a rose bi any other name

tagging @today-in-fic

This is a Three Words fix-it fic.

tw: pregnancy, depression, season 8

She was running as though in a bad dream, as though through water. She could not move fast enough; she didn’t. Doggett found her screaming on her knees and when he helped her up, she could not keep her balance. Her legs tingled, and her speech was slurred. The second time he’d carried her someplace. He’d sat her in his passenger seat—they could follow Mulder’s body to the hospital—when he’d said “Mulder’s body,” she’d moaned—and she could get checked out there too. She had wanted to tell him, It’s a fight or flight response. It’s a panic attack. All my blood is going to my heart. That is why I can’t feel my legs. That is why I am sweating. That is why I am slurring and breathing hard.

Her mother comes to get her. Mulder’s body, pronounced DOA, is behind an ER curtain, and soon someone will come to take him to the morgue. 

“I have to go,” she tells her, when they roll him out.

“No, Dana,” her mother says, holding on to her arm, because she cannot really get up from her seat, because the attending nurse had insisted she take a sedative. (Pregnant, she’d told the nurse. It’s safe for you, the nurse had told her, as she knew already. Still, she hadn’t wanted to risk it. If Mulder was parenting a baby, carrying a baby, he’d do it like a hippie, a homeopath, like her sister. Like if he wanted the baby he might try to sell her on some big, inflatable in-home birthing tub and its potential for multiple uses, and she would look at him fake-annoyed and say No, Mulder.

She hadn’t want to risk the sedative because she had not protected Mulder properly. She had not protected their family properly. And she could not afford another mistake. But when someone handed her a bag of Mulder’s “belongings”—the blanket he’d had wrapped around him in the ambulance—she’d wailed. And Doggett had said, Dana. And the nurse had offered again, and she’d accepted the pill because her hands were shaking too hard to hold the blanket in its large Ziploc baggie.)

She watches Mulder on the gurney, down the hall, through the doors, feeling like a deserter. 

“He’s alone,” she cries into her mother’s shoulder. She thinks of their basement and how desperately, madly he is wanted. Needed beyond want.

“He’s here with you, Dana.”

“My—" she chokes. My husband, she thinks. How when they told her she was pregnant, before they told her he was gone, she’d imagined them together forever. My partner. “My baby,” she says instead, low and keening, holding her stomach.

-

Later, when the medicine wears off, when her nervous system is no longer depressed, when her mother drives her home, she will cling to Maggie’s shoulders on her sofa. “I can’t do this, Mom,” she will weep, hyperventilating. “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t…” 

Maggie rocks her like a child. She reminds Dana that she’d taken home a prescription for panic attacks as needed. After the first dose Doggett had talked to Maggie in hushed tones. Mrs. Scully… after she saw him, she was just layin’ on the ground.

Dana takes it to go to sleep. Dana takes it for the funeral. Dana takes it to reduce the premature urge to nest, to reduce her conviction that she is already an inadequate mother. 

-

The best day of her life, she thinks: when Mulder comes back. She argues and argues to treat him and to save him, as though running slow, through water.

“Who are you?” he jokes when he wakes up, and she is so grateful. She wants to tell him Go easy, I am barely off the sauce, and Please only be exactly yourself.

-

She leaves him at the hospital to pick up her car and his change of clothes, and when she returns, she is barely holding it together. She wants to take something, but if he sees her, she thinks he will disapprove, and regardless, she needs to drive him home.

It makes her heart beat fast and fearful to even think of leaving him alone. To even think of being apart. 

“Whatever neurological disorder you were suffering from, it’s no longer detectable,” she assures him. He eyes her suspiciously, as though he is confused as to why she is not furious with him for not telling her of the aforementioned. Maybe when their family is together and whole and safe in her arms, she will worry about trivialities like his lies, or his long betrayal.

She goes on, “The scars on your face… on your hands, on your feet, on your chest… they seem to be repairing themselves.” He touches his face, and she wonders if anyone has yet given him a mirror. 

She tells him he is in perfect health. She means, I will always take care of you. I will never let this happen to you again. You have always been perfect.

“Wow,” he says. 

“How do you feel?” the doctor asks. 

Mulder is glib. He borrows her deadpan humor. “Like Austin Powers.” She has missed, missed, missed him.

-

At Hegel Place, she insists that she carry his bag. He is distracted by the familiar and does not argue, which makes her feel displaced, like she’s out of line for needing tenderness, specifically his. Inside his apartment, her chest gets tight. A lump comes to her throat.

