#post-abduction

His tone adds: Obviously.

As early as 1951, travelers headed to Lake Ashby before dawn have reported seeing a woman shrouded in blue walking ahead of them on this stretch of road, on the edge of the pavement. She is always gone by the time they catch up. Sightings picked up in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s before stopping abruptly in 1974—until, 20 years later, last week, a pair of young lovers saw a woman in blue vanish into the trees.

Young lovers is how Mulder said it when he told her.

“Has she killed anyone?” she asks, then frowns and shuts her eyes. Not like that, Agent Scully. Not like it’s Florida after midnight. “I mean,” she tries again, “have there been any documented fatalities tied to these sightings?”

“One man swerved off the road and hit a tree. Broke his leg.” He cracks another sunflower seed in his teeth. “But no fatalities, no. She just,” Mulder shrugs, “walks ahead of you for a while.”

“I see. So you flew me down here to observe an unsolvable phenomenon that doesn’t hurt anyone.”

“Yeah.”

“Just take me to see the Northern Lights next time, Mulder.”

He cracks a ghost-white smile. “I think I’ll need another few years before I’ve saved up enough money to take you to the end of the world.”

It surprises her that he sees the end of the world as a place. It surprises her that he sees it as a place they haven’t been. They drew their weapons on each other in an icy Arctic outpost. They work in a basement office at the far end of a crowded hallway where the laws of physics give way. She’s felt on the verge of falling into nothing since she offered him her hand, and now that she has—now that she’s vanished and returned, she understands that every point on the surface of this earth is the end of it. Most people have stopped feeling gravity.

“We have all night,” he observes. “I’ll keep an eye out if you want to sleep.”

“I’m not tired.” Maybe she says it too quickly.

“Are you still having nightmares?”

She doesn’t answer. She thinks of a window cracking. He keeps going, split as wide open as she is: “What do you see?”

White lights. Metal. Coarse bed sheets. Mulder jumping into a river to reach her and getting carried away in the current.

“Stories,” she tells him, in the voice she used to dismiss Missy over the phone last week. “Just fiction in the absence of fact.”

“Dreams are culled from memories, Scully, however muddled they may look.” He taps the steering wheel for emphasis. “I read we can’t dream a face unless we’ve seen it. And evolutionary psychology suggests that dreams are a way to process threats.”

“Mulder, recent neurobiological studies say we don’t even attach a cogent narrative to dreams until after we wake up. Our brains want to find logic in the illogical.”

He chuckles at that. “Do tell.”

Mulder. She holds herself in the lamplit contours of his jaw and remembers how clear his voice was in the senselessness of her hospital dreams. She says, “I just want to be awake.”

“You aren’t leaning against the window, are you?”

In answer, she leans further into the car, hands up in mock surrender. He turns the key, lowers the windows all the way, and turns off the car again.

“Crickets,” he explains. The shrill chorus is unmissable now.

She breathes an almost-laugh, matches his tone: “Mosquitoes.”

“Are you getting bitten?” There’s his hospital bedside voice. “We could listen to the radio instead.”

At sundown, on their way out the road, they stopped at a driftwood diner without any neon. As a radio in the corner played the Christmas staples, Scully had traced ringed coffee stains on the table and thought how unsuited this place was for Sinatra, for strings of tasteful white lights.

She’d expected to wear Florida like a wet wool blanket. In books, it was a state of heavy extremes, oppressive muggy heat and hurricane downpours, and she’d wanted its weight: as protection, as indictment, as any sensation that could flood the empty space in her memory. At the very least, she’d thought she might blend in among plastic flamingoes and tinsel trees and other bad mimics of living things. But so far there was no tinsel and no temperature in Florida, at least central Florida, at least in December. Just “White Christmas” in a land without snow. Two of the coffee-stain rings formed a Venn Diagram. She rubbed at the center.

She was raised on California breezes. Maybe it was rich that she wanted to find falseness here.

She realizes, in the car on the side of the road, how fiercely she’s rubbing the back of her hand.

“No,” she says. “I’m not getting bitten.”

The crickets chirp all at once. She can’t remember the last time she heard this many voices rise up for no other reason than to prove they can.

****

The second word she plays in Hangman is Evection, and Mulder guesses it.

"How do you always do that?" she asks.

“Well, I did consider a few other consonants.”

She swats his arm with her notepad, and he just holds out his hand. She passes him the pen.

“Evection,” Mulder shrugs. “A regular variation in the moon’s orbit caused by the attraction of the sun.”

“Fine,” she sighs, leaning back into the headrest. “Stump me.”

