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Mulder turns around and takes a good look at her. She’s still holding the little silver tray with cheese, crackers, and wine.
It’s funny to see Scully with wine. He hasn’t seen her with an alcoholic beverage for months because of the medications she was on. Mulder can’t help but grin to see her with wine in her hand.
She can drink now, he thinks proudly of how far she’s come after her illness. He will drink to that.
He always has this flooding pride when it comes to Scully. Always.
The last time he saw her with wine, it was when Eddie Van Blundht showed up at her doorstep, impersonating him; good thing he had made it in time. Whenever he thinks about that incident, Mulder wants to travel to Maryland and pay a little visit to that bastard at the Cumberland Reformatory. But that wouldn’t do any good, would it? It’s not like he could sign Eddie out just to beat him up again. Plus, he’s heard that Van Blundht gets beat up quite a lot over there, because even with the muscle relaxant, he can still do impressions of people pretty well, and prison inmates typically don’t like being mocked, not even for comedy.
He nearly broke Eddie’s nose that night. If Scully hadn’t stopped him, he might have kicked and beaten Eddie to a pulp. Scully was pleading for him to stop, because she fully understood the consequences if he had really whupped Eddie’s ass.
No wonder the Maryland PD thought it was a love triangle when they arrived at Scully’s apartment.
It’s strange how levelheaded Scully remained after nearly a whole bottle of red. Eddie claimed to have drunk only one glass of the wine, and when Scully blushed, Mulder knew there was some truth to that.
That junior-size bottle of white on the silver tray would do nothing at all for her.
Scully has picked up a piece of cheese and is nibbling on it; her right eyebrow is challenging him like a teenager, looking as if she’s asking permission to borrow the car this weekend so she can go hang out with her friends at the mall.
“I’m not...” he quips, “I’m just going to check on the Asekoffs. You know where I’m going; it’s not ditching if you know my destination.”
“Mulder,” She sits down on his bed. “You invited me to come over and hang.”
“Yes, I did, that’s why my door was unlocked. Stonecypher and Kinsley could barge in any minute while I was waiting for you to show up. I was afraid that they’d come in and suggest a singing contest which would end with all of us singing ‘Kumbaya’ together while holding hands.”
“Well, it took me a while to prepare these.” She glances at the plate of refreshments.
“I’d have gone to the vending machines.” He tosses his jacket on the mattress and walks over to her.
“I thought you were heading out?”
“Well.” He sits on the mattress and pats the spot next to him. “You went to all this trouble already.”
Mulder recalls some months ago, when he was in the bargaining stage of his grief, that he had vowed he would do better. Of course, he had also bargained for a lot of other things, too. But as he thinks of the promise he’s made to himself, be a better Mulder is definitely something he can do.
And a Better Mulder would stay and drink and be ready to have a good time right now. A Better Mulder might even get a kiss by the end of the evening. A Better Mulder would remain gentlemanly and keep it chaste and sweet.
He is determined to be the Better Mulder, because whoever on the other side has certainly kept their promise. Scully is alive and well now; she is even able to drink wine now.
And if this doesn’t call for a celebration, Mulder doesn’t know what does.
“Here, Scully,” he picks up his wineglass carefully. “Cheers.”
She stands up and gives him a good glance from head to toe.
“You have two choices, Mulder.” She parks one of her arms on her hip, and Mulder is once again reminded of how much he’s longed to see Bossy Scully. How he loves this bossy, petite redhead who sometimes looks like she could fit in his pocket like Tinkerbell.
“One, you go check on the Asekoffs and come back ASAP.”
His eyebrows do a surprised dance.
“Two, I drive you to the Asekoffs, and on the way back, we can pick up something you like. Something bubbly.”
She knows that he doesn’t care for wine.
“You know what I like,” he grins. “After you, M’Lady.”
The Better Mulder will always, always listen to Scully, bossy or otherwise.
UNIVERSE DET, 1997
“That wasn’t so bad.”
If he wasn’t hurt, she would consider hurting him.
“You a Three Dog Night fan?”
Scully lowers her head so that her nose is touching him. Having sung that song, that particular song, she suddenly feels very embarrassed. She wants to either crawl under a rock or hit Mulder with the said rock for making her sing.
