Life, she’s always been taught, begins at the moment of conception.
It begins, then, at some undetermined hour; on some dappled afternoon on the floor of her living room, her legs twisted tight around Mulder’s narrow, urgent hips. Or it begins on his couch, her sweat-damp back slick against the scarred leather, traces of brewer’s yeast and buttered popcorn lingering on his tongue. A boozy night in the generative lather of the sea. An after-hours liaison in one of the cramped Hoover laboratory bathrooms. A stripped motel queen-size, her bliss-bright eyes shining back at her from the mirror above the dresser.
But life does not begin at conception. It begins years and years ago, in an office underground. It begins with his hot palm meeting hers in a lazy handshake, his sylvan gaze tempting her down into the underworld. It begins with Quantico, with Stanford and UMD, with a textbook on the beach, a rabbit’s maggoty corpse, a B.B. pellet in the shredded neck of a garter snake.
Life begins before life, in the dark, secret world of her own mother’s womb. The female fetus, at 20 weeks gestation, already carries a million ova; ova that her body whittles down to 300,000 specimens by the time she reaches biological maturity. Even then, the body only offers up roughly 400 of these ova for fertilization during the body’s reproductive career, sacrificing a handful of failed follicles at every full moon, only presenting one or two perfect beads of potential, primed for transcendence, awaiting the wriggling violence of one similarly tenacious and unlikely spermatozoon.
It is a survivor, this little life. It has escaped the unearthly harvest; it has slipped through the procreative gauntlet. It has been activated by the only person remotely capable of such a thing, gifted a spirit, invited quietly into the endless spiral dance.
Mulder—
-
Scully fights her way up through the terror, jolting awake with a gasp.
Stiff hospital bed beneath her, monitors sedately beeping, sweat dampening her collar. Her heart hammering, her stomach sour. His screams echoing through the pathways of her nerves.
She recalls so little—it was all light, just a scorching, fulgent light that stirred and fluttered, trying to make figures and faces before melting back into itself over and over. What remains is how she felt when they returned her; gravely violated, afflicted with a bizarre and foreign emptiness, as though she’d been turned inside out and back again, clumsily stitched back into something only slightly resembling the body she used to inhabit.
But God, surely they’d keep him unconscious, surely, please God, at least let him be unconscious—
And why did she play with him like that, why did she tease him so relentlessly, why did she need to hear him say it so many goddamned times, what was she thinking—
And maybe he wouldn’t have gone if she’d just—
She swallows the rising lump in her throat, trying to calm herself, because this is not the right time, because panic is not productive, because she remembers a pregnant Tara telling her that stress is bad for the baby—the baby, my God—
Slowly, she slips a trembling hand over the flat plane of her belly, a callous from handling her gun catching on the thin hospital robe. She tries to feel something, anything, reaching out desperately to any part of herself that might be able to sense the surreal phenomenon taking place within her, any sliver of herself that knows, like any good mother should, that she is not alone.
The blood test has confirmed it. She has the science to back it up. She has done her due diligence, scheduling a dating ultrasound with the help of a bubbly nurse, sending a restless Skinner to the pharmacy for prenatal vitamins and cocoa butter.
But evidence is not enough. For the first time in her life, hard evidence is simply not enough.
Mulder—
-
Strangers in their office, frenzied as vultures at the kill. Kersh stern and sneering. It is the sickening indignity of Melissa’s sham of a murder investigation all over again—these men don’t want the truth, and they never have. They don’t care if they find him. They don’t respect his work, don’t know his heart, can’t even begin to comprehend the beauty or importance of his radical curiosity. Mulder is, to these people, an anecdote to relay at the Fourth of July block party. He’s a joke.
It’s no wonder the man they chose to head the task force isn’t even a good enough agent to tell a convincing lie. As if Mulder even had the time to sleep around, not to mention the inclination—Mulder, who alone had stolen her back from forces unknown in Antarctica. Mulder, who picked up her dry cleaning and her mail, who’d borrowed and scrawled notes in half the books in her bookshelf. Mulder, who was so obsessed with eating her out that she often had to yank him off by the hair.
Mulder, who’d been asking her to marry him since 1998.
Mulder.
-
The room is dark, the gel is cold, the ultrasound tech blessedly sedate and straightforward. Scully watches as the image on the screen between them refines itself with every exploratory glide of the wand over her skin, becoming clearer as the tech zeroes in on her uterus and taps at the keyboard, adjusting the picture with tidy, sure movements.
