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twenty-one.
Melissa's arms rest atop her collarbones and they are cheek to cheek with her breathy, hoppy singing voice against her ear. She’s crept around the back of Scully’s (but she isn’t Scully, not yet, just Dana) chair and reached around her to grab her from behind. Scully is pretending she’s never had a drink before (for her mother’s sake) and the world is pleasantly fuzzy, warmed by the glow of birthday candles.
“Happy birthday, dear Dana,” her sisters sings and Scully reaches up to brush her hand against her arm.
Twenty-one could have been out with friends or a night in studying but instead it is seated at the head of her mother’s table and pretending she doesn’t want her father to call her Starbuck anymore. Twenty-one is blowing out far too many candles and eating far too little cake. Twenty-one is curled up on the couch with Missy after everyone else has gone to bed and listening to her wax poetic about astrology.
“You’re a pisces,” she says, wrinkles her nose at the book she’s holding open on her lap. She sits criss-cross like a child at story time and she’s three years older but with an unfading innocence in the lilt of her voice and the twitch of her lips.
“I know that already,” Scully says but leans closer to her sister anyways.
“'Your unique planetary influence makes you a romantic,'" Melissa quotes and Scully snorts.
“Shush. Let me finish. 'You sometimes run the risk of retreating into your own world.'” She gives her younger sister a pointed look that means she thinks the book is stating a fact. She continues, red hair falling into her dark eye make up, “And with your loved ones you always offer a supportive ear or shoulder.'” Scully drops her head to her sister’s shoulder at this and Melissa smiles.
“Your element is water, Dane,” Melissa says. “You were born under the planet Neptune.”
God of the ocean, Scully thinks. How fitting.
twenty-nine.
She buys herself chocolate cake in the cafeteria and no one tells her happy birthday. It’s alright though, she didn’t expect them to. She’s never been the type of person to enjoy her birthday, or even to care. Mulder gives her a case file and a presentation in lieu of a gift. Her mother calls at 8 and Melissa calls the next day with three apologies and seven minutes of gossip and she listens with an indulgent smile even though her sister can’t see her.
“Oh, how’s your new job?” Melissa asks just before she hangs up, like an after thought.
“It’s fine,” Scully says, because it’s only a few months and couple cases old. And it is fine, it’s not mundane but it certainly isn’t groundbreaking.
“Your new partner?”
“He’s nice,” she says and wonders if Mulder knows she is the same age as his sister.
thirty-two.
Thirty-two, she thinks, is probably too young to die.
Mulder takes her to a late lunch and she’s glad because now she doesn’t have to feel obligated to see her mother, who has been watching her like she’s counting down the seconds until she winks out of existence. “You’re my last daughter” is a heavy thing to hang on anyone, especially someone who is thin and fragile and also dying. She didn’t want her mother to cry over her birthday cake, it would make it hard to light the candles.
She didn’t think Mulder knew when her birthday was, let alone that he would remember it, but he has a fondness for tucking tricks up his sleeve and surprising her at any given moment. The crowd always goes wild. So he buys her desert and gives her a gift and they both act like this isn’t the last birthday she is ever going to have and she is deliciously, deliriously happy to play pretend with him.
She twirls the keychain around her finger much later that night and it gives off white-gold light. Thirty-two is at least an even number.
He calls her around one-thirty and says, “I was just watching a documentary about Alexander the Great.”
“So?” she replies, rubs her eyes with the back of her hand.
“So nothing. You know he conquered almost the entire known world before he died?” he asks.
She didn’t, but she doesn’t care so she hums into the phone something that sounds like goodnight and falls asleep with the keychain around her ring finger like a promise.
In the morning she remembers that Alexander the Great died at age thirty-two, it springs into her mind like a snap shot of her sophomore history textbook, and she thinks that maybe in Mulder’s way he was trying to tell her something. She watches tears fall into her coffee cup like they aren’t her own.
She has conquered next to nothing save for a few fluke men and some things that go bump in the night. The known world belongs to presidents and explorers and she feels like she hasn’t left the basement office in a very long time. But she’s seen lights in the sky and men who can slip through air ducts and live for hundreds of years. She’s tracked mythical creatures through forests and swamps with her disbelief suspended and hanging over her like a dark cloud. So maybe she’s conquered something, maybe she’s conquered the unknown.
Mulder would like that, she thinks. But she won’t tell him because either way, scientists and historians will agree, thirty-two is too young to die.
thirty-five.
It’s not her birthday.
“But they don’t know that, Scully,” Mulder assures her as he tugs her into the ice cream parlor. It is uncannily warm and smells like sugar and whipped cream.
“I’m not in the habit of lying for no reason, Mulder.”
“You once lied to a courtroom full of people. You lied under oath at a congressional hearing,” he counters.
“I had a reason,” she explains. “Besides I didn’t lie. I just...didn’t tell the truth.” She crosses her arms a little tighter because she’s finding it hard to be annoyed with him even though she has dust from the baseball diamond creeping up the hem of her pants. Maybe because of that.
“This is free ice cream, Scully,” he says with his eyes going wide like he can’t believe she wouldn’t commit perjury for a scoop of mint chocolate chip. “Real ice cream. Not that fake crap.”
“I resent that.”
Fifteen minutes later and they’re crammed in a booth with a ridiculously large ice cream sundae and the entire staff has just finished serenading her with “Happy Birthday." She hates him and she tells him so.
“No you don’t,” he replies happily, dodging her spoon to get a bite of ice cream.