A few moments pass by in silence between the agents, but the forest noises are very much present. Bugs chirping. Birds calling. Stomachs growling.
She should really begin packing energy bars in her coat pocket or something. This jacket comes with a lot of pockets for some reason.
“What about another one?” Mulder suggests.
“Don’t push your luck, Mulder.”
“C’mon.”
He whines, and she doesn’t have to see it to know that he’s pulling the puppy-dog eyes right now.
“I wanna sing too.” He snuggles closer to her. Mulder reminds her of a big dog. Like Leo the Golden Retriever her family had when she was seven. Archie the Mutt who was lost for two whole weeks and came home on his own. Queequeg the Pomeranian who was not big in size but a giant in personality.
Holding Mulder in her lap feels just like that. A big dog that you want to pet his head while cooing nonsense about what a good boy he is and feeling giddy.
“One song.” Mulder promises. Pleads.
This man can always get her to give in to his way. Maybe she’ll make a New Year’s resolution about that.
“Fine.”
Scully is about to roll her eyes before remembering that he can’t see her face in this position. She adjusts her grip on him, just a little, even though there’s really no way for Mulder to fall off her lap.
Exuberantly, he jumps right in:
“Hakuna Matata! What a wonderful phrase!”
“Hakuna Matata! Ain’t no passing craze.”
Scully is dumbfounded for a second. A very short second. She knows this song. She knows this song because she’s seen the Lion King. With Mulder. After he cluelessly gave her a snow globe with Simba and Nala inside when they came back from being a hundred years old on the Norwegian Sea.
“Mmm?”
Mulder makes a small sound, checking in with her. She knows she has to sing this with him.
She begins, “It means no worries—”
Mulder joins in: “—for the rest of your daaaays”
“It’s our problem-free phi-lo-so-phy”
“Hakuna Matata!”
She doesn’t have to look to know Mulder’s grinning like an idiot now. Fox Mulder, the boy wonder, can sing even when he's in shock, how about that.
Feeling pretty enamored herself, Scully lowers her head again and rests it on him; their breathing has become one. Maybe their hearts are beating in sync, too.
UNIVERSE CA, 1998
She leans against the door of her motel room, not sure if she wants to hide her smile.
“What took you so long?”
Mulder’s mouth hangs open—he did not expect that to be the first words out of her mouth—he had expected annoyance, feigned annoyance, shock, and anger... mostly not-so-positive emotions, which was precisely why he waited so long to come up.
It’s not that long, Mulder wants to say, but instead, he says, “Well, can I go in, or what?”
Scully steps aside and lets him, once again, become the plus-one of her vacation. No matter how mini this is, to her, it is still a vacation. A weekend getaway. One she tried but couldn’t come up with the courage to invite Mulder, because she knows he’d taken too many vacation days for her already when she was dying and recovering from cancer...
Mulder marches in and sits directly on her bed—the only bed—and takes a slow look around the room. She steps closer to the armchair by the table, suddenly feeling a little shy, though she doesn’t know why. Mulder’s seen her in a bathrobe before—in fact, he’d seen her out of a bathrobe before he’d known her for 48 hours—but somehow, this feels different.
Mulder’s also been in her hotel room on every out-of-town case, slept in the same bed with her numerous times, held her in his arms, and kissed her a little too close to her lips to be considered friendly, but why the hell does it feel so...
Why is her heart pounding like she’s nine years old and is about to give a presentation in front of her entire third-grade class?
“So,” he begins, “how’s your case? What’d I miss?”
“It’s not my case, Mulder.”
“Yes, it is,” he says, like a seven-year-old arguing my dad’s better than your dad. “Tell me one place you’ve seen since you got here yesterday.”
“.…..”
“What touristy thing did you do? Any local delicacy you have sampled?” Mulder says as he pumps his eyebrows, “Did you get me a souvenir?”
Scully opens her mouth, closes it, and opens it again.
Mulder smiles like the cat that just ate a canary.
