Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

He threw himself off a bridge chasing that goddamn train. The one she told him not to board.

She knows the bar staff’s urban legends about rum-drinkers and aggression but she orders it anyway. It’s the alcohol content that does it, not some magical property of the drink itself, and she tells herself she won’t have much. It’s just a tonic to settle her nerves after what can only be described as a very bad day at work. Couple of days. Whatever. By any measure, it’s been an atrocious case, and she doesn’t want to talk about it, so she’s here at the nondescript bar down the block from the hospital she left Mulder at instead of sitting around looking at that garrotte wire line carved across his throat and listening to him try to make her feel better.

He can’t. Or maybe worse, he might. He might take her mind off it and make her smile, make her want to forget how scared she’s been for him since their last phone call disconnected. He might trick her, as his presence often does, into believing that everything will be alright.

How can everything be alright when he doesn’t listen? When he leaps onto moving trains, gets trapped in secret train cars with assassins and bombs and leaves his life, or rather his remote control, in her hands? With all she’s been dealing with, she did not need the added responsibility of springing him from that trap and knowing that her guesswork with the exit code on the stupid alien autopsy video had the power to save or pulverise him.

She glares at the dark liquid in her glass and tries to forget. She does not need the reminder that if she’d thought of it sooner, he might have gotten clear of the train car on his own, that his would-be assassin wouldn’t have had the same chance to get free and attack him. She doesn’t need to see the bruising around his eye indicating fracturing she might have prevented, nor the stitches in his hairline where a savage boot split him open. So she’s keeping clear of the hospital. Looking at Mulder like this reminds her he jumped when she told him not to. When she had proof that he was walking into something he shouldn’t.

Maybe she should have said something different. Or maybe nothing would have deterred him, because he doesn’t listen. Not when it matters. He hears what he wants to hear.

She’s one.

Tenderly she touches the back of her neck. The little incision is just a fine scar now but the tentative contact of her own fingertips sends an uncomfortable jolt to her stomach. Until this case, she’d been managing to feel relatively okay about what happened to her last year. She can’t remember it, after all, and there have been no lasting effects, whether medically or financially. Her job at the Bureau was still hers and her body bounced back after its brush with death. Mulder and her family have been only too happy to indulge her in acting like that missing month never happened and resuming life as it was before. It was easy for Scully to pretend along with them that she was fine, to slap a bandage over it and call it healed. But meeting the Mutual UFO Network of Allentown has torn that back open, and the wound is much wider than the little line at the nape of her neck would suggest. It’s deep and it’s sore and it’s festering even now as she reflects on the faces of those women in Betsy Hagopian’s living room. Faces she isn’t even sure she’ll see again, because someone with no face and too much power can simply wipe them off the board when it suits them.

We’re all dying, because of what they do to us.

And that’s not even the worst of it, though it should be. The worst is that she’s been on edge and afraid for days because of these horrific possibilities about her own fate that were laid out for her by Betsy’s friends, and the person who she expected to make her feel better absolutely did not. Instead of wondering whether she’s got cancer, she’s thinking about the immediate and all-consuming concern in his eyes when she told him.

But you’re alright, aren’t you, Scully?

Heaven forbid something happen to her and ruin his day.

She orders a second.

If she’s starting to feel angry, it’s not because of the rum. She hasn’t had enough for the alcohol to go to her head, and besides, anecdotal evidence linking rum and other spirits with aggression isn’t backed up by science. It’s about who you’re with when you’re drinking, and what feelings you’re already experiencing, that creates these associations, and then the high alcohol content pushes drinkers to greater extremes on the spectrum of emotion.

So she knows it’s not the drink that makes her knock it back and hiss and fume quietly as she orders a third. She can feel it tickling a throat that can’t remember how many tubes were threaded down it for surgeries she didn’t consent to. She can feel it warming limbs that don’t recall being strapped down. She feels it settling in her middle, where she is so sure something was done to her, but there’s no evidence whatsoever and she doesn’t have any concrete memories to warrant further investigations, so she has to live with the assumption that she’s just paranoid.

This time there was evidence, and Mulder ignored it and she nearly lost him. She can’t shake the breathless numbness of the five hours she spent thinking she’d killed him with that exit code before the phone call came that he’d been admitted to some random medical centre. She can’t forget the weak relief in her legs as they almost stopped holding her weight and she sat, automatically asking all the right questions but silently just thanking God on repeat for answering this prayer.

She couldn’t get here fast enough to see him alive for herself, but now that she’s here, she can’t look at him.

It makes her mad because she’s not meant to feel this way about Mulder, not when he can’t follow a basic direction.

Mulder, don’t get on the train!

If he felt the way his face looked when it occurred to him that she might be sick, why didn’t he hear all the things she meant when he told him not to jump?

She finishes off the third and calls for another. The bartender looks dubiously at his watch and she catches his drift. She’s barely been here half an hour.

‘What are you, my doctor?’ she demands, and he shrugs and pours it. His gaze follows someone who just entered the bar.

‘Speaking of doctors, have you seen mine?’

She turns to Mulder as he climbs uncomfortably into the stool beside her. She’s immediately torn between wanting to shove him and wanting to clutch him close and check him over, because he’s a frightful mess. The alcohol’s reaching her head now, no denying it, and in her softly warping focus and the dim bar lighting, the unnatural colour of his bruises and that gash above his face are especially garish.

‘Buddy, should you be here?’ the bartender asks. He’s not wearing a hospital gown, at least, but with the bandages and iodine stains on his skin, and with a hospital only a block away, it’s clear where he’s come from. Mulder smiles painfully and waves his concerns away with a dismissive hand.

‘Don’t worry, she really is my doctor,’ he reassures the man, settling with a wince into the stool. Scully wonders whether it would make a difference if she were his treating doctor, since he hasn’t listened to them, either, if he’s here. She only wonders, a little snidely, and it surprises her when she hears the question aloud.

‘Perhaps I might as well be. You don’t listen to me, either.’ She doesn’t mean to say it, certainly not as passive-aggressively as it comes out. He blinks, perhaps surprised by her tone. She changes the subject to what matters right now; triage is something she’s good at, and her feelings where he’s concerned can always be stashed away for later observation. Or just left at the back of the storage cupboard where she never needs to address them. Whichever works. ‘Mulder, what are you doing here?’

‘Looking for you. I checked myself out.’

‘I can see that. And what did your treating doctor have to say?’

‘Don’t know,’ Mulder replies easily. ‘She wouldn’t answer her phone.’

She switched it off when she left the hospital. She’d seen him for herself; she knew he was going to be fine and knew there was nothing the medical staff would need to contact her about. Otherwise, of course, she never would have. After the crushing tension of the five empty hours she stared at her phone waiting to learn he was still alive, that she hadn’t blown him up, she can’t bear to look at the thing.

She’s normally so composed. She’d normally let her irritation slide away, keep her stress to herself. It surprises her again when her frustrations slip right out her mouth.

‘Gee, I wonder how that feels.’ Which is so immature, she’s better than this and she knows it, and that only makes her angrier. She sips her drink for something else to do with her mouth. Mulder has crossed a thousand lines in the past, ignored her advice, wandered off alone, gotten himself nearly killed – none of it’s new. She shouldn’t feel more annoyed than usual. She swallows and redirects in the hope of salvaging whatever grace she still possesses. ‘How are you feeling?’

‘As before – like I had my head kicked in and almost taken off,’ Mulder admits, unconsciously tracing the angry red line across his throat. Scully wants to grab his hand and drag him off into the city to buy a scarf so she can hide it and they can pretend none of the last few days ever happened. She also wants to punch him in the mouth for being so stupid, putting himself in that situation, letting her worry like she did. Letting her believe for five hours that he was dead, and that she was probably going to die soon, too, and that dying would be worse if it wasn’t with him.

Yes, she’s dimly aware through the swelling warmth of the dark rum that she’s being ridiculous. She’s also aware that him being here has done nothing to decrease the shaky anger that’s been festering ever since he had the nerve to turn up alive and alright.

It’s ridiculous because the possibility of dying of Mulder’s crusade – which is essentially what it would be, if she were to fall prey to this incurable cancer Betsy Hagopian and her companions claimed had been caused by the implant Scully too had borne – should be the most infuriating thing on her mind right now, but it’s not. It’s there in the mess of thoughts she’s carrying around; it just pales beside the maddening reminder that Mulder’s quest could very well take him first and leave her without him, and that it would all be because he’s just Mulder and he attracts trouble like bars attract the lost. For Mulder to not jump onto that doomed train was for Mulder to not be Mulder.

After three years working together, she’s worried she likes Mulder just as he is a little too much, and today’s events are pushing her uncomfortably close to having to ask herself some hard questions about what that means.

He’s sensitive and she knows he cares about her too, so when he inevitably asks, ‘What about you, Scully? Are you alright?’ she isn’t surprised. ‘In all the chaos of the train and the hybrids, and then the hospital, we haven’t had a chance to talk about what you learned in Allentown.’

It’s a miracle, maybe, that she’s got his whole attention and his beautiful puppy eyes locked onto her with only concern – that he’s put her in the same sentence as aliens and is putting her first – but he’s picked his moment poorly. He mustn’t see the colour slowly brightening her cheap Irish cheeks, mustn’t have noted the rings of condensation on the counter marking how many drinks she’s already downed since she arrived. Odd, since normally he’s hyper attentive to that sort of thing, which if she were two or three drinks shallower into her night, she’d realise means he’s too focused on her to take in these other details.

He’s ready to listen. She’s starting to find those greater extremes on the spectrum of emotion.

She means to say, Today I was more scared for you than I was for me. She means to say, I’m afraid of what I learned but I trust you to be there with me and help me confront whatever comes. She means to say, I’ve been thinking of you differently lately and today I thought I’d lost you before I could even work it out.

That’s not what comes out. The rum speaks.

‘I don’t want to talk to you about it,’ she retorts, though that isn’t true. She finishes the drink and then it keeps talking. It doesn’t hold back. ‘Do you never think? I can’t believe you jumped on the damn train, Mulder. Except I can believe it, because it’s your usual brand of reckless and stupid.’

She forgets to say, and brave and clever and perceptive and righteous, but she means those too. She thinks her words are slurring a little but she isn’t sure.

‘Scully–’

‘Shut up, Mulder.’ Her glass hits the counter with a heavy, blunt finality that silences him, and somehow she finds herself in his face. ‘You nearly got yourself killed. Everyone on that train could have died because you don’t listen to me. You ignoring my advice and running headlong into danger is why I’m one, why those women recognised me and I’ve got this scar on my neck. They’re dying of cancer, Mulder, because they were abducted, because of the implants. They’re dying and they say it’ll happen to me. So I don’t want to talk to you about it.’

