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While she was on her deathbed, Dana Scully had a lot of time to contemplate her love life.
Not that it was on the forefront of her mind, of course, but when faced with the sum of what she believed to be her entire life’s choices, it was hard to ignore. She had been single since the Reagan administration, save for a few brief mistakes she preferred not to dwell on. She had grown used to not having a date on national holidays, and her mother no longer phoned her to ask about evening plans. Her career, her dedication to the X-Files, hoarded her energy and most of her free time. She simply didn’t have time for any distractions.
Well, except for Mulder.
After she recovered, there was a nagging feeling in her mind that things might finally change between them. They had been dancing around something, though she was loath to even attempt to label it. Yet, even as she slowly began to feel like herself again, the moment of revelation never came. They returned to their work, burying themselves in the X-Files as usual, as if he hadn’t—once again—saved her life.
She was frustrated. With him or with herself, she couldn’t be sure, but at some point within the last week she had made the decision to quit the exploratory flirting and the lingering glances. She was a professional, and she was going to act like it.
Despite all this, with some encouragement from two glasses of Merlot, she still managed to find herself outside of his apartment door at ten o’clock in the evening.
Scully tried not to make a habit of entering people’s homes uninvited. Well, at least not without a warrant or probable cause. She had been on the receiving end of home intrusions far more often than the national average, and it was never a pleasant experience.
But as she felt the familiar key in her pocket, turning it over in her fingers, she acknowledged a certain comfort contained in the possibility. The power that came bundled with that kind of trust. The trust that she would no doubt be betraying, she also acknowledged, by using it for such a frivolous reason.
She pressed her ear against the door, listening for any signs of life. Ideally snoring, she hoped, but she would settle for nothing at all. Anything that would convince her to turn around and go back home.
Instead, she only heard the faint crackling of static voices and hushed music from his television set.
That doesn’t mean he isn’t sleeping, Scully reminded herself, well aware of his nighttime habits after years of sharing thin motel walls. It was rare for her to ever hear his room in complete silence, even after a demanding case. Mulder always had company late at night—Rod Serling, Bela Lugosi, or whoever narrated the nature docs on PBS. She had begun to find comfort in the consistency of it, the background noise of his presence. It was that comfort, she supposed, that led her to his doorstep tonight.
She tapped three hesitant knocks above the number 42. She would give him sixty seconds, she decided. That was more than enough time for him to make it to the door. Unless he was asleep, or not home, or trapped under something heavy—in any case, unavailable. Then, she’d just step back into the elevator, no harm done, see you on Monday.
Only four seconds had passed before her train of thought was interrupted.
The door swung inwards with a jerk. Mulder stood askew, his mouth half-open, as if the questions had formed in his throat before he had even been certain she was there.
“Scully, are you alright? What are you doing here?”
Her head swam with replies. I’m here because I’m lonely. I’ve got no one else to talk to. Oh, also, I was a little intoxicated earlier and I can’t stop thinking about you. Just the usual.
Instead, she just shrugged. “Can’t sleep. Had a feeling you couldn’t either.” It wasn’t a lie. He was usually awake at this hour.
Mulder hovered in the doorframe. “Oh.”
The two of them stood deathly still, as if any wrong move would send their precarious orbits crashing into each other. Scully allowed herself the moment to relish seeing him like this—Weekend Mulder with his hair uncombed, a T-shirt from some 1991 convention bunched up against the waistband of his sweats. He had clearly not been expecting visitors.
Scully was unsure how much time had passed before she decided the silence was no longer bearable. She took a half-step backwards.
“I’m sorry. It’s late, I should—“
“Come inside?”
Mulder shuffled aside, offering her a wide path across his threshold. There it is again, Scully thought. That damn gravitational pull of his. How often had she found herself at his doorstep, or in his arms, without even thinking about it? How many times had she reached out in the dark and found his outstretched hand? She was getting predictable.
But, she wouldn’t be much of a scientist if she didn’t follow this lead to its logical conclusion, whatever that might be. If it ended with her back in her own bed in an hour, just as well.
She smiled at him as she entered and he slipped behind to shut the door, trading places with her. After a few moments of fiddling with the locks, an uncertainty passed over his face, his mouth opening and closing like one of his fish as he searched for the proper topic of conversation.
Scully didn’t notice. Something else had grabbed her attention; the voices from the television were clearer now that she was inside.
“You realize, of course, that we can never be friends.”