“Placenta,” the woman murmurs in affirmation, as if to herself. Scully watches the static, colourless landscape carefully, closely, her breath suspended.
“And… here... is the fetus.”
A bright smudge floats in a pool of dark night. Indistinct, amorphous, curled in on itself. But one thing is unmistakable: in its center, there is a rhythmic, flickering heartbeat. The scientist within her marvels. The wife within her mourns.
“And you can’t confirm the date of your last period, correct?”
“No,” she breathes, blinking back tears, unable to look away from the soundscape effigy displayed on the screen. “I mean, yes. I mean... it’s, uh, it’s been a little erratic since… I’m a cancer survivor, it’s been… my cycle's been unpredictable for some years.” Scully explains, feeling a small twinge of shame, as though she’s a teenager who’s been deeply irresponsible in her boyfriend’s back seat on homecoming night.
The tech nods, expressionless. She silently takes a few measurements, typing cryptic notes in rapid succession, leaving Scully to grapple with a myriad of emotions she assumed she’d never have the occasion to experience.
“Well, Ms. Scully,” the tech says. “I don’t like to leave my patients in the dark—I’d like to assure you that everything is looking perfectly normal. I’ll just slip out and have the doctor look over these to confirm, but to my estimation, it looks like you’re about nine weeks along. We’re all done—feel free to clean yourself up, dispose of the napkin in this bin here—”
Scully wipes her midsection clean, trying to visualize what lies beneath the skin, achingly aware that this still feels like a dream, a nightmare, like anything but real life.
“Congratulations,” the tech offers straightforwardly, before snipping the door shut behind her.
Nine weeks. Nine. Before the jinniyah, before the cigarettes, before even California. Nine weeks.
Mulder—
-
The acrid burn of bile in her throat, her mother’s cold and empty answering machine. A ghost of her lover walking the halls of her apartment building, or a copy, an imitation.
She absconds to Hegel Place, prays for the first time in years, falls asleep clutching a dirty shirt, hunting for any comforting trace of his cologne, his spiced and musky sweat. She sees Missy from afar in her dreams, shouts her name, watches her walk away. She sees Mulder, metal, light.
When she wakes, she is not alone. It’s clear that in this chase, it is she who is the fox, and John Doggett the hound, calling back to his ruthless, frothing masters for blood while she is trapped in her hollow, trying only to protect her young. Theirs—
Mulder—
-
Gibson Praise underground, dust in his hair, his fibula snapped. Empty sky stretching over a cruel expanse of sand, dreams upon dreams, shapeshifters twisting, searching, disappearing into the night. She paces the drifting hills like a penitent, seeking forgiveness from the universe—she believes, she believes, she feels him, have mercy—
God, Mulder, please, have mercy—
-
She shoots a monster who looks like a friend. The enemy cradles her like she is a child.
She dreams, she wakes. She calls out, and Mulder answers her from deep inside her womb, and from somewhere beyond the starline.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality
Anya is LIVE right now
FREE
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
The Autumn Court has just been posted! as i wrote in my chapter notes, i’m on mid-sem break this week so i should have plenty of time to write and get ahead of the curve to get back to weekly posting!
That night, wading through the undergrowth in the boreal chill, Walter Skinner believed.
He saw it all and he believed; saw the ship slip from its shimmering veil, massive and magnificent in the endless, glittering night; saw the bodies rise; saw light, saw heat, saw his agent rapt and limp in the ecstasy of surrender.
He saw it all, and he felt anew the awe and terror of Vietnam, the helicopters and the fire and MK-NAOMI, the sputter of an M60, khaki dark with blood. He saw it all, and he felt the quiet peace of inevitability, and then the sick sweetness of wonder, or perhaps the end of wondering.
He stared into the sky as the tears gathered without falling, stared as the invaders blinked away into an abrupt and infinite void. He stared until there was nothing left but the slow creep of dawn’s mist, the sound of his own ragged breath. Stared until there was nothing left to do but stumble back through the pines to the car, to Mulder’s keys still dangling from the rental keyring in the ignition, to his jacket crumpled in the back seat.
Walter sees it all, again and again.
He closes his eyes, and he sees it all, sees nothing but his promise, made in earnest and then helplessly, flagrantly broken.