He looks stricken. She’s gone too far. She didn’t even know she was thinking these things; she’s just stressed and angry and guilty and being hurtful is coming too naturally.

She sees him swallow. He doesn’t deny any of it, and that’s the worst of it – he was already thinking this. He’s sorry. But she’s had too much. He’s closing down, she can see in his face, which she’s much too close to. This isn’t what she wanted to say. This isn’t what she imagined saying to him in her prayers for the five hours she thought she’d killed him.

She makes her best decision of the evening and steps back from him. She bumps her stool; she wavers.

‘I want you to call me a taxi,’ she says, and he does without question. He walks her to the sidewalk in silence. She has a long ride home to reflect on her miserable performance.

Like her abduction and her coma, they plaster over it and when she sees him the next day, they smoothly move on. She stiffly apologises for her unfair comments and for having too much to drink when she was supposed to be visiting him in hospital. He insists she has nothing to apologise for. They investigate the leper colony and his alleged alien hybrids and the train and as expected, all the evidence dries up. The man who showed her the other train disappears without a trace.

She’s no closer to understanding where she stands with Mulder, but she decides rum is not her drink.

Chapter Text

He knows something’s up. He’s perceptive like that. She told him it’s just a scan and she won’t know anything until her appointment with the oncology specialist at the end of the week. Then she told him to meet her here because she thought it would be quiet, but she didn’t know about Tacky Tuesday. The place is a riot of colour and midweek gaiety, and he’s running late.

She knows the social stigma tied to tequila and the associations it has with reckless abandon, but when she sees a party of younger women drinking it, laughing wildly and dancing with the liveliness of people who aren’t dying of cancer, a silly part of her wants to reach out for that elusive vitality, and she orders it anyway. It’s not the tequila that’s bringing those other women their freedom and their joy, she knows. It’s the satiny Bride sash and the fact that they’re about twenty-five and healthy. Though, if Scully’s been keeping count correctly of their drinks, they won’t be feeling so twenty-five or healthy in the morning. She tells herself she won’t have that much. She just wants enough to blur the resounding certainty that settled in her stomach when she saw the x-rays.

She knows. How could she not? She’s a medical doctor and she’s seen hundreds of scans of hundreds of bodies. As a professional courtesy, today’s technicians gave her access to hers when they stepped out to let her redress, and though they wouldn’t discuss it, preferring to leave it to her specialist to interpret, she doesn’t need that appointment to know what’s already so clear. What she’s been dreading for over a year.

She knows, but what she doesn’t know is how she’ll tell Mulder. Of course she has to. She remembers his face the day she came back from Allentown telling him that other abductees with implants were being treated for exactly this ailment. She remembers the way the conversation about secret railroads and alien conspiracies and Japanese scientists went flat for a moment as she captured his whole and undivided attention with the prospect that this might pertain to her, too.

But you’re alright, aren’t you, Scully?

She was scared then. She said she didn’t know. Now she knows the answer and she’s not scared. Not of that. She’s… numb. Certain, and certainty is cold and still. She doesn’t want to be still. The song changes and the bachelorette party shrieks, jumping and dancing in place. She wants to be like that. She knocks back her own drink and regrets it. It's straight, the wrong stuff, intended to be mixed. How does anyone drink enough of it to get drunk, honestly? – but she agrees when the bartender offers her another. Why not? What is there to lose now?

Reluctantly, while the bartender pours, she reaches back to touch the still-tender patch of her fresh tattoo. Something else to regret. She’s screwed everything up with Mulder over Ed Jerse and now she’s about to be diagnosed with a malignant tumour. She gets it now, why his disregard for his own life has become steadily more confronting as time’s gone on. She’s been falling for him for a few years, no denying that, and it’s been a slow, unwilling and intoxicating descent. She’s tried to not. She’s tried to grab onto increasingly desperate ways off this doomed metaphorical train, knowing it’s already a wreck. But it won’t derail, it won’t stop and let her off, and though she can’t remember jumping, she knows that at some stage she must have boarded, against better judgement, against evidence, against sound advice told directly into her ear.

She’s really no different to Mulder, put that way. Maybe she is wild and alive after all. She drinks, and orders more. She loses count while she waits for him, glad for the space, glad for the extra minutes to deliberate on what to say when he arrives.

Tequila doesn’t make you have a good time. It’s about the alcohol content and the early exposures you have with particular drinks that wire the brain to connect certain substances with certain conditions. So when she bounces on her feet in time with the terrible music, it’s not really the drink. It’s just past experiences of partying with Missy or college friends telling her brain that this is fun, and her body playing along.

She’s got the presence of mind to feel it starting to set in, and to remember how all those tequila-fuelled college parties ended, in gutters and gardens. This scene has never quite been fun for her. She tried fun, weeks ago, and it cost her. Mulder isn’t talking about it but she knows she bewildered him when she disappeared for this fling with Ed. Maybe hurt him, she isn’t sure. Now this mass is gathering behind her face, a ticking time bomb waiting for its moment to snatch her life away. The doctor will tell her what she already knows, that it can’t be surgically removed and if it grows in the wrong direction, she’ll seize and die. How soon? That’s what she doesn’t know.

How’s she supposed to break this to him? She calls the bartender over for a refill, but the fluorescently dressed woman – totally in the spirit of Tacky Tuesday – is watching someone else approach.

‘Rad party, Scully.’

He has to lean close to speak into her ear but she doesn’t flinch. She turns to him, close enough that she could kiss him if she wanted. The buzz in her head agrees that it’s a deliciously terrible idea. She wouldn’t regret it until later. And later she might be dead, so where’s the harm?

Luckily she just says, ‘You’re late.’ Her refill lands in front of her and the bartender sweetly asks for Mulder’s order. He declines with a brief smile, attention back on Scully. She can see the creases around his eyes and smile. He’s still in the same suit he was wearing in the office today before she left for her appointment. He’s late but he hurried straight here. He’s worried.

For her.

She knows right then that she can’t tell him, despite her best intentions. Not in a noisy bar on Tacky Tuesday to a soundtrack of synth pop.

‘Skinner caught me on my way out,’ he explains, or rather complains. His sharp eyes watch her raise her glass to her lips. ‘How many of those have you had, Scully?’

‘All of them.’ She laughs a little into her glass, recalling how she’d started off the evening counting those bachelorettes’ drinks and has since lost track of her own. She should have ordered water or something while she waited. Now the world is soft at the edges, her head starting to swim and stomach turning, and she dimly wonders when she last ate. She hasn’t had dinner, and doesn’t think she had lunch. A bad combination when you throw in world-ending news.

‘Did you get your scan?’ he asks, and asks again, louder when she pretends not to have heard him over the music. She gets a tiny thrill at the way her white lie manipulates him into leaning into her, his face brushing her hair. She nods, indulging in his nearness and the way the alcohol thrums through her veins to the noisy soundtrack. ‘Are you okay?’

There’s the question. She closes her eyes tight against the taste and tips the tumbler back. The bartender was heavy-handed with this one; mouthful after mouthful, it buys her a few seconds. She feels Mulder’s warm hand close firmly over hers and together they lower the glass to the bar.

Together. They do everything together. This, though, she’ll do on her own. You don’t get to take a friend along when you die of cancer. Not even a best friend you’re quietly in love with.

She avoids it for as long as she can get away with it, then dares to look up at him. It’s more irresponsible than kissing him or running off with some stranger to teach him a lesson about taking her for granted. She meets his eyes and she’s captured in their intensity. He’s gazing down at her with concern, eyes that see deeper than any x-ray machine. She feels his unconditional care for her in her soul and knows he sees her wholly. He sees the connection between her uncharacteristic drinking and choice in venue and her fear. He’s scared, too, and he doesn’t even know yet.

He scares her when he’s like this, and the tequila and her anecdotal associations of recklessness aren’t helping. In moments like this one, she’s afraid he might be in love with her, too.

His fingers unwind hers from the glass. They unpick her attachment to the reality where they’re just partners and she’s got a simple fact to share with him that’s relevant to them both. The music leaves a gap between upbeat verses, just long enough for him to ask again, ‘Scully? Are you okay?’

She tries to smile. ‘I’m fine. Really.’

‘Why don’t I believe you?’

Why indeed? He knows her too well. Impulsively she twists her hand so that her palm faces his. She twines her fingers through the gaps between his and smiles for real when he obliges. She could fall into his warm affection, soak it into her bones where it’ll either melt her or cast her stronger. She could tell him about the white node in the x-ray and he’d listen and then dispute it and savagely insist that together they’ll find a way to save her. She’s not sure she can handle his optimism right now, not on top of everything else.

The moment’s so perfect. She should use it to say, I’m sorry about Ed. She should use it to say, This right here, it’s all I really want from you. She should use it to say, There’s something you need to know, and it’ll hurt us both for me to say it, but you make me believe I can handle the immensity of it if you’re with me.

That’s not what comes out. The tequila speaks.

She yanks him closer just as the final chorus rises to its crescendo, and it’s so loud in this stupid bar that she isn’t sure he hears when she whispers, ‘Take me home,’ right into his ear. But maybe he does. He releases her hand so he can flick a bank note down beside her last empty glass and lets her pull him between overly enthusiastic bachelorettes and seedy day drinkers who’ve overstayed their session. All of it’s a blur of noise and tacky brightness in line with the theme, and amidst it she feels emboldened. Maybe she’s months from death from incurable cancer, but maybe by some miracle her gentlemanly partner has misinterpreted her request exactly the way the tequila intended.

Her stomach twists, hope and horror adrift in a turbulent sea of alcohol she hasn’t digested yet. She chances a terrified look at him but can’t tell. Has she just ruined everything? Has she just opened the door to everything she hasn’t dared to want outside of dreams?

She trips in the doorway and Mulder catches her arm. Momentarily she imagines that he’ll pull her in close or press her up against the wall or some other thrillingly arousing scenario where he takes advantage of her weakness, where her weakness is good for something, but later she’ll cringe at the pathetic fantasy that ignores the key fact that she’s a drunk wreck and he’s her caring best friend keeping her from utterly humiliating herself. Barely. Did she not just ask Fox Mulder to take her home with him?

