walk.

...

There is, she supposes, the notion that they are two parts of a Venn diagram. At the very beginning, their shares overlapped only in a belief in Billy Miles, a limited mutual sympathy, and an office in the basement. Over time their circles have stretched into one another's, stealing crescent moons of space as they merge closer together. They take in each other's families, histories, past loves, idiosyncrasies, keys and thoughts. Sometimes one slips a little further out, loses ground or stabs messily towards the outer of the circle. Eventually, they are drawn back in. This is a conversation they begin this night, and they know that they will return to it, and to each other.

They will kiss, a few years from now, on New Year's Eve, and promise each other that this will be the year. The circles merge. This is the conversation, begun tonight.