a rose bi any other name

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.”

Scully looked almost like she’d seen a ghost, and he should know; he’d seen her after she’d seen one. Her fingers flexed on the back of one of her high wooden chairs. “It’s because I haven’t been getting enough zinc.” She swallowed. “Isn’t it.” 

When he stepped toward her she kept the chair between them. She could break his heart if she weren’t so busy scaring the shit out of him.

He tried, “Scully.”

The low, sibilant way she used to take to like a body to water, in the middle of the night, in the flail of some nightmare: Where is my weapon. Did I take enough zinc. And -- Scully, till she sagged with it. Her muscles going long against her bones, which had gone still against his. Scully, alright Scully. Asleep in his arms untense as an exhausted swimmer. 

But now she was rigid. And her eyes were so open, he could see straight to the very blue bottom of her confusion, which was something terrible and true.

“No,” she said. “Don’t do that.” One hand went to her mouth and the other to her chest. Like she was going to throw up and recite the Pledge of Allegiance at the same time. “Oh my god,” she said, all but doubled over with it. “Please don’t do this to me.” 

She hadn’t answered the door when he’d knocked, though he’d hardly knocked. The buzz of anonymous highway had been in him, dirt still in his hair, and he’d realized on the walk up to her apartment that he was wearing a rather nice suit, probably Armani.

It was all too strange, even by his generous measure. He’d woken up under a slice of clear blue rectangle in North Carolina that morning. In his gums, it made his teeth ache.

And then there was Scully.

Don’t do this to me, that’s what she’d said when he’d come in the door, too, bolting upright on her couch, scrabbling for her service weapon. Had she been asleep? It was two o’clock in the afternoon. It was, per the gas station calendar as he’d hitched statelines, a Tuesday. Her hair had been a fright. There were bruises under her eyes as purple as any cadaver’s little finger.  

He’d thought — what had he thought? What was he supposed to think? She was Scully. The steps were quite simple: If things were strange, he found Scully. Sometimes, yes, it took a moment to travel from point A to point B. Sometimes there were many smaller steps between those two essential ones. But the fact remained that, in ketamine dreams or the throes of self-imposed psychodementia, the buck stopped with Scully. Once he found her, some broader leap toward not-strangeness, or at the very least a better kind of strange, could almost always reliably be made. 

Except this was worse, undeniably. Scully cornered across her kitchen where she’d flown after failing to locate her gun. It was not so much that she seemed afraid. The first thing she’d said, before imploring him that she could not take it, had been his name. And she’d said it just like she always had, with a tugging in it, a slur that was like closing a distance. It sounded exactly like the buck still stopped at her front door. 

“Please,” she was saying still, but she had stopped looking at him, sobbing to the hard wood and pale tile floor. “I don’t know—”

“Scully,” he said, in a different way, older and more urgent. “It’s me. It is me.” 

And damn if her face didn’t snap right up to his again. Yes. The echo and aftershock of recognition. His Scully of the basement office and the connected motel room door. Since forever, his assigned seat-mate, his stalwart, his level best. The dutiful daughter whose eyes had looked like that — Christ, just like that — when her father had died. 

Still, she was shaking her head. Her chin in that self-loathing crimp. “I can’t,” she said. 

“Yes,” he told her, though he didn’t know what, really. Anything. “Sure you can, Scully. It’s alright.” 

Scully took a deep breath. When she tore loose of herself it was with a shudder. The same rent-apart way she'd looked when she recalled burning spaceships with her hands open, or when she’d stepped through the doorway into his room, that first time. 

Upon him then, across the room, the dig of her forearm into the flesh of his neck like an incision, like that was how close she wanted to be: to the bone. The chair rattled.

“Hey,” he said, “hey, oh —” He put his arms around her ribs and spine. He put a hand in her hair to hold her and mean it. He said her name one more way, a way that wasn’t worth describing. 

Scully cried like to bring down high heaven. She cried like when she’d nearly had her heart torn out on his ratty living room floor. She cried in a way he’d never heard her cry before. 

A small detail from a scene of “Dreamland II” I find intriguing is when Scully exposes Morris Fletcher as fake Mulder. Fletcher has just more or less dragged her onto the waterbed, and they are both lying next to each other looking at themselves in the mirror above.

“You hate it”, Fletcher/Mulder tells her, half question, half statement. There’s a significant little pause before she answers, in a pensive, (I find) somewhat sad tone: “No, I don’t hate it”. And this is revelatory, and I love it to bits, because it's so cleverly done, both visually and how GA interprets it. What she sees in the reflection is something unreal (and that’s what we see in mirrors, an inverted, alternative world, a possible threshold, think of Alice’s Looking glass), a wish: Mulder and herself together, in a bed = as lovers. But what’s meaningful, it’s what we see and hear there as well: not Fletcher, as in all the other body-switch scenes, but Mulder, speaking with his own voice. We get to see her dream-wish too.

Then Fletcher turns around, rests his face on his hand and says, “You hate it”. Scully pauses, knowing it is Fletcher but choosing to look at the “Dreamland” up there for two more heartbeats. “No, I don’t hate it”, she says in that melancholy voice and means, I wish this were real, I wish it were you here with me instead of this horrible man. Then sits up, slips back into reality (steels herself, I guess) and proceeds to unmask Fletcher.  

There is so much in this single sentence for me, it’s so subtly done and so precious to me that she reveals what she is longing for by saying it the way she does.

msr, fluff | 1.2k words | ao3 | tagging @today-in-fic & @poangpals

written for @stxrdust-widow for the summer surprise exchange. i hope you like this fic!

Down the street, a car alarm started blaring and woke Mulder out of a deep sleep. He rolled onto his side, eyes still closed, and instinctively reached over for Scully. His hand found nothing but empty bedclothes. Mulder opened his eyes, now wide awake, and let them adjust to the dark while he scanned the room, even checking the bathroom for a sliver of light around the door frame. Scully was missing and if they were a normal couple, Mulder wouldn’t have been so worried, but there was no way he could go back to sleep without checking on her first.

Digital painting of Buffy and The Master from Buffy the Vampire Slayer season 1.