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The air in the Crown Vic is stagnant, stuffy. A stale fast food funk mingles with the (not entirely unwelcome) musk of Mulder himself, no longer fully contained by yesterday’s Old Spice. The air freshener does little to mask it, just adds unsettling notes of chemical pine over top.
Dana Scully breathes in and out in the passenger seat, assessing the most efficient way to compress her care and concern for her partner into a format that he’s capable of receiving. It being a format that she’s capable of expressing is another limitation entirely.
She takes a long sideways glance at him as he bites into the sandwich she brought him and lowers her voice as she rattles off surveillance protocol. He meets her beat for beat, dryly listing back the regulations with a clear tone of implication.
Scully’s struggling to hold it all in untenable balance: the ever-fluctuating relative stability of Mulder (current status: suboptimal), the exigencies and extravagances the X-Files require for them to maintain their high solve rate, and now Skinner breathing down her neck about reports and regulations. Their entire situation is a house of cards.
There’s an edge in her voice when she answers him, even though her care for him spills out around the edges. “This isn’t about doing it by the book. This is about you not having slept for three days. Mulder, you’re going to get sloppy and you’re going to get hurt. It’s inevitable at this point.”
“A request for other agents to stake out Tooms would be denied,” Mulder argues as he chews. “To them we have no grounds.”
“Well, then I’ll stay here, you go home.”
Mulder sighs, looking pointedly away from her. When he speaks, his tone is flat, almost distant, like he’s closing her out of the room of his voice. “They’re out to put an end to the X-Files, Scully.” She watches his face in profile as he worries his lip with his tongue, then continues. “I don’t know why, but any excuse will do. Now I don’t really care about my record, but you’d be in trouble just sitting in this car” — he finally turns to look her in the eye — “and I’d hate to see you carry an official reprimand in your career file because of me.”
Scully considers her hands, because this is what she really came here to say and because saying it does not come easily to her. “Fox,” she begins, hoping to strike at the heart of the matter, but his laughter startles her into silence.
“I — I, even made my parents call me Mulder,” he says, his smile rueful. “So, uh, Mulder.”
Something in her gut flares. When her father died, Mulder had called her Dana, and she had let him. She respects Mulder immensely, so of course she takes him at his word. She won’t call him anything he doesn’t want to be called. But she finds herself in the central keep of the formidable emotional fortress she’s spent her entire life building and maintaining, suddenly enraged to find that anyone else’s city might also have walls. No, not anyone else. That’s neither true nor fair. Specifically him. Mulder doesn’t get to break down her walls even as he constructs new ones of his own.
Scully steels her stomach and says it, determined to get back inside the room of his voice. “Mulder, I wouldn’t put myself on the line for anybody but you.” I’m in this with you, Mulder, and I’m not going anywhere.
He may not have let her call him Fox, but Scully watches him absorb her words in the brief moment — his face softens — before his defense mechanisms come back online.
“If there’s an iced tea in that bag, could be love.”
Her stomach flutters as she pulls out the cool glass bottle, knowing exactly what it holds: Lipton’s, unsweetened, with lemon, the way he likes it.
“Must be fate, Mulder.”
It’s meant to be a joke, but it doesn’t sound like one. She presses the bottle into his hand then looks straight ahead, betrayed by the flush she can feel crawling over her face.
Mulder takes the tea but falters, opening and closing his mouth without finding anything to say. “Thanks,” he manages, after an excruciating interval.
Damn it. She’s been counting on him to diffuse the moment with a Mulder Special: 2 parts flirtation to 1 part comic relief, a ratio that promises that the very possibility of his come-ons being sincere is absurd. But he’s unusually quiet.
“So what do you say?” Scully asks, forced by the awkwardness into attempting the Mulder Special herself, even though it’s a doomed proposition. “Wanna blow this popsicle stand and head straight for Vegas? Get hitched by Elvis?”
He smiles and chuffs out one of his wry little half-laughs, but his eyes shine with something softer.
Then Mulder turns to her and brushes her hair behind her ear, like he’s done before sometimes on cases. This time is different mainly because they aren’t being reunited after one or both of them have faced recent mortal peril, though that doesn’t stop him from looking at her with a similar level of intensity. His fingers linger on her neck then glide forward, until he’s cupping her jaw, gently turning her head to fully face him.
“Scully,” he breathes. “I, uh. It’s mutual, you know.”
Her eyes go wide and she blinks, her heart pounding with sudden panic that he’s calling her on her apparently very obvious crush, territory that she thought they’d both silently agreed not to broach. Her shock must be evident on her face, because Mulder resorts to rambling.