“Why not?”
“What I’m saying—and this is not a come-on, in any way, shape or form—is that men and women can’t be friends because the sex part always gets in the way.”
Scully looked towards the living room, then back at Mulder, catching him wearing a sheepish smile.
“I didn’t know you liked rom-coms, Mulder.”
“Yeah, well. Guilty pleasure, I guess.” He grabbed the remote to pause the movie, and Scully took the opportunity to digest this new nugget of information about her partner.
“Can I get you something? I got… okay, not much, admittedly. Water?”
Scully opened her mouth to say no, she was fine, but he was already halfway to the kitchen and grabbing a glass.
A sudden pang of guilt settled in her stomach. “I’m sorry for intruding, Mulder.”
“Don’t be,” he answered.
“Maybe I need a dog again,” she said, half to herself. “I know you never liked Queequeg, but at least he was someone else I could bother.”
“Scully, you’re not bothering me.”
“It’s Friday evening, Mulder. I’m sure you have plenty better to do than to entertain me.”
Overtop his refrigerator door, Mulder shot an incredulous glance in her direction. A knowing smile played on her lips in response. Yeah, okay. Touché.
“You’ve got good timing, actually,” he said, returning with a full glass. “I was just thinking about you.”
Scully raised an inquisitive brow.
“Thinking about calling you, I mean,” Mulder quickly corrected. “I was taking a look at the evidence reports from yesterday’s case, the blood patterns. I was thinking…”
He trailed off, chewing on his lip. Scully tilted her head, wondering if she was supposed to know how to finish his sentence.
“Thinking… what, Mulder?”
“Nothing. It’s not important. That’s Monday talk.” He swayed slightly as he spoke, fidgeting with the counter behind him. “I’m trying this new thing where I only talk about work when I’m getting paid for it.”
Ice cubes clattered against her cup as Scully shuddered with a stifled giggle. “Since when?”
“Since two minutes ago.”
They fell into another silence, but not quite like the one from earlier in the hallway. This one was comfortable, relaxed, settling into the room as they traded looks.
This time, Mulder spoke first. “So, I know this probably isn’t why you showed up here,” he began, pointing with a thumb towards his living room, “but would you like to watch this with me?”
This wouldn’t be the first time they shared a movie night together. In fact, they used to be a regular occurrence, one of the rare occasions that they socialized outside of the Bureau. Scully would appear at his doorstep with a selection from Blockbuster, he would order takeout and pretend not to be squeamish at the horror films she usually picked out, and their conversations would tend to meander towards a case or some scientific discovery. Over time, the films just became an excuse, a chance for two hours in the week to stop acting like coworkers.
But after her diagnosis, with her exhaustion from work compounded by the burden of constant tests and treatments, the times she spent at his apartment grew fewer and farther between. She had felt like a ghost in her own skin, half-dead already, and seeing her reflection in Mulder’s eyes only worsened the pain. Though she forced herself to work, she couldn’t bear watching him fight against an enemy she knew to be inevitable.
Of course, in hindsight, it was foolish to doubt him, as it always was. Old habits die hard.
In truth, she was glad for his offer. Perhaps this would be the start of a return to normalcy, to her life before she knew the name of every oncologist in the greater D.C. area.
She nodded, and the guileless, toothy grin that crept onto his face alone was worth the Metro fare to his apartment.
He bounded back into the kitchen, digging through cupboards until he found his paper bag prize.
“Popcorn okay?”
“Better than wine and cheese alone in a motel room,” she laughed dryly. Mulder winced. The joke must have landed harsher than it sounded in her head.
“Ouch. I deserved that one,” he replied, flashing a guilty smile. Scully cursed its effectiveness. “Still owe you that tower of furniture, though.”
The microwave hummed, thickening the air with the warm scent of popping kernels and a tinge of nostalgia. Scully made herself comfortable on his couch.
“Thanks, but I’ll pass. I think I’ve had my fill of government-mandated team bonding exercises.”
“Hey, we’re bonding right now, aren’t we? I’ll tell Skinner he can mark us off the list.”
She nudged him in the arm as he settled into the cushions beside her, bowl in hand. “Press play, before I change my mind.”
The awkward angle of his television set and his other chairs being piled high with loose files and magazines meant that they were both crammed into one end of the sofa. Scully felt the heat rise in her cheeks as he lay nearly flush against her side. It was hardly the most convenient sitting position, but she wasn’t about to complain.