“As a matter of fact... Mulder,” she says his name like it’s still foreign to her tongue and not something she’s said multiple times a day for nearly five years. “I did get you a souvenir, but I’m not sure if I should give it to you now, seeing how you’ve invited yourself to crash my vacation... Maybe I should just give your souvenir to Bill...”
His eyes grow wide—perhaps at the mention of her brother, perhaps at the prospect of losing his gift—and Scully laughs.
“And I did visit the harbor with Captain Bonsaint, where we sampled some local delicacies. He ordered this—”
Mulder interrupts, “What’s on the itinerary for today, Dana?”
His use of her first name startles her a little, and she looks at his eyes, trying to read him, trying to see if she’s reading him wrong.
If she doesn’t know better, this is Fox Mulder, jealous.
“Are you here to help him solve the case?”
“No,” he denies quickly, “I’m here to… vacation.”
“For how long?”
“For as long as you’re going to be here. We’ll see Maine! I’ve always wanted to see Maine!” Mulder feigns enthusiasm. “What’ve we got?”
“Mulder...” Now his moniker is said in the same, old, familiar tone. “If you’re here to help Jack solve the case, or to even see the talking doll yourself, you can just say so. I won’t say you’re ruining my vacation.”
“Ruining your vacation…” He mumbles as he repeats her words, “No, Scully. I want to do stupid touristy things with you. Really, I do. We’ll take a historical tour. See a magnificent lighthouse.”
She looks at him like he’s claiming the talking doll was stolen from the British Museum before it was taken from the gravesite of a medieval princess named Isabella.
“C’mon, Mulder. You can be honest. Isn’t that why you came up here? To make my choices seem ridiculous?”
“Wait, what exactly do you think I came up here to do?”
“You’re jealous.” Scully asserts, “I go on vacation and stumble upon an X-File with a talking doll. And there you were, bored out of your mind and missing all the action in our basement?”
Mulder snickers. “No.”
“No what?”
“That’s not why I’m here.”
“Then tell me, Mulder, why are you here?”
She crosses her arms in front of her chest. She should really change out of her bathrobe. It’s getting a little warm in here.
Scully knows Mulder is jealous, but, truth be told, she isn’t very familiar with jealous Mulder. Jealous Mulder goes between whiny and pushy; he’s a kicked puppy or he’s an alpha dog pissing in a circle with her in the center of it. She hasn’t figured out Jealous Mulder yet. She won’t be surprised if she never does.
Mulder sighs in frustration.
“Jack. Vacation...” Mulder looks as if he isn’t sure what he wants to say. “Look, Scully, history was my least favorite subject in school because it seemed so stupid that humanity never learns, so why study it? Humans have this inability to act before it’s too late, and I hate to jinx myself, but…”
He pauses for a second. “For fuck’s sake, he’s a captain, Scully! You’re on vacation, and you met a captain, and his name is Jack? And I just...want to be here. With you.”
Scully smirks. She suddenly gets it.
“Mulder, he’s not that kind of captain...”
He shrugs. Didn’t matter, his body language argues.
“Just so you know...” She says good-humoredly, “Bambi’s a boy’s name.”
Mulder looks at her, clearly confused. “Why’re you telling me that?”
“Cockroaches?”
“In your hotel room?”
Mulder’s slightly panicking and looking on the walls around him.
“Never mind.” She shakes her head. For someone with an eidetic memory, Mulder certainly chooses what to remember and what to forget.
She stands up and goes to sit next to him on the bed. The mattress is very soft and she’s nearly half sitting on his lap, but she doesn’t care.
“I think Captain Bonsaint could really use our help.” She picks up his hand, and he responds to it immediately by squeezing it. “And since you’re here, we can have Bonsaint issue an official request to Skinner about us being consultants for a case here. We’ll solve the case, move back our flight, and actually have ourselves a little vacation in Maine?
He looks at her with eyes full of childlike hope, like he’s just been told that if he behaves, he’ll get a remote-control car for Christmas. Scully sandwiches his hand with hers and smiles encouragingly at him.
“And since you’re crashing my vacation, I think you need to know that there’s only one bed here, and it’s a very popular time to visit Maine.”
He grins and inches closer to her. Just when their noses are about to touch, the hotel phone starts ringing.