She wants him to smile at her for preserving this space, here, for them. She wants him to say Remember the last time we were on that couch, Scully? and waggle his eyebrows. She wants his approval, his assurance that she has done enough because here they are, together.

She fights, failingly, for control of her breath. Her palms begin to sweat. She digs her nails into the skin. 

“Something looks different,” he says. She twists her fingers, his perusal making her nervous.

“It’s clean.” Her arms are numb, her legs are numb. Her tongue feels thick in her mouth.

“Ah, that’s it.” And then, “Missing a molly.”

“Yeah,” she whispers. “She wasn’t as lucky as you.” Stay positive, she tells herself, be positive, make him comfortable, it’s all on you. If she fails to make his return to Earth run smooth, she will fail this baby, their baby, again.

She wonders at his grimace if she deserves to be a mother, to be entrusted with his child. If she is worthy of his love. She’s wanted him back, but she’s wanted him for her.

“Mulder,” she says, trailing off at the second syllable because her voice sounds unnatural to her ears. She knows she is dissociating for self-preservation, feels her soul leave her body like a snake from old skin.

“I don’t know if you’ll ever understand what it was like.”

He stares.

“First learning of your abduction, and then finding you dead…”

Mulder nods.

Her flat affect is a poor ruse. She has wanted nothing more than for him to be there for her for months, but she can’t ask it of him, she won’t, not yet. She panics that he can smell it on her, the desperation, and resents it.

It is still her turn to be strong. Everything still depends on her. 

“… And now, to have you back…” her voice rises and cracks.

“Well, you act like you’re surprised.” He Vanna White-s himself. The strength to stay positive leaves her.

“I prayed a lot,” she tells him. “And my prayers have been answered.” Her vision blurs. She always cries.

“In more ways than one.” His first acknowledgement of their child. All she’s ever wanted, and now it is up to her to make it work, save them all.

“Yeah.”

“I’m happy for you.” His nodding is so fucking… fake. “I think I know… how much that means to you.” It ruins her composure.

She thinks, This isn’t how it’s supposed to be. And, still, even with him in front of her, Oh my god, I can’t do it.

Her lips tremble; she can feel her face crumple; she can feel it go numb; she looks like a little girl. “Mulder—”

He’s saying something to make her stop crying—“I don’t mean to be cold or ungrateful”—but she should be the one doing all the work, and then the zinger: “I just, I have no idea where I fit in… right now. I just… I’m having a little trouble… processing everything.”

Well, me fucking too.

-

She offers to give him a little space. She leaves his apartment building and crosses the street and realizes she cannot drive home when her hands shake so badly that she struggles to find her keys in her purse. In the driver’s seat, she watches them tremble on the wheel.

And she hears it again: I don’t really know where I fit in.

And she feels it: the paralyzing fear that if she leaves him alone, he will not be here when she gets back.

The baby moves. She has to protect them both. He would never forgive her if she didn’t protect them both; already he hasn’t forgiven her; you act like you’re surprised.

She had wanted to run from Mulder’s apartment, to make him comfortable, to give him space, but she can’t leave, she has to protect them, what if something happens to Mulder while she is gone, what would she tell her baby then. She’d thought of him—My husband, because none of her claims to him felt adequate—she’d thought: what will we do without him. They couldn’t do anything without him. After they found him, she hadn’t left her apartment for a week, not until Maggie implored her to take out the trash otherwise she’d never return to Baltimore. (She hadn’t even wanted Maggie to leave. She hadn’t even been capable of caring for herself alone.)

And now he’s back, but he doesn’t know where he fits in. And she doesn’t know where she fits in if he doesn’t know, because she’d always assumed it would be—she can’t even think it, only: what if something happens if I drive away.

So she doesn’t. She heaves big breaths. She hopes she will stop sweating. She wraps her arms around herself because weight on the chest depresses the nervous system, like burial, like a grave. She cannot take one of the pills in her purse because, though she won’t be driving, she must stay alert.

She sits across the street from Hegel Place in the driver’s seat, watching his window. She cries herself to sleep.

-

When she comes to, it’s dark out. Someone is yelling and knocking at her window. “Scully! Scully!”

She jolts awake, but still feels sluggish. Her eyes go wide, she blushes; it’s Mulder. He looks confused and horrified. A hand goes to her stomach, checking the baby—what the fuck was she thinking, falling asleep like that—the other to the door. “Open the door, Scully, Jesus Christ,” he’s saying, and he’s looking at her like she’s crazy, and she’s shaking her head.

The moment it clicks for him that she is not totally with it, perhaps hasn’t been for weeks or months, she sees it in his eyes.

