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She wonders if he can hear her thinking. If he can hear the cogs turning around in her head and her mind flashing through endless memories. Lying here, the pitch dark threatens to engulf the both of them, but she’s sort of glad she can’t see his face because it’s only going to make her nervous.
She’s about to do it. She’s about to ask him to marry her.
Which is insane, on various counts, because she used to think marriage was trivial.
She used to think it was mindless and pointless and one of those meaningless societal expectations that was bound to pass her by.
After all, it was all the girls at her high school could talk about, spending their days walking daydreaming down the corridors while she had her head buried in a Physics textbook. She'd grown up on stories not of princesses and castles, but of wild adventurers and Moby Dick; and marriage didn't factor heavily into those kinds of stories - only to serve the context behind sobbing sailor’s widows teetering on the edges of docklands in New England. After signing away their last names, legally bound, they’d merely wanted to end it all. And her younger self could never get her head around how anyone would want that.
As a teenager she’d sat through countless of her distant cousins’ weddings, sulking at the ribbons and the dresses and the balloons and the butterflies; not seeing the point to any of it. As far as she was concerned, you didn’t need to be married to be happy - so why bother?
All her young adult life, reluctant as she is to admit it - she'd been firmly in the position of homewrecker. The cheater, the other woman, and marriage had been the furthest thing from her mind when she was going around with those taken men, the ones who spent endless nights complaining about how desolate their lives had become anyway.
It just seemed like a trap. Giving up the rest of your life to live in unfathomable misery. And heaven forbid she'd ever end up with someone who'd expect her to be the perfect housewife - cooking dinners, saying very little at all - because that's the furthest away from perpetual bliss that she could possibly fathom.
But then, there was Mulder.
And Mulder had been different from the start.
Of course, she'd always thought marriage would be out of the question with him - it didn't matter that he fluttered his eyelashes or cracked stupid smiles or let pencils fall from the ceiling like rain.
She could think he was cute without needing to marry him. Hell, she could fall in love with him without needing to marry him, because those two things didn't even mean the same thing. She'd seen perfectly wretched people trapped in marriages without being in love, and in the end, it became something she thought she’d like to avoid at all costs, if at all possible.
And when he asked her one day, jokingly down the phone - marry me echoing around the local police department in southern Maine - she'd only rolled her eyes at him. She’d kissed her teeth at the sheer insinuation.
I was hoping for something a little more helpful.
Because didn't he know how ridiculous it all was? Didn't he know how meaningless and pointless and stupid the whole concept was? She’d pushed the butterflies in her stomach to the back of her mind and tried to pretend that they weren’t happening. She couldn’t marry him. She just couldn’t.
All her life, she'd assumed it was something that she was going to miss out on.
But she wants that something, now. If marriage is what comes with stability and normal life and white picket fences, then maybe she could stand to entertain the idea.
They’ve been through enough rough patches over the years for her to want to stop and find calmer, common ground.
She wants to bother with the tradition and formalities, and all the little things that come with finding the one person who completes her. She can see the point in the long white dresses and the glinting wedding rings, and the fact that she’d get to stand in a Church and confess her heart to God as well as the love of her life.
She remembers years ago, back when they were undercover in that stupid gated community, he’d accused her of wanting to play house. And maybe… he was right. Whenever he was out of the room, she’d looked down at her hands constantly, trying out what it felt like to have a ring on her finger for the first time in her life. She’d tried to ignore it like she had the butterflies, but she couldn’t. She just… couldn’t.
The thought had occurred to her that maybe she did want to be married. Maybe all that time she’d just been waiting for the right person. And maybe it would make her miserable. Maybe it would leave her feeling destitute, and looking for an escape route, but she’d risk all those things for Mulder. He was worth all of it.
And that’s when the switch had flipped.
That's when the waiting had begun.
She’d waited for years for him to ask her - to turn around and get down on one knee. When he’d kissed her at midnight, when he’d left her in the afterglow, when he’d left her pregnant, she was convinced he was going to ask her. And when he never did, she tried not to chalk it up to him being an idiot. To him not loving her enough. To the whole thing being pointless anyway.
But that’s when things had gone wrong.
Less than a year later she'd stood by his graveside throwing earth onto his coffin, weighed down by the weight of his child she was carrying. She’d felt so much like one of the sailors' widows teetering on the brink of the docks in New England that she'd had to stop herself from buckling at the knees.
For a brief second, her younger self had come back to her, glaring with sharp unforgiving eyes at her swollen stomach, hell bent on enforcing her opinion.
This is what thinking about marriage gets you. A life of pain and misery.
But she’d tried to shake away the train of thought. The sheer regret of it wasn’t worth it. There was only one clear thought in her head in that instant. She should have been putting her hands over her baby bump with a ring on her left hand, given to her by the man lying dead beneath her.
Not because she expected him to. Not because society expected him to. But because she sort of... wanted him to. God knows having children and being married weren't one and the same either - when she'd first thought about motherhood, marriage had been the furthest from her mind. But things were undeniably different after he’d died.
There was a void in her world where Fox Mulder used to be.
So, she’d filled that hole with thoughts of marriage.
She’d stood in darkened rooms and thought about what it would have been like if he had proposed to her, if they had been living in perpetual bliss by the time he was taken from her.
And then she did it again years later, after she’d fled from him.
They’d broken up horribly after they’d lost William because they couldn’t stand to look at one another. She’d stood alone in her new house and thought about what it would be like to be carried over the threshold by a man who hunted aliens for a living.
She’d thought about wanting more from him. About being lonely without him. About missing every fibre of his being. Back then, going separate ways had been the right decision. But it hadn’t mattered how much she’d fought with him, or picked holes in all his flaws, the desire was still there. The desperate, overpowering need to tell the world how much she loved him.
The teenage voice in her head had made a reappearance and told her not to be so sentimental.
It’s still in her head now, whispering through the night, telling her to move on.
You don’t need to be married to be happy. Look where marriage gets you.
Her younger, tomboyish self, folding her arms over her chest at the very thought of something pink and pretty. The naive 20-something homewrecker, dealing with all those men who were miserable.
But she’s older now, and lying in bed in the dark with the love of her life.
And since he’s never going to ask her to marry him - because if he was he would have done it already - then it’s up to her to make it right.
She's the one who has to pop the question.
There’s going to be no more wondering in darkened rooms, no more running hands over baby bumps.
She’s not going to spend another second of her life thinking in terms of what ifs and could-have-beens, because if God forbid they get separated from each other again, by manpower or force of nature, then she’s going to know categorically what it was like to be married to him. Whatever happens, at least she’ll know now.
And maybe she doesn’t need to be married to be happy - maybe it might make her miserable. Maybe it might make her stand out on the edges of docks in New England, weeping into the wind.
But Fox Mulder has always been different. So, she doubts it.
Rolling over in the dark, she turns to face him, a smile playing on her lips for the first time in forever.
Bated breath, heart beating to a crescendo, it’s now or never.
He is the love of her life. The only person she could ever imagine herself with.
The four-word yes-or-no question sits on the tip of her tongue, something she should have said twenty years ago when she first felt those butterflies in the pit of her stomach, back when the switch had flipped for the first time.
“...Will you marry me?”
She hopes he might just say yes to it.