The thought comes with a spark of clarity that ignites the confused sea in her stomach, and in horror she feels it all coming back up. She retches and keeps the first sour wave down; her partner recognises the signs and pulls her to a small garden. She’s violently sick and her mortification is complete when he warmly hugs her shoulders and brushes her short hair clear of the mess.

The cancer behind her eyes will only be treatable with chemical and radiation therapies. This is what she’s got to look forward to.

‘I’m sorry,’ she mumbles after spitting out the last of the tequila’s dregs, the bar’s noise slamming against the insides of her skull. She’s sorry for more things than she can get her tongue around right now. She closes her eyes and lets her head fall forward against the tree. ‘I don’t usually…’

‘Vomit on my shoes? No, I did notice that slight deviation.’ She hears his smile as she groans. She really has royally screwed this up. First Ed, now tonight. It wasn’t meant to go like this. He drops his voice. ‘Scully, it’s okay. It’s okay to be scared. I’m scared too. But we don’t know anything yet, right? Not until you see the specialist?’

He’s scoping, checking his intel is right, and she hates to lie to him but she can’t throw up on his shoes and then tell him she’s dying. She nods against the tree trunk. Her head’s pounding now and even with her stomach empty, she knows she’ll feel rotten tomorrow.

‘Today it was just… technicians,’ she confirms, and he gets her walking again, slower this time. ‘No results yet.’

‘Sometimes waiting is worse.’ He keeps her at his side down the narrow street toward the busier one at the juncture up ahead. She drowsily supposes he plans to wave down a taxi from there. No chance here. The lights are few and she thinks it’s not a lane she’d normally traverse on her own at night. But she’s not alone. He’s got her.

‘I didn’t mean to drink so much. Thank you,’ she slurs, stopping suddenly, realising that of all the things she hasn’t said, this one can’t stay that way, ‘for meeting me here. On short notice, over nothing, and for… Mulder, I’m so embarrassed.’

She doesn’t remember all tonight’s details, but she remembers him smiling through one breath of laughter and tightening his arm around her shoulders. She seems to remember him assuring her, ‘Scully, it’s not over nothing,’ or something to that effect. He accompanies her in the cab to her home and sees her inside, where she effectively passes out still dressed on top of her bed. The next day at work he’s sitting behind his desk when she walks in and he asks about her head. The question freezes her in place as she thinks about the tiny cancer growing in there until she realises he’s asking about the dull ache she’s carrying around. She’s spared telling him for another day. She apologises for her appalling conduct. He asks if she’d like to buy him a drink later to make up for it, and her wince becomes a reluctant smile.

She still doesn’t know how to be honest with him to his face, so that night she starts to write, but even before she puts pen to paper, she’s decided she’s never touching tequila again.

Chapter Text

Agent Pendrell is dead.

The popular stereotype of gin-drinkers as miserable is of course one she’s familiar with but it’s late at night and that bottle she was gifted by her cousin last fall is over the back behind some out-of-date jar sauce, so she pours it anyway. She knows the correlation between gin and grief is entirely socially constructed. It doesn’t make people sad – they choose to drink it when they’re sad because of the subconscious associations. The alcohol content serves as a depressant, sedating the central nervous system and inhibiting emotional regulation, so whatever the drinker is already feeling is untethered and allowed to tumble free. In this instance, it seems appropriate, and she doesn’t suppose it matters what she drinks.

He’s gone. Yesterday, young and eager, now cold and still, his life extinguished. For what? An interrupted kill shot in a convoluted scheme to cover up another hundred and thirty or so murders conducted in service of keeping an even bigger secret. The bullet wasn’t intended for Pendrell at all. One second earlier or one second later and he’d have cleared the line of fire. Louis Frisch would be dead. Maybe Scully would be, if she’d paused to ask her colleague how he was before returning to her seat. If she'd thought to care. Pendrell would still be here.

Sean Pendrell. She hadn’t even known his given name, not in any of the conversations where he went out of his way to help her with her investigations, not as she shot his killer’s leg and knelt with him to stem his pierced and bubbling chest. And now he’s not here anymore.

He’s gone and that’s what should be breaking her heart, but it’s more complicated than that. Because he idolised her and she never loved him back, not like that, and he never got his chance to bring it up and know for sure. Because she’s dying, too. Because she’s leaving people behind and, just like Pendrell, she hasn’t made peace with her feelings yet.

Hey, birthday girl! I have something for you.

Slowly she takes the keyring from her pocket and plays with it while she sips her drink. It’s not from Pendrell, but as nothing resembling a gift was catalogued among the contents of his pockets at the hospital where he died from his wounds, she’ll never know what token of affection he picked out for her. Likely something with more thought and relevance than the Apollo 11 keyring Mulder gave her, though of course she loves it more than he can know, more than anything poor Pendrell could have chosen. She tightens her fist around the metal disc, the sparkle of Mulder’s eyes as he offered it to her glinting in the silver of the ring.

I just thought it was a cool keychain.

She’s never said the words, but she knows he knows, at least that she loves him dearly, if not the nature of that love. She relies on him and he’s seen her at every high and low. Now each day he’s working at her side while cancer slowly eats away at the time she has left, lurking invisible behind every shared glance and choosing inopportune moments to remind them both it’s still there. It’s stealing her life but in other ways it’s killing him, an everyday memento of his own impotence. She hates what it does to the glow of him. Pendrell’s death hurts, but it’s opened a darker hole that she can’t seem to fill and hide from – Pendrell’s dead, and she’ll be next, and her last hours won’t be spent in shock, expecting to get better because that’s what’s meant to happen to healthy young men with kind and patriotic hearts. It’ll be aware that there’s no coming back, no miracle on the horizon, that going out unspectacularly is what happens to sick young women who get in the way of important men, and it’ll be spent watching Mulder watch her die.

The thought stings her eyes and makes her throat ache, and she empties the glass trying to swallow it away. See, it’s not the gin that makes people sad. They’re sad when they pour the glass. They’re sad when they finish the glass, and they’re sad when they lean forward for the bottle and can’t be bothered pouring another. She settles back on her sofa with the two-thirds-gone gin bottle and swigs from it periodically in the half-hearted hope of washing the feelings down where she doesn’t have to feel them. It’s normal to feel grief over unexpected loss, she tells herself. What’s unfair is that it dredges up other grief. Impending losses. Life unlived. And she should know better than to drink when she already feels like this, not least because she has cancer and this isn’t helping, but she’s dying anyway.

She’s dying anyway.

She chokes on a painful sob and hugs a cushion closer. Closing her eyes doesn’t make things better. Images and unprocessed feelings tied up with the yellow-bagged bodies of one hundred and thirty-four crash victims from flight 549 wait in line behind unprocessed feelings around the death of Max Fenig and unprocessed terror lingering from the impossible span of time between Mulder hanging up on her in-flight – my watch just stopped – and the moments her pounding feet and heaving chest brought her to the plane aisle to see him, alive. Death and loss. Loss and death. Soon it’ll be her death and Mulder’s loss, and he’ll be the one sitting on his well-worn sofa with a bottle of something his body could do without and an endless pit of regrets and things unsaid.

They’re good at digging for the truth, just not at facing it when it comes to each other.

She drinks and drinks and stops only to gasp for breath and to blink new tears away. The piney ethanol really could do with a mixer but the refrigerator is too far away. Questions she forgot to ask earlier start to drift upward from the swirling sadness taking root in her chest. Where will Agent Pendrell’s funeral be held? Where was he from and who knew him well enough to attend? Did he have family to miss him? Are they sitting at home like she is, in shock and crying their hearts out over his loss, and thinking just of him, like he deserved?

When she goes, and leaves Mulder and her family alone to miss her, there will be questions. She thinks of Max and his unfinished business, left now in the hands of his believer Sharon following his untimely death. Scully, though, her unfinished business is her death, and the circumstances around her abduction and subsequent illness will fall into Mulder’s hands. Heavy. Hard to carry, impossible to solve and a death sentence to prove. Her loss will derail the second half of his life the way Samantha’s disappearance ruled the first half, not because she thinks herself so integral to his existence that he won’t be able to go on, but because she knows what Fox Mulder is. Obsessive. Driven by guilt. She sees it in his worried eyes whenever her nose bleeds or when she tires quicker than she used to. He already blames himself. Finding someone else to pin with responsibility will be his new life’s quest, and it can’t be won.

She loves him and she’ll be the ruin of him.

Minutes fade into the next and she loses track of them as the bottle’s volume drops and drops. The tears keep coming. She was okay at first, but now the case is done and she’s at home alone and without the investigation to focus on, she’s coming apart at the seams. The living room swims behind saltwater lenses whenever she looks up, but mostly she stares at the senseless keyring. Pendrell wasn’t in love with her, she tells herself – surely she would have known, he would have said something, wouldn’t he? – but his preoccupation with impressing her is what got him out of his seat. She remembers his bright, eager eyes lighting up at the prospect of buying her a drink for her birthday. He was already past tipsy, drinking with one of the other professional women who frequented the place until he spotted Scully. It was while bringing drinks to her table that he took Frisch’s bullet, saving both Scully and the whistle-blower with the unintended sacrifice of his own life, but what a waste, because Louis Frisch has been arrested and probably won’t be heard from again, and Scully will be dead in a matter of months.

She’ll be dead. She’s known this for a long time, and she’s seen plenty of death across her career, but this case has smashed the boarded window she hides her feelings behind and the light falling through reveals ugly truths. Something inside cracks and she curls over herself, wracked with frightened, miserable sobs. The bottle, now empty apparently, slides between her knees and hits the ground with a loud thud that makes her jump.

A momentary distraction from her spiralling grief. She reaches for her lifeline.

On impulse she grabs out her phone and, through the blinding tears, dials the number she could recite in her sleep. She doesn’t even check the time but unless he’s chasing a UFO to the bottom of a lake or knocked out unconscious in someone’s basement somewhere, she knows he’ll answer her.

‘Scully?’

His voice saying her name is a balm for which there are no earthly words. She’s saved having to confirm by caller ID, which gives her time to realise she’s still sobbing, gasping for breath, and couldn’t speak anyway. Squeezing her eyelids shut and clutching the phone to her ear, she curls her legs close like a pathetic child and is just glad he isn’t there to see.

Though, it’s a little deep into their relationship to worry about judgement.

‘Scully, are you okay?’ he asks, and she can easily picture him, lying on his own sofa in the dark in one of his black turtlenecks, now sitting up in sudden anxiety. ‘Talk to me. Are you there?’