He doesn’t get the chance. They’re two vowels down when something that looks like a winged cockroach buzzes into her face, and she leaps outside, slamming the door before she knows what she’s doing. She doesn’t even notice Mulder followed her out of the car until she’s pushing the hair from her eyes.

“Are you okay?” he asks, and she thinks, just for a second, What would you do if I said no?

“Yeah,” she mutters. It was a bug. She straightens her shirt rather than look at him, but here he is anyway, like this is nothing to laugh at.

“Here.” His fingers brush the side of her neck. “Your necklace is tangled.”

“I got it.” She stops him with a hand to his wrist, her heels sinking in the gravel as she takes a step back. Mulder just stands there, palms flat against the sides of his jeans, watching her fumble with the clasp. He just stands there.

She will not be his dead girl walking.

“You know Mulder, this was pretty transparent.”

“What?”

“This case,” she emphasizes, like it’s in quotation marks. “Did Skinner even approve this?”

Mulder closes his eyes. He is impossible to figure out but easy to read, her partner. He tells the truth at top volume in an echo chamber; he deceives by omission. His confession is to close his eyes and curl his top lip over the bottom, and she suspects that if this were a sacrament, he’d already be absolved. But Scully is not a priest and she is not a miracle.

She leans into her outsized anger. “I’m not your project,” she steams, feeling good and alive. “You don’t have to protect me.”

“That’s not what I’m doing.”

“So you’re not sending me on fake cases that aren’t dangerous so you can trick me into feeling useful?”

Mulder looks stricken. “I didn’t lie, Scully. I never said we were assigned this investigation.” She runs it through: the thwap of a newspaper article on her desk, Mulder reciting the details of the case from memory while she tried to read. She’s back, Scully. We’ve got a flight this afternoon.

Fine.

He shoves his hands in his pockets and stares at the car. He says, “I thought we could both use a change of scenery.”

“Mulder,” she hesitates, glancing left to see what caught his gaze: their reflections in the windshield, glassy and distorted. “If you treat me like I’ll break if I breathe wrong wherever we go, it’s just the same shit in a different state.”

“Fuck, Scully, I know you won’t break.”

He knows she can. Three weeks ago, she fell apart in his arms at the bottom of a Minnesota staircase and he spread his fingers wide so he wouldn’t touch her bruises. She’s never doubted that he respects her vulnerability; she just doesn’t want him to accommodate for it. He’s reckless enough already.

He is still just standing there, the sleeves on the turtleneck he didn’t need to wear pushed up at the elbows. She is suddenly, vividly aware of the car, of the hot metal and the smell of rubber in stagnant humidity. Duane Barry’s trunk smelled like a spare tire. Her mouth goes cloth-gag dry.

“Can we?” she asks. She waves her hand at the road ahead and wonders how she’s so sure of this: He’d have known what she was asking even if she hadn’t.

“Sure,” Mulder nods. He looks relieved. He grabs their flashlights from the glove compartment and hands her one, and the flood of Pfaster’s headlights behind her eyes softens and clarifies into two beams that will never outrun her. And they walk.

****

“You’ve never been to Florida before?” Mulder asks.

“I spent most of my childhood in California, Mulder. We already had plenty of coastline.”

“Well, what do you think?”

“Of Florida?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m not sure I’ve seen it yet.”

She couldn’t tell him what she’s waiting for. With Mulder, she’s learned to know states by back roads and diners—places that dot the map in every town but only happen once, like the people in them. He has a way of seeing the singular in the ordinary. Here, it just seems ordinary.

“What was your word?” she asks. “In Hangman.”

“Oh, it was Flying cockroach.”

She plays along in awed deadpan. “Was it really.”

“I recruited the bug as a visual aid,” he insists, smiling straight ahead. “He just missed his cue. Came in too early.”

“You know Mulder,” she skips to get ahead of him on the road, then spins to face him, walking backwards, tucking her hair behind her ear. “I think your presentations are getting a little too interactive.”

He winces. It’s only for a second, but it’s enough to make the flashlight heavy in her hand, and she halts him in its glare. Mulder blinks.

“That’s not what I meant,” she says.

“What?”

“Cases aren’t slide shows,” she tells him. “You’re not presenting the field to me.”

“Scully...”

“No.” She steps closer, curling her fingers around his. "You have to hear me, Mulder. I have always known the risks.”

He rubs his thumb across the back of her hand and nods, and when he looks her in the eye she thinks Maybe, and she doesn't know where that thought ends.

She drops his hand and turns to keep walking, but Mulder doesn’t follow. He just stands there, white knuckles around a cold metal flashlight. He just stands there. “A storm is coming, Scully.”

