Work Text:
1.
The day after, the new year. New starts, new beginnings, the calendar fresh and white. The air was dry and cold. It pricked at her eyes and chapped her lips. She brought him lunch, perching on his desk chair to eat a salad while he one-handedly picked apart his turkey sandwich.
“Come here,” he said when she was getting ready to leave, buttoning her coat and giving him careful instructions for his own care and feeding.
“What.”
“Come here.”
She came because he called her. Sat across from him on the coffee table. With his good hand, he tilted her head and lightly touched the jam-purple scratches on her neck.
“Come here,” he said again. Softer. Lower. She leaned forward. Waited. His hand went to her knee to steady himself and he leaned forward and kissed her neck, right on the raspy part.
“Zombies,” he murmured into it.
2.
She flinched and steadied herself on the cabinet of curiosities. When she turned, she saw him framed in the glass partition, looking like something of a curiosity himself. There were certainly days when she wanted to knock him out with an alcohol-soaked cotton ball and pin him to a piece of foam core, his trench coat flapping out like wings. “Muldicerus Foxendrum, FBI Agent, native to the American northeast.”
He slapped a lab report to the glass instead of coming through the doorway like a regular person.
3.
Frat brothers, athletes, soldiers. They used last names; the name on the back of a jersey, stamped on a dogtag. In high school, Bill’s friends had called him Scully. Before Mulder came along, she associated people yelling her last name with oafish football players in t-top Trans Ams.
If someone had told her then that she would fall in love with a man who called her Scully, she would have laughed. There were a lot of things about her current life that would have made her laugh.
The truth was, she sometimes forgot about her first name for days on end, only reminded by a phone call from her mother, by four letters scrawled on her to-go coffee cup.
“Is it weird that I never call you Dana?”
They were side by side and face to face on his couch. He was almost falling off the edge in order to maneuver a hand up her shirt. He didn’t seem to mind potential danger via the sharp-edged coffee table lurking behind him.
“Since when do you care about weird?”
Why was he trying to start a conversation? Rude. Well, at least his hand was still grazing her breast, thumb brushing lightly. His hand up her shirt and inside her bra was a new development, about 30 minutes old, and it rendered her goofy and speechless and unable to argue.
“I mean it,” he said.
“So say it,” she challenged.
“Say what?”
“Call me that. Once.”
“Dana,” he whispered, drawing it out. She arched into his hands. “Dana, Dana, Dana.”
"That was more than once."
He shrugged. She pulled him over to her with fistfuls of his shirt, forcing him to press her against the couch. His mouth was hot and his tongue felt more purposeful than it ever had before. Maybe conversation wasn't so bad.
“I think I got it out of my system, Scully.”
He ran his tongue over her bottom lip.
“Good. You know, I kinda like your name, too, Mulder.”
She whispered into his mouth, their foreheads reeling.
“Oh, please.”
“I do. It’s lucky you turned out so handsome, though. It could’ve been quite the albatross.” She wiggled her foot against his shin.
“You know, the only one who calls me that anymore is your mother,” he said.
She laughed. “And it’s very sweet that you let her.”
He took a deep breath.
“Okay."
“Okay, what?”
“Scully.” Was he whining?
“What, you want me to say it?”
“Scully.”
She made like she was getting comfortable and her hand sliced softly through his hair, over and over again. She put on her very gravest face, a kid getting serious at church under the threat of parental retribution.
“Fox.”
He swallowed. “See? It sounds silly. Never say it again.”
It did sound silly, but it was also one of the most wonderful things he’d ever heard.
“Oh, Mulder.”
“I would never name--” He stopped himself.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
He closed his eyes and she thought maybe she could feel his eyelashes brushing her cheek.
Her heart felt pulpy and stitched up. He would name something with her, but her body refused to give them anything to name.