Mulder groans, and she giggles, trying to stand up.
“Nope, not yet,” he says quickly, and presses his lips on hers for a chaste kiss. “You don’t know how long I’ve been wanting to do that.”
Scully snickers and returns a quick peck on his lips. “What took you so long?”
The kiss turns into something more. Captain Bonsaint will just have to call again later.
—–
thanks for reading. tagging @today-in-fic, thanks.
it's actually really important that aziraphale talked about who crowley was as an angel, it's not insulting, it doesn't reduce him to his past. it's not in any way contrary to their relationship.
for the very first time, aziraphale fully understands that there is no fundamental difference between angels and demons, that those who fell aren't evil, that they didn't fail at being good.
that there's nothing to fix.
the entire time we've known them, aziraphale has been stuck in his black and white thinking, terrified of being cast out, of no longer being on the "right" side. crowley on the other hand always knew sides were arbitrary, there's no innate quality that makes someone an angel or a demon, it's not even their choices. they're characters in her book, they cannot escape the ink on the pages.
acknowledging that crowley was the best of them means accepting that crowley is perfect the way he is. it means that he loves him for his past and his present, that he understands how he views the world now. he is finally seeing the universe through crowley's eyes without hesitation, he's not turning away like he has quite literally done so many times before.
an artist, a scientist, a cosmic engineer—none of those are contradictory, they're one and the same. saying crowley was the best of the angels doesn't negate him being perfect as a demon or "private individual". he's all of those and more.
for millennia, aziraphale struggled to balance two opposing views of crowley: the starmaker and the demon.
all demons are evil, they have to be for angels to be good, but the crowley he knows isn't evil. so either his perception of crowley is wrong (impossible, it can't be, it can't be) or the celestial dichotomy is meaningless (it can't be, it has to matter, he cannot question god). his behaviour was inconsistent, dependent on circumstances, both beliefs true and false at the same time.
he just wanted to do the right thing but didn't know how. god lays it out for him, though at that point it's just the final tiny nudge, most of the work was already done. listing his sins which an angel should not have, and yet there he is, the second best angel she ever had. aziraphale can hold both beliefs in his mind now without struggling, without fear, without caution.
finally, he knows how to do the right thing, how to love crowley without feeling like it means losing himself.
it's good, it's honest, it's the truth. real shades of grey.
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That Carrie post reminded me of my biggest and oldest pet peeve: adaptations taking a character who's supposed to be ugly, or at least not beautiful, and casting someone perfect-looking. A lot of the time this is simple misogyny, but the inability to allow ugly people to exist also extends to men and boys, and I remember how pissed I was when I started understanding this at around the age of eight.
Bastian of the Neverending Story is fat and weird-looking, in the movie he's a perfectly photogenic all-American kid.
Hermione is buck-toothed and unpretty, in the movies she's a perfect little girl who grows into a very attractive woman.
Carrie is fat and unpretty, in the movies she's a supermodel in slightly unflattering clothes.
Don't even talk to me about Ugly Betty.
The latest Frankenstein adaptation continues a long trend of trying to convey the message of "this monster is not inherently evil" by making the monster look good. Because obviously if the monster did look bad, it would be evil and people would be justified in shunning it.
Even supposedly more serious media does it. Imre Kertész's Holocaust novel Fateless has a minor character, a wimpy weird-looking member of the group of boys who got deported together. The other boys don't really like him, and disdainfully agree when he's deemed not fit for work - of course they don't yet know that it's a death sentence. In the atrocious movie he's not weaker just younger, a photogenic little boy, and him being sent to his death is played as a sentimental tearjerker for the audience instead of forcing us to grapple with the complexity of the original, where mundane teen boy cruelty continues to exist in boys who are currently victims of a genocide.
A written text says: this person is ugly, this affects how people treat them, this affects how they feel about themselves, how they behave, how they live in the world. This might just be an incidental part of their story, or it might be its entire point of the whole fucking book. And then the movie sweeps in and says: oh, but they aren't ugly! They have always been beautiful! They are being bullied and shunned for no reason! So unfair!
