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“trust your heart if the seas catch fire, live by love though the stars walk backward.” - ee cummings
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i.
The second week of January is cold and wet. Frost creeps up windshields and windows, turns the light from the office skylight a perpetual grey. The last of the Christmas lights are out of place on the city streets now. They linger, curled and draped, around a fence on U street. Lost fairies, too frozen to go home.
"You know Abe Lincoln died in that house?" he asks.
"I’m reading the same sign you are, Mulder."
They had wandered away from their regular lunch spot, standing across the street from Ford’s theater and tilting their heads at the townhouse that crouched above them. Matching black coats like they were in mourning and some deep shift in their electric field hovering above them. Neither of them were surprised that the sidewalk had pushed them towards death and creaky floorboards. They were moths to a flame. Nothing competes with habit.
She looks at him, lights in her eyes that are maybe reflections of the street lamps (evening doesn’t crawl so much as roll, sliding over the street like smoke and he thinks maybe they’ve stayed out just a bit past their lunch break) but maybe they aren’t.
"I suppose you want to go in?"
He nods and she lets go of his hand, picks her way up three of the slick steps and turns to look at him.
"Are you coming?" She’s got that tilt to her smile like she'd had when he’d kissed her. Zombies in the backs of their minds and cheering on the television.
Three steps above him and she’s only a few inches taller. He always felt like she towered over him. Five foot six in Malanos and somehow holding up the whole world.
"Don’t just stand there and stare at me, Mulder, you’ll get cold." She scrunches up her nose when she speaks and stuffs her hands in her pockets. "Aren’t you cold?"
She is five foot six in heels and red nosed in the January light and she carries the logistics of his entire life in the palm of her hand. He thinks of the fountains in the park in Dupont, granite and marble and mesmerizing, and two weeks ago he had kissed her.
She leans towards him and down, just a little. Her hands are on his shoulders and his are on her waist and she presses her forehead to his, uses a voice that is entirely hers and yet not at all.
"Mulder," she says, her lips nipped by frost. "You’re cold."
She kisses him suddenly, and for a moment he is sure that he feels a tectonic plate shift under his feet. She pulls back to look at him with that tilted smile.
"I’m not," he says, tugs her by the belt of her coat until his mouth is just above hers. His breath freezes in the air to save his words. Five foot six in heels and holding up the whole world, he thinks. The whole world. "I’m not."
ii.
Maybe, he thought, it would just happen. Maybe she would come home with stars in her eyes and sugar on her lips and tell him with her words stumbling across each other that she was having a baby -- they were having a baby -- and they’d be so caught up in the wonder of it that they wouldn’t notice, wouldn’t have time to sabotage themselves, all of the sudden they would just be them but something more.
But they had never just happened. They were deliberate in all of their motions or lack thereof. An object at rest will stay at rest unless acted upon by an unbalanced force. They’d defied a lot of things, but never basic physics.
Still, she does come home. And there is something in her eyes that glimmers, but it’s not stars. Her lips are chapped and she speaks like she’s been chugging broken glass. She tells him, with her words stumbling across each other and spilling out of the corners of her mouth, that she is not having a baby. They are not having a baby. And before he can mourn the life he’d imagined on her couch she is kissing him with lips that taste like salt water, like the sea.
An object in motion will stay in motion and afterwards, she presses her fingers to the inside of his wrist, says, "stay" into his palm, so he does. They sleep fitted together like a jigsaw puzzle.
In the morning he kisses her by the kitchen table and she tastes like coffee and a ghost of mint toothpaste. He remembers the twisted pull of inertia and the impossibility of stopping after starting, and he does not leave. He keeps not leaving. Not leaving, not leaving, not leaving.
iii.
In Chicago, she asks him if he wants to get lucky. He stops breathing for a full minute before she laughs at him and tugs on his sleeve.
"Come on," she says because the case is closed (or as closed as it gets for them which is usually the kind of closed you get when you have to sit on an overfull suitcase to try and zip it shut; it was closed enough), and he'd fallen through a floor. "I'll buy you a drink."