“What you said, I mean. I know it means less, coming from me, but. There’s uh. I’d trust you with my life, honestly, and to me that’s… well, reciprocal doesn’t even begin to cover it. Your sticking with me, standing by the work, no one else has ever…” His free hand lifts to stroke her hair, to thumb tenderly at her other cheek, so that now he’s cupping her face in his two hands. His large, warm, competent hands. “I don’t think you know what it means to me, Scully.” Mulder is so fervent, so sincere, with his whole heart worn right out there on his sleeve. Perhaps he senses, not wholly incorrectly, that his monologue is veering awfully close to romantic declarations, because he attempts to course-correct, letting his left hand fall from her face and land on the armrests between them. His other hand still cups her cheek, though. “I know I’m hard to put up with, that I’m the one that gets us into situations nine times out of ten, but there’s really very little I wouldn’t do for you, Scully, and I hope you know that. Seriously. Any day of the week.”
“Oh.” Scully swallows, then meets his eyes. “Mulder. I know. I do know that, and it doesn’t mean less.” In the dim car, Mulder’s irises are almost completely consumed by his dark pupils. His eyes are still shining with some kind of soft, secret light, though. They meet hers, then dart down to her lips, before flitting back up to look right into her eyes again.
“Do you even believe in fate, Agent Scully?” he asks, and she’s so shaken by everything that has transpired that she has to follow the thread all the way back to her glib comment about the iced tea. It’s hard to parse his intentions: his voice has an ironic edge, not unlike how he asked her if she believed in extraterrestrials on the day they first met, and his use of “agent” here is confusing at best. But his thumb is gentle on her cheek. His fingers still stroke her jaw in a manner best described as sensual. And his eyes are all alight with tender intensity — his eyes tonight are absolutely killing her. His left hand slips up again and into her hair, and she feels his fingers cupping the back of her neck. Her brain melts around the edges, acquires a sort of two-benedryl fuzziness.
She reminds herself that Mulder hasn’t slept in three days, that whatever is hovering thick in the air between them could easily be explained away by his objective unraveling, but the truth is that this isn’t the first time she’s caught him looking at her this way. Moreover, if she’s being honest with herself, she’s pretty sure that she looks at him this way all of the time.
From this close up, though, it’s different. It’s dizzying. It’s real.
It would be so easy to lean forward, to let her eyes flutter closed…
It’s too real.
“Fate? I don’t know, Mulder.” It’s a genuine answer, even if she is also using it as a bulwark for feelings she’s unready to address. “I go back and forth. I do believe that we have choice, but how much choice do we really have when we’re all bound to some extent by our essential natures? If something in me is unable to act on the other options available because of my character, is that still free will? It’s an interesting thought exercise, but there’s inadequate data, so none of us can ever really know for sure.”
“Isn’t that a little grim?” Mulder asks, still stroking her cheek. “I guess I believe more in possibilities. Life’s not a Greek tragedy. We make our own fate.”
It’s a bold statement for a man who has spent his entire life bent like a sunflower towards his lost sister. The phrase "fatal flaw" could have been created custom for him. He might be the most tragic figure she knows, and there’s a profound bittersweetness in his optimism, in his insistence that, yes, this is what he chooses. It almost pains her, Mulder’s innate faith that his life could have gone another way, had he only willed it to be so.
“You don’t think we could choose it, Scully?” His voice is husky. His warm fingers, cupped around the back of her neck, guide her the tiniest bit towards him.
“Choose what?”
Mulder’s eyes are molten, his whole face lit with wonder she feels unworthy of.
“Our fate,” he says, like it’s obvious. Then, low and gravelly, bold beyond belief: “Iced tea.”
Scully wonders what it’s like to be the kind of person who could simply say yes. What would it be like to be Mulder, or Melissa, or anyone else she knows who just lets things happen without any thought for consequence? What would it be like to brush her nose against his and play with the hair at the nape of his neck until he caved and kissed her?
But she's not that kind of person; she never has been and she doubts she ever will be. From behind her battlements, she loads her trebuchet.
She’s silent for long enough that he tries again. “What about signs, Scully? I suppose you don’t believe in those either?”
His voice is warm, more playful now, and it leaves room for her to banter back. He’s giving her an off-ramp, a place to escalate or de-escalate as she chooses, a move that, she’s loathe to admit, only strengthens his argument about free will.