The tears come faster as blurry drunk thoughts of all the things he must be worrying about occur to her, too slow. What would she assume, if a call came from his phone late at night and she could only hear the sounds of choking on his end? A kidnapping, an assault, an injury?

With effort she manages, ‘M-Mulder. I’m here.’ And then she’s crying again. She can’t stop. One day soon, she won’t be able to call him at any time of the night. She doesn’t know where her soul will go and what level of awareness she’ll have there, but she’s terrified of any realm where Mulder isn’t available to take her calls.

‘Where are you?’

‘Home.’ She hiccoughs. Great. Breathing evenly is enough of a challenge. She starts to say that. What she hears is an incoherent mumble. Mulder probably thinks she’s being strangled by house invaders.

‘Alone?’ he checks warily. She looks down at the floor, trying to swallow her sobs and get some semblance of control.

‘Gin’s here.’

‘Jen? Who?’

‘No one. Bottle. I… I drank it all. Half, maybe.’ Her voice is embarrassingly raw and choppy as she dissolves again, trying to tell him the reason for her call. ‘Mulder… I’m s-so… I’m so sad.’

‘Well, that’s because you’re drinking gin,’ he replies sensibly. ‘In a study just last year of more than forty regular drinkers of different spirits, a majority self-reported significantly higher rates of depressive thoughts while drinking gin.’

It’s a statement with so much wrong with it that even in the state she’s in, she scoffs.

‘That’s not…’ She hiccoughs again. Where does he read this rubbish? ‘There’s no… no causal connection…’

‘There she is,’ he says warmly, and she can imagine his relaxing smile, the tightness of his shirt across his chest and arms as he swings his legs over the edge of his seat. ‘Do you want me to come over?’

Yes. ‘No. I want…’ so many things. Now’s not the time. ‘Can you j-j-just talk? Please?’

He says something gently cheeky and reassuring but she doesn’t remember it, only the relieved warmth under the words. He probably says the right things. She listens to the sound of his voice and breathes through this emotional crisis while he guesses this is about Pendrell and tells her it wasn’t her fault. He manages to not talk about flight 549 or his own abduction experience or the military’s convenient cover story to bury credible evidence of alien technology. It’s selfish, that she’s not thinking of what he’s going through and worrying only about her impending demise and imagining the impacts, but she’s too drowsy and shuddery to care much. He brings her down, or rather back up, from where her feelings were taking her. Her eyes sting and her throat feels raw and her nose is running. Still, she feels safer already, more grounded. He does this. He makes life what it is, and makes death seem a long way away.

‘Mulder,’ she interrupts in a small voice, and attentive as he is, he shuts up immediately.

‘Yeah, Scully?’

She tries to say, You know me better than anyone and I’m so grateful for you. She tries to say, We both need to come to terms with what’s coming for me. She tries to say, I never want you to blame yourself or throw your brilliant self away chasing my ghost when I’m gone.

That’s not what comes out. The gin speaks.

‘Mulder, I d-don’t want to die,’ she stammers out through wobbly lips, and bursts back into fresh tears at her mind’s crystal-clear image of his falling expression. Her emotions plummet with that picture, and she sobs and sobs like the absolute wreck she’s determined nobody, least of all Mulder, will ever guess that this disease is reducing her to. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry…’

‘No, Scully, don’t, don’t be sorry,’ he insists. She hears the pain he’s trying to hide from her. Telling the truth is what they demand from the shadows they investigate, not, apparently, from each other. ‘None of this is your fault. Your feelings, all of this is valid and normal. It’s okay to be sad. Your friend died, and you’re exhausted. You’ve had a godawful birthday.’

It didn’t start out that way. ‘And you… you remembered i-it and everything.’

‘Look how that turned out. Lesson learned. No, seriously, Scully. Do you want me to come over?’

Nothing would feel better than to curl into his embrace and fall asleep to the steady beat of his loyal heart and the erratic pounding now building in her brain. He’d come over armed with a bunch of crappy movies to stick in her VCR and he’d sit here with her and pretend she’s not red-faced and drunk and snotty and terribly depressing company. He’s more than she could ever deserve, sometimes. She wipes her runny nose as she starts to tell him yes.

Her finger is red. Clarity tears through the alcohol haze and she sits forward, grabbing for tissues to stem the bleed. She shouldn’t have had this much to drink. She shouldn’t have put her body under this much stress.

‘Scully?’ Mulder knows her too well, and he can read in her delayed response that something isn’t right. ‘You still there? I can be there in half an hour. Less, if you need me.’

If she needs him. When does she not? She pulls the tissue away and sees it’s more than earlier today. She rips more from the box.

‘N-No, no, it’s…’ She stuffs the bundle clumsily against her face, speaks through the tissues, half-aware that her sober partner is hearing all this scuffling. ‘It’s late. I’m… I’m okay.’

‘Yeah?’ He’s unconvinced.

‘Yes. I don’t want you to… I’m a mess,’ she admits, the most honest she’s prepared to be with him right now. If he comes here now he won’t just see her drunk and vulnerable, two things she hates to be in front of him. He’ll see her dying. She’s been dying for months and she will be for months more but tonight, fuelled on gin, she doesn’t want to make this the scene where she spills all her fears for his existence beyond her death. She can’t do that to him. It’s going to be bad enough when it happens for real. She gets up and goes to the bathroom, still clutching the phone to her ear. ‘I think I need some sleep. Thank you, though.’

He lets her off the hook reluctantly and makes her promise to call back if she changes her mind. She hangs up and stands at the bathroom sink for what feels like a long time waiting for the blood to stop flowing. She fills and swallows two glasses of water from the tap, and cleans herself up with clumsy hands under unforgiving lights. She stares at herself in the mirror for a long time and sees someone weak who just came too close to shattering the person whose strength has been holding her together. She swallows, uncomfortably and abruptly sobered by that thought, and resolves not to crack again.

She still doesn’t know how to reconcile the thought of her own death as an end to her journey with Mulder, but she’s sure that no matter how many short days or miraculous years she has left, she won’t repeat the mistake of grief and gin.

Chapter Text

For once their case has a relatively happy ending, or so it does in the way Mulder retells it in the car as he drives endlessly south instead of endlessly east. The Cher impersonator, he insists, would be excellent, indistinguishable from the real thing.

Associated with celebration and milestone events, Scully knows the associations between champagne and fits of giggles and tactless slips of the tongue, but when the waiter offers it at the door on his classy platter, she accepts it anyway. Mulder declines, making her think she should have, too, but he doesn’t give her time to reconsider, leading her into the run-down establishment and regaling her with descriptions of how majestic this place would look and how the deformed and nameless individual they’d found back in Indiana would light up to have his dreams made true. She sips idly and listens and lets him weave this reality for her, thinking these bubbles don’t do his vision justice, thinking he’s the one alight with dreams and wonder.

He shines. She’s been in love with him so long now that sometimes she wonders if it’s just bias, especially since so many others don’t seem to see it. Right now he’s in his element, illustrating this better ending and drawing the final connections of his outlandish theory for her, and he’s so alive that despite a sleepless case where her last rest was livestock anaesthesia, she feels unreasonably alive, too.

She is alive, thanks to him. Thanks to him in many ways. Her cancer is in remission and she’s back at work, and even on black-and-white days she feels vibrant in a way she doesn’t recall feeling before she got sick. Like almost losing each other, and then getting this miraculous chance to rewrite their ending and see out the rest of their story, has brought her and Mulder onto a new wavelength of understanding and appreciation. He’s crazy and impossible but she loves him that way. She’s stubborn and fastidious but she has seen the lengths of his devotion to preserve her just as she is. She thought she needed to find the right way to tell him but now she sees it doesn’t need to be said. She listens and she drinks until the flute is empty. The waiter, trapped in his greyscale reality without Mulder’s story to bring the world its colour, doesn’t have the crowds of their fiction to serve, and when he notices she’s finished he brings her another. The base leaves a ring of condensation on his silver platter.

Somebody set a tumbler here and didn’t use no coaster.

Ungracefully, she snorts a breath of laughter at the memory of Shaineh Berkowitz presenting wood stains as evidence of a home invasion by a two-mouthed monster, and Mulder pauses, mistaking himself as the source of her amusement. It doesn’t put him off – he’s well accustomed to being laughed at, and to her general disbelief. Instead he’s invigorated, accepting a glass of his own. His hand on her lower back urges her from the antiquated foyer his words have turned beautiful and into a rundown hallway where he changes peeling wallpaper and stained carpets into a high-end venue straight out of Vegas. He describes the delight on the face of their young and friendless charge and she sees it without question, though he’s in fact far behind them.

Champagne’s associations with fun are more substantial than associations made with other drinks. While the traditional connotations of celebration and playfulness are of course constructed through repeated exposures and media advertising, the science agrees that it does get drinkers drunk faster than even high-alcohol spirits. It’s the carbon dioxide, the bubbles, that gets the alcohol more quickly into the bloodstream. People aren’t wrong when they say it goes straight to their heads. She feels it going to hers. She finds she doesn’t mind. She smiles over the rim of the glass and lets the minutes drop into the timeless realm between the end of a case and their return to DC. As far as anyone else knows, they’re still on the road, still dutifully driving back to headquarters. He’s the only person in the world who knows she’s here in this neglected theatre, hours off course, and she’s the only one around to hear the magic in his voice as he tells the way he thinks this story should have ended.

Where’s the writer? I want to speak to the writer.

He pauses in the middle of detailing his theory about the use of farm animal DNA in Pollidori Senior’s insemination experiments to let her giggle at the ridiculousness – his grasp of biology is honestly so poor – to sip from his flute. The hall lights twinkle in the bubbles and in his eyes. She’s exhausted from this case but momentarily pities the billions of people alive today who will never meet him, never witness the marvel that she’s been blessed to walk alongside for what sometimes feels like an eternity.

Her light-hearted laughter inspires the next scene of his storytelling, which is now taking on a life of its own.

‘The Great Mutato told us himself, Scully, that he experienced the world through the homes of the women his father impregnated, so when he sees this place, it’s a castle in the clouds,’ he describes as an older couple drift past with affronted looks on their faces. Scully ignores them and their drab reality. She’ll have to return to it soon enough. ‘He’d turn his head to see the high ceiling with its plaster roses and the chandelier and he’d know awe.’

She tips her head back obligingly and sees his vision through the flaking paint and the dusty light fittings. When she straightens, he’s looking at her and she finishes her drink. The bubbles fizz on her tongue and down her throat, and, caught up in this stolen moment with her beautiful best friend, even her very rational mind can’t convince her the warmth running through her is resultant of the alcohol.