"And then?"
"And then," she looks up at him with a smile that touches her eyes. "And then we'll see."
Somehow, just like that, all ease and teasing on a busy street, they stop using separate motel rooms.
iv.
“So really, Mulder, there just isn’t a way to quantify it.”
She is cross legged on his floor, Chinese food and manila files fan around her like her own little personal catastrophe (which he knows is her favorite kind right next to the ones she inherits from him and merges with her own to turn into complete and utter apocalyptic messes).
“It’s Newton’s third law. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Physics 101," she says. He is watching her mouth from the couch.
“I love you,” he says. Her head jerks up so fast her cross bounces, throws off golden light on her throat. She swallows, purses her lips, her eyes rake over the case file on the coffee table.
After a pause: “Were you even listening to me?”
“Not really,” he confesses without a lick of shame.
The light of the fish tank glows soft blue across her cheeks, and she thinks he can’t see her smile.
“Asshole.”
v.
He is not afraid of her breaking. Something (possibly iron, probably steel) stronger than marrow seeps into her bones at times like this, and he's half-sure she will not shatter. She has seen too much to shut her eyes now.
He is afraid that she is afraid. He is afraid that she isn’t. He is afraid that, with big eyes reflecting in the semi-dark of his bedroom (Don’t, she’d said, hand on his wrist. Don’t turn off all the lights) she will turn to him and he will not recognize her in them.
But when she rolls towards him it is to say: “I’m sorry I got blood in your shower.”
And it’s her, it’s her.
##
She lets the sleeves of his shirt fall over her hands in the morning because she still has gunpowder underneath her fingernails. She lets him hold her in his kitchen while the coffee is on because this is just like the last time except it isn't. She has her face pressed to his chest, but she does not cry. He does not tell her it's alright. She wonders if that's because it isn't, or because he thinks she already knows it is.
She thinks maybe she hates him for not believing her, hates him for trying to save her when it was too late. She thinks maybe he hates her for almost being taken from him, hates her for the emptiness he'd seen in her face after she'd pulled the trigger (and not just once, she'd held it, she'd emptied her clip into the son of a bitch, she'd massacred him).
"Coffee's ready," she says, more to break his hold on her than to save the coffee. He nods and motions for her to sit down.
He does not say the right thing, but to his credit she doesn't even know what the right thing would be. He sets a mug down in front of her and holds her hands across the kitchen table and says almost nothing at all.
This, she thinks, is the trick up their sleeve. This silence, this language of sympathetic vibrations they have. She ducks her head and tucks it away for closer examination.
When she stands up to get dressed he reaches across the table to reorient her cross, which was lopsided and precarious on the gold chain.
"I don't know," she says to his hand because it lingers and it's easier than saying it to his face. "I don't know what to believe."
"I do," he says.
vi.
“Do you ever think about dying?” he asks her stomach and thinks about blood on Kleenexes. She does not answer him.
A motel room with cheap sheets and cheaper beer. Case closed, lives saved, another monster dragged out from under someone’s bed and cornered in their twin flashlight beams. They’re scratched up and bruised, but they’ve been worse for the wear. They’ve been wearier. Some cases are heavier than others, but this one only makes her shoulders sag a little under her suit.
Technically they were breaking several rules, but they’d caught the bad guy and she’d leaned up against the frame of their connecting rooms and blinked up at him sleepily, so he’d kissed her. The case was closed so she’d kicked off her heels and let him. He had never been very by-the-book and dragging her into rebellion had become kind of a hobby. He was very good at it.
“Are you afraid?” he asks next and she can't remember if they started an unofficial game of truth or dare or if this is how he always talks to her.
She knows he’s only asking because he thinks he knows the answer. He thinks the world spins on the tip of her finger, basketball style. He’d taught her how to do that. His mouth is pressed to her bare stomach, her hand curling in his hair.
“Of what?” she asks because she always likes to be precise. Equations didn’t work if you write the formula down wrong. She feels his eyelashes flutter as he blinks.
