Blindspot

They haven’t really discussed this, though he’s tried to bring it up. His paternal leave was up a week ago and he’s come to her apartment every night after work like Ward Cleaver, tie loosened, Scully in the kitchen or nursing on the bed. He sits and takes off his penny loafers and asks to hold his warm son in the crook of his arm and wonders how life has deposited him here; a ticking stripe chair, a new nine-to-five Bureau gig, a contentment he has never before felt, never chased. 

“Marry me,” he says again, more earnest this time, and he feels her thighs tense where she’s straddling his lap.

“Are you always this talkative in bed?” she asks, lifting herself up only to sink back down. 

He is still learning her body, and she is relearning this new version of it, twisting her hips in a way that makes them both groan. Their first time sleeping together again after William was born was shy and tentative, Mulder afraid he’d hurt her and Scully half dazed with remembered sadness and longing. 

“I don’t remember,” he husks. 

“Me neither,” she says on a sigh. 

Her orgasm comes on quickly and she seems surprised by it, her mouth rounding into a little O that has him finishing not far behind her, sinking back into the pillow in relief. She climbs off of him half a minute later and pulls the sheet up and over her shoulder. 

Mulder rises and removes the condom he wore on the advice of her OB-GYN, and comes back to the bed, stopping to look into the bassinet before sliding in beside her. 

“Were you serious?” she asks, her voice small. 

His pillow smells sweetly of breast milk, and he finds an errant burp cloth rolled under the corner of it, which he tosses gently onto the bedside table.

“I was,” he says, turning back to her, surprised to find it's the truth. 

“Are you asking out of some sense of responsibility or…” 

She’s looking at him like she’s trying to figure him out, reconciling the man who had been her partner with the man currently laying beside her. 

It has been hard-fought–reconciling those things himself–won out with one look at his newborn son after several months of not knowing where he fit in, who he was anymore. He now only feels a rightness, a sense of peace. And it’s only by Scully’s side, by William’s, from which that rightness flows. 

“I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t part of it,” he says. 

Scully looks at him with a look he’s come to recognize as hope. “What’s the other part?”

“I’m irredeemably in love with the both of you,” his voice cracks. “And I want to bind you to me in every way I possibly can.”

She turns her head so her cheek is resting on her hand.

“The way you bound yourself to Diana?”

The comment stings, but not sharply. She has a point. 

“Diana wanted me under her thumb. Marrying me was an act of control, not devotion.”

“How come you never told me?” 

“I was embarrassed. There’s a reason I asked for an annulment rather than a divorce.”

Mulder thought of the ring, which he’d thrown in the Potomac. It had been made of gold. A soft metal, malleable. Easily bent. If Scully agreed to marry him, he was doing it with platinum. Titanium. Steel. 

“And you’d rather have a family than the Truth?” Above the constellation of her freckles, her eyes burn with the blue of a driftwood flame. 

“I think they’re one in the same,” he says honestly. Fuck everything else, he thinks. He wants them both knit to him like Pan’s shadow.

Her flower petal lips creep up into a smile. 

“Is that a yes?” he smiles back. 

“It’s not a no,” she purrs, and a lightness zips through him. From the bassinet, his son awakens with a happy babble. 

He’s going to get her the most obnoxious ring he can find. It’ll catch on sweaters and in the craw of Kersh’s secretary. It’ll make Tara blanch and her mother smile. She’ll only pretend to hate it.