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day one
She wakes up at three in the morning and untangles herself from his limbs. He doesn’t stir, which isn’t like him. But then, she doesn’t really know what he’s like anymore.
This motel room is every motel room they’ve ever slept in. If she closes her eyes she can see their ghosts.
She’s twenty-eight and sitting in that stiff-backed chair, a file in her right hand, her left hand tracing patterns on the faded upholstery. Mulder’s cross-legged on the bed and she can’t decide whether he’s talking to himself or to her, but she’s already charmed by him, against her better judgement.
He’s covered in someone else’s blood and trying to wash it all off, but blood always stains. She is throwing up in the bathroom, a side effect of the chemo, and praying he can’t hear her through the thin walls. They are watching Casablanca and he falls asleep on her shoulder just as they start to sing “La Marseillaise”; she doesn’t wake him up, even when her muscles start to cramp. Someone who looks like him is throwing her up against a wall. A dead cow. A poisoned pizza. He whispers I love you when he thinks she is asleep. She types another draft of another report.
She is thirty-eight years old. She is trying to remember how she got here.
The water is cold and clear straight out of the tap and she fills the cup twice, downing the liquid in one long swallow each time. The desert’s left her bone-dry already, and they have such a long way to go.
For good measure, she splashes some of the water on her face. In the darkness her reflection is another ghost. Her cross glints in the moonlight that creeps through the blinds.
Walking back into the bedroom, she reaches up to unclasp the necklace and just stands over the bed, watching him.
It’s not something she intended, but she bends down and fastens the necklace around Mulder’s neck. He’d worn it once when he needed hope. Maybe they can find another miracle.
He awakens at the touch of her fingers on his neck. A sharp inhale and he grabs at her wrists, his eyes wild until they settle on her face. “Scully,” he says, the adrenaline leaving his body.
She settles herself half on top of him, in the bare inches between his body and the edge of the bed. His arms come around her and she feels the ghost of his lips on her forehead.
She still knows some things.
day four
In the lobby they have continental breakfast starting at five in the morning. At six-thirty the light is blinding, golden, and he can hear the interstate waking up.
They are in a speck on the map in Utah, but he knows better than to dismiss this kind of town. The same kid who checked them in is still at the desk now, ten hours later, and he doesn’t bat an eye when Scully walks into the lobby with newly dark hair, even though just last night he’d commented on the red, how it reminded him of his sister.
“Is it legal for him to work a ten-hour shift?” she mutters, sliding into the chair across from him. She has half an English muffin and coffee, black, and he wants to tell her to eat more but she can’t stand it when he does that. “He can’t be more than seventeen.”
“He’s sixteen,” he says.
She raises an eyebrow at him.
“Last night I came out to get a soda,” he explains. “And we were talking. He missed a baseball game to work last night. Saving up for college.”
Of all of his hardships, that’s never been one of them: money. He’s never worried about how he would pay for anything.
Now that he’s officially dead (again), he imagines that will become a lot more complicated. Not for the first time (or the hundredth), he misses the Gunmen.
Outside everything is still damp from the night; a chill rises off the grass and fogs the windows. Inside a television plays the news on mute. He keeps an eye on it, looking for his own face. He’s a time bomb. He was convicted on a capital murder charge - they’re not going to accept his death without a body.
Scully presses her hand on top of his, just for a moment, but the warmth is reassuring. One day he’ll ask her what the hell she’s doing here with him, but today is not that day.
“I’m going to pack up,” she says, “if you check out.”
He throws away their plates, Scully’s English muffin only half-eaten. A trucker is standing at the reception desk so Mulder hangs back until he leaves. The fewer people that see his face, the better.
Without checking their room, the kid hands back the hundred dollar bill they’d left as a security deposit. “And you might want to get some rings,” he says, his voice low, “if you’re gonna tell people you’re married. At least around here.”
“Thanks,” Mulder says, swallowing his surprise. If they were this obvious to some teenager in Nowheresville, Utah, they were fucked. “Uh, good luck with everything.”
The kid nods. “You too, man. I think you need it.”
day fifty-four
The car sputters and dies somewhere outside of Ogallala, Nebraska. It’s a beater, purchased with five hundred dollars in cash from a driveway in a Denver suburb, but even five hundred dollars should’ve gotten them further than this.
The highway is deserted. He pulls onto the shoulder and they get out, lift the hood and stare impotently at the mass of cables and engine. They are clever people and they should be able to fix this, but it is so far beyond their experience.
Two hours later, they are both sitting on top of the trunk, waiting for someone to stop, hoping it’s not a cop.
“It could be worse,” she says, and he responds with silence.
She continues, “We’re not dead.” That counts as optimism, lately.
“Not anymore,” he drawls.
He sees her wince, and he doesn’t care. He doesn’t want to remember either, but that choice isn’t available to him.