-
When the sunrise begins to stain the wood paneling of his office, burning away the homey shadows in a flame of honey and bronze, he swills back the last of his whiskey and makes the trek, coatless, to the steaming coffee cart across the street. He is not drunk. He is never drunk, even after his best efforts, but the cool morning air slaps him sober anyway.
He stands in line, pays the burly, ageless Serbian woman manning the cart her due, and wrestles a lid onto the paper cup. Black, no sugar, no cream. He stalks back through the wind with his coffee to the Hoover, picturing Scully at home in the great concrete belly of the building, tilting endlessly at her strange and unclassifiable work, reluctant to leave its orbit.
He glances at his watch as he shoulders past security. He’s still got twenty ‘til their meeting.
Jesus Christ, she shouldn’t even be here. It’s bad for the baby. She should be resting, goddamn it, should have her feet propped up on a pillow or three, should be eating fucking bonbons with her stubborn head wrapped up in a fluffy towel. She should at least be on desk duty, not running around Idaho brandishing scalpel and SIG-Sauer like some sort of modern day dual-wielding hedge knight.
As usual, he abstains from the elevator, and takes the stairs back up. The mild exercise helps him squash his chivalrous irritation, helps him put it back into context. Maybe he’s just more of a sexist than he thought he was. Or maybe he just knows his agent. Maybe, that night in the hospital, he looked down into her wet blue eyes and saw rage and fear and unbridled joy as she wept, saw a woman, a lover, a mother. It was a revelation; he hadn’t even seen her cry when her sister was killed.
She’s a warhorse, that one. She’s Joan of Arc. At the very least, she’s one hell of an agent.
He guards himself against sentiment; he does not yearn. But in his weaker moments, he allows himself to wonder. He knows that he is no Fox Mulder, no crusader or revolutionary. War’s vicious hand had already beaten the thirst for adventure and glory out of him by the time Dana Scully was ten years old. He’s no longer the kind of man that could inspire the love and loyalty of a woman like her, and maybe he never was.
But hell, he still believes in doing the right thing; believes in America, even after all he’s seen. He’s got the patience to play the game by the rules, the muscle to bend them. He knows his place, his role in all of this.
Some men are bound for greatness. Some must be content to be good.
-
Nothing about Dana Scully has ever been cliché, but he can’t help but think that in this newly fertile iteration, she really does glow. Across from him, coolly delivering her account of the events in Burley, she’s pale and dewy, clearly fighting through a bout of morning sickness. He thinks she might be wearing less makeup. Her cheeks are beginning to fill out, her cider hair shines with health. She is beautiful beyond all reason, beyond all sense. When she finishes her narrative, he has to clear his throat in order to speak.
“And Agent Doggett?” He prompts, watching her face carefully. He likes John Doggett, likes his weary moxie, his work ethic. He recognizes within him the familiar clarity of loneliness.
Scully purses her lips for a quick moment, the only indication that he’s hit a soft spot. “He’s a good agent, sir,” she clips. “He’s thorough and seems to have a respect for what we—what I—do. But…”
“But he’s no Mulder,” he finishes for her.
She blinks, slowly, unevenly, and looks down at her hands, knotted together in her lap.
“Listen, Agent Scully, I couldn’t very well leave you alone down there,” he says. “Not while you’re… not in your present condition.” He pries off his glasses and pinches the bridge of his nose, knowing that he sounds like the worst kind of man. “Not that you’re…”
“It’s okay,” she says, saving him. “Thank you.”
She still won’t meet his gaze.
“Scully… off the record. We haven’t given up. We’re still working hard to find him,” he says, leaning forward, reaching for some sort of simpatico, some way to scale the wall between them. “Frohike—”
“Frohike can’t do a goddamned thing,” she interrupts, her voice thin and sharp. She lifts her shining eyes to his, trapping him in the vortex of their whirlpool blue. “If Mulder couldn’t bring me back when I was taken, then there’s nothing that any of us can do to bring him back now. We have to wait. I’ve been thinking. It’s the only way. I have to be—”
“Exactly, Dana. Now is the time for patience.” The use of her first name seems to shock her back into herself. Her pink tongue darts out to wet her lips.
“Your only job right now is to wait,” he continues. “To focus on your work, on your pregnancy. I won’t have you doing anything rash or stupid. That’s Agent Mulder’s job.”