‘And then what happens?’ she asks, unable to resist challenging him even when she’s enjoying him. ‘We smuggle him here and show him the beauty of the world where he can belong, too, and we’re here with his whole town of supporters standing on the threshold of the rest of his life…?’

He grins, loving her willingness to play along in the poetry of his vision, and ignores the handful of overdressed patrons heading for the double doors at the end of the underwhelming hallway. He offers her his arm.

‘Then the show starts,’ he says, gesturing to the framed sign promoting tonight’s entertainment. Finally reality taps at the fragile enchantment he’s woven over the night and she balks.

‘No, Mulder, you can’t be serious,’ she insists. ‘We’ll end up so late. We’re already not getting back until morning.’

Not that she’s eager to get back to their real lives. Maybe that’s why she doesn’t protest when he plucks the empty glass from her hand and switches it for his nearly full one.

‘Scully,’ he admonishes, looping his arm through hers and leading her after the other patrons, ‘you don’t want to disappoint our new friend after we’ve brought him so far. This is his dream.’ He tightens his grip and leans closer, gesturing ahead at nothing with the empty glass. ‘Look at his faces.’

She’s a medical doctor with a degree in physics but he’s had her in his charms for a long time, and he pulls her back into the fantasy of fun with expertise. He’s had a lot of practice and she’s indulged him with many opportunities. She sips from his glass, smiling at the silly thought that her lips might be touching the same place his did and that’s kind of like a kiss but broken in half by time.

‘One song,’ she relents begrudgingly, but begrudges it more when Mulder nods and straightens, accepting her determined distance from his magic. She wants it back. ‘Maybe two. One for each of his smiles.’

It does the trick. Her partner smirks and the spring comes back to his step. He pulls her off course to stash the empty glass in one of the miserable-looking potted plants lining the hall while no one’s looking, a childish move reminiscent of a schoolboy hiding soda cup litter at the cinemas, but instead of making her shake her head it makes her giggle. This impromptu detour is better than any movie date she can remember with any past boyfriend. This night sparkles with colours that make her life before she knew him seem grey by comparison.

‘Our young friend is enthralled by the vastness of this venue,’ he murmurs into her ear as they step through the double doors into a decidedly small and poorly laid out theatre. She suppresses another giggle at his well-disguised sarcasm. Six or seven other couples who already look bored are sitting at small tables scattered toward the back, leaving another dozen tables free, facing the moth-eaten red curtain behind which the act is still preparing. ‘He’s never been anywhere so glorious, so classy. The crowd’s anticipation is palpable in the air and we have to squeeze to get through. Mutato insists on sitting near the front and by fluke, by magical coincidence, or maybe because you so thoughtfully called ahead, there’s one table left for us, front and centre. Everything’s falling into place.’

They take seats right up close to the stage, surrounded by empty tables and distant people of grey, all of it blurring at the edges thanks to the combined spell of Mulder’s continued storytelling and the bubbles. She keeps drinking, keeps listening. The champagne’s cheap and too sweet, somehow perfect for the moment, and soon it’s gone and the waiter stops at their table to offer another ahead of the show starting. She plans to say no. She’s tired and it’s literally going to her head.

‘Everyone’s having too good a time to stop now, Scully,’ Mulder says, and says yes for them both. Two new glasses appear on the table. The waiter takes her empty one and looks dubious when he seems to remember serving them both last time. They keep straight faces of ignorance until he walks away, then both snort with uncontained laughter. She pulls her glass closer, giggling harder when it sloshes up the side.

‘Alright, what does he say once he’s sitting down?’ she asks playfully. ‘His whole town’s here with him, all around us.’

‘Obviously.’

‘Well, how’s he feeling? What does he say?’

‘He feels on top of the world,’ Mulder replies very sincerely, ‘like everything that’s gone wrong in his life, every time he’s questioned his place in the universe and wondered whether it’s worth pushing on, has all been part of a grander plan to bring him here, to this moment. He’s off script, free from all the expectations he set for himself, and he’s only feet away from the person he idolises above anyone else in the world.’ He lifts his champagne to the drawn curtain. Even through the warm haze of the drink she’s consumed too fast, she’s touched by the correlations with his own life, his recently shaken belief in aliens, her brush with death and his crusade’s part in that. He drinks half his drink in one go and lowers the flute to the table. ‘He says he thinks you look beautiful tonight.’

She bursts into giggles, delighting for once in the feeling of colour flushing her traitorous translucent cheeks. ‘No, he doesn’t.’

‘Alright, he says he hopes Cher sings Turn Back Time,’ Mulder relents, watching her. ‘He likes the disco ball. He says this is the perfect ending to his story.’

‘One eerily matched to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and just as plausible,’ Scully teases but won’t break the spell. The time between wrapping a case and arriving back in Skinner’s office to debrief is an inconsequential no-man’s land, a series of long flights and longer roads all of indeterminate length. None of it goes in a report. None of what’s said gets repeated. It’s their own time. She sips from her glass, inspired. ‘How does he know it’s the ending?’

He isn’t ready for that, and reflects for a moment, tapping his fingers on the stem of his glass as the lights start to dim.

‘You think it’s not?’

‘I think you brought him all this way and he’s got his whole life to live,’ she answers. ‘You said at the farm that the story wasn’t supposed to end like that. Maybe it’s barely started. He’s got to search for his bride. He could go anywhere.’

‘Maybe he just wants to stay here.’

The lights go out, a little ominously actually, and the music begins as the curtains draw back. The Cher impersonator really doesn’t look the part unless you squint considerably but has the deep, impressive voice right from the first note. The magic Mulder’s been weaving all night is sealed with Turn Back Time, and Scully’s as enthralled as Mutato. It’s the best show she’s ever been to. In the transitions between the songs, while the other patrons offer lukewarm applause, she and Mulder show their missing companion’s appreciation with loud and unbecoming cheers and claps. The singer bows her head in gracious acknowledgement of their enthusiasm and her pianist starts up the mystical notes of the next song.

Mulder leans across to her. She feels the buzz of his attention and her drink in her underslept veins as a pleasant tingle of anticipation.

‘He just realised this is his favourite song,’ he reveals seriously. ‘He can barely stay in his seat, he’s so excited. Cher is delighted to have her biggest fan in the audience and she comes down from the stage to sing to him in the big chorus.’

Her cheeks hurt from grinning at him. ‘Really?’

‘Really, Scully,’ he insists as the music builds and their entertainer starts to sing. ‘You watch. It’s a huge moment. Everyone will be up on their feet, dancing. Clapping in time to the music.’

The stage lights shine back at her from his eyes. He’s beautiful, and in this moment, hers alone. He inspires her and fascinates her, and by now, she knows she’ll follow him anywhere, even into dingy sideshow bar acts in obscure towns with washed up singers with voices that belong in Vegas when they’re meant to be on the road home.

‘You only like this song because it cites Elvis,’ she accuses. He feigns hurt.

‘It’s not my favourite, it’s his. Watch, Scully. I bet even you’ll be dancing in a minute.’

He waits for her comeback, eyes dancing already. She sips more of the champagne she should have stopped drinking two glasses ago and smirks back at him.

She considers saying, You’re magical. She considers saying, I love you, too. She considers saying, Thank you for your wonderful imagination and the way it’s carried us through all the horrors of the last few years to bring us here, to this very minute, which I never want us to leave.

That’s not what comes out. The champagne speaks.

‘Mulder, I almost believe you,’ she says with her sincerest giggle. He shrugs, unoffended, and they turn back to the show. It’s an excellent rendition of Walking in Memphis and the alcohol dulls any sensory information that contradicts the perfection of the scene. As the song builds and drops back and builds again, the same way their lives do, she can easily imagine the naïve and quite sweet deformed young man known as Mutato dancing with elation in his seat. Just as Mulder predicted, she pictures the superstar stepping down from the stage mid-song to approach their table and sing to her biggest fan, drawing him away to dance.

Mulder’s right. His version is better. It often is. Too bad he’s not the writer.

The chorus explodes and Mulder stands. Spins to offer her his hand. He doesn’t look at her so maybe he doesn’t see the surprise on her face, but he’s smiling at the floor like he knows what she’ll do. Maybe he is the writer after all.

The champagne makes her brave. He makes her reckless. She takes the offer without hesitation and he pulls her up, straight into arms that are made for her. His downcast eyes are already angled to meet hers and his other hand catches hers like the move was choreographed. Smiles matched, they’re already in sway, and she lets him lead her in a waltz through the fictional crowd for the remaining minute of the song, a minute that’s all theirs. The drink makes the room fuzzy, makes it hard to distinguish whether the smoke effect he described is there or not, makes the impersonator the real Cher, but it does nothing to diminish him. He’s real, his embrace warm, his body firm and alive. It’s everything else that’s the dream.

She starts laughing and can’t stop.

‘Told you,’ he teases when the song winds down, though he doesn’t let her go. She lets him hold her, buzzing with the joy of being alive and being alive with him. She’s also feeling a little unsteady and is happy for the bracing of his arms. ‘Tonight’s the highlight of his life so far. You know, since he lived in a farmyard cellar prior to today.’

‘Hmm,’ she agrees through her mirthful smile. ‘And with so much life left to live, who knows what will come next?’

‘Could be anything,’ he concurs, releasing her waist to twirl her though the music’s ended. She giggles and spins, hearing the clatter of her shoes on the dancefloor. He catches her and draws her in again. She grins up at him and thinks he can’t possibly not know she’s enchanted by him.

‘What about Mrs Berkowitz and… and Mrs Pollidori and their pregnancies?’ she wonders between bursts of uncontrolled laughter. The champagne’s levels of magnesium, zinc and potassium are lifting her spirits to a point of ridiculousness, and her exhausted state before her arrival here has hastened the process. She’s sure she’s making a fool of herself but she doesn’t care. Those people in the audience, they’re black and white and boring.

‘Jerry Springer,’ Mulder quips immediately as a new song picks up. ‘Shaineh Berkowitz names her daughter after you, Scully.’

She cracks up and collapses into him, almost crying with laughter. She hears his smile in his voice as he details the special episode about the mutant babies. Apparently it all ends well for everyone in Mulder’s version of this story. The new song peaks and he tightens his hand in preparation for another twirl. She feels her wobbly legs and should say no, but he makes her reckless, and bad things don’t happen in his stories.

He spins her and her ankle twists. The spell breaks and reality returns with a shock of pain up her leg. She misses his world immediately and wants to cry.