The sun sets on the plains, and they are still waiting.
day one hundred and sixty-six
They’ve been in Chicago for a month now, in a small, clean apartment with a Serbian landlord who doesn’t ask too many questions. She’d worried about staying in a big city, but in some ways it’s easier. Whenever they spend more than a few nights in a small town they become part of the community. The same people see them day after day and start to ask questions.
Here they are ghosts and nothing. She can go anywhere and no one pays her any attention. Three days ago he’d come back to the apartment spooked - he’d seen his own photograph on a Wanted poster in a liquor store - but no one said anything then, and no one’s come for them since.
“When do you think they realized we weren’t dead?” she’d asked.
“The sign looked pretty beat up. Has to be a couple months.”
She considered this. “Was I mentioned?”
He looked at her evenly. “No.”
This has been circling around in her head ever since, and she’s still not entirely sure what to make of it. Maybe they don’t know she survived, maybe they think she won’t be with him, maybe they don’t care about catching her at all. Maybe it is all about him.
You could go, a traitor whispers in her ear. No one is looking for you. You don’t have to live like this.
Neither deaf nor stupid, she hears it. And lets it pass.
There was a time, once, when such a thing would have been possible. It no longer is. There’s no use in arguing.
That night they go out for a walk around their neighborhood, in the darkness where, dark-haired both, it is easy to fade into the shadows. It’s brisk and she can smell the snow coming.
Music sneaks out the open door of some club on Western Avenue, something scratchy and acoustic and somehow sharp. She pulls him toward the door.
“I think we’re a little old for this place,” he says.
She stands outside, listening.
“Cover’s five bucks,” says a guy from just inside the door.
Mulder looks at her. “You wanna go in?”
Inside it’s even more dank than the exterior let on; like everything in this city, it’s all edges and industry and grime. But the man on stage has something sweet and unassuming that she likes, and they stand in the back and stay. Mulder wraps an arm around her shoulders. This bar is all shadows and dark corners; it is almost safe. She breathes the feeling in, saving the scents for later: his leather jacket, cigarette smoke, cheap beer. Her life is nothing like she’d planned.
The song is about a couple on the run, and she closes her eyes and imagines them as anyone other than her and Mulder, imagines them bank robbers or refugees, anything not to see herself in it. Anything to be normal, just for a few minutes.
The insistent buzzing of his burner phone destroys that illusion. Mulder shows her the screen. It’s a text message from Leroy, their contact in Chicago, an old friend of Frohike’s.
The message is short: “Time to go.”
She closes her eyes and Mulder turns her toward him, presses his lips to her forehead. “You coming?” he asks softly, like he does every time they have to leave.
And like she does every time, she says, “Always.”
day two hundred and twenty
It’s eighty-five degrees and sticky, unseasonable even for New Orleans. Their apartment, a third-floor studio in the Marigny, has a broken window unit and a box fan that’s less than useless in the oppressive heat.
Scully’s lying on the couch in her bra and underwear, her skin glimmering with sweat.
“Merry Christmas,” he says, dropping a bag of groceries on the kitchen counter.
She turns her head to look at him, unimpressed. “This is hell.”
“Yeah, that sounds right.” He starts pulling things out of the bag. A loaf of bread, a bag of romaine lettuce, a little log of goat cheese. She’s watching him with some interest now, and he explains, “It’s too hot to cook.”
He dumps the ingredients into a mixing bowl and adds balsamic vinegar and one meager tablespoon of olive oil. As soon as Scully looks away, he adds a little more. Maybe a lot more. What she doesn’t know won’t hurt her. Sometimes he feels bad about sneaking extra calories into their meals, but not bad enough to stop.
After he plugs in the Christmas tree - a strand of white lights on a fake ficus tree that came with the apartment - they eat their salads on the couch. “Christmas salad,” Mulder declares, because the lettuce is green and the dried cranberries are red. They down one bottle of wine with dinner and another during the first half of “It’s a Wonderful Life”. A few minutes after the guardian angel shows up Scully mutes the TV and pulls him down to her.
“It’s too hot,” he complains between kisses, like that’s going to stop them.
“Then take your clothes off,” she says, already pulling his t-shirt off. He runs his hands down her sides, her ribs too sharp, and she is still so beautiful. He can taste the wine on her lips.
Their sweat-slicked bodies move against each other and then with each other, and when she licks the salt from his collarbone and clenches around him he shivers, no matter the heat. It is, he thinks, one of their better Christmases.
day five hundred and eleven
They are walking through a park in autumn, in some small midwestern town. Her hair is dark and the leaves are bright. He misses the red, but it’s still soft when he runs his fingers through it; she still curves into his touch. It’s enough.