She considers him for a moment, twirls the stem of a cherry around her tongue.
“No, I don’t,” she decides.
He looks up at her with a half smile. “You have whipped cream on your nose, birthday girl.”
He wipes the tip of her nose with a napkin and says he can’t believe she’s almost seventy-three, gee, how time flies. She punches him in the shoulder and lets him have the last bite of ice cream. It’s not her birthday, but when a harried waitress scurries over to their booth and stabs a candle into the remains of their sundae with an “Oops! I forgot!” she closes her eyes and makes a wish.
thirty-six.
He takes her out to dinner and she wears a dress that’s too small and feels like she’s pretending to be a grown-up, like she is tiptoeing around in her mother’s high heels.
They give up after less than an hour. The food is slow to come out and the wine is too good and this is not them at all, this fancy dinner and small talk. They leave cash on the table and duck into a cab when the waiter isn’t looking and it’s all very unprofessional and she doesn’t mind at all.
He kisses her against the door of her apartment and she has her heels in her hand and his tie wrapped around her finger.
We are a cliche, she thinks. We are some stupid romantic comedy.
He says: “I didn’t get you a gift.”
She says: “That’s okay, I don’t need anything.”
And if they were in a movie this would be the part where she adds: except you. But even though they are disheveled and still leaning against her door and even though she had laughed against his mouth and loves him in some deep intrinsic way, they are not a movie. The music will not swell and there will be no close up, no sudden declaration of love.
So she says nothing more and he kisses her again.
thirty-eight.
She stays up late on her thirty-eighth birthday and tells her son: “your mom is getting old.” He laughs a baby laugh and she smiles down at him because he’s beautiful and perfect and she almost had everything.
She realizes she starts a lot of sentences with “your dad” and very few with “your mom.” She hopes he can picture his father as some heroic alien-slaying knight because even if it’s not entirely accurate he had saved her a hundred times over. She doesn’t tell him stories about his mother because she is right here. And because she has all the time in the world.
Still, she watches herself in the reflection of william’s eyes and wonders if she is disappearing.
forty.
It’s a year after she’s stopped looking at every bright-eyed, dark-haired boy just a moment too long in the supermarket and a little longer since they became fugitives. This is how she measures her time. Bonnie and Clyde was a love story but the road is not romantic.
He buys her flowers at a gas station and she doesn’t have a vase to put them in when they drive so she dangles her wrist out the passenger window and the petals are ripped off by the wind. They leave a trail of roses on the freezing highway.
fifty-one.
She knows what day it is less from the number on the calendar and more from with way his hands tease her out of sleep and his breath tickles the back of her neck.
"Guess what day it is?" he asks. She smacks his arm to stop his hand from moving any farther up her stomach.
"I don't care," she groans.
This, she supposes, is something like tradition.
“Yes, you do.”
"When are you going to stop doing this?" she asks as she rolls over into his chest.
"When I'm too old to remember when your birthday is," he says earnestly. "Or when you leave me for that younger, probably less thoughtful, nurse at the hospital."
"He'd probably be less annoying," she muses.
"Ouch."
He kisses her before tugging her out of the bed by both hands and it's times like this where she feels very silly and very lucky and very much like someone Dr. Dana Scully, infamous stiff, perennial loner of Our Lady of Sorrows fame, wouldn't recognize.
Telling him what time she was born had seemed innocent enough but things with him rarely were. And now, eight years later, they are standing in their kitchen at four-thirty in the morning watching the clock and she regrets a number of things and nothing at all.
“I should never have told you what time I was born,” she mutters and leans back against him. He rests his chin on her head and hushes her as he watches the minute hand turn from thirty-five to thirty-six.
Four-thirty-six and she’s sighing, “Can I go back to bed now? I do have to work.”
Four-thirty-six and he kisses the top of her head, says, “You are more than half a century old. You can sleep when you’re dead.”
Half a century sounds far more interesting than fifty-one but he's usually like that when he talks to her. And somehow she does not end up going back to bed and they end up staring each other down across the kitchen table as the sun creeps up and runs strands of gold through her hair. He is reading her the newspaper.
“You want me to read you your horoscope, Scully?”
“I'd prefer you tell me how old I am in dog years.”
“Two hundred and seventeen,” he says without blinking, without looking up.
“Did you look that up last night?” He never ceases to amaze her.
“An Eagle Scout is always prepared” he explains.
“You were never an eagle scout, Mulder.”
“No,” he concedes. “But I like their motto. You want to hear your horoscope or not?”
“Not,” she says and he’s already reading.
“‘You are complicated and mysterious’. Ooh, Scully, this is a good one. ‘You will have many adventures...but you will not go into work today because it is your birthday. Also you have met a tall, handsome man who is going to make you breakfast even though you look like you want to kill him,'” he looks up at her and smiles. “Scully, this is incredible!”
She kicks at his legs under the table. “Does it say you’re going to let me go back to bed?”
“It says you live happily ever after.”
She wrinkles her nose. “I don’t believe in horoscopes.”
“Fifty-one years and you’ve been a skeptic for everyone of them." He gets up so that he can lean down over her chair and brush her lips with his.
“Happy birthday, Scully,” he says and rain pounds against the window with sudden violence. She is reminded of hurricanes and tidal waves and tsunamis.
“Do you know I was born under Neptune?” she asks suddenly.
“God of the ocean,” he replies and nods, takes her hand. “Daughter of the sea.”
__
fin.