‘Scully!’ He catches her before she can fall on it and do more damage, and rights her, guiding her to his chair where he lowers her down. ‘Damn it, I’m sorry, Scully.’

She won’t accept his apologies. She’s the one who just ruined a wonderful night, and now her head’s throbbing against the beat of music that doesn’t sound so magical outside of Mulder’s fantasy and her ankle aches. The pain is sharp and new and makes the alcohol in her stomach feel uneasy.

‘I shouldn’t have had so much to drink,’ she insists as he kneels to remove her shoe. Cinderella and her prince, except the story’s over and Mulder’s so much more than a man who likes a girl for her dancing and her shoes. ‘Just leave it. I don’t want to be sick on you.’

‘That would top my evening,’ he claims, and though the magic’s been undone, they can still grin at each other. Maybe it’s not all gone.

He helps her hobble out in the interlude and gets some water into her. She passes out in the car, the opening bars of Walking in Memphis still singing in her veins, and wakes up when he pulls into a motel halfway to home. She supposes she sleeps there. Her foot feels a lot better after the rest when they’re back on the road the next day, so while it’s tender, she diagnoses it as not broken. The ride is quiet but content. They’re in a good place, this no-man’s land of their own time between case and real life, and that doesn’t fade.

Otherwise the comedown is worse than just the dreaded champagne hangover. The details of what really happened are entangled with her partner’s vivid fiction and writing the report is an absolute nightmare. It takes three times as long as she anticipates, between all the phone calls and fact-checking, and the result is a very dull and vague retell. Luckily the forensic evidence of the old man’s murder at the hands of Dr Pollidori is indisputable and her unhelpful report does nothing to undermine what should be a clean conviction. Mulder, when she complains to him in the car, grins his sparkling storyteller’s smile and asks if he’s made a believer out of her.

She still doesn’t know if she’ll ever believe like he does, and tells herself that fanciful ideas stimulated by too much champagne aren’t a good indicator, though they’re hard to shake.

Chapter Text

Diana Fowley.

There are various myths and legends associated with red wine and Scully’s perpetuating one right now, a lonely and pointedly single woman wallowing in it to drown her sorrows, but she orders it anyway. The waiter brings it and asks if she’s ready to order an entrée. She says she’s still deciding and he leaves her be, reading the clues and clearing the table setting opposite her just to highlight the fact that she’s dining alone. She’s convinced the other diners notice, but equally certain that none of them care. Their disinterest barely registers against the amplified version of this feeling that’s been haunting her on and off since Mulder’s ex-partner came back on the scene. It’s a stinging wound that she hasn’t really addressed with him but after their argument in the car on the way to Arcadia at the Falls, it’s not as though it can have escaped his notice.

She read the email chain. She didn’t mean to; it was open on the computer they share on the desk that’s his in the office that only has his name on the door. He’s normally more careful so it didn’t occur to her that something left up on the screen might not be for her eyes. He’s back in contact with Agent Fowley. Despite that she’s been untruthful before. Despite that she’s arrested them and taken the X-Files out from under them and broken Mulder’s heart. She’s sent him intel, and he’s acting on it, though he’ll claim he’s not.

Instead he’s been fighting against this assignment, which he views as a waste of his time and “not an X-file”, and reading up on whatever it was Diana sent him. He’s not sharing with Scully. They’ve only just won back their office and only just been reassigned, and this woman still has her claws in Mulder’s back, manipulating him. Using him. It makes Scully angry just to think of it, but after she brings it up maybe a little tactlessly on the walk from the plane to the rental car lot and he accuses her of spying on him – and after a tense intermezzo while they sign paperwork and collect keys from the rental office – the resultant conversation is over before they hit the highway. She reminds him hotly that he can’t trust his ex-partner and he coldly rejects that out of hand.

There’s little else to say on the topic. At least it gets them back on the subject of the case, which is all that feels safe to talk about, but then their handful of days posing as a married couple are tense and strained. A window into what married life might look like, perhaps? He’s hot and cold. She knows she is, too. This case should have been fun. It hasn’t been. She can’t remember the last time she felt this lonely, least of all with him.

Admit it: you just want to play “house”.

Hollowly, she turns another page of the document she brought with her. The perpetrator is dead and the murders have stopped. Mulder’s got his explanation and it’s never going to hold up. No surprise there. The excavation of the former Kline property will continue for a few days and the agents are staying on in the motel nearby to oversee the processing of evidence and to direct the final stages of groundwork. Today was a full one, interviews with the Arcadia community neighbours and then write-ups, and this is her break from faces and screens. On a normal case, she knocks on Mulder’s door and tells him when she’s heading for the diner, but this evening she came here alone with some light reading. Okay, police reports. She doesn’t want the mental and emotional strain of trying to work him out, not right now. After his frosty dismissal of her concerns on the way here, he’s swayed from condescending to provocative, putting her on her guard with his customary moments of playful flirtation and unnecessary, apparently impulsive physical contact.

You want to make that honeymoon video now?

She rolls her eyes and takes oversized sips of red wine. Who says that on camera? Especially when they know it’s going into federal evidence? Only hours after their argument, she has to assume he was trying to lighten the tension, which she reluctantly concedes he succeeded in doing, like always. She can never stay mad with him for long, and the work always trumps any issue she takes with him personally. It’s why Skinner put them onto the Kline case in the first place – he wanted two agents who could pose as husband and wife while exploring avenues of investigation no one else would think of, and who better than his pair from the basement who already live in one another’s pockets? Their electricity and ease with each other is apparent to anyone who looks, Scully knows by now. They should have been a safe bet for the roles of Rob and Laura Petrie.

Well, they managed to convince the Arcadia gated community, at least. They did the job well. But that’s all that she’s sure of. She’s spent years believing she’s special, this connection she has with him, but she finds now that she doesn’t really know him. She still comes second to the crusade, and apparently third behind the woman from his past who helped him start down this unhealthy path. He keeps secrets and despite everything they’ve survived together, he’s still selective on how much of his past he shares with her. It hurts to know he’s got someone else he’s prepared to open up to and makes her wish she wasn’t hopelessly in love with him. She drinks her wine and keeps reading, pretending she can’t hear the raw echoes of Mulder calling her name in the Kline house when she was locked up hidden in the wardrobe.

Scully? Scully! Talk to me!

Because she knows, without a doubt, that he loves her, too, and that only makes this whole schism lonelier. He’d die for her. He came looking for her in that bedroom because he thought she’d been torn apart by his monster, when in fact the gore belonged to the former Big Mike, and she heard his fear for her in his voice. He’s been to Antarctic hell and back on her behalf, cried by her bedside when he thought his quest for aliens was going to kill her, overcome the previously insurmountable psychic duress of both Pusher and his evil twin to resist shooting her. He only asked, ‘what street?’ when she told him about the caduceus charm she couldn’t reach in the storm drain and came back fifteen minutes later with a filthy shirt and a bagged necklace. He supported her through cancer and danced with her to Cher.

He’d do anything for her except be honest about his involvement with another woman. That’s an answer in itself, isn’t it, even if she never meant to ask the question? Her glass soon empties and she waves the waiter down when she next sees him and orders a second.

‘You can keep these coming,’ she says when it arrives. ‘Actually, I’ll buy the bottle.’

She tells herself she doesn’t intend to drink it all in the one evening. It’s a lie. She tells herself it’ll help her sleep. Maybe it will – it’s a known relaxant – but first, she knows the alcohol will impair her ability to read these police reports and impact on her serotonin and dopamine levels, exacerbating these feelings of loneliness and turmoil. Whatever. She’s already feeling down and the wine’s working its sorcery, dragging her deeper into apathy. She doesn’t really want to be reading these anyway.

She can’t put what she really wants into words, because she doesn’t know, exactly. She drinks and she reads and she pours another and she watches the paragraphs swim on the white page and outside, the evening turns to night. The couples and families at the other tables swap out for different ones and the waiter is joined by a waitress for the dinner rush. Though it can’t really be a rush, how many rooms does this place have? Scully’s distracted brain starts to count the doors in the mental image she summons from her memory of the building before she realises she doesn’t even care. The other motel guests order average-looking food that fails to stimulate her appetite as it passes her on plastic plates. Luckily she’s filling up on wine so she doesn’t feel particularly hungry, though logically she knows she should eat at least bread or something else light to soak up some of this liquid loneliness. She can already predict tomorrow’s headache and knows work alongside her moody partner will be a bitch. Or she will be. A great tactic for winning back his favour and showing him what he’s missing out on by chasing shadows of his past girlfriend and trusting her over Scully.

She groans and drops her head into her folded arms, miserable. The headache is starting early. Her limbs feel like lead and she wishes she’d ordered this bottle to her room and done this reading in bed, so she could curl up now with all her regrets and self-doubts and fall asleep. At least if she’s lonely in her dreams, too, she probably won’t remember.

‘Looks like I’m interrupting a riveting read.’

She sighs but doesn’t look up as he drags out the seat opposite her and sits. His presence does its usual trick of somehow both relaxing and quietly thrilling her – that’s their unique blend of devoted love and magnetic attraction at work, she supposes dully. It’s not new. She doubts it’s something he’s unaware of. That only makes his stupid broody infatuation with the false hope that he can trust Diana Fowley more hurtful, because he has to know Scully’s lovesick for him and has spent five painful years subconsciously rebuilding her identity around the concept of herself as the nexus of his tenuous, hard-earned trust.

A foolish decision she’s paying for right now with what feels like a head full of cheap red wine.

‘Go away, Mulder.’

‘That’s no way to speak to your loving husband, Laura.’

‘Scully,’ she corrects irritably. ‘Case’s over. Now go away.’

‘That good?’ His voice is jovial but the way he tugs the pages out from under her elbow is gentle, not trying to dislodge her. ‘Something I’d like? You know I love a good mystery.’

‘Crime novel,’ she replies into the nest of her arms, unable to resist the playful banter he inspires, even if she doesn’t have the energy for him right now. ‘The villain’s Gene Gogolak. Sorry, spoilers.’

‘Aww, I don’t know about that,’ he responds airily. She feels the bottle beside her arm lift clear of the table and she hears its volume, or lack thereof, in the noise of it being placed back down. ‘As you’re usually quick to tell me, the case isn’t closed until we’ve got enough for a prosecution, and we’re a long way from that.’

That makes her look up, lifting her gaze to his with incredulity. She might be inebriated but she did not just hear him imply his claims about Gogolak aren’t proof of supernatural acts of setting a Tibetan thought-demon on his own neighbours. That’s her line.