And the unintentional but very obvious implication arises that if they *were* ugly, of course they would deserve the bullying, the audience would agree that they deserve the bullying, the audience would want to join in, kick spit point laugh. The idea of empathizing with an actually ugly person doesn't compute. (Maybe it's clear by now that this has done low-grade but long-lasting damage to me as a person: weird ugly people are simply not allowed to exist, not even in stories about being weird and ugly.)
Btw this is why "everyone is beautiful" type body-positivity does nothing for me, and why I'm hyper-sensitive to how people discuss ugliness in reality and in fiction. For example, I love the Just King Things and the Shelved by Genre podcasts, but I think they struggle to see the value of written descriptions of ugliness. They interpret Steven King's descriptions of Carrie as cruel, they interpret Tiptree's description of P. Burke in The Girl who was Plugged In as cruel and fatphobic. Sure, I don't want to give King kudos for all his depictions of women, but he did get it right that time, and Tiptree absolutely did. Describing a character, especially a woman as ugly, genuinely ugly, no not secretly beautiful, actually ugly, and then telling her story, a story about existing in the world as an ugly woman, is really really fucking important. And people keep shying away from it, oh, it's cruel to call anyone ugly, let's pretend that ugly people don't exist instead.
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To expand on this a little bit: Ryoko Kui takes the tools of character design seriously, and uses them with forethought and consideration to set her characters apart, give them personality and specificity, and thinks very carefully about what each piece of design communicates and how it interacts with all the other design in her story.
Body shape, face shape, noses, eyes, brows, hair, proportion, fashion, ears, posture, roundness and angularity, broadness and slenderness, posture... Kui clearly thinks about ALL of it, and incorporates all of it.
And this is part of what gives her story such a profound sense of taking place within a world, a whole world inhabited by thousands of people each of whom are as full and unique and distinct as every other one. You look at a group of her characters and none of them feel like Copy Pasted NPC Placeholder #3457, they each feel as though there is a life there, an individuality, even if they are never actually deeply explored in the story.
Compare and contrast with something like Genshin Impact's style of character design:
Now, I don't bring this up just to sh** on Genshin - its character design style is adapted very effectively to the kind of story and world it is trying to build, which is to say a gacha story where every part of a character is formulated towards the singular goal of appeal. It's a world inhabited by nothing but main characters, essentially, and it is a laser-focused power fantasy structured around constantly pursuing the high of maximum damage numbers pumped out by maximally cool and badass battle moves executed with maximal grace by physically perfect avatars who provide the player with maximal aesthetic pleasure.
But because of that, its character design style is under severe pressure to regress to the mean - i.e. skinny bodies, young bodies, beauty ideals, and a minimal amount of physical difference. This style of character design tends to focus all of its effort in colorful, detailed and attention-grabbing fashion and hair styles, and generally avoids "alienating" design features like, well, literally anything that could be conceptualized by anyone as "ugly." Big strong noses, for example, or larger ears, or wrinkles, scarring, skin folds and so on. Fatness functionally does not exist in Genshin Impact's character roster for this reason, and it's part of the reason why the franchise struggles so notably to design characters of color - the concept of "beauty" is deeply bound up in systemic biases of class, race, gender and nationalism, and since Genshin's character design ethos is "make every character as broadly beautiful as possible" it has to keep hitting the same limited set of beats over and over and over again, and it reinforces the biases it inherits with its inability to step outside of them.
So Genshin Impact characters have a tendency, for me at least, to all kinda blur together into a brightly colored cavalcade of lowest-common-denominator ambulatory clothing racks, characters whose bodies exist for the primary purpose of transporting a highly elaborate costume around.
Kui by contrast very very actively seeks out elements of physical difference, and incorporates them into her design process - she seems to delight in inventing as many nose shapes as possible, as many different kinds of eyes as she can think of, and the result is that she has a character roster which is recognizable even if you change or remove very important parts of their basic design.
Where Genshin Impact (and that style of character design) would severely struggle to make characters recognizable without their costumes, because the characters in large part are their costumes, Kui's design style makes characters extremely recognizable not only in and out of costume, but even if the fundamental nature of their bodies change across species, and it makes her characters of the same race and species eminently recognizable from one another, even while sharing many physical traits and aesthetic features.
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