“Anything.”
He lifts his head and his eyes hold hers. She runs her fingers down the cut on the side of his face. He’s had worse. They both have, and they’ll have worse still, she knows.
“Yes,” she says, hand on his cheek. “Yes.”
vii.
She makes a fort out of their jackets, tented over their legs, and finds his hand under the dark wool. The plane shudders as it traipses a patch of turbulence and she tells him to close his eyes.
Last night he'd told her she was the only thing left. The only thing left like he'd found her in a post-apocalyptic wasteland and taken her hand by necessity rather than choice but that was wrong, that logic was inherently flawed.
"Scully," he says and he mostly whispers it because Skinner is a row in front of them and avoiding making eye contact with incredible dedication.
"Mulder, neither of us slept well last night."
She does not add that it was because he couldn't close his eyes for more than a few moments without finding something in the darkness behind his lids to be afraid of, or to mourn. She does not add that it was because rather than sleeping she had crawled into bed with him fully clothed and held him together by sheer force of will. He would not break entirely, not on her watch. She does not add that it is because when he finally accepted a shaky, shuddering sleep, she had watched his ceiling and thought about cutting into his mother's body without even a tremor in her fingers and cried without making a sound.
She squeezes his hand under their jackets. "You're tired."
He drops his head to her shoulder and he sees Skinner's eyes flit back towards them and then quickly away.
"Scully," he tries again.
"Sleep," she says.
He closes his eyes and dreams that they watch the end of the world together.
v.
"I’m not angry with you," he says and he lies all too easily.
It’s better, she supposes, that he lie than say nothing. The silence in his apartment had not been deafening, like it’s so often said to be. No, it had felt like diving too deep into the far end of the lake, like falling into dark water, like pressure building at her temples. But it was quiet. She could hear the ripples of his fish tank, bubbles blowing up to the surface.
She reaches for his hands and they are hot, like his bones are burning.
"I don’t believe you," she says calmly.
"You never do," he hisses. "Never."
Later she would kneel by his couch and run her fingers down the his cheek. Later he would catch her hand and hold it and they wouldn’t apologize but they would match their heart beats, fall back into rhythm again, realign.
That would come later.
Now she slams the door when she leaves and it cracks through the air like thunder.
vi.
The blanket whispers against the carpet as she drags it along the floor. Shushing and hushing her as she walks into the bedroom.
“Mulder,” she whispers and he starts when he sees her. She is translucent, transparent, china-white in the moonlight. He believes in ghosts, she remembers. And how could she forget?
“Jesus, Scully. What’s wrong?”
She walks to the edge of the bed to stand by him. Shrugs. “I was cold.”
“Do you think,” he starts and the words are molasses, slow and sweet off his tongue, “you might be warmer if you were wearing more clothes?”
“That is entirely plausible. Should I test your hypothesis?”
He shakes his head. “Don’t bother.”
He reaches out to touch her, brushes his thumb against her hip bone like it’s a good luck charm and discovers that she is very much not a ghost. Still, when she kisses him he wonders if she leaves lipstick like ectoplasm and he thinks: I have been possessed.
vii.
He hadn’t thought of her as a light weight. He had pictured her in college with stacked boots and ripped jeans knocking back whiskey with the rest of the over-worked med students with rings around their eyes, but she was out of practice. She was not an exhausted twenty-something with leftover teen angst and exam stress to drown but rather a grown woman in a small black dress with her hair falling into her face and so much grief packed into a barely-five-foot frame that sometimes it leaked into her sea-glass eyes, tugged at her lips even when she was smiling.
But she was smiling now. Smiling and sort of tilting and leaning on him and dangling her heels from one hand and he didn’t see anything in her eyes but a glaze of alcohol and maybe something warmer and deeper and so bright that it hurt to look at so he didn’t.