‘You don’t think Gogolak’s at fault for what happened at the Falls?’ she demands. He sits back, eyes holding hers, expression too still and closed for her to read even if she wasn’t bordering on drunk. Is that a sampling of the minibar she smells on him? He’s been locked in his room for a long time. It makes sense, she supposes; he hasn’t seemed happy, either. What comes next she assumes is loaded and uncomfortable for him to say.

‘No, I do,’ he counters very precisely, ‘but I’ll hazard a guess he’s not guilty of driving you to emptying a bottle of wine in one sitting, is he?’

It’s surprisingly forward of him considering he’s got to know the answer to that, and must know the answer to the next question and that’s a topic he doesn’t want to discuss with her. He’s definitely been drinking, though he’s holding up better. She settles her chin on her folded arms.

‘It’s not empty,’ she comments finally. He sits forward and tips the bottle over her glass. It fills maybe two fingers’ worth and they both watch the dregs dribble out. His point’s made but she’s still feeling resentful and she isn’t going to let him have it. ‘Thanks. I was just thinking I need another.’

‘Scully, you’re upset. You’re avoiding me.’

She plays with the base of her glass and breaks eye contact, annoyed that he wants to have this conversation now. ‘You’re always so perceptive, aren’t you?’

‘Talk to me.’ The stoniness of his face has broken a little and she sees the desperation and vulnerability he’s hiding behind it. This Diana stuff, it’s tied up somewhere deep and he doesn’t want her to see it and judge him for it – she gets that, honestly, she does – and while he’s trying to guard this mess of emotion and keep moving forward, he’s struggling to show her how badly he wants her right where he needs her. But for her, none of that’s the issue. It’s that he doesn’t see why it should be Scully’s concern, so he alternates between pulling her in and shutting her out as soon as Diana appears on the horizon, offering to the woman who betrayed him her position as trust’s anchor. It doesn’t say much about the integrity of the position. ‘Let’s sort this out before we’ve got to go back to work tomorrow.’

She laughs bitterly. She doesn’t mean to.

‘I hope you’re not suggesting I’ll have trouble remaining professional around you at work, Agent Mulder,’ she says with scorn, which is more than she intends to say but by this point her feelings for him must be the Bureau’s worst-kept secret. Ironic, actually, that until she read that stupid email, she had been genuinely worrying about her ability to keep things professional as Laura Petrie, not knowing how long they’d be living that false life. Laura Petrie, she’d feared, might be tempted. Her husband looks like Mulder, after all, and she’d be alone with him each night after each day of pretending to belong to each other… Not an issue, it turns out. She sits up and begins collecting up the pages of the police reports so she doesn’t have to look at his wounded frown. ‘I’ll be fine tomorrow. You just be sure to let me know when I’m not meeting your high expectations, won’t you? And I’ll refrain from offering my thoughts or opinions on the matter.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ he asks sharply, then catches himself. She doesn’t look but she hears in his breath that he gets control of his frustration and redirects his focus. ‘No, I’m sorry. Scully, stop.’ His hands catch hers and she stills. It’s such a taken-for-granted thing, the holding of hands, but with him it’s something else entirely. ‘You’re right, I haven’t been hearing you. But I’m listening now, if you want to talk.’

So he says. She reluctantly meets his imploring eyes and knows he believes what he says. Sometimes that’s almost enough to make her believe, too.

She wants to say, It hurts me when you don’t seem to trust me. She wants to say, I’m in love with you. Can’t you see that? She wants to say, I’m envious and I hate that I feel this way and I want you to reassure me I have no reason to be.

That’s not what comes out. The wine speaks.

‘I’m going to bed,’ she says finally, pulling her hands free and getting to her feet. If she’s unsteady, she hopes it isn’t noticeable. ‘Happy reading.’

Undoubtedly she leaves things behind, but where she doesn’t trust him to be forthright with her about Agent Fowley, she fully trusts him to pick up after her when she walks off in a huff. She’s glad for sensible shoes as she departs the diner with not a stumble. She’s glad for the alcohol in her veins when the night is cooler than she knew California nights could get at this time of year. She’s glad for her partner when she arrives at her motel room door to discover she’s forgotten her jacket and therefore her key.

‘Looking for something?’ His voice is teasing but not hard, and only a few paces behind her. Those long legs. She’d never get away from him even if she tried. She sighs and lets her head fall forward to rest against the cool of the door, feeling defeated. Softly she feels the fabric of her jacket settle over her shoulders, cancelling the cold seeping through her thin blouse. Like a hug delivered by her favourite person, except not quite. ‘Better?’

Better not to answer while she’s in this state. She pats down the pocket where she knows she put the room key. It’s empty. Defeated again. She hears the jingle of it and opens her palm expectantly, and he obliges without a word. He hasn’t touched her but she feels his nearness at her back, a radiation of his magnetic warmth. She wishes things were easier, that she could step backward into him and let him wrap her comfortingly in his arms. She has no doubt he would. But there’s still just enough cold space between them to fit precisely one Agent Diana Fowley. So she clumsily turns the keychain in her useless fingers, trying to orient it.

‘I missed you this week,’ he says as she tries to find the actual key. There are like seven frivolous souvenir keychains hanging from this damn thing. Not fair on lonely single women drunk on red wine.

‘This week?’ she repeats sluggishly, wishing her reflexes and thoughts weren’t so obviously delayed. This week they were at the Kline house, and then here at the motel. ‘When I went to San Diego for the lab work?’

She’d managed to not be home throughout the day with him, taking meticulous care to do thorough testing at the labs and to arrive home late. Mulder barely sleeps, though, so it wasn’t as though she’d stood a chance of avoiding him completely.

‘I mean when you were around, I missed you. Today. Right now.’

She needs to drink less and have him drink more regularly. He’s not normally this forward. Normally they’d dance around this for weeks or months and just learn to live with it or resolve it in some other indirect way.

‘Mulder, I’m right here,’ she says wearily, forehead still leaning into the door, eyes drooping closed in exhaustion. But she has to keep them open to work out this godforsaken key. ‘I’m tired.’

‘Tired of what?’

She separates the key from its web of keychains and it feels like an achievement. She aims it for the keyhole and misses by an embarrassing margin. Surely she’s not that smashed.

‘Tired of this key,’ she grumbles as she tries again. Misses again. It scratches the paint beside the lock. There are other marks. She’s not the first. She never is. ‘Tired of you, not trusting me.’

‘How could you ever think I don’t trust you?’ he asks in bewilderment.

‘You don’t trust my instincts.’

‘Your instincts nearly took my head off with a fire poker a few days ago,’ he reminds her, finally catching her fist and holding it tightly when she tries to shrug him off. He guides her hand to the keyhole and holds her steady while she struggles to get the key to fit. She briefly wonders if anyone’s watching, anyone else returning to one of the uncounted rooms, and still doesn’t care. ‘But now as much as then and any other day, I trust you with my life, Scully.’

The key slots in. It’s an actual relief. The relief makes her tongue loose.

‘You think I can’t be objective about Agent Fowley because you think I’m jealous,’ she mutters as she turns the key forcefully. The lock clicks and the door opens; his hand tightens on her fist and pulls it back, holding it shut. Her plans to push in and flop down on her lumpy bed are briefly foiled and she slumps into the door with a soft noise of complaint. It doesn’t occur to her to fight him.

He closes the Diana-sized gap between them, his broad chest and tight abdomen and firm thighs pressing against her back, solid and warm, helping keep her upright. She needs it. The contact makes her melt, half relaxed and half quietly thrilled, the usual reaction to his proximity, but add to that the eager stirrings in her midsection that might be the wine or might be desire.

His voice is curious and low when he asks, ‘Are you? Jealous, Scully?’

It’s a question she should never answer, and even with a full bottle of red wine in her veins and his warm body close enough to intoxicate her, she knows better than to tell him the truth. The truth is what they demand of others, not each other, not until recently. Now’s not the time to start.

She inhales the familiar scent of him and wants him. She wants him to make a move so she’ll have to comply with the yearning in her blood, but she also knows that motel room sex on the Bureau’s dime isn’t going to dull the loneliness for long. The red wine headache will last longer. They’ve got stuff to work through. His is trauma and loss and whatever else he’s got wrapped up in Diana Fowley. Hers is self-doubt and identity and whatever else was stolen from her during her abduction.

She tips her head back against his chest, an indulgence in her hopeless, eternal waiting.

‘I’m not anything,’ she insists faintly, though to her ears it sounds dreamy. Maybe to his it does, too. He releases her hand, relinquishing the door, and cradles her head, fingers stroking her hair back from her face. She sighs and lets him, opening her eyes to meet his in the yellowy porch light.

‘Well,’ he says softly, voice a little rough from the minibar, ‘that’s just not true.’

It’s a sweet thing to say and she smiles despite herself, blinking up at his upside-down gaze. She knows he loves her; it’s nice to be reminded. But love’s not enough. If it was, they’d have been together years ago. She touches his hand.

‘You’ve got secrets. You’ve got someone else to share them with. Whenever you’re ready to let me in, Mulder, you know where to find me.’

She tugs his hand away and pushes the door inward. It’s cold, stepping away from him, but it’s the right move. He lets her go, leaning in after her to grab the doorknob once she’s through. He wrestles her room key free and hands it to her. They say goodnight. He closes the door and she latches it on the inside. It’s a long time before she can fall asleep, the final snapshot of his sad puppy eyes burned into the back of her eyelids despite enough wine that she shouldn’t have been able to make out such intense detail. The next day, all’s not well, but it’s better, somewhat. Her head thrums when someone’s car revs loudly on their way to the rental and does again when Mulder puts the key in the ignition and the radio blares unexpectedly. He quickly turns it down and offers her bottled water as his olive branch. They’re quiet and methodical around each other all day, though she notices he runs subtle interference on tasks and responsibilities that should come her way and miraculously don’t. He’s trying. She can try, too.

She still doesn’t know whether his heart hurts like hers does, but she’s not taking the chance of pairing red wine with lonely in the future.

Chapter Text

The Amazing Maleeni and Billy LaBonge are in league and they’ve pulled off a great heist. If Mulder’s disappointed that this one’s almost entirely a case of human trickery and very little to do with the supernatural like he so clearly hoped when they started, he’s not showing it. Rather he seems impressed by what convoluted crimes the pair very nearly got away with, and he’s still smiling hours later when they’re sitting in his motel room writing up their reports.