She has failed, because she was supposed to stay awake to protect them. She remembers all her previous failures—all day today, and every day, for months. He is mad at her, she thinks. She is scared. He is going to leave her. She hasn’t even told him: I can’t do it. She needs some air. She needs to beg, she realizes. She unlocks the door. 

In a second, he yanks it open. His hands on her face. She sighs; it is such a relief to feel him. “Scully?” Feeling all around, fingers to her neck, checking her vital signs, checking the baby. “You okay, Scully?”

Him. Touching her. She begins to cry. She holds her stomach. “I’m sorry,” she weeps. “I’m so sorry, Mulder—”

Mulder brushing the hair from her face, Mulder looking confused. 

Mulder feeling like he has no idea where he fits in right now, but sure as hell knowing how to play her hero. 

“I’m sorry,” she’s choking, and he’s crouching by her to get a better angle, pulling her legs out of the car so her shoes dangle just above the pavement, just by his legs. “I can’t do it.”

“Shh,” he tells her, “Shh, you’re shaking. Take a deep breath. Take a deep breath.” 

She shakes her head. “I can’t.” Tears leak from her eyes but she is silent except for when she inhales, tries to inhale.

“Scully,” he tells her, sternly, but soft, like in a good dream, and he smells like himself, and he’s saying her name.

She hurts. “My chest,” she tells him. 

“What’s wrong? Scully, what’s wrong, why are you in here? Have you been in here this whole time?”

“I’m sorry,” she cries. 

“What are you doing here, Scully?” he’s asking, but his voice is tender, like he’s worried, not angry.

“I’m sorry, Mulder, I didn’t mean to fall asleep, I was—I was—I was going to—I…” her mouth is open but she doesn’t know what to say, and she cannot breathe, she can’t.

“Alright,” he whispers. “It’s alright. Come here.” And then he is taking her hands, pulling her out of the car, pulling her close. The compression of her chest slows her nervous system.

“What are you doing out here, Scully?” he asks again, rocking her back and forth and back and forth. “It’s late.”

“I… I couldn’t leave.” It is easier to talk into his sweater, the one she had left the hospital to retrieve from her own apartment. 

“S’that why the pajamas under my pillow smell like you?”

She is embarrassed. “I’m sorry. I was just… keeping watch. If you… if something happened I-I couldn’t go on, Mulder.” She can’t perform a moment longer, and he has always seen right through her.

“Oh, Scully…” he pulls back to look at her, as if to say, finally, Baby, you are eight months pregnant, who the fuck do you think you need to protect?

Her chin wobbles. “I’m—”

“Shh,” he tells her. “Don’t be sorry.” And then: “It’s okay. It’s alright. I’m here.”

It absolves her.

She nods. She cries a little more, and says “Yeah.” After a minute, she speaks again. Her voice is high and thready. “I haven’t been… doing well, Mulder.”

He looks into her eyes and nods very seriously, comprehending.

She feels the burden leave her body. She feels partnership, at once foreign and dear.

“Come on,” he says. The first time since waking up that he has not felt helpless. “Let’s go to bed.” She nods. She is so small.

He takes her upstairs.

16. Over and over again, ‘til it’s nothing but a senseless babble

“I love you. I love you. I’m so sorry.”

He finds her in the morgue, clinging to Mulder’s biceps, face to his mottled, bare chest. Hunched over the slab they’ve layed him on.

Her breath comes fast and loud, utterly frantic. For months he has dreaded this. Thought to himself: can she survive it.

“Agent Scully.” Skinner approaches tentatively, and she doesn’t look up.

“I love you,” she begs Mulder. “Please. I’m so sorry.”

Mulder stays dead.

Skinner puts a hand on her shoulder blade. “Scully,” he tells her. “Come on.”

She turns to look up at him in disgust, or incredulity. She is not leaving.

“Let’s go,” Skinner soothes.

Scully wraps her arms around herself, puts her head down on Mulder’s breastbone, and weeps.

He eases her up, holds onto her for a second. She sways.

“Alright.” He wipes her sticky face. “Alright, Scully. I’m gonna take you home.”

“I love you,” she cries. Her mantra. “I’m so sorry.”

~Approx. S3 bc puffy hair Scully is integral to my vision~

She is huffing when she walks into the office. He looks up at the clomp of her briefcase on the floor, in time to see her whip her scarf over one shoulder and whoosh her hair the other way like a very frazzled Katharine Hepburn. She’s a little tangled.

“Do you know who I sat next to on the Metro this morning, Mulder?”