There is a pergola in the center of the park and a couple standing beneath it, a handful of onlookers sitting in folding chairs off to the side. The woman looks impossibly young, shivering in a knee-length white sundress in the October chill.
They meander in that general direction and the wind carries the girl’s voice across the dying grass. “For better or for worse,” she says, “for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health.”
Scully slips her hand into his.
On the way home he stops into the pharmacy and emerges five minutes later with a new box of hair dye, dark brown with a food name. “Your roots are showing,” he says, almost apologetically.
“It’s fine,” she says. “It’s been at least a month.”
“And there’s this.” He hands her a copy of The Des Moines Register. At her quizzical look, he adds, “Page fourteen.”
She flips to it and scans the page. Down towards bottom a headline reads: “Slater Sasquatch?!” Just below, there’s a tiny, blurry picture of - well, something - almost certainly not Bigfoot - wandering through a pasture, surrounded by cows.
And she giggles.
Giggles. Like a kid. “Oh my God, Mulder,” she says, covering her hand with her mouth. She reads, “In a Register exclusive, local farmer Theo Henry photographed the mysterious creature last Wednesday night.”
“What do you think?” he says, leaning over her. That same familiar posture, the way they’ve always stood. Posed to keep everyone else outside. “Should we investigate?”
The sun is low and golden and it catches that hint of red on her scalp. On the walk back to their apartment she reads the rest of the story out loud to him. She even does a voice for the farmer. She sounds happier than she has in months.
He thinks about wedding vows. He thinks about how far she has followed him and how much they’ve lost.
Looking over at her, he kind of hopes the Slater Sasquatch is really out there. It seems like the least the universe could do for them.
…and twelve
It’s well after midnight but he knows she is still awake. “If I’d asked you then,” he says to the ceiling, “would you have said yes?”
She props herself up on one elbow, looking at him cautiously. “Are you asking me, or are you asking me what I would have said?”
“Before all of this,” he insists. “Before - before my abduction.” Those short months when he had loved her and she’d loved him back, when it had finally been a shared secret; clinging together in dingy motel rooms after autopsies and interviews.
“I’ve never really thought about it, Mulder,” she says, but he can tell that she’s thinking about it now. He also thinks he won’t like the answer. After a long moment she sighs. “It doesn’t seem relevant.”
“The question? Or getting married?”
“Both.”
He purses his lips and nods, slowly.
They lie in silence for a long time, and he thinks she’s fallen asleep when she finally responds. “I don’t need a piece of paper to tell me,” she says. “I don’t need an official sanction to be with you.” Her voice is quiet but there is grit behind her words. He can feel her shaking. “They don’t have the right.”
Eighteen hours from now she’ll sneak out of the apartment, claiming they’re out of Advil. She’ll come back with a big cupcake - chocolate with chocolate icing - and a votive and a matchbook. “It’s the best I could do,” she’ll say. He won’t have remembered that it’s his birthday. He is forty-two years old.
And he’ll blow out the candle and he will make a wish, because whatever else is lost, there are still things he hopes for.
day seven hundred and thirty-two
They have been cautious around each other lately. After two years of seeing only each other, there are small things that fill her with unaccountable rage. Things like: when they buy the newspaper, he fills out the crossword puzzle in pen. This strikes her as an outrageous display of hubris, of exactly the kind of arrogance that got them here.
And today is.
Three years old is dinosaurs and sneaking cookies and scraped knees and tantrums. It is memorizing Green Eggs and Ham in its entirety and declaring that you know how to read. It is puzzles and the alphabet song and watching the same movie over and over again.
There is an ache inside her that grows. Like a black hole, it threatens to destroy everything it approaches.
She doesn’t know how to hate him and she doesn’t remember how to do anything else.
All morning he shoots furtive glances in her direction, like he’s waiting for her to bring it up or break down. Last year it went unsaid. Last year when she woke up on the morning of William’s birthday, Mulder was gone. He’d left a yellow rose and a note on her pillow. Last year she’d been grateful that he knew her well enough to leave her alone.
Last year they were younger. Last year they were better to each other.
He’s sitting on the couch with the newspaper and a fucking pen, as always. She sits at the kitchen counter, facing away from him. It’s easier when she can’t see his eyes on her. “It’s his birthday,” she says.
And then: “Sometimes I wonder if you know what I’ve given up.”
“Dana,” he says, and she flinches to realize that she hasn’t heard that name, even in her own head, for at least a year now. That at some point, between Scully and the dozens of aliases they’ve run through, she’d stopped thinking of herself as Dana. As a person with a history, a family, a life outside of running.
The newspaper rustles as he closes it, and his footsteps creak on the old hardwood floors. His hands on her shoulders, the energy in them crackling. He traces the tendons in her neck with his tongue and she shudders.
“You told me once,” he says after a while, his lips close to her ear, “that you wouldn’t change a day.”
