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“Unlike you, Mulder, I would like to have a life.”
Scully regretted saying it almost as soon as it left her mouth, even after Mulder laughed it off, even after she joined in to show him she was being light-hearted. She didn’t yet know Mulder well enough to guess whether she might have hurt him—whether somewhere deep under the façade he put on, the one that gleefully leaned in to his reputation, there was a part of him that might feel wounded by the implication that he did not have, nor did he desire, a life. Whatever that meant.
She hadn’t wanted to hurt him. Really, she’d only said it because she had resented his presumption. Cancel her date? Sure, Scully had a job that might, under certain circumstances, warrant canceling a date. Rob knew she worked for the Bureau. If she’d called and told him something important had come up with a case and she had to reschedule, he would have understood; he seemed like a reasonable guy. But that wasn’t the point. This wasn’t urgent business. Mulder was asking her to cancel her date so that she could help him investigate an urban legend. It was ridiculous, and he should have known it was ridiculous, and yet here he was, looking at her with those earnest eyes, as though suggesting she ditch her date to chase the Jersey Devil were as benign as suggesting she ditch her chores to go to the movies.
So she had resented his presumption, and she’d let that little barb slip. But upon further reflection, Scully decided that Mulder’s presumption bothered her far less than the presumption of Mr. “You’ll understand when you have kids.” When Mulder had paged her in the middle of dinner, she was so relieved to get away from the conversation that she almost forgot that she was supposed to be mad at him, that he was interrupting the date he knew she was on, the same date he had asked her to cancel
And when Mr. “You’ll understand when you have kids” became Mr. “Let’s bring the kids on our second date,” she knew it wasn’t going to work.
“Don’t you have a life, Scully?” Mulder asked as she followed him to the door, and Scully was proud of the snarky reply she managed to shoot back. Because what she was really thinking was, Do I? If she did, she was clinging to it by a few fraying threads, one of which she had just severed by declining to see Rob again.
It was happening so fast, her descent into antisocial, work-focused solitude, and yet it was subtle enough that she’d only become conscious of it that day at Trent’s birthday party. Her conversation with Ellen had stirred something in her, something she’d been ignoring since her placement with the X-Files and the breakup with Ethan that had followed shortly thereafter. She’d told herself that it was for the best; she’d told herself that this new job, the one that required jetting off on a moment’s notice to chase monsters and mutants and government conspiracies, didn’t lend itself to maintaining a serious relationship, and that was okay. She was still young, and this assignment wouldn’t last forever. Besides, she’d started to find Ethan less interesting lately anyway.
Or maybe she’d never found him very interesting at all, and it was this new job and partner—both of which put “interesting” to shame on a regular basis—that had finally made her realize it.
Scully held the door for Mulder and followed him out, trailing in the wake of his excited chatter about what thoughts this Smithsonian ethnobiologist might have to offer on the possibility that a family of prehistoric beast-people was living in the woods of New Jersey. As she fell in step beside him, a soft, sensible voice in the back of her mind warned her that she was making a mistake: that nobody was perfect, and if she didn’t give men like Rob a chance, she would be the only one at fault when she ended up alone, without the life she claimed she wanted.
And then Mulder settled his hand on the small of her back and the voice faded into the recesses of her subconscious without so much as a dying plea.