Scully uses the prim voice that means she’s about to talk shit. He smiles and leans back in his chair, crossing his arms.

“Please tell me.”

She wrinkles her nose like she smells something bad and leans against the cabinet. “Brenda Simmons.”

He laughs. “Oh come on.”

Brenda Simmons is—ubiquitously considered—the hottest agent at the bureau. Totally competent, perfectly polite, smoking. fucking. hot. (And thus also as ubiquitously resented, by male and female colleagues alike.)

“We talked.” She looks flushed from the cold.

“Do you want some water?”

She glares. “The car was—it was empty! As it should be, at eight on a Sunday, by the way. It was only Brenda, so we said hello, and she said she was on her way to church choir, so I sat down—“

Church choir. God, she’s so cute.

“—and she takes out her little yogurt—which doesn’t make any sense if you’re going choir, anyway—and, I mean, if she was going to have breakfast, I thought I’d have breakfast! So I took out my bagel and, ugh! I mean, she looks me in the eyes, Mulder, and she says, ‘Oh, wow, a bagel. I don’t usually eat a heavy breakfast.’ What the fuck!”

She seems surprised to find the end of her own tirade, and springs still, panting for a second.

“You okay?” he asks.

“I’m fine.” She looks him in the eyes. “Sorry.”

She looks so vulnerable there, ruddy from the neck up, hair sticking out from static cling.

“I’m sorry, Mulder,” she says again, and then, a cheery contrivance as she steps around to his side of the desk: “What’d you want to show me?”

It hits him suddenly that she does not know he thinks her beautiful.

“Just this really weird email. But—hey, Scully.” He turns his chair to face her, close. “Come on. Forget her. Don’t worry about your breakfast.”

She looks chagrined, a little embarrassed.

“It’s the Lord’s day. God bless the bagel, and scallion cream cheese unto you. Brenda’s just gonna be phlemy.”

She cracks a smile at that one.

“She’s got nothing on you.”

They both freeze, a moment, to consider if he really said it aloud. They decide he did.

Her hand brushes his scapula as she steps to take a seat on his desk.

“Show me that email.”

When she speaks her voice is soft, and he notices her shirt’s a little wrinkled where it’s tucked into her skirt. Scully came to the office for him on a Sunday morning, and she rewore her blouse from Thursday to do it.

She is pouting in full. He brings her one of those little yogurt parfaits for breakfast and she spends fifteen minutes stirring the granola around halfheartedly before throwing it away. She leans back in her chair with crossed arms.

“Scully.” At her name, she flicks her eyes in his direction. “What’s up?”

She shrugs.

“Come on,” he encourages. He bumps her foot with his under the desk. “I know you got last night’s Final Jeopardy right, and you’re not even bragging.”

She shrugs again.

“Scully.”

“It was an easy question.” When Scully grumbles, she does it in this very sexy way that could also be her bedroom voice. Hypothesis untested.

“I dunno about that.” He swings around to the pile of folders behind him and plucks one off the top, pretends to flick through it. She’s still sulking. “But that’s five for you this month, two for me?”

She smirks. “So you got it right.”

He smirks, then gives them each a tally on the Post-It stuck to his computer screen. “It’s early yet,” he tells her. “You’ll beat me.”

Her eyes pulse, it seems, or grow. She gives him a little smile. A sad, slow smile, during which her left eye blinks faster than the right one. She seems preternaturally delicate, he thinks, for a woman who knows that the body carrying features Tombaugh Regio & Sleipnir Fossa, named for a horse that carried Odin to the Underworld, is Pluto.

He loves her. “What’s wrong?”

She chews her lip. She’s gonna tell him.

“I won’t tease you,” he says. “But you’re really pouting.”

She blinks again. “It’s my hair.”

“What?” What about her hair? It looks the same as ever, if a little more slicked back today than usual, but he’s accustomed to slight variations on the theme.

Now she licks her lip, looks over her shoulder at the file cabinet. Keeps her gaze there as she speaks. “It’s… I can’t wash my hair, Mulder. I have to go as long as possible without washing it. And I shouldn’t blow-dry it—“ her voice gets high and she composes herself. “It… falls out, less. That way.” She huffs. “Allegedly.”

Finally she looks at him, uncrossing and recrossing her legs, then her arms, as if he might challenge that hers is a dignified problem. Oh Scully.

“It looks great to me,” he manages, and smiles at her so earnestly she has to close her eyes. He takes her hand over the desk and squeezes it, brushes his thumb, once, across her pale knuckles.