She can’t restrain a small, sad, girlish smile, and the sheepish pleasure and relief that rushes through him is entirely inappropriate. Juvenile. Undeserved.
“Which, by the way, is waiting for him when he returns, once he is ready,” he says, forging onward. “Doggett’s position is temporary. I just feel better knowing that there is someone looking out for you, someone you can rely on, to turn to when you need something. John Doggett is a good man. You can count on him.”
She does not respond. Silence fills the room.
“I, uh, I have something for you,” he says. He rummages in a drawer, extracts an overstuffed manila envelope, slides it across the desk. She stares at it for a moment before claiming it, drawing it into her lap and unspooling the clasp.
“The investigation no longer requires these items as evidence,” he says, by way of explanation.
Scully reaches inside and pulls out a worn leather wallet. A badge. A ring of keys and a lockpick jackknife lashed together with a Liberty Bell keychain.
She opens the badge and rubs her manicured thumb over Mulder’s photo. It’s an act so intimate and heartfelt that it hurts him to observe it. He studies his own hands instead, large and square and calloused from long, punishing hours in the Gold’s weight room down the block from his condo.
There’s a soft metallic click. He looks up.
There is a single key on his desk.
“This is my apartment key,” Scully says. “Hold it for Mulder until he gets back, will you?”
She stands, and her waist is still tiny, her secret still safe. She is proud, sweet, noble, peculiar. He is not in love with her, but he could be, if he let himself.
“Thank you for looking out for me, Walter.”
He watches her disappear through the door, back to the basement, back to the shadows. He savours the sound of his name on her lips.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality
Anya is LIVE right now
FREE
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
Billy Miles has a voice like an echo, or an epilogue.
Mulder remembers a whole generation stolen into the sky, a rain-beaten cemetery, the spice of pine needles crunching underfoot. He senses the parabola of their small, searching lives, the clumsy tautology of their strange and lovesick saga. He recalls the first time he touched her, the giddy exhilaration he felt as he first beheld the white slope of her bare shoulder.
Fate or choice, it hardly matters. There was never a time before her. There is all the time in the world ahead.
One last look into the blaze outside, before they let the blackout curtains fall.
-
That frightened, bleeding girl from the diner, her fat-cheeked baby on Scully’s knee.
Mulder contemplates the implications—he can’t help but see the child as somehow saturated with starlight, knit through with filaments of the otherworld. An inherited radiance, trauma in the blood, the unsteady aura of the reluctant traveller.
He can’t help but wonder—
The baby sucks noisily on Scully’s knuckle. Her hand is doused in drool. He remembers how she was with Emily; immediately devoted, intensely tender, making a mother of herself without a moment’s hesitation. That secret part of her, unfurling like a corpse flower in its seventh hothouse year.
For too brief a time, Emily knew what he knows: she is the safest place, the truest north, the candle in the window on a moonless night.
-
She is pale and cold at his motel door.
His spread of old photographs and case notes slips to the carpet and scatters as he pulls back the comforter. He pries off her shoes and briefly squeezes her small, chilly feet between his palms.
She thanks him sheepishly as he tucks her in and folds himself around her. He’s touched that she would even come to him; his proud little stoic, ever loathsome of needing anything or anyone. It is a rare treat to comfort her, and he basks in it, breathing in the clean scent of her hair, holding her close.
Sometimes, when he thinks about it, he really can’t believe his dumb luck. He remembers the unexpected delight of sifting through her senior thesis: it had been snotty and cocksure, playful, audacious, the most intellectually and creatively stimulating thing he’d read in years. Her first handshake was firm, her first kiss soft and hungry. He’d fallen for her all at once, and then again, very slowly, over years and years.
It’s time, he thinks, burying his nose into her shoulder. It’s time.
“It’s not worth it, Scully,” he murmurs.
“What?”
“I want you to go home.”
“Oh, Mulder, I’m going to be fine,” she sniffles, but he senses that she’s only saying it out of habit, only trying to cover for the grievous crime of borrowing a bit of warmth, of craving a bit of comfort.
“No, no, I’ve been thinking about it,” he continues, hurting for her. “Looking at you tonight, holding that baby… knowing everything that’s been taken away from you. A chance for motherhood, and your health—and that baby…,” he swallows back a fresh swell of emotion. “I think that… I dunno, maybe they’re right.”
“Who’s right?”
“The FBI. Maybe what they say is true, though for all the wrong reasons. It’s the personal costs that are too high.”