She swallows, bites her lip. Out loud she says, “Please don’t,” and she’s afraid it sounds like begging.
He asks anyway. “Is that still true?”
She wants to say fuck you. He should know better than to ask her something like that. They’ve still never talked about it.
Instead she slides out from his hands, off the chair and lets him back her up against the counter. With both of them barefoot he is just so much bigger than her, and sometimes it’s easier to pretend that it’s not a choice.
He kisses her like he wants it to bruise, like she’s not already all bruises.
She used to think that sex was extraneous. She’d worried that their relationship would change when they started sleeping together, but it hadn’t; they’d been everything, and then they had been slightly more than everything. And it had been good - sometimes desperately, mind-blowingly good - but she didn’t need it.
Now she only knows him when he’s inside her. He is a stranger in these halls. When she looks in a mirror and sees him behind her she startles like prey. He barely touches her except when they’re fucking. All of the gentleness has been carved out of them.
They have watched so many people die.
He lifts her up onto the counter and she wraps her legs around him. With his mouth hot on her neck she feels real, and her body remembers what her heart can’t. Her body knows him, craves him like water, and it can teach the rest of her to remember. She is sure of it.
day seven hundred and sixty
When she’s lying awake at night, watching the rhythmic rise and fall of his chest and tracking every movement of his legs and every shiver that traces down his spine, she whispers things she can’t say when he’s listening.
Sometimes secrets, sometimes confessions. Sometimes I love you, which lately feels like a confession. Or I’m sorry, but only because she likes to imagine how those words would sound in his voice.
She knows the way death set over his features. She has seen his decay. She knows that he was awake through those long months, and if she could take his nightmares she would do it.
He wakes up with a grunt, his eyes flashing open in an instant. Too fast for her to pretend to be asleep. “What’s wrong?” he asks, groggy.
“It’s nothing,” she says. Variations on a theme: I’m fine. It’s not a problem. I’m feeling better.
“Bad dreams?”
“Something like that.”
He pulls her close against him and she stiffens. He must be half asleep; he hasn’t held her like this in months. But he turns her body to face him, and his eyes are bright when they meet hers. His right hand traces from her shoulder down to her fingers, and he brings them to his lips.
“I’m sorry,” he says quietly.
Biting her lip, she stops herself from asking, for what?
His hands are in her hair now, his thumb tracing her earlobe, her jaw. When he gets close to her lips she draws his thumb into her mouth, sucking lightly at the tip. She loves him and loves him and loves him, even if she’s forgotten why.
She whispers, “What if we can’t outrun it?”
“Then we’ll stand our ground,” he says. “And fight.”
day one thousand, one hundred and eighty-two
She takes him by the house later, having ensured that one of the windows was left unlocked. They sneak in together like high school kids coming home after curfew, and he feels something resembling delight for the first time in a very long time.
Once he’s helped her jump down and they’re both standing inside, he takes a good look around. “Yeah,” he says.
Room by room Scully guides him through the little house. The dated kitchen, the drafty bedrooms, the thin layer of dust covering every surface.
“The realtor said it was a vacation home,” she explains, running a finger along a windowsill. It comes back nearly black. “It didn’t get much use, obviously. Too far out of the way. And Skinner thinks it’s safe. Your name won’t be on any of the paperwork.”
“Well, if Skinner thinks it’s safe,” he says, not a little sarcastic.
“Stop,” she says. “He’s trying.”
“He still works for them.”
“What do you expect him to do?” she snaps.
Mulder doesn’t actually have an answer to that question. It’s just that with all they’ve been through and all they’ve given up, it seems unbelievable that Skinner has just…gone on. Like a human being, with an apartment and a job and his own goddamn books on his shelves.
Scully could have done that, he knows. She could have left him to his quest and his madness.
He looks at her curiously then. “Is this really what you want?”
“What?” she asks. Like she doesn’t know.
He gestures broadly with his arms, intending to encompass - well, everything. This house, that gate, the impossibly long driveway. This house doesn’t even have an address. He’s not sure the road that brought them here is on any map.
“You have other choices,” he says quietly.
“I did,” she says, “once.”
He thinks about buying furniture. About filling the little house with new books, with their clothes and photographs and memories. He thinks about a house that smells like her. About living like normal people, even if it’s in secret. Maybe they’ll get some fish.
“I don’t suppose we can get the newspaper delivered out here.”
She smiles, her eyes crinkling at the edges. “I don’t think so, Mulder. I’ll have to bring them home from work.”
“Probably for the best,” he says, and takes her hands in his. They both look down to their joined hands, the patch of sunlight on the dusty floor.
“So what do you think? Ready to settle down out in the country?” she asks, half joking, just barely meeting his eyes.
He answers her seriously. “It depends. Are you coming?”
She’s on her toes, reaching up to kiss him, and she says, “Always.”