She felt Mulder sink into the armrest behind her. If he was uncomfortable, he wasn’t making it obvious. “Want me to rewind?”
“That’s alright,” Scully replied. “I’ve seen it before.”
Once before, in 1989. She had been alone in the theater, two weeks fresh off of a break-up, surrounded by handsy, lovesick undergrad couples. Needless to say, it was not an ideal viewing experience.
This time was different. This time, she was sitting next to her best friend, and every time he laughed at a joke it sent ripples down her whole body. This time, she was determined to enjoy herself.
“I guess we’re not going to be friends, then.”
“Guess not.”
“That’s too bad…”
-
Scully’s eyes fluttered open. Had she dozed off? She glanced at the wall clock. 11:21 P.M. Meg Ryan was faking an orgasm.
She shifted underneath her blanket—was that there, before?—just enough to peer up without drawing attention. Stealing glances at Mulder when he wasn’t looking was another habit she found it hard not to indulge in. Tonight, though, she allowed herself a better look.
Fox Mulder was an incredibly handsome man. Of all the things she was reluctant to admit, she could grant at least that much. The cool glow of the television screen softened his features and reminded her of their late night research sessions, caught in the haze of a projector beam. She could never decide what color his eyes were, but at this moment she favored the word overcast. Grey but not gloomy, cool but not cold, like a perfect autumn sky in Central Park.
Her gaze trailed down his strong profile and landed on his mouth, his full lips drawn into that permanent, boyish pout. She watched with fascination as he rolled a burnt popcorn kernel on the edge of his tongue.
Scully found herself transfixed by the movement, the rhythm of his oral fixation. She thought about pencil tips and sunflower seeds and suddenly imagined how it would feel to be an object of his habit, or his hunger. She thought about what that berry-pink bottom lip might feel like between her teeth.
Then, she peeled her eyes away from him to think about anything else.
Not that she believed in mind-reading, but with Mulder, she decided it was better safe than sorry. Even in the privacy of her own bedroom she preferred to avoid entertaining those fantasies, let alone inches away from him.
She forced her attention back to the television, where Sally looked across the table at her partner, smug and satisfied.
I’ll have what she’s having.
Scully thought about dinner dates and walks in the park, and all the normal things that best friends do together. She wondered if Harry had ever woken Sally at two in the morning to look at the night sky, or if he ever lectured her on the finer details of extraterrestrial biology. She wondered if he ever sat next to Sally in the hospital, his throat slick with tears and prayers to the God he didn’t believe in. That’s what best friends did together, too, wasn’t it?
The rest of the film passed by quickly, and Scully was kept awake by Mulder’s compulsion for commentary. It didn’t take long before they slipped back into old habits, spending more time talking than listening to the movie. They debated Casablanca, Christmas trees, wagon wheel coffee tables. While he couldn’t resist the occasional suggestive tease—has anyone ever made you meow, Scully?—he seemed content to stay in their comfort zone, to Scully’s relief.
When Harry and Sally, after years of friendship, finally consummated their feelings for each other in a moment of passionate weakness, she swore she felt Mulder tense against her hip. She must have imagined it, of course. Just as she also imagined his fingertips ghosting along her shoulder as, later, partygoers counted down to a new year and Harry and Sally finally figured out the one thing their lives were missing.
“Anyway, it’s about old friends,” Sally remarked, beaming her sunshine smile at the love of her life. Scully didn’t catch the question she was answering.
-
They sat in stillness for a while, basking in the afterglow of a good ending. As Frank Sinatra crooned at the edges of her mind, Scully resisted the teenage impulse to leap from the couch and pull Mulder into a dancer’s embrace. Instead, watching the names in the credits begin to blur in front of her weary eyes, she mused on the final scene.
Twelve years and three months. Was that the magic number, the expiration date on friendship? Was 2005 the lucky year she would finally be able to open the huge can of worms always nestled between them on the couch? Or, did that only apply if you met serendipitously in a bookstore, and not when you spent nearly every waking moment together?
Mulder’s voice pulled her from her thoughts.
“What about you, Scully?”
“Hmm?” Her head lolled to one side, and she could barely make out his face in the dimming light.
“Do you think men and women can be friends?”
Scully pinched her brows together. It was a familiar expression to her partner, one equal parts amused and perplexed. “Aren’t we friends, Mulder?”
“Of course we are.”
“Well, then, case closed,” she said.