Scully sighs. “I don’t know what to tell you, Mulder.” She finds that at some point while she’s been lost in him, her traitorous hand has tangled itself around his wrist. She closes her eyes, then opens them. She squeezes Mulder’s arm, then gently releases him. “Is there a slim chance that some divine force is leaving us all breadcrumb trails along our ideal paths? I suppose so. Maybe there’s a constellation of secret or symbolic meaning hidden amidst the mundane. Or — as Occam’s Razor would suggest — maybe sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”
Maybe sometimes an iced tea is just an iced tea.
Scully hesitates before what she says next because she doesn’t like to lie, especially not to Mulder. But she already laid her heart at his feet tonight when she told him she wouldn't put herself on the line for anyone else. There’s too much vulnerability in admitting that she knows his preferred stakeout beverage, let alone that she fears that he was right, that maybe it is love. “In any case, the deli was out of root beer.”
Mulder pulls a silly face that insufficiently masks his actual disappointment. “Textbook Scully,” he says with an exaggerated sigh, releasing her jaw, and jokingly clutches his heart, as though he’s been mortally wounded. She mourns the absence of his touch immediately. Her goal was to break the moment; that doesn’t make her success any less devastating. Mulder twists the cap off of the iced tea and takes a sip, then passes her the bottle to share with the sort of casual domestic ease she’s only ever experienced before with family and boyfriends. “You know, Freud didn’t actually say that. It’s a misattribution. And Memphis is way closer than Vegas, by the way.”
She nearly spits out the sip of his iced tea she’s been taking, managing to save it with an inelegant little throat-clearing sound. “Memphis??”
“If we want The King to join us in unholy matrimony, Scully, keep up.” Mulder grins, fully restored to glinting teeth and ironic swagger. He appears to be papering over any remaining hurt by leaning a little too hard into their usual banter. The Mulder Special is back in full force, only now radiating a certain manic energy and the added undercurrent of, Did we almost kiss back there? “There’s a chapel at Graceland. You’ve got to reserve it months in advance, though. You can’t just do it on a whim.”
He says it all with an authority that makes Scully wonder, somewhat uncharitably, just how close he’s gotten to planning a Graceland wedding and with whom. But she forces herself to roll her eyes, to signify that they have resumed the charade. He’s tossed them both a life raft by finding a joke they can cling to; it’s the least she can do to help row them back to shore. She ignores the mild aura of defeat emanating from him, the exhaustion showing around his eyes, and chooses to embrace the bit.
“They should study you, Mulder,” she says, dry as a bone, “in a laboratory.” She passes the bottle of iced tea back to him; their fingers brush. She resists the urge to climb into his lap and kiss him until she forgets her own name.
“In your laboratory? Sign me up, Doc,” he says, wickedness incarnate. Regrettably, it’s working for her. Her life might be easier if she could bring herself to hate him.
But how could she? He’s Mulder.
“You're delirious. Go home and get some sleep.”
“Doctor’s orders?” His cartoonish leer is so silly that she has to choke back a snort.
“Don’t push your luck.”
He foists the liverwurst sandwich upon her and gives her sports radio advice that she makes no effort to register. She exits the car and makes her way behind it, but then pauses. Turning on her heel, she walks up to the driver’s side window and knocks.
Mulder rolls the window down with an arch little smile. “What, you want my tea too? This is highway robbery, Scully.”
Scully leans down to rest her elbows on the rolled-down driver’s seat window, cupping her own chin in her hands. There’s really no way to do this without sticking her ass out, without letting her back arch. She has an absurd vision of herself taking his order at a drive-in hamburger stand, the ones with milkshakes and French fries and waitresses on roller skates, the kind of mythic American teenage fever dream she’d always felt vaguely on the outskirts of as her family had moved from town to town.
Her face is surprisingly close to his for the second time tonight.
Mulder cracks a sunflower seed with his teeth. His eyebrows do things she couldn’t begin to describe, and she knows she has to speak now before he makes some off-color joke and steals her thunder.
“Ask me again sometime, Mulder,” she says. His mouth is maybe five inches from hers, and it’s her turn to look at his lips, which are parted, pillowy, inviting. The car door is wet with rain everywhere she’s brushing it and it seeps through her sleeves, leaving her elbows cold and damp. “If things are ever… different.”
His lips twist, always mischief-ready; Fox Mulder is nothing if not game. “Ask you what exactly?”
She shrugs, bites her lip. Her cheeks feel flushed despite the chill in the air. “If I think we can choose our fate.” If it’s love.
“Oh,” he says, apparently at a loss for words for once, and takes a sip of the iced tea. It feels good to shut him up. She watches her implications dawn over his face: good! Let him be the one to sit with the emotional calculus for once, instead of running roughshod over her feelings with his incessant flirty jokes.