The humble beer is as diverse as it is misunderstood, much like someone else she knows, but when he cracks open two bottles from the refrigerator in the corner, Scully accepts it anyway. Beer’s one of humanity’s earliest achievements and there’s evidence, and conjecture of course, that it may have sparked the domestication of grain that led to agriculture and therefore to the modern decentralised mode of western living. It’s the drink of family men and wife beaters, of summer barbeques and football afterparty punch-ups. It’s for consumption in good company, everyone seems sure on, but no one can quite agree whether its social narrative should be proud or tragic. Like someone else she knows.

He smiles. He taps the neck of his bottle to hers with a chink of brown glass, a wordless acknowledgement of a day well done and a case wrapping up. He’s on the phone on hold, cell wedged between shoulder and ear as he flicks the caps into the wastepaper bin under the desk like the wannabe basketballer he is, so no one but she hears him sip from the bottle.

He’s right, even without saying it. It’s been a great case. The magicians are free without charge, and she doesn’t expect that any level of excellent policework or report-writing will change that, but the murder they came to investigate was not a murder and a dangerous repeat offender is behind bars for a crime he probably didn’t commit and as a result he isn’t walking free to commit worse ones. Technically speaking, the case is a mess, but from where she’s standing, it looks a lot like everything has worked out for the best. Perhaps magically so.

You’re working with powerful forces at work here.

Contentedly, she rearranges her legs, uncrossing them and settling the laptop on the bedspread beside her so she doesn’t spill beer in the keys. She’s had a long day and feels very done with it, but while Mulder’s still stuck on the phone she feels like she should still be working, too, and keeps typing for the purpose of solidarity. She sips the drink, enjoying the fizz of carbon in her mouth and the mild invigoration of the bitter taste ahead of the mild sugar hit she’ll get when her body starts processing it. She expects to notice. She’s been eating well and drinking less since the New Year as part of a thus-far short-lived but successful resolution. The year’s still young, but this one feels special. Things beginning, things ending. It’s a new millennium, and it started with a kiss.

She glances up as her partner paces past her, peeling off his jacket awkwardly. One of many great things about Fox Mulder is that he always looks good. Another is that she can look at him whenever she wants. He seems indifferent to her gaze, so accustomed to it that he happily exists under it. The ease that’s always been between them has found a rhythm since she got back from Africa. He taps out a few half-hearted sentences on the laptop he’s got balanced on the motel television set and drinks his beer without seeming to notice her roaming, admiring eye.

Misdirection. It’s the heart of magic.

It’s certainly not the heart of getting reports written. She tries to focus on what she’s meant to be doing, finds it easier when his caller returns to the line and he’s talking to them again, but this case, and the way his new trousers hug his backside, is getting to her. She locks her eyes onto the laptop screen and tells herself firmly to concentrate on the details of the case, but rewriting the bemusing sequence of improbable events she witnessed only seems to bring to mind images of her partner’s mesmerised expression as he got to watch magic shows and call it work.

He kissed her when the clock struck midnight on New Year’s Eve but hasn’t since. She isn’t worried that something’s wrong. Their year’s been busy so far, never done with a case before another one’s landing on their desk. The last case was rough. She’s spent more nights than Skinner needs to know sleeping at Mulder’s after Donnie Pfaster escaped prison and attacked her in her home. Pushed her to commit what Mulder won’t let her confess to but was certainly murder. She keeps drinking. This Maleeni case feels like a fresh start. Magicians, card tricks, bank heists, sleight of hand, her partner’s childish delight – it seems like a little vacation from real life. Maybe when she gets home, the apartment won’t feel like a crime scene and she won’t feel like an X-File. Maybe she’ll feel like she does here, with him. Free and light and fun and capable.

And lucky. Don’t ever forget lucky.

‘Right. Thanks again.’ He hangs up the phone with extra flourish and slaps the laptop shut. ‘And that’s me done. What about you, Scully?’

‘Nearly,’ she claims, thinking that since she started a sentence she might as well finish it before closing things down for the night. The battery’s almost shot anyway and she struggles for the right word to describe the apparent plight of Albert Pinchbeck following his supposed Mexican car accident and the subsequent falsified removal of his legs. It’s annoying that she can’t capture the word; she’s normally quite poetic, a trait she suspects she picked up from her eloquent wordsmith partner somewhere along the way. She decides to blame the beer, though she’s still on her first.

Mulder sits down on the end of the bed with her, too close as is his custom and her preference, and kicks off his shoes.

‘You know, LaBonge and Pinchbeck threw an awful lot behind this plan,’ he comments. ‘The more I think about it, the bolder it seems, and the more impressed I am with the execution. They nearly got away with it, too.’ With his foot he pushes the shoes away to join hers against the wall. ‘I don’t know if I’d even be mad if they did.’

‘I don’t know whether I’m supposed to be shocked that you’re critiquing a series of crimes as if it’s a stage show, but I’m not. You see the silver lining in everything, Mulder.’

‘But it was a stage show, Scully,’ he insists, stirred into excitement. Eyes sparkling. ‘We were its audience, lured into position by smoke and mirrors and pretty lies, given marked cards so we could be willingly amazed while the real trick was happening everywhere we weren’t looking.’

‘Maybe you were willingly amazed,’ she retorts, but it’s without bite. He grins, hooking a finger in the loop of his tie to loosen it. She gathers her feet at her side, utterly comfortable in his presence the way only two people who have been through everything and survived together can be. He’s been called crazy; she’s stood at his side and never wavered. She’s been told she won’t have children; he’s held her while she’s cried and whispered that they see impossible every day. He’s been shot; she’s nursed him back. She’s hated him for leading her through his unresolved feelings for his ex; he’s fought his way back to her and chooses her, every time.

They’re in love and there’s no question. There’re no words, either. No verbal confirmation. It’s all faith, all feeling, all certainty at the very core of her. For all the nightmares she’s lived as a result of her connection to him, there’s a smile to break the world, a firm hand around hers to hold it together, a token gesture of thoughtfulness to make it worth living in.

‘What I’m trying to work out,’ he explains to her now, reaching over to pick a grain of lint from her sleeve, ‘is why they threw down so much behind a plan that hinged on someone as unreliable and unpredictable as me.’

‘That’s a good question,’ she muses, sipping her beer and tapping the edge of the laptop. It’s battery is critically low. She might as well give up on this report. The word’s not coming and few great writers of history are renowned for the genius they penned while drinking beer.

‘I mean, it makes sense that they risked a high-profile trick when the opportunity of the dead twin arose, or at least it seems to make sense in hindsight because it was investigated by the Bureau and Pinchbeck needed an agent’s badge number and fingerprint to perform the EFT.’

She blames the beer again when she doesn’t see the problem he seems to be describing.

‘Right, that’s the theory we’re working off, isn’t it? They figured a trick involving what looked like a violent and inexplicable death would attract the attention of someone such as ourselves.’

‘Right, except that ourselves are not popularly known, nor promoted by our good employers,’ he reminds her. ‘This case would never have been picked up by the Bureau, at least not as it stood when we arrived here. It’s only because it seemed to be an X-File that I took an interest.’

‘So?’

‘So how did they know?’ he demands, but he’s halfway to grinning because he loves a puzzle at least as much as he loves her. Maybe it’s one and the same. Maybe it’s why he loves her. ‘They can’t have known it would cross my attention. Why would they go all-in on a hand that wouldn’t catch the notice of good, sensible FBI agents? If I didn’t drag you out on this case, Scully, would you have independently elected to pursue it? You’re a good, sensible FBI agent.’

‘Don’t call me names,’ she replies, feeling a smirk tug at the edge of her mouth when his gorgeous grin grows to light his whole face. Beer’s a drink of good company and cockiness and it’s living up to its social connotations tonight. She shuts the laptop without bothering to log off, giving up. ‘I don’t know what you want me to tell you. No, I probably wouldn’t have come out here if it were only up to me and my judgement, but that would have been a mistake. And no, they probably didn’t know of you, even less likely they’d heard of the X-Files. What are you getting at?’

‘I don’t know,’ he admits. ‘If they couldn’t have known I’d come and what we’re assuming is the endgame is only possible because you and I are here… Maybe we’re not seeing the bigger picture.’

Great. A worrying scenario to consider.

‘A double misdirection?’ she ponders. He shrugs.

‘Maybe. I’m off the clock. Either way, it was a bold plan,’ he says again, stretching out the kinks in his neck. ‘Courageous, even.’

‘Courage,’ she repeats with a sigh, reaching back for the laptop she discarded, but when she flips the screen up it won’t switch back on. The battery’s dead and she left the charger in the other room. She checks her watch. It’s late. ‘I should go to bed.’

‘No, I have a charger,’ he insists, looking around for his bag as she pushes off the bed and goes for her shoes. She smiles and shakes her head.

‘It’s fine. We’ve got to be up in the morning for our flight and I haven’t finished packing.’

He concedes that point, glancing around at his own messy room. ‘At least finish your beer.’

There’s only a mouthful left so once she’s got her feet wedged back into today’ shoes, she takes a final swig. When she lowers it and swallows, he stands as well. He holds out her laptop and extends his other hand, open, waiting for the empty bottle.

‘Sweet dreams, Scully,’ he says, though he mustn’t know she’s been living her sweetest dream for months now, the dream where he’s hers if she wants him and the questions between them have turned into answers neither needs anymore.

She could say, You too. She could say, Thank you. She could say, I love you.

That’s not what comes out. The beer speaks.

She steps closer to place the empty bottle in his hand. Feeling the glass against his palm, he drops his gaze, which is when she grips his loosened tie and lifts her face to meet his. He bends automatically and his mouth meets hers in a kiss so perfect it might have been planned. It’s sweet and long and inspired and full of all the moments in the past when she might have kissed him and didn’t. Beneath her fisted hand on his chest, she feels first his surprise, then the way he melts into this, just how much he’d like to drop what he’s holding to free his arms to hold her close. She breaks away and breathes the same air he exhales in a dazed rush. His face is priceless, his pleasant shock evident. He looks so raw and the moment’s so magical she almost goes back for a second, but that wouldn’t be a surprise. She loves that she took him by surprise.

There’s no rush. There will be other nights. They have the rest of their lives.

‘Thank you for the beer,’ she murmurs against his lips, and, taking her laptop from his startled grip, turns and leaves him there, still smiling to herself. Her heart and stomach flutter with anticipation of what tonight’s courage might bring for them.

Misdirection. It’s the heart of magic.

She still doesn’t know where this road is going to take them, but she’s glad she took his offer of beer and good company tonight.