“Mulder,” she protests. She thinks of the two of them side by side staring into a tree, of her partner taking a chrysalis as harbinger of danger. Of how they always talk around change.

“No,” he says, “I mean it’s going to rain.”

Her face goes hot at her misunderstanding. “How do you know?” she frowns.

“It’s in the air. Listen to how loud the crickets are.” He seems awfully sure of himself for a man wearing a turtleneck in Florida, and she swells with infuriating affection for him. She turns back. They hike shoulder to shoulder.

“What was your word?” she asks again, quieter this time.

“Imprint,” he says.

****

She flipped pictures to talk to him the last time they were split up. She slipped messages through cracks in the walls he tried to build and called him to a parking garage beneath the birthplace of a scandal. To know that you’re all right, she said then, but she had never meant, Lie to me.

****

Sheets of rain are rolling in the distance by the time they reach the car. The edges of the clouds glow orange, whether from approaching dawn or approaching storm she couldn’t say. Lightning whips the horizon.

“Northern lights,” Mulder says.

He perches on the hood of the car and scoots backward, all limbs, leaving handprints in the wax. “Want to watch the show?”

“Mulder, this is a rental,” she reminds him, but he’s already offering his hand, and she’s already taking it.

He adopts performative gravity as she slides next to him, bumps his arm. “Whatever happens to this vehicle happens in pursuit of our solemn duty as agents of the law,” he intones. Two streaks of lightning crash and join together. “Didn’t you ever do something you’re not supposed to do and get away with it?”

She died once and got away with it. She does not say this.

“The summer I was 15,” he continues, “I would take my dad’s car out in the middle of the night and drive it around Quonochontaug. Just speed the back roads.”

“And you never got caught?”

“He never said anything to me. At the time I thought I was really getting away with something, but part of me knew he already knew. I think he thought rebellion would make me a man. So I wanted to rebel against that,” Mulder says, “but maybe that proved his point.”

The whole sky blazes white.

“I snuck out onto my the porch and smoked one of my mom’s cigarettes once,” she concedes. “She did not know.”

“Really? Dana Scully,” he feigns indignation. “I’ll have to call your mother about this right away.”

“You wouldn’t dare,” she says. “You’re this close to being her new favorite, Mulder. Don’t blow it now.”

“Does she know a lot of Mulders?”

It takes her a breath too long to get the joke, but when she does she laughs, plainly and delightedly. And she could swear she sees something blue flash on the treeline.

“Did you see that?” She grabs his wrist.

“See what?”

The rain is minutes away. A rapid dip in barometric pressure, lack of sleep, expectation acting on perception...pareidolia. Rorschach’s test in bursts of light.

“Nothing,” she says, releasing her grip.

“I’m sorry, Scully.” Mulder scoots to the front of the hood and slides off.

“It was nothing, Mulder. Just the storm.”

“Not that,” he says, kicking the gravel like a guilty schoolboy. “I’m sorry I dragged you on a half-baked case.”

She slides down and takes his hand, squeezes it. She says, “You didn’t.”

The first drop hits her cheek, heavy and warm. They run to their doors and jump in, beating the full rush of the storm by seconds. It pelts the windshield with watery fists, roaring hollow in the dry absence of the car. The contrast feels familiar. They sit in silence until the rain eases.

“I don’t have anything for you,” she says finally. “I know you want me to be able to move on, but this time I lost—” He looks ready to interrupt, and she rushes to finish. “It's like going to space to fill a vacuum, Mulder. I have no memories to channel. There’s no one I can blame. Not with evidence.”

Mulder meets her eyes. “Something was taken from you, Scully,” he assures. “That is not your fault.”

She hadn't realized until now that she thought it was. She sucks in her breath, turns to the window to blink back tears.

He tells her, “You lose more time if you fight it.” He would know.

****

When the storm breaks and the sunrise is still hidden in clouds, they drive—“nowhere in particular,” Mulder says, but the closer they get to the coast, the fewer miles the signs say they have to go until Kennedy Space Center.

They stop for gas at a station with two pumps and no other cars, aside from one around the side of the building that she assumes belongs to the clerk, an older man reading the paper in a beach chair just outside the door. She gets out to stretch her legs, shielding her eyes to watch a pair of seagulls flock east. South for the winter, she thinks, and wonders if they know there’s a biological imperative they do not share.

Mulder has disappeared into the store. She finds it full of spinning display racks lined with keychains and magnets shaped like manatee license plates and Saturn V rockets. He’s at the counter, dropping a penny in the change bucket.

“Didn’t you pay at the pump?” she asks.

“I did,” he nods, and waves two water bottles in her direction. He palms a small paper bag into his jeans and doesn’t elaborate.