She should be restoring health and life with her skilled hands and beautiful mind, receiving tearful declarations of gratitude in hospital waiting rooms, write-ups in medical magazines, plaques at conferences.
“There’s so much more you need to do with your life,” he whispers. “There’s so much more than this. There has to be an end, Scully.”
He presses his lips to her cheek. Her hand frets within his. A warm tear slips over one of his knuckles, becoming cold as it travels over his skin. She snuggles closer into him, and he can’t hold himself off any longer—he allows himself that forbidden image, the one he hasn’t indulged since the IVF failed, the one where she’s heavy with his child, well-fed in a way she hasn’t been since her cancer, glowing with the radiant happiness of miracles.
-
Scully is out sick.
Her dizzy spells are getting worse. He’s been finding her slumped in corridor chairs with her head in her hands, leaning drunkenly on walls, and, to his violent concern, flat on her back on the forest floor. His covert bursts of research assure him that this is normal for some women, but still, he banishes her to bed, moves the TV to her dresser, leaves her with a kiss and a triple latte in decaf incognito.
There is no work, and there’s a chance that there won’t be, not ever again. In the office, he slings his feet up onto the desk and spins a basketball, lazily inspecting the homey disorder of their office: their omnium gatherum of weird tchotchkes and bibelots, outdated med school textbooks, a chunk of raw jade, the rolled maps in their wire basket, his intramural track and field trophies besides her marksmanship commendations. The room is their story, written in airport gift-shop magnets and grisly polaroids, redacted reports, the walls fire-scarred, the green chair stained with semen. He’ll have to set up a home office, he thinks, unwilling to imagine a world without their lovingly-curated clutter.
He’s pulled out of his preoccupation by a knock on the doorframe. Skinner wanders in, and Mulder feels a smack of affection for the old guy—hell, at this point, he’s almost a friend.
There is no forthcoming letter of termination or notice of reassignment, not even a signature AD verbal ass-whooping.
There is, however, a twist.
Krycek, that one-armed bastard, all comely, belligerent grit; behind him, an undead Marita Covarrubias, retaining all of her glacial film noir self-possession. Their intrusion feels like an astonishing violation of his endangered sacred space.
A flame of rage licks him deep, but it quickly withers to embers. Once the fight goes out of him, he feels like he’s thumbing through a yearbook, or a smudged, yellowed newspaper. They are extraneous threads, those two, fraying brails; Jacks in a card game long discarded in favour of the warmth of the hearthfire across the parlour.
So this is the swan song, he tells himself—the final pursuit, the terminating inquiry. The price of admission to the great awaiting Eden. Beyond, there is a land of sleepy Vineyard summers, of deck stain and manuscripts, scrubs in the washing machine, sourdough starter thriving in a repurposed jam jar in the fridge. Beyond, there is a new life of making and growing, their wartime days all laid to an uneasy rest in the vegetable garden out back.
He will pay this last toll. He owes this much to Scully, cancer-scarred and sisterless. He owes it to the brief memory of Emily, their first ill-starred child. To those two unlucky zygotes, and all the foolish and extravagant dreams he harboured for them.
This time, perhaps he can earn a different fate.
-
Dawn begins to lift the unquiet night. His travel bag is at the door, his hair is still damp from the shower. He sits down on the bed, traces the crook of her elbow, reaches out to move a stray wisp of hair from her face. She awakens softly into his palm, as if from an enchanted slumber.
“Hey,” he says softly. “My flight’s in an hour. Skinner’s outside.”
She gazes up at him from the shadows, her eyes shining with a love so plain that it knocks the breath right out of him. Through an ache of adoration, he bends to kiss her, and she receives him with desperation, latching onto him and making sweet sounds of protest when he reluctantly pulls away.
“Don’t go,” she pleads, sitting up. She is Venus in lavender satin, Onuava, a nymph arisen from the lake. She has pillow marks on her cheek. Sometimes, she looks like she does not belong to this world, but has slipped through from the transient dimensions beyond.
He finds her hand and brings it to his lips. “I won’t be long. And when I’m back...”
A moment passes.
“When you’re back,” she says. “Will you marry me?”
The fae queen offers him a cup. He knows he will drink, and that he will gladly remain hidden in her realm forevermore.