As she strides back to her own car, though, he calls after her. “Scully! Wait!”
“Yeah?” She turns over her shoulder and tosses her hair out of her eyes.
Mulder’s head lolls out of the open driver seat window like he’s a golden retriever enjoying the breeze. The quality of his grin promises that whatever he has to say next will be deeply stupid. “I thought maybe you meant ask you later if you wanted me to reserve the Graceland chapel after all.”
Scully sighs with her entire body and pivots on her toes to face this, the man who has never met a joke he won’t drive all of the way into the ground. “I can’t stop you from asking, Mulder,” she says, in her most cutting deadpan, “but don’t get your hopes up.” He’s just smirking at her. His shoulders have followed his head out of the window, so he hangs gleefully half out of his car. He’s all rumpled and boyish, with little tendrils of hair falling into his face. She cannot help but smile back.
“Time will tell, Scully. Time will tell!” And then his fluffy head disappears back into the Crown Vic. She slumps into the driver’s seat of her own car and watches his taillights recede into the rain-streaked night.
Against a movie screen in her mind, Scully replays Mulder grasping her jaw, saying, “It’s mutual, you know,” and imagines herself calling his bluff by reaching out to run her thumb over his plush lower lip, imagines herself saying, “Oh, I know,” while looking at him in a way that could not be misinterpreted, even by him. She imagines shutting him up by kissing him — it’s a well-trodden fantasy, because he spouts so much bullshit all of the time. Kissing him would be incredible, that much she’s sure of. That she could easily love him and that he could love her back has never even been in question. Scully is possessed of good observation skills and ample self-assurance: he wants her, and she could almost certainly have him if she wanted him back, which she does, to a degree that feels careless. But then what?
Scully cares about the work; it’s the most compelling work she’s ever done. But if they do lose the X-Files, she’ll grieve it and move forward. Scully will regroup and Mulder will go off the deep end. She cringes at the way something inside of her believes that she could fix him. Beyond the clichés, stereotypes, and inherent naiveté required to support the belief that a strong, loving woman could (or even should) repair a wild, wounded man, there’s this simple fact, incontestable: Dana Scully has never respected broken horses. Supposing they do lose the X-Files and being together becomes less complicated, how would that even go? Is she supposed to trap him in her apartment at his most vulnerable, fuck him into submission, and what then? Train him to boil pasta and put the toilet seat down? Dress him in Dockers and drag him out on double dates? Cut his hair and tie him to her bedpost? If she could somehow domesticate Mulder, quell his mental turmoil and quash his inherent tendency to sprint in the direction of the nearest danger, would he still Mulder be? If she could get him to surrender to a nice quiet university job at Georgetown or American, would she even want him anymore? Mulder’s meant to be roaming free on a barrier island somewhere, unfettered and glorious. Maybe she’d start to resent him if he had her bit in his mouth.
It’s better this way, she thinks. Want is to be bottled, stoppered, or, when absolutely necessary, siphoned away and off-gassed into the anonymous outer reaches of her life, the rare dim nights spent in crowded bars that carry the thrill of the forbidden but — thanks to the birth control pill, condoms, and her capacity as a medical doctor to have frank conversations about STIs with any and all sexual partners — have very little consequence beyond the awkwardness of the morning after. On the Dana Scully list of priorities, want figures very, very low. It’s not that she doesn’t possess it in great quantity, it’s just that she fights like hell to rate it less highly than ambition, dignity, control, pragmatism, self-sufficiency, stability.
That’s why Scully squints out into the rain-blurred night and doesn’t think of Mulder. She doesn’t imagine how his tongue would feel in her mouth or picture the rapturous look he’d have on his face after she kissed him. When she takes out his sandwich, she doesn’t think about his lips. She does think about his teeth, briefly, because the bite marks are right there, and in any case, that’s permissible, as teeth are arguably less sexy than lips. And then she’s thinking only about dental records and the gnaw marks on the 1930s murder victim. Her brain becomes a brave little engine chugging steadily along huffing, “Case, case, case, case, case,” drowning out all thoughts of Mulder’s mouth until the next time the two of them inevitably linger a little too long at one crossroads or another.
Scully can’t bring herself to regret not kissing him: too much hangs in the balance. But for the rest of the stakeout, her want burns inside of her, incandescent. She’s a pillar candle, nearly used up, and she’s sure her longing must light her up from within.
So she sits in her car in the dark where no one can see her not thinking about him and gives herself over to the case. She eats his sandwich and quietly burns.