#ully

Mulder and Scully don’t celebrate anniversaries or birthdays.  They celebrate the holidays, of course, and will acknowledge each other’s birthdays with a special dinner or you can pick the movie tonight nonchalance.  They are not married and they kind of eased into the romance. There was never an official “we have been dating for..” date.   At some point they might have decided to celebrate the day they met, March 6- the moment Scully walked into the basement office, but they never decided to and so don’t. The day they went on the run wasn’t really something to celebrate.  So, they don’t celebrate anniversaries or birthdays.  

There is one date they try to avoid being together at all.  The day of their son birthday is never forgotten by either, is never mentioned by either, and somehow or other they always manage to barely see each other on that day.  Mulder  spends hours at the batting cages and Scully  works a long shift at the hospital or spends the day cleaning and organizing.  

There is that other date. Mulder saw a pattern of Scully picking a fight with him every year on the same date for the first couple of years on the run. He did some digging. She had never provided details and he never asked. He investigates but the records were so deeply sealed and hidden that the only detail he could determine was the date. As he suspected, the date each year that Scully always picked a fight is the anniversary of the day she had given their son away in an adoption.

Mulder was an expert investigator. He knew that after a few weeks after the adoption agency had found a couple and had taken William to the couple, Scully had called Mulder’s half brother, Jeffrey, and had asked him to find some way to really hide the details.  Jeffrey had paid for relocation and money for the family to move and to move again and to move again, had paid them money enough so they could change their careers completely and had altered documents.  He had done a damn good job because Mulder looked thinking he wouldn’t meet his son but would make sure he was safe, but the protections had been complete and his half brother was protecting the secret and would only confirm with Mulder the date.  

Mulder never told Scully about his investigations. Scully never knew he knew the date. She continued to pick a fight with him every day on that date for years. Mulder let her. Mulder let her say to him what ever she wanted to about his sunflower seeds or the way he loaded the dishwasher or aliens.  Then one day, on that date, she left him which seemed lIked destiny itself declared it necessary and appropriate. Her leaving ended the fighting. Still, no matter how long it has been since they have talked, Mulder calls each year on that date to make sure she is ok. He never tells her why he is calling. He is unsure if she remembers the date she left him, but he is sure she remembers the date she gave her son away in an adoption, and, though Scully doesn’t know he knows the meaning of the date, he calls to make sure she is ok.

Scully has been there for Mulder everyday he really needed her since they met.  When his father died she actually shot Mulder and drove him across country to protect him.  She comforted him when his mother had a stroke.  When his mother died she completed the autopsy.  She broke him up out of prison and went on the run with him.  She saved his life more times than he could count. 

He could count the times he hadn’t been there for her.  When she was abducted, she left a voice mail screaming that she needed his help, but she had been abducted and he had been too late to save her.  Sure he had been there for her when she had cancer, but..  She had never let him down the way he had her.  He was gone when she found out she was pregnant. He missed most of the pregnancy. He wasn’t with her at the birth. Only a couple of days after their son was born he was gone again. He wasn’t there when she made the decision to give him up for adoption.  

Scully changed, it seemed, more from the period of his abduction than hers.  She became a mother who would do anything for her son. She was strong in way he hadn’t known she wasn’t before and weak in ways he didn’t know she could be.  He loved her.  He loved his son, but he never pretended he had any right to grieve.  He felt grief, but knew he had no rights to the grief. He had been gone and the fact of his absence caused Scully a type of loneliness from which she has never fully recovered.  

Mulder and Scully never took wedding vows. Still, Mulder had made his own vow when he first learned the date of this horrible anniversary. He vowed he would be there for her whenever she would let him be there for her.  He would be there for her if she wanted to cry or she wanted to yell at him or she wanted to hold and love him.  On any day, on any ocassion, he would be there for her.   He pledged to himself that  her grief for their son would always take the prominent place it deserved by virtue of the times she had been there for him and his son. She had made all the hard decisions to keep them both alive and safe; no matter the cost to her. His grief didn’t matter’.