Strong, sure hands, long fingers notched into the pleats of her ribcage, two of them still hot and slippery from being inside of her. Slow and wicked sweep of tongue, clumsy clash of teeth, all acts sacred and vulgar and honeyed between them. The delicious challenge of receiving him, the ache and the stretch and the breathtaking intrusion, his cock thick and hard as a satyr’s, just as mythic, just as potent.
She strokes and rubs and circles, too sensitive for anything but her own hands, too swollen and tender from hormones and heartache, from the gaping wound of his absence. She masks the pain with the memory of pleasure, allowing herself the luxury of delusion, summoning the texture of his skin and the heat of his gaze.
Far too soon, her orgasm rises to consume her, and then the sobs crash down in a reckoning storm.
When the worst of it passes, she tugs the comforter tightly around herself, trying to replicate the safety of his embrace, his big arms and steady breath, the warm home he would make for her of his body. The clock eats the seconds, the minutes, and guilt begins to brew within her chest; a new and distinctly Catholic-flavoured guilt that whispers to her that her own body is a home now; that she is selfish and depraved for doing to herself what she just did, soiling the temple, desecrating the sanctity of motherhood. She tamps it down, embarrassed and frustrated by this illogical uproar of latent girlhood shame.
But it’s true, to some extent, she thinks, scrunching the sheets with her toes. Isn’t it?
Her body is no longer a meaningless tool to trade or deal with, to extract pleasure from, to control and monitor and adjust to her aims. To starve or to push or to punish, to scald clean in scorching bathwater, to overcaffeinate or intoxicate. Her chipped, scarred, carefully-whittled body is now a home to two spirits, to memory made delicate, translucent flesh. To what she has left of Mulder, until the others give him back.
-
She does what she has always done in order to survive: she works.
There is an heirloom family hearse squatting in the driveway at the crime scene. Her people, Death’s people, denied dignified passage into the otherworld, a quiet retreat into their home country; she thinks she would be sadder about it under different circumstances.
It’s straightforward and simple. The victims are wet food for some secret beast—the husband’s fingers eaten clean off, the wife chewed up like a fleshy human Kong. Typical monster stuff, Fox Mulder 101. She tries to channel him, to do him proud with a few shocking, snarky slides, a line of quiz-show queries lobbed over to John Doggett with her very best deadpan Mulder mien.
Doggett, with his pinched New York mouth and monsoon eyes, who is unafraid to meet her gaze and hold it.
Doggett, who treats the case with solemn respect. Who humbly defers to what expertise she can claim, who defends her to the ill-fated Detective Abbott. Who, most importantly, stays late.
Scully is most comfortable around workaholics and meal-skippers, burners of the midnight oil. When Doggett catches her late one night in the autopsy bay with a newspaper from 1956, when he confesses to camping out in the office all weekend to pore over every X-File in the cabinet, she’s forced to contemplate the idea that he might actually be a good investigator.
He’s no rung-gripper, no Tom Colton. He cites Occam’s Razor, teases her with a drip of flashlight-related sarcasm, writes a concise, insightful case report. He’s on time. He brings her coffee. He’s not only nice, but kind, making no mention of the files that bear her name—no missing months, no Gerry Shnauz, no brief and violent Philadelphia affair.
Maybe she had the wrong idea. Maybe he could be a friend. Maybe she even likes him, which feels like the worst betrayal of all.
In the steamy grotto of his kitchen, Scully cuts a witch-like figure; black-clad and bent-nosed, her hair whipped into a fetching nimbus by the rain. She has been hovering over the pot while she sips at her second glass of wine, driven to industry by her skepticism of his ability to feed her.
“The onions are going to burn,” she needles, thieving a shard of gruyere from the cutting board.
“Get outta there,” he scolds, bumping her with his elbow. But she’s right as usual, and he turns his attention back to the onions, shoving them around the pot with a spatula. He’s been trying to be extra good to her lately. It would not do to burn the onions. Between the thing with the smoker and that ill-advised stakeout, he really owes her one.
Scully checks on the garlic roasting in the oven, releasing a zephyr of heat into the room. He strips a fragrant sprig of thyme between his fingers, observing her ass as she bends over and pries the crimped tinfoil bundle apart with a pair of tongs.
“This seems like an awfully convoluted way to flush out Hegel Place’s resident vampires,” she quips, letting the oven door clang shut. He grins at her, feeling another fragment of the lingering tension between them shake itself out. He can’t help it; her bad jokes make him feel loved.
