She had gone to Philadelphia and come back changed—he feared irrevocably. Sure they had newfangled lasers that might starch ink from skin but this wasn’t about that. It was about the cool level way she looked at him across their desk, the way she’d not met his eyes in the hospital, and how he’d thought he missed her, then.
They confer professionally with long silence. Scully’s raw with bruises and rough handling. He recalls how, in Graceland, he had addressed her a postcard but not gotten it sent. Scully — scrawled, and that was all.
4x6 sentiment. The square footage of them. If they got another desk she’d have to stand in his shadow to reach anything of value. Her face is familiar, and silent, and WISH YOU WERE HERE! is what the card had had to say before he’d ever touched it.
The quiet grows to the size of the room.
“I may be in love with you,” is how he chooses to fill it.
After he’s said it, he knows it is true. Before he’d only had his hunches.
Scully says nothing. Impassive. But he sees it, a kind of wince, to the right of her eyebrow, with the bruise, like he, too, has caused her some pain. She leans forward and slides a file off the desk, tucks a paper clip to it, then looks down to her brief case and neatly puts it away.
Had he spoken? Mulder blinks at the place where a moment ago her face had been, absent now as she ducks about her business.
“Scully?”
Half-rising. “Hm?” The smooth, unflinching side of her face.
It’s astounding. He blinks again at nothing. “Did you hear what I said?”
Scully gives him an absent, midweek smile. A Thursday night, reports done, let’s call it early crimp. Then it’s gone. “Been a long day,” she says. “Night, Mulder.”
The door shuts behind her, and on Monday, he knows, she will come in with her face powdered, and her mouth closed. The postcard stuck in a motel drawer with the Gideon Bible.
