Just read all the Henry stuff you wrote! It’s so good! Can we please have some more?)) pretty please?)))
Oh, bless. Henry is my albatross. As a woman who was a teen girl in the 90’s and a secret romantic I want Mulder and Scully together 4 EVRRR!!!!
But as a woman who has watched so goddamn many of her friends in toxic relationships I’m also like DANA KATHERINE SCULLY GTFO THIS ABSOLUTELY SHIT RELATIONSHIP.
I struggle, man. People want Henry and Scully shmoopy fic. They want Scully leaving him for Mulder. And I also want both.
What have I done? Sigh.
***
She loves him, her gentle, straightforward husband. She loves his children, who love her back but revere their mother, the dead and saintly Joan.
The dogs, at least, are reliably fickle. They revere anyone with snacks.
Henry in a tuxedo, handsome in the way of freshman biology professors and the bachelor uncles of high school best friends. Henry would buy you a malted, would walk you home, would defend your honor. Would love you until your splintered heart knit back together like a comminuted fracture.
She adores him in a way that is unfair to him.
Scully - no. Dana. But old habits haunt hard.
Dana is in a strapless silk dress the color of an August thunderstorm, the color of an angry sea. A dress cut like a first kiss, a last kiss. Like a long goodbye.
Viv helped her pick it, Viv with the endless ripened-peach beauty of eighteen.
“Gorgeous,” the other guests tell her, and she tosses her russet head as Henry’s wife must. As Dr. Scully must. She bares her pretty white arms, her pretty white throat. The ropes of freshwater pearls click softly.
Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty Waltz begins and Henry beams down at her with his hand at her back. They are beautiful in the mirrors and she knows it and she likes it. She likes her long red hair and her handspan waist and Henry like Cary Grant.
Henry dips her and she laughs, happy. She likes that too, being happy. She was sad for a long time.
In the mirror is Mulder at the corners; she sees him hold out his hand to her for the shadowed dance they did for so long. It was a tango more than a waltz, it was a minor key more than it was ever a major. It was painful and sweet and lonesome and violent.
Henry kisses her beneath the chandelier, cups her face in his big hand. “I love you,” he mouths.
She smiles up at him. “I love you too.” And she does, oh, she does. She rests her head against his chest, against his solid, endless heart.
Dana - Scully - closes her eyes until Mulder slips away, William slips away. The shadows gather in the mirrors, in the corners, and they are alone together in the crowded room.