Mulder had thought a stakeout would be romantic. A few long nights alone together in a neutral location, scratching notes, complaining amiably. Indulging in the cozy candour that is always inexplicably summoned by paper cups of burnt corner-store coffee. It had been off to a good start, Scully working herself up to one of her standard-issue grouches, getting all slouchy and pouty and sarcastic. But then Skinner swooped in on the wing of a raven and a mystery, and Mulder found himself suddenly, irrevocably in Vermont.
He had to admit that Ellen and her monster were rather Aesopish in their timeliness. In any case, her rabid domesticity had clearly rubbed off on him, because here he was, professing devotion in the form of soup, a damp dish towel slung over his shoulder, carefully pouring chicken stock into his mom’s prehistoric Osterizer Galaxie blender.
He might be a monster, but just like those 44 cloves, he wants to prove he can turn the pungent things inside of himself into something sweet and rich, something that can nourish her.
Across the kitchen, Scully sets down her wine and shoves her hand into a tattered oven mitt, rattles the tray from the oven and rests it on the burners. She shakes off the glove and impatiently picks open the foil with the tips of her fingernails. A bloom of aromatic splendour billows out from it, and he can’t help but follow it to the source, placing his hand on the small of Scully’s back as he leans over her and inhales. Together they peer down into the dark. The garlic resembles four papery nests of caramel-coloured hummingbird eggs.
“Ready,” he confirms.
He lets her squeeze out the flesh from the skin over the steaming blender while he transfers the onions. Scully is adorable, exsanguinating her alliums with a warlike, satisfied expression, the same one he’s seen while she’s elbows-deep in an autopsy.
“They say garlic’s an aphrodisiac,” he purrs into her ear, adding the thyme.
“You know, Mulder,” Scully says, eyes still glued to her task. “I find it a little strange that you seem so enamoured of an outmoded patriarchal institution like marriage.”
He feels a grin inhabit his mouth. “That’s one hell of a non-sequitur, Scully.”
“Indulge me.”
He leans against the counter, thinking.
“Well, there’s the fact that I love you, of course,” he offers.
“Big deal. You’ve loved me for years. Next.”
Mulder pulls open the fridge door, peering inside. “I dunno, don’t you think there’s something nice about the formal, ritualistic binding of two souls in front of the eyes of men and gods alike? The publicly-sanctioned promise to do right by one another, to go forth and bear fruit, to share the yoke?” He locates the carton of coffee cream, grabs it, pours a few good lugs into the blender.
“Did you share the yoke with Diana?” She asks lightly. It only stings a little.
“C’mon, Scully.”
“Anyway, marriage across nearly all cultures was traditionally the exchange of a woman as property from father to husband. It doesn’t have some primal, ancient spiritual significance. It was business.”
“Well,” he replies warmly, “I’ve got great news for you. It’s the year 2000.”
“We wouldn’t be able to continue our work.” With this, she sets her empty husk of garlic down and looks up, pins him with her Aegean eyes.
Here was the big one, the colossal Moby-Dick truth of it lurking under the water, threatening to crest in a heave of spectacular violence and suck down the Pequod. He hits the puree button. The Galaxie screams to life, buying him some time. The slop whirls and liquefies, like a magic potion.
The kitchen is very quiet when the blender jerks to a stop.
“I know now what happened to Samantha,” he says. His voice is softer than he intended. Like sharing a secret, like hiding from god. “Lately… lately it feels like the rest is… I dunno, recreational. I know you’ve got your goals with this work, too. I’m just thinking of what comes after.”
Mulder reaches over to briefly cradle her wine-flushed cheek in his palm. She leans into him like a stray cat, fierce and purposeful in her affection.
“And what if this is the thing that makes us?” She asks. “What if without this, without the X-Files, we lose ourselves? What if we become people that we are incapable of recognizing? What if nothing is important ever again? What if, what if, what if you don’t—”
“Hey,” he interrupts, utterly humbled by her integrity, her allegiance, the wide, wet ocean view of her eyes. “Hey.”
He fishes out a spoon from the drying rack and scoops up a mouthful of soup, floating it over to Scully with a hand cupped underneath it to catch any overflow. He tips the spoon against her lips, and she receives it like communion.
“Nothing would ever make me stop loving you,” he promises. “Nothing.”
He bends down. He kisses her soundly. “Even garlic breath.”