Sometimes looking at her was like looking at the sun, which is a cliche, he knows, but there is no other way to describe it and will be no other way until NASA discovers something else as radiant and as terrifying. She was blinding and beautiful but only in the briefest of glances because if you looked too long your eyes would burn, your retinas would reflect her image onto every blank space. But right now, barefoot and tipsy in the middle of an empty L.A. street, she is more like the stars and he could watch her for hours without ever knowing what made her luminescent or why and where she aligned.
“Scully,” he says, but mostly just to say it. he can’t think of anything beyond the way she is running her fingers down his undone tie.
“Yes?”
“Do you think it’s at all possible that you are maybe a tiny bit drunk?”
She makes an indignant, annoyed sound.
“No,” she sneers and trips a little, grabbing for his arm. She straightens up and reconsiders, says: “Although, I wouldn’t rule out the possibility entirely.”
“Oh, you wouldn’t?”
She takes his hand, apparently having decided she could use the support but also maybe because she likes the weight of his fingers tangled with hers. In L.A. they are not Mulder and Scully and they don’t have to have both hands free to grab for a gun or another clip. In L.A. they are not Mulder and Scully and she can swing their hands between them just a little bit and not have to worry about anyone watching. In L.A. he is Mulder and she is Scully but only to each other and no one else so she kisses him on tip toe without letting go of his hand.
“A good scientist never rules out any possibilities," she says with cherries and liquor on her breath.
“Really? I don’t think you’ve been adhering to that rule for, I don’t know, the entirety of our partnership.”
“Please, I’ve been giving you the benefit of the doubt for years,” she says and blows hair out of her eyes. “Mostly I just like to hear you explain your ideas. Sometimes you can be rather intelligent.”
“Sometimes?”
“Mm,” she nods and throws him a wicked, fleeting grin. "Occasionally.”
She’s leading him towards the beach and he wonders if she’s doing it on purpose or if she was born with a compass on her ribs that didn’t point North, just towards waves and tidal pools and all of the other things her father had braved while she had sat on the shore and imagined big blue whales and unknowable depths.
“Where are we going?” he asks but he doesn’t really care, it just seems like the thing to say.
“To the ocean.”
“Why?”
"I'm going to tell you about the sea.”
##
She doesn’t. Tell him about the sea that is, and he does not tell her about the stars. She is water, he is sky and they have this understanding, this conceptualization of the way of the world, that hums unspoken between them. They have had this conversation before without ever moving their lips so why have it now?
The tide moves with the moon and that is they way it has always been with them.
“I thought I saw a mermaid once,” she admits. “I was really little.”
“You’re still really little.”
“Shut up, you know what I mean.”
Things moved independent of the two of them, pitched together like bottles attempting to remain upright in the sand, and when she leaned her head on his shoulder and let him talk about mermaids everything seemed infinite, but nothing stopped. The waves hit the shore in their uneven rhythm and somewhere in the muggy L.A. night Skinner was getting absolutely hammered. He shares this thought and she laughs.
“That’s rather unlike him, don’t you think?”
“No one is who they are in L.A.”
“Except us,” she says.
“Except us,” he says and he means: we’d have this anywhere. But of course she already knows.
viii.
“You have freckles.”
This is a statement of fact and somehow proud. He said it like he would say “I believe in aliens” or “The loch ness monster is an amphibian not a reptile.”
“That’s not the dumbest thing you’ve ever said, Mulder, But it’s up there.”
She’s entirely on top of him, chest to chest under the covers of his bed. It’s making it a little bit hard to argue with him, she has to admit. She’s used to being able to tilt her head and plant her hand on her hip.
She’s dressed, he’s less so. She’s been leaving for about an hour and it’s proving to be a long and fairly difficult process. It’s a bit like a one of those puzzles where you try to get the red car free (they must base this on d.c. parking lots, he’d said when they’d found one in her coffee table drawer. it’s shockingly accurate).
Every time she thought she’d untangled herself from him completely (she was leaving, damn it) he’d move a blue truck right into the middle of her path. It had started off as her fault, she’d made the mistake of leaning down to brush hair off his forehead, wobbling on her heels and he’d grabbed her before she could leave the bedroom. He had wrapped his fingers around her wrist, knocking her off balance and pulling her on top of him.
