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Chapter Text

She knew she was drunk. Her bones buzzed, and she leaned clumsily over the counter. But Dana Scully could hold her alcohol. She wasn’t mind-swimming drunk, nor did she desire to be drunker. She was just drunk enough to enjoy herself in spite of the asshole sitting next to her and definitely sober enough to know whatever he’d just said didn’t merit a response.

All she wanted was a few days out of town, a little time to enjoy herself and rejuvenate. Something she hadn’t done since her twenties, maybe before. The last time she’d tried, it ended in several murders and a demon doll. So far the unexplained phenomena hadn’t followed her to London. Really, though, a blood-sucking goatman or a haunted mansion sounded far more interesting than the man in front of her. 

A distinct blonde woman slid between Scully and her goateed suitor. She acknowledged neither of them at first, turning her head to where the bartender was fixing a bald businessman’s cocktail. She wore the most elegant blouse Scully had seen in life and well-tailored trousers. She cut a sharp figure, with a jaw like a razor blade and constellations of freckles and worry lines about her visage. Well this counts as interesting.

Then she met Scully’s eyes, raised one dangerous eyebrow, and turned to the bartender.

“Vodka martini,” she said smoothly.

Who did she think she was, James Bond? Looking her up and down one more time, Scully concluded that was entirely possible.

“Excuse me,” piped up the man still seated beside Scully. “You’ve interrupted our conversation.” Scully rolled her eyes—so far it hadn’t been much of a conversation.

The woman eyed him dangerously. “Oh?” she said. Her head swiveled back to Scully. “My apologies.”

She took her drink and stepped back, a tantalizing few inches from Scully. Scully’s attempted date placed his hand on her thigh. She swatted him away and shot him a glare, and looking down noticed the bump of a firearm on the woman’s hip.

“What’s your name?”

The woman cocked her head slightly. “Detective Superintendent Stella Gibson.”

So she was law enforcement. That explained the pistol and worry lines. 

“I’m Dana.” Just on vacation, just in London, just for tonight she was Dana. No more monsters, no more aliens and paperwork. This week it was alcohol and beautiful detectives.

“Pleasure to meet you, Dana.” She had the kind of voice that belonged in a black and white movie. Maybe this was her Casablanca, and Stella Gibson was her Humphrey Bogart, minus the chauvinism. 

An old man in a beige sweater hobbled past them, scratching his white stubble and tapping the bar’s jukebox with his cane. Scully followed him with her eye, his stooped frame and snow-white comb-over. He put a couple of quarters into the slot, and the smooth wail of Satchmo’s trumpet eased into the room.

Scully blinked. “I thought Louis Armstrong was an American thing?”

“Worldwide voice of blues.” Stella held out her hand. “Care to dance?”

What the hell. “My pleasure.”

She took Stella’s hand and allowed herself to be led to the middle of the bar. Stella’s cool hand wrapped around her waist and swayed her in a slow, sultry swing. Stella’s perfume clouded her nose—roses and a trace of gunpowder. Stella Gibson was at once a beacon for the future and a phantom of a bygone age, made headier by the alcohol in Scully’s system. 

“I went down,” Stella whispered with the music, “to St. James Infirmary.”

Stella danced her toward the door frame, and Scully leaned against the chipped, blue paint. As Stella’s cool hands held her waist, as she breathed in the whiskey and scratchy jazz, she noticed a pale scar along Stella’s cheekbone. Where it sat, how deep it ran, all sang of a painful story.

It reminded Scully of her bout with the Brazilian psychic surgeon, pinned to the floor as his hand tried to steal her heart from her body. Had all women been through something like that? Stella, for all her grandeur, was no more invincible to the whims of monstrous men than she.

She kissed Stella first. She ran her fingers down the lines on Stella’s face and through the tangle of curls and only broke away when some drunk bastard whooped. She kissed Stella first.

She would remember that the next morning as she fished for her clothes and snuck out at dawn to pack her suitcase, pretending Stella wasn’t standing naked and wordless behind her. She would remember the high-pitched wail of a clarinet as her plane screamed down the runway. She would remember Stella singing in a husky whisper as she ate breakfast in a DC cafe with Louis Armstrong blaring over the radio. 

She would remember the scar on Stella’s cheek when she returned to the basement office that still didn’t have two desks or her name on the door, despite she and Mulder’s request. 

We’ll always have London didn’t have the same ring, but this wasn’t the 1930s, and Scully wasn’t flying from the fight. She was flying toward it.

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Stella doesn’t consider herself a nostalgic woman. She doesn’t look in the mirror and pinch her wrinkles and woe her younger days. She doesn’t keep in touch with her college friends, and she’s never regretted sneaking out of a man’s house at four am with her high heels dangling from her fingertips.

What happened?

Scully’s head settles against her shoulder, copper hair spilling over the duvet. Stella lifts her reading glasses and arches an eyebrow. “I was reading,” she says softly, brushing Scully’s hair off the page.

Scully lifts her head and mumbles, “I was sleeping.”

She’s all too precious, curled up in one of Stella’s t-shirts in their London flat. Part of Stella wants to fuck her until neither of them can tell the difference between hickeys from wandering lips and bruises from the ornately carved headboard. But another part of her wants to kiss Scully’s forehead and touch her cheek like they’re made of glass.

The radio croons warmly from the kitchen—she’ll turn it off before she falls asleep. The ring of a jazz trumpet bounces off the walls. It reminds Stella of dancing to the pub jukebox, two years ago. Has it already been two years? Has it only been two years?

“Do you remember the night we met?”

Scully rouses again, licking her chapped lips. “In that dingy bar? And you asked me to dance to St. James Infirmary and we made out against the wall like we weren’t too old to justify it?”

“Yes.”

“I was slightly drunk. It was very good sex.” 

Stella chuckles and runs her fingers through Scully’s messy hair. It’s late, later than Scully usually goes to bed. Scully gets blunt when she’s tired, and it’s funny. It’s precious. 

It was very good sex, the night they met. Sometimes it surprises her that the sex got better. Everything got better. One night she was sleeping with an American doctor she met in a pub, and the next she was calling Dana Scully her lover, asking her to move to London.

She cups Scully’s cheek, presses her forehead against her own. She sways in uneven time to the faint radio jazz. 

Stella is not a nostalgic woman—there was no soul-crushing love at first sight or romantic vacations. What happened was, they were jaded and world-weary, sick of the implications of relationships and tired of being alone. And one day, they figured out how to live together in the precious space between.