“But if you hate it,” he releases her to spin around, back to his pile of clutter, “what about this?” He plops the Yankees hat on her head and she jumps, laughing.

“Mulder!” She swats him with an envelope.

He grins, smug. “You like it?”

msr | s7 | teen | words: 891

so i heard it’s fictober.

who do i tag for this? @fictober @today-in-fic

— — —

In seven years, he’s been lucky enough to get to know quite a few Scullys. There’s Special Agent Scully, of course. And Doctor Scully. There’s Sleepy Scully and Cranky Scully (who are, more often than not, the same person). There’s Friday Night Beer Scully and Thursday Morning Bee Pollen Scully and I’m PMSing Don’t You Say A Word Rocky Road Scully.

Lately, he’s been delighted to meet Bubble Bath Scully and Pancake Scully and Oh My God I Never Knew A Woman Could Come Like That Scully.

And he loves them all equally from the bottom of his heart, he really does (although that last one, man, that last one might just eke ahead a little), but there’s one Scully he loves best. One Scully he feels stupidly, deliriously, unbelievably lucky to have met. One Scully he thinks about sometimes on Tuesday mornings, when Doctor Scully is at the lab, when he’s particularly lonely in their little basement office, and it’s this one right here, in front of him right now.

She’s on his couch, and that in itself is enough to earn her a top spot. She’s on his couch, and her hair is still wet from her shower, piled on top of her head and held with a big clip and a cloth headband and smelling like some kind of tropical fruit.

She’s in his t-shirt (which, combined with the couch, is enough to earn her top five, easily) and it’s one of his favorites, old and a little threadbare in places from years of washing. If she stretches just right, he can see the rougey rounds of her nipples (top three), and if she bends her leg up like she’s doing right now, he might catch a flash of her little purple panties (top two—he’s taken that scrap of cotton off with his teeth before).

But what really does it for him, what cements this particular Scully as his numero uno, light of his life, empress of his lonely Tuesday mornings, is this: her face is green and minty. And her little tongue is poking out between her teeth the same way it does when she’s focusing on an autopsy.

Except the only thing she’s focusing on now is her foot, tiny and perfect, propped up on the edge of his coffee table. And the little bottle of petal pink nail polish sitting on a coaster (which was, by the way, a gift from her so many years ago when she realized with horror the sheer number of water rings on his furniture. He realizes now she was grooming him. Domesticating him before he even knew what was happening. And he is totally, completely okay with that).

She paints her toenails the same way she does surgery: cleanly, precisely, never spilling a drop. He knows, because he’s watched her perform a lot of surgeries (if surgeries on dead things count as surgeries). And he knows because he’s watched her do this a lot now, too. He can still barely believe it. Nearly two months of Sunday nights with her, and they’re always like this: shower, mask, big t-shirt, nail polish. He could set his watch by it. Has considered it, just to see. He’s never loved a routine so much.

“You’re staring,” she says, and it’s almost comical, the familiar arch of her eyebrow under so much green goo. Would be comical if he didn’t love it so damn much.

“You're—” Beautiful. Ethereal. Bride of Frankenstein meets Miss America and mine mine mine. “—cute.”

“Cute?” The eyebrow climbs higher, and that’s familiar, that’s in every Scully (even, sometimes, Fuck Me Harder Till The Neighbors Complain Scully, and that in itself is a feat).

“Yeah, you know. All—” Amazing. Unbelievable. Here. With me. Willingly. “—womanly.”

She snorts. “Womanly, Mulder? Really?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Hmm.” She turns her attention back to her foot, gifts her pinky toe with one even stroke.

He abandons his chair—front row seat to the Little Purple Panty Show—and slides onto the couch next to her, kisses her shoulder through the worn fabric of her shirt.

“I like seeing you like this,” he admits, low so she’ll let him get away with it. “With all your lotions and potions and woman things.”

“Woman things,” she mocks, and he even likes Contrary Parrot Scully. He likes her a lot. “Just wait till I send you on a tampon run. See how much you like ‘woman things’ then.”

“Scully.” He nuzzles her neck with his nose and wonders if she’s forgotten so soon, forgotten his hand between her legs in the shower two weeks ago while the water ran pink.

“What?” She caps the nail polish bottle and sets it aside, turns to face him straight on, and she looks so like herself, so Scully, with the little disbelieving screw of her lips and the shine in her eyes and her little perfect fucking pink toes that he can’t help himself.

He kisses her full on the mouth, sweeps his tongue between her lips until she groans. When he pulls back, she giggles. Half of her face mask, the bottom half, is mostly wiped away.