Somehow she’d wound up with her shoes off and her sweater twisted up on her waist and she was still lying on top of him. It was only 5:45. A Thursday morning. There was cool morning light against the shades and the partially open window brought in late spring air. It was muggy and smelling of cherry blossoms and car exhaust.
She’s prevented from moving by some deep tug in her chest, some anonymous grounding force like she dropped an anchor from her collar bone and it caught. Gravity, she decides and leaves it at that.
“I never see your freckles,” he says. She’s propped up slightly, enough to make eye contact and hold some sort of a conversation.
“Mulder, meet make-up. Make-up, meet mulder.”
“I like them,” he decides. “They’re like stars.”
“Mmhm,” she agrees. “Whatever you say. We need to get up.”
“Can’t we play hooky?”
“Tempting, but no.”
She pushes herself away from him, fast, rolling over top of him and landing on her feet. She searches the floor blindly for the sharp spike of her shoe.
“Hey, Scully,” he looks up at her from his pillow, all soft edges and morning hair.
“What is it?”
“Come here.”
“If you pull me down again, I swear to God.”
She leans close anyways. in their physics equation she is the proton to his electron and she’s drawn to him on some fundamental level. Gravity is a very real problem. She winds up with her hair brushing his cheeks, her lips hovering above his.
“What, Mulder?”
“I like you,” he says, like it’s just occurred to him. “I like you a lot.”
She tilts towards him a little, just enough, and pretends it’s because she lost her balance. She fell at some point, she can’t remember when. Her brain flits to try and pinpoint the moment, nail it down like gossamer, but it’s elusive and ethereal, like all truths are. She knows this though: she just kept falling.
“I like you too.”
ix.
"Shooting stars."
"Birthday candles."
"Coins in a fountain."
"Genies."
The movie is whirring in his VCR like it hates being ignored but they've had it paused for an hour and she wasn't really following the plot anyways.
"That's not fair, Mulder. That one was too easy," she says and nudges him with her foot. She'd sunk down into his couch somewhere around her second beer and has her legs in his lap like there isn't anywhere else to put them.
"It's not my fault that I pick the low hanging fruit, Scully. You're just too good for that," he says and his hand runs up from her ankle to her shin and she closes her eyes.
"I guess so," she accepts, remembers a piece of a nursery rhyme.
"I wish I may, I wish I might," she starts to herself and pauses. When she cracks one eye he is hovering above her with that stupid smile he's had for a month now.
"What do you wish, Scully?" he asks and crinkles his eyes. He traces the outline of her ribs through her shirt and she thinks: I wish, I wish, I wish.
But she can't think of anything else to wish for.
x.
Bellefleur means beautiful flower but she can't recall ever seeing any roses in this part of Oregon.
"Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it," he says and grins sardonically at her as they drive into town.
She'd like to think that in between mosquito bites and cancer, Antarctica and Los Angeles, that they'd acquired at least some knowledge. But maybe they've been driving in circles for all these years. Maybe now they were closing the circuit, allowing electricity to flow through whatever crisscross of wires they'd created. Maybe, she thinks. Maybe that's what this is.
"Do we have to repeat it exactly? I didn't bring a rain coat."
##
Later, in a familiar motel with familiar names and faces littering the case files at the end of his bed she decides that they are not doomed to repeat anything. He has his arms around her and they have moved forwards without stopping. She refuses to believe that their path is anything but straight towards the horizon even when it's broken or twisted.
His window is open and the sky in Oregon is all in black and white. Constellations sketched across the sky free hand, otherworldly and unfinished.
"Mulder?" she asks quietly.
"Yeah?"
"We're not doomed," she says. "We're not."
He doesn't answer, but reaches above her to turn off the light and presses his lips to her cheek. She listens to his breathing next to her, feels the weight of his arm across her waist and when she breathes it sounds like a sigh.
She dreams that the stars walk backwards.
--
fin.