In the office, or on a stakeout, or any other night, that’s where that banter would have ended. They would each file it off in some dark, forbidden corner of their minds to replay later as they lay awake at night, shoved behind police tape and barbed wire with every other unspoken thing. But Mulder had that gleam in his eye, the one he reserved for chasing ridiculous leads or coaxing answers out of her. It was the look that told Scully she wasn’t going to be able to avoid this particular line of questioning.
“You don’t think there’s any truth to it, then?” Scully could hear the playful teasing in his voice, the tone for when he knew he was breaching a topic that his partner was skeptical about. He knew she was a non-believer; in aliens, Bigfoot, romance, and other things that didn’t exist. Which scientific improbability is going to be pulled apart tonight?
“That you can’t be friends with someone you’re attracted to, I mean,” he added, answering her thought.
Scully scoffed. “Obviously, you can. I’ve been friends with plenty of cute guys.” She squirmed under his gaze and hoped it was too dark for him to notice. “Besides,” she said, “Harry and Sally were attracted to each other, and they were friends.”
“But then they weren’t.”
“Mulder, that’s the movies, not real life. It’s not that simple.”
“Why not?”
She was caught off guard by the question, by the complete earnestness of it. Scully was used to having her ideas challenged by him, but this was something different. Mulder had found the invisible line that she kept drawn between them for the last five years, and he had nudged one little toe over it, daring her to push him back.
Why not? She frowned. There were countless reasons why not. So many that she didn’t dare come up with examples. It was practically impossible.
The problem with impossibilities, in Scully’s experience, was that Mulder had a habit of ignoring them. She wasn’t even sure if the word graced his vocabulary.
Something like a sigh escaped her lips. The distance between them on the couch suddenly seemed at once an impenetrable chasm and the space of a single breath. He looked at her, doe-eyed, still expecting an answer.
“Mulder,” she started, but he had known her too long to ignore the skepticism laced in the way she said his own name.
“You’re my partner, Scully. My confidante. My best friend,” he said, unwilling to give her doubt a foothold against his own reasoning. “What’s one more thing on that list?”
Scully blinked, speechless. The hypothetical had evaporated, and she felt like a platform had dropped from underneath her. Why was tonight the night he chose to abandon the plausible deniability they had been so careful to maintain?
Yet, for once, she had trouble poking holes in his logic.
She had lied for him, held men at gunpoint for him. It wasn’t even worth trying to keep track of the federal crimes she’d committed just to keep him safe. Bureau regulation was a convenient shield, just like everything else. Excuses to wrap around the feelings she feared to give a name lest they become something tangible.
Her hand moved to rub absentmindedly at the back of her neck, a nervous tic she had developed since she left the hospital. She teased the puckered skin beneath her fingers, feeling the small mass underneath the scar. She still wasn’t entirely convinced that the tiny piece of metal resting there had been the cause of her newfound good health, but it comforted her to reach for it all the same. It was as if she needed proof that it was still there, that she was still there—undeniable evidence that Dana Scully was alive, breathing, real.
As if the proof wasn’t sitting right next to her. In the ways he watched her when he thought she couldn’t see, the ways he touched her as if her body was as sacred as his own. In the depths of her illness, when even she had become untethered from hope, he was there to pull her back into his orbit, stubbornly clinging onto her life when she no longer could.
She was pulled from her musings by the sudden warmth of his hand on top of hers.
“Scully…” His voice was low and gentle as his thumb traced timid circles onto her skin. “Why did you really come here tonight?”
In the back of her mind, Harry Burns answered the question for her.
I came here tonight because when you know you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.
As far as Scully was concerned, the rest of her life began when she stepped out of the oncology ward and the shadow of Death, the words remission and miracle following her in whispers back home. Though, perhaps it might have been before that—the first hospital, the first time she had inexplicably returned from a voyage to the other side and moored herself to the strength of another’s beliefs. Or maybe it was even earlier. Maybe it was when she was overcome with laughter in the rain in Bellefleur, Oregon, struck dumb with the absurdity of her new assignment and the audacity of the man who championed it.
Could it have been that she knew from the very beginning? Like the way you knew about a good melon?
No, Scully chided herself. That was the movie talking.
Scully had never cared much for romance films. They always ended with some grand declaration of love—sprinting through Manhattan, or maybe an airport terminal, the whole world pausing to hear all those messy feelings put into words. Everything had to be tied up with a neat, uncomplicated bow; a long kiss and an implicit promise that everything would work out past the fade to black. It was nice, for the movies, but her rational mind couldn’t help but to protest.
Love, in Scully’s opinion, was not something suited for grand affairs. It was a quiet acceptance; a small, tender thing best kept closely guarded lest it slip through her fingers. It was a commitment, not only to another person but also to that deepest part of herself that recoiled at the thought of being laid bare. There was no promise of a happy ending in the world outside of the silver screen, and to love was to accept that it would one day be lost, leaving behind only grief and unreliable memories to prove it ever existed at all.
Love was something heavy and fragile, gentle and devastating, all at once: a contradiction, an impossibility.
She wasn’t sure if she believed in true love, or soulmates, or romance at all. At least, not for herself. But she did believe in Mulder. She trusted him with every atom of her being.
And as crazy as she felt for it, she did love when her phone rang in the middle of the night and it was Mulder’s voice on the other end of the line. She loved that it took him three sentences to explain something that could have been summarized in three words. She loved that he couldn’t use a pencil unless it was perfectly sharp. She loved that he pretended he didn’t need reading glasses anymore.
Most of all, she loved how he loved her, selflessly and without pity.
Yet, the question remained.
“Why say this now, Mulder? After everything, I mean, I thought…” She hid her reddening face behind her hands. “This sounds so stupid. I thought you were avoiding me.”
His eyes were wide with some emotion that she didn’t have a name for.
“When you were… when I thought I was going to lose you again, Scully, I was the most scared I’ve ever been in my entire life. And then you were okay, and I thought things would go back to normal, but I keep seeing you in that hospital bed and it feels like someone’s kicked the entire world off its axis.”
He breathed out a frustrated laugh. “And then I kept thinking, you know, what the fuck is normal? Do we even have a normal to go back to? Why did it take the thought of never seeing you again to make me realize I’d never danced with you before, or asked you to dinner without pretending it was just for convenience’s sake?”
Scully could see the glistening of tears creep into his eyes, and felt them forming hot and eager behind her own. She resisted the urge to blink them away.
“I’m still scared of losing you, Dana,” Mulder said softly, and the sound of her own name on his lips nearly buckled her resolve. “I don’t know why I’m saying this tonight, but I don’t know why I haven’t said it before, either. Maybe I just needed the right movie on.”
Scully managed a weak laugh, one that spilled a few loose tears onto her cheeks.
It would be ridiculous to deny her feelings for him now, but in the last five years she had become something of an expert at rationalizing the impossible. She did love him. She knew that. Despite Mulder’s theories to the contrary, though, she just couldn’t believe that love could ever be simple.
She had convinced herself that the freedom from her cancer had unburdened her, but suddenly faced now with his heart on his sleeve, in her hands, she wondered if maybe it hadn’t changed her much at all.
“Mulder, I just don’t know if I can be everything you want me to be for you. Not…” Her voice wavered as she swallowed the growing lump in her throat. “Not right now.”
The words felt like sandpaper on her tongue. Not right now. It was an implicit admission. A note in the margins.
Not right now… but not never.
She had met Mulder at her line in the sand and she hadn’t stopped him from crossing it. Perhaps someday, she’d grab him by the shoulders and drag him across, into her uncharted territory. Perhaps the tide would come in, and one day she would wake up and suddenly the line would be gone, washed out to sea, no longer needed.
But for now? Better to just redraw it. His one step forward, her two steps back.
An age passed, or maybe just a few seconds. Mulder leaned forwards, bringing a hand to brush gingerly against her cheek. Scully’s eyes drifted closed and for a brief moment, her stomach and the room and the universe began to spin—until she felt the chaste, tender press of his lips upon her brow.
She opened her eyes.
“You’re everything I need you to be, Scully,” Mulder whispered into her hair, like a secret gifted into the hollow of a tree. “Whatever you want to be. It will always be enough.”
Before he could move away, Scully clumsily slipped an arm over his shoulder, pinning him in place. A soft gasp escaped him as she pressed herself into his chest, their bodies squeezed against the couch cushions in a tangle of limbs. Mulder’s breath was hot against her temple, smelling faintly of artificial butter. Her foot prickled with pins and needles, protesting the sudden movement, and she could just barely lean forwards enough to settle into his embrace. It was awkward, uncomfortable, like a jigsaw puzzle with a piece missing. It was nothing like the movies